A climate of change

摘要

On Friday afternoons two years ago, the picture on Arab television screens developed a curious habit of multiplying. It would split in two, then three, then more and more lookalike frames. At the end of noon prayers, as mosques emptied in sequence across four time zones, news teams in city after city beamed up dramatic imagery that was strikingly similar. The same vast, joyous, flag-waving crowds surged into the Pearl Roundabout in Manama, the capital of Bahrain, thronged the Tahrir Squares of Sana'a, the Yemeni capital, and of Egypt's great metropolis, Cairo, and swarmed the beachfront at Benghazi in Libya and the leafy avenues of Tunis. Everyone was chanting the same refrain: "The people demand the fall of the regime."