Protest

JERUSALEM - An Israeli protester set himself alight during a rally Saturday night marking the anniversary of a wave of demonstrations that swept the country to protest the high cost of living and other social issues, authorities said. Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said the man in his 40s poured flammable liquid over himself at a protest in Tel Aviv and set himself on fire. He was later rushed to a hospital, where he was being treated for serious burns, Rosenfeld said. Israel's Channel 10 TV showed footage of the man on fire.

There she is, smartly dressed in red, trim and blond, eagerly plugging her new book on the perils of popular culture. Tipper Gore is sitting at a card table at Encore Books on Walnut Street, happy to autograph copies of her book, Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society. But wait - she is not swamped by similarly worried parents or even pin- striped shoppers on their lunch hours. Outside, a dozen teenagers stand holding protest signs. And inside, she is surrounded by kids with rainbow- colore d hair, spiked jackets, shredded jeans, and earrings.

About 50 people in wheelchairs blocked the driveway at the Greyhound bus terminal in Center City yesterday to protest the company's failure to provide access for the handicapped to its buses. Police made no arrests.

The Grim Reaper, dressed in the dark robe of death, walks around the chalk- outlined bodies of 75 protesters sprawled across the sidewalk in front of the Sun Co. building at 18th and Market streets yesterday. Pretending to be corpses, the demonstrators held signs to their chests in protest of any changes to ease laws enacted to reduce air pollution

Pro-life demonstrators sing and pray in the rain yesterday morning outside the Northeast Women's Center on Comly Road in Northeast Philadelphia. Their protest closed the clinic for a while until they were threatened with arrest and dispersed. Some then joined a demonstration at the Reproductive Health and Counseling Center in Chester, where nearly 100 people were arrested. The protests came two days after the Supreme Court ruling that permits tighter restrictions on abortion.

RECENTLY, I've seen numerous announcements of various groups planning to "protest the Republican National Convention. " These announcements do not talk about, say, "protesting Bush's policies" or "protesting Republican support of big business at the expense of labor and the middle class. " No, they say they will be protesting the convention - one of the hallmarks of our democracy. Direct your protests at the actual issues - rationally, calmly, one-by-one. Don't feed the conservative stereotype of liberals as emotional noisemakers.

Members of Dignity Philadelphia lock arms yesterday outside the Cathedral Basilica of Ss. Peter and Paul. Some two dozen members of the group, an organization of lesbian, gay and bi-sexual Catholics, staged a demonstration inside and outside the cathedral to protest Cardinal Anthony J. Bevilacqua's stand aginst the proposed domestic-partnership legislation before City Council. When the cathedral's pastor, Msgr. James Howard, began reading from Bevilacqua's letter, Dignity members got up from their seats and walked out of church.

Part of a crowd that swelled to about 200 people demonstrates against the war outside Independence Mall. Protesters, who later formed a human chain to block traffic on Market Street between 5th and 6th, carried a black coffin and shouted "No blood for Bush!"; "Money for AIDS, not for war!" and "Stop the bombing now!"

ISTANBUL - Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Sunday it was his "duty" to order riot police to evict activists occupying an Istanbul park that became a center of defiance against his rule, even as the government crackdown continued across town with tear gas fired at protesters trying to regroup. In a thunderous speech to hundreds of thousands of supporters in western Istanbul, Erdogan also railed against foreign media coverage of the unrest amid criticism over his government's handling of the protests that left his international image battered, and exposed deep rifts within Turkish society.

ISTANBUL, Turkey - In a tear-gas-filled conclusion to two weeks of antigovernment protests in Turkey, riot police on Saturday cleared a central Istanbul square and park that had formed the heart of a broad challenge to the 10-year rule of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The storming of Taksim Square and adjoining Gezi Park risked further inflaming opposition to Erdogan, with protesters who had complained that he had authoritarian tendencies saying Saturday that the leader had destroyed all chances for negotiation.

Foreign business leaders are increasingly looking to Pennsylvania as a potential location for investment because of the availability of abundant Marcellus Shale natural gas, Gov. Corbett told an industry-supported energy summit Friday. Corbett said Pennsylvania's shale-gas boom was a frequent subject of interest on his trade missions this year to South America and last year to Germany. "In each place, business leaders wanted to know more about our shale industry," Corbett told about 170 people attending the daylong summit sponsored by the Keystone Energy Forum.

SIXTEEN EDUCATION advocates who were arrested in March for blocking auditorium doorways during a raucous protest at School District headquarters were acquitted yesterday. Municipal Judge T. Francis Shields granted a judgment of acquittal at the request of four defense attorneys after hearing attorney arguments and testimony from police Lt. Joseph O'Brien, the trial's only witness. In issuing his order Shields said he believed the protesters "went a little too far" but still concurred with defense attorneys that O'Brien had failed to identify any of the 16 defendants as those who blocked the three doorways into the School Reform Commission meeting.

Sixteen people arrested in March for protesting the Philadelphia School Reform Commission's decision to close 23 schools were acquitted of disorderly conduct charges Thursday by a Municipal Court judge. "I really do believe you went a little too far, locking arms and standing in front of a door like that," said Judge T. Francis Shields. Still, Shields said, there was no evidence that any of the 16 blocked had doors to the auditorium at School District headquarters at 440 N. Broad St., as others had done.

TRIPOLI, Libya - One of Libya's highest military officers resigned Sunday after clashes between protesters and a government-aligned militia he was in charge of left 31 people dead in the eastern city of Benghazi, the deadliest such violence in a country where armed factions hold sway. The bloodshed underscored the rising public anger over the government's failure to build an army capable of reining in the militias that dominate parts of the country nearly two years after the fall of Moammar Gadhafi.

ISTANBUL, Turkey - A violent police crackdown on a small environmental sit-in at Istanbul's central Taksim Square has done more than spawn a week of protests across the country. It has left cracks in the shiny international image of a tolerant and deeply democratic Turkey. It might even have rattled the nation's grand ambitions on the world stage, which include a bid to host the 2020 Olympics and its long-standing aim to join the European Union. Thousands of protesters gathered for the eighth consecutive night Friday in Istanbul's Taksim Square, where the demonstrations originally began, and about 10,000 showed up at the main square in the capital, Ankara.

ISTANBUL, Turkey - The prime minister took a combative stance on his closely watched return to the country early Friday, telling supporters who thronged to greet him that the protests that have swept the country must come to an end. In the first extensive public show of support since antigovernment protests erupted last week, more than 10,000 supporters cheered Recep Tayyip Erdogan with rapturous applause outside an Istanbul airport. Despite earlier comments that suggested he could be softening his stand, Erdogan delivered a fiery speech on his return from a four-day trip to North Africa.

On a mobile device? Click here to view the video. WASHINGTON - Michelle Obama experienced a rare face-to-face encounter with a protester late Tuesday - approaching the activist and threatening to leave a fund-raiser if the person did not stop interrupting her speech. Obama was addressing a Democratic Party fund-raiser in a private home in the Kalorama neighborhood of Northwest Washington when Ellen Sturtz, 56, a lesbian activist, interrupted her remarks to demand that President Obama sign an antidiscrimination executive order.

ISTANBUL, Turkey - Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday rejected claims that he is a "dictator," dismissing protesters as an extremist fringe, even as thousands returned to the Istanbul square that has become the site of the fiercest antigovernment outburst in years. Over the last three days, protesters around the country have unleashed pent-up resentment against Erdogan, who after 10 years in office many Turks see as an uncompromising figure with undue influence in every part of life.