LONDON (Reuters) – Sitar player Anouska Shankar, whose album “Traveller” takes a journey through the music of India and Spanish flamenco to explore their shared Gypsy roots, was named Best Artist in Songlines magazine’s annual world music awards.

At a time of political unrest in Mali, artists from there took two awards – veteran Sahara Desert bluesmen Tinariwen were named as Best Group while their young compatriot Fatoumata Diawara was Best Newcomer.

Best Cross-Cultural Collaboration went to renowned American cellist Yo-Yo Ma and his fellow musicians Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer and Chris Thile, who combine classical and bluegrass music on “The Goat Rodeo Sessions.”

Shankar is the daughter of legendary sitar player Ravi Shankar and the half-sister of Norah Jones. For “Traveller she teamed up with the in-demand Spanish producer Javier Limon, Indian singer Shubha Mudgal, guitarist Pepe Habichuela and singer Buika among others, mixing ragas with flamenco rhythmns.

“She’s an amazing sitar player and a heritage you can’t beat. She’s done classical sitar — she’s one of the best,” Songlines publisher Simon Broughton told Reuters. “There’s a link between Indian music and flamenco because of the gypsies, who originated in India, and that’s what she’s exploring. They have made something very special”.

Tinariwen, a band of guitar-playing Tuareg, have enjoyed huge success since they emerged from the desert sands to world stages a decade ago. Supporters of an independent Tuareg state, the current strife in Mali has given their music a new topicality.

“They’ve taken African music to a whole new audience. And now this whole desert story, which we thought was history, is now very much a reality,” Broughton said.

LONDON (Reuters) – American revolutionary leader George Washington has been voted the greatest enemy commander to face Britain, lauded for his spirit of endurance against the odds and the enormous impact of his victory.

In a contest organised by the National Army Museum, Washington triumphed over Irish independence hero Michael Collins, France’s Napoleon Bonaparte, German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey.

Making the case for Washington, historian Stephen Brumwell said the American War of Independence (1775-83) was “the worst defeat for the British Empire ever.”

“His personal leadership was crucial,” he said.

Washington was a courageous and inspirational battlefield commander who led from the front but also had the skills to deal with his political counterparts in Congress and with his French allies, Brumwell said. Above all, he never gave up even when the war was going against him.

“His army was always under strength, hungry, badly supplied. He shared the dangers of his men. Anyone other than Washington would have given up the fight. He came to personify the cause, and the scale of his victory was immense.”

Almost 8,000 people voted in an online poll which produced a shortlist of five men, whose merits were debated by guest speakers at a weekend event at the museum before a final ballot of attendees.

BEIRUT (Reuters) – People in the Lebanese capital Beirut are watching anxiously as the increasingly bloody conflict in neighboring Syria unfolds, fearing it could spill over the border and bring a return of the violence that tore their own country apart for so long.

Beirut has undergone a renaissance since the days when Muslim and Christian factions, as well as Palestinian guerrillas, clashed over a Green Line and foreign interlopers imposed their will with troops, tanks and warplanes.

The bars and restaurants of Hamra and Gemmayzeh are buzzing every night with crowds of young professionals and students.

But memories of the car bombs, massacres and kidnappings are still fresh and opinions on Syria vary across Beirut’s patchwork of religious communities and alliances, all colored by people’s own loyalties and experience of war.

In the poor St Michel district, home to Muslim refugees from the 1975-90 civil war, Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad is a hero.

“He is at war with the United States and Israel. They support the opposition,” said Ramha al-Hassan, a Sunni Muslim woman stopping to buy bread at a shop in a scruffy street of crumbling houses and overhanging electrical wires.

She said her brother and three of his children were killed in 1983 when the U.S. battleship New Jersey, anchored off Beirut, shelled their home in the mountains. Her mother was killed by Israeli bombs.

AMMAN/BEIRUT (Reuters) – Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces rained rockets and bombs down on opposition-held neighbourhoods of the city of Homs, reducing buildings to rubble and killing more than 80 people, including two Western journalists.

The barrages marked an intensification of a nearly three-week offensive to crush resistance in Homs, one of the focal points of a nationwide uprising against Assad’s 11-year rule, and prompted further international condemnation.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy described the deaths of the two journalists, French photographer Remi Ochlik and American Marie Colvin of Britain’s Sunday Times, as an assassination and said the Assad era had to end.

“That’s enough now,” Sarkozy said. “This regime must go and there is no reason that Syrians don’t have the right to live their lives and choose their destiny freely. If journalists were not there, the massacres would be a lot worse.”

France and Britain demanded that three other Western journalists wounded in the strike on a house in Homs be given the medical care they urgently needed.

More than 60 bodies, both rebel fighters and civilians, were recovered from one area of Homs’ Baba Amro, a Sunni Muslim district opposed to Syria’s Alawite ruling class, after an afternoon bombardment on Wednesday. Some 21 were killed earlier in the day, activists said.

“Helicopters flew reconnaissance overhead then the bombardment started,” Homs activist Abu Abei told Reuters.

AMMAN/BEIRUT (Reuters) – Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces rained rockets and bombs down on opposition-held neighborhoods of the city of Homs, reducing buildings to rubble and killing more than 80 people, including two Western journalists.

