More than 500,000 Syrians may have turned out to protest on the traditionally largest day of the week for protest. To give you a sense of scale, that's the equivalent (percentage wise) of roughly 7 million Americans on the street. Martin Gasciogne demands the global media pay more attention:

In Syria, President Bashar al-Assad has suggested that he is a pragmatic politician trapped by circumstance. Whether, however, his plan of conducting more open elections in 2012 has any hope of offering a way out of the impasse has a rather big question mark over it. The legitimacy of the regime may well have been fatally wounded. Syria, unlike Tunisia or even Libya, risks becoming trapped in a cycle of debilitating violence rather than seeing the sort of political progress for which the opposition Syrian National Council hopes. I might help if the rest of the world would at least pay attention.

Along those lines, Ahmed Al Omran (whose Twitter feed is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the Syria uprising) pens an extended obituary for rebellion chronicler Basel Al-Sayed, whose death we mentioned yesterday. Daniel Serwer thinks the Arab League is helping, somewhat marginally, but the Free Syrian Army isn't. Joseph F. Jacob exposes the hollowness of Assad's "concessions" on the core right to free speech. Here's a protest outside some beautiful historic ruins: