Syria: Push for partition fails again

These are some of the headlines we are tracking for you in this episode of On the News Line:

Syria: Push for partition fails again 

New signs have emerged of what Syria and even Western observers have time and again called a scenario to partition the country into several statelets. The Syrian government has rejected a proposal by UN envoy Stafan de Mistura to give autonomy to the eastern part of Aleppo. De Mistura had called on Damascus to allow the region to be administered by the so-called opposition. Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Muallem has flatly rejected the idea as a violation of the country’s sovereignty. The notion of an opposition administration comes at a time when the armed groups holed up in the area are facing inevitable defeat at the hands of Syrian forces who have laid a siege to the militants and are tightening the noose by the day.

US: Anti-Trump protests and a fake story 

Following Donald Trump’s surprise victory in the US presidential election, violent protests broke out across the US. Hundreds of angry protesters took to the streets in several cities from New York to Chicago and Austin. Donald Trump himself was quick to condemn the protests as organized professional rallies fueled by the media. Hashtags such as #paidprotests rapidly spread among Trump’s supporters, giving rise to the allegations that protests staged against Trump were neither spontaneous nor organic. The false assertion was based on a fake news story shared thousands of times on the net.

Bahrain: The forgotten crisis 

Bahrain is a tiny island in the Persian Gulf. The kingdom has been in turmoil for several years. Since 2011, ordinary Bahrainis have held demos and rallies to demand their fair share of a voice in the way their country is run. But their calls were met with torture, crackdown, bullets and teargas. The Manama regime has been under pressure ever since and back in 2012, in order to address concerns, it decided to create two institutions to probe rights violations: The Ombudsman of the Ministry of Interior, and the Special Investigations Unit within the Public Prosecution Office. But it has now emerged that rights violations have gone on unabated.

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