At a glance

Police pounced on the protesters immediately, running towards them from all corners of the square. They kicked, punched and dragged protesters to their feet, herded them into vans and drove them away. Other protesters who came to the square alone or in smaller groups of two or three were likewise quickly and violently tackled. At least two men were felled by police whotook running kicks and knocked their legs out from under them. Some officers shouted obscenities at practitioners as they beat them into submission.

RUSSIA: War and Peace, that great if very long classic of Russian literature, is available in a new, shorter edition that is a mere 800 pages, a newspaper has reported. The Moscow Times said on Friday the edition is actually a first draft of the novel that Leo Tolstoy rewrote and lengthened before publishing. A trial run of 5,000 copies of the new edition went on sale last month.

The novel has long been a dreaded part of schoolwork in Russia, where pupils have to wade through more than 1,600 pages of the original. The novel often figures in school graduation exams. Igor Zakharov, the book’s publisher, said his version is more appealing because it is shorter, has fewer war scenes and there’s a happier ending. The novel is a panoramic portrait of Russian society and its descent into the Napoleonic wars in 1812.

IRAN: Koranic schools in Iran’sholy city of Qom suspended classes on Saturday in solidarity with a growing protest against a newspaper that lampooned a leading conservative theologian, state radio said. The move came as a sit-in by theology students at the city university’s mosque entered a third day to demand the resignation of Culture Minister Ataollah Mohajerani, who issues press licences, over the affair. On Friday more than 1,000 demonstrators in downtown Qom, the stronghold of Iran’s conservative clerics, shouted slogans against Mohajerani over two satirical cartoons against Ayatollah Mohammad Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi in the Azad paper. Mesbah-Yazdi, who last month alleged the US Central Intelligence Agency had infiltrated Iran’s reformist government and bribed moderate journalists, was shown in one as a crocodile — in a Farsi pun on his name weeping at being a victim of “mercenary writers”.