DAMASCUS: Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was to address Saturday a new government tasked with launching reforms after protests demanding greater freedoms snowballed a month after they first broke out.
Meanwhile, thousands of Syrians attended the funeral of a man who died from his wounds after being shot by regime agents on Sunday in the northwestern city of Banias, witnesses and activists said.
The mourners chanted slogans in favor of greater freedoms, against the ruling Baath party, in power since 1963, while some also called for an end to the regime, the sources told AFP.
About 2,000 women also rallied "in favor of liberty and in homage of the martyr," in the centre of the coastal city, a human rights activist told AFP.
Assad was expected to deliver a speech during the first meeting of his new cabinet, tasked with introducing broad reforms, including lifting emergency laws.
"The speech will (then) be broadcast in the afternoon" by state media, said an official who declined to be named as state television began broadcasting the swearing in of cabinet ministers.
Assad made his first public comments two weeks after the protests erupted, telling parliament the violence was part of a "conspiracy" against Syria but keeping mum on the notorious emergency law.
Prime Minister Adel Safar unveiled Thursday his new cabinet, which is expected to carry out broad reforms including the lifting of the emergency law imposed since the Baath party seized power.
Tens of thousands of people rallied across Syria on Friday demanding greater freedoms, exactly one month after a rare protest was staged in Damascus calling for the release of political prisoners.
Friday protests stretched from the key southern town of Daraa, to the predominantly Kurdish north, via the central industrial city of Homs and the coastal cities of Latakia and Banias, activists said.
In Homs, baton-wielding police had waded into a crowd of around 4,000 people who chanted "freedom, freedom," political activist Najatai Tayara told AFP by telephone.
The official SANA news agency said a policeman who was killed when violence flared during an anti-regime demonstration in Homs would be buried on Saturday.
Up to 3,000 protesters marched in the centre of the agricultural town of Daraa, near the border with Jordan, where security forces shot dead at least seven people a week earlier.
"Between 2,500 and 3,000 people showed up at Al-Saraya area in the centre of the city, chanting slogans in favour of freedom and against the hostile regime," an activist said.
Security forces looked on as protesters chanted "Death rather than humiliation," he said.
Hassan Berro, an activist in the northeastern Kurdish-majority city of Qamishli, said some 5,000 people, waving Syrian flags, demonstrated in solidarity with the people of Daraa and Banias.
Banias, on the Mediterranean coast and home to Sunnis, Alawite Muslims and Christians, is another protest centre where government forces had killed at least four people on Sunday.
Another 4,500 people demonstrated in the three Kurdish neighbourhoods of Ras al-Ain, Amuda and Derbassiye, near Qamishli, Berro told AFP.
Around 1,000 people held similar protests in the northwestern coastal city of Latakia while in Jobar, north of Damascus, police with batons and tear gas clashed with some 2,000 demonstrators, rights activists said.
And about 50 protesters threw stones at police in Barz, near Damascus, said rights activist Abdel Karim Rihawi.
A global outcry over deadly crackdowns on month-old, anti-regime demonstrations widened on Friday with the United States and the United Nations renewing calls on Syria to halt the violence
"It is time for the Syrian government to stop repressing their citizens and start responding to their aspirations," US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Friday.
A statement by the United Nations in Geneva denounced the regime's bloody response to the protests.
The new Safar cabinet is expected to reform the restrictive media and political parties law -- demands tabled years ago by the country's opposition which seeks a role politics and an end to corruption.
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