Assad's speech is poor echo of Shakespeare - Financial Times

Every time in the past three months that President Bashar al-Assad has vaguely pledged reforms aimed at damping down the uprising engulfing Syria, his regime has intensified the repression, using tanks and helicopter gunships to shoot protesters across the country.

Each ostensible recognition of the demands of a people struggling to break free from four decades of iron rule by the Assad family comes accompanied by unsubstantiated claims that the uprising is the work of armed gangs, foreign agents, Arab media, Islamist extremists and a motley cast of other disembodied threats to Syrian society.