The barrages marked an intensification of a nearly three-week offensive to crush resistance in Homs, one of the focal points of a nationwide uprising against Assad’s 11-year rule, and prompted further international condemnation.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy described the deaths of the two journalists, French photographer Remi Ochlik and American Marie Colvin of Britain’s Sunday Times, as an assassination and said the Assad era had to end.

“That’s enough now,” Sarkozy said. “This regime must go and there is no reason that Syrians don’t have the right to live their lives and choose their destiny freely. If journalists were not there, the massacres would be a lot worse.”

France and Britain demanded that three other Western journalists wounded in the strike on a house in Homs be given the medical care they urgently needed.

More than 60 bodies, both rebel fighters and civilians, were recovered from one area of Homs’ Baba Amro, a Sunni Muslim district opposed to Syria’s Alawite ruling class, after an afternoon bombardment on Wednesday. Some 21 were killed earlier in the day, activists said.

“Helicopters flew reconnaissance overhead then the bombardment started,” Homs activist Abu Abei told Reuters.

AMMAN (Reuters) – Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces rained rockets and bombs down on opposition-held neighborhoods of the city of Homs on Wednesday, reducing buildings to rubble and killing more than 80 people, including two Western journalists.

The barrages marked an intensification of a nearly three-week offensive to crush resistance in Homs, one of the focal points of a nationwide uprising against Assad’s 11-year rule and its ferocity has caused international outrage.

More than 60 bodies, both rebel fighters and civilians, were recovered from one area of Homs’ Babo Amro neighborhood after an afternoon bombardment, adding to 21 killed earlier in the day, activists.

“Helicopters flew reconnaissance overhead then the bombardment started,” Homs activist Abu Abei told Reuters.

Videos uploaded by opposition activists showed smashed buildings, deserted streets, and doctors treating wounded civilians in primitive conditions in Baba Amro district, the main target of Assad’s wrath.

“President Assad wants to finish the Homs situation by Sunday to prepare for the constitutional referendum. Then he will turn to Idlib,” a Lebanese official who is close to the Syrian government told Reuters in Beirut.

The devastation has caused an outcry but Wednesday’s carnage only showed how helpless Western powers are in their efforts to stop the bloodshed.

AMMAN/BEIRUT (Reuters) – A leading Chinese newspaper accused Western countries on Monday of stirring civil war in Syria, where police and militia patrols clamped down on a district of the capital to prevent new demonstrations against President Bashar al-Assad.

After almost a year of protests against Assad’s 11-year rule, the uprising has moved to his centre of power in Damascus, where the security police surrounded a funeral of a young protester on Sunday to ensure there was no renewal of some of biggest demonstrations in the capital.

China’s Communist Party mouthpiece the People’s Daily, in a front page commentary, said the West’s support of the opposition and its demands for Assad to step down could provoke a “large-scale civil war” that might demand foreign intervention.

China and Russia angered the West and Arab states this month by blocking a draft U.N. Security Council resolution that backed an Arab plan demanding Assad step aside.

If the Security Council had passed the resolution backing the Arab League, that would only have lead to more violence, Qu King, whom the newspaper identified as a foreign affairs expert, wrote in the article.

“If Western countries continue to fully support Syria’s opposition, then in the end a large-scale civil war will erupt and there will be no way to thus avoid the possibility of foreign armed intervention,” Qu wrote.

China has sent envoys to the region, stung by Western criticism that by vetoing the resolutions at the United Nations it was allowing the violence to increase. China and Russia also voted against a non-binding U.N. General Assembly resolution to back the Arab plan last week.

AMMAN/BEIRUT (Reuters) – Police and militia patrols fanned out in the Syrian capital’s Mezze district on Sunday to prevent more protests like those that have threatened President Bashar al-Assad’s grip on Damascus, opposition activists said.

On the international front, China said it believed a peaceful solution to the Syrian crisis was still possible but Britain’s foreign minister said he feared the Middle Eastern country would slide into civil war.

China’s official Xinhua news agency reflected Beijing’s view a day after a Chinese envoy met Assad in Damascus while thousands of Syrians demonstrated in the heart of the capital in one of the biggest anti-government rallies there since a nationwide uprising started nearly a year ago.

Samer al-Khatib, a young protester killed when security forces fired on Saturday’s rally, was buried in Mezze on Sunday amid a heavy security presence to prevent the funeral from turning into an anti-Assad demonstration, opposition activists contacted by Reuters from Amman said.

Fifteen pick-up trucks carrying security police and armed pro-Assad militiamen, known as ‘shabbiha’, surrounded the funeral as Khatib was buried quietly, they said.

Police cars and militia jeeps patrolled Mezze while secret police stopped men at random to check identification cards, they said. “Walking in Mezze now carries the risk of arrest. The area is quiet, even popular food shops in Sheikh Saad are empty,” activist Moaz al-Shami said, referring to a main street.

The Damascus protest indicated the movement against Assad, who has ruled Syria for 11 years after succeeding his father Hafez on his death, has not been cowed by repression and embraces a wide section of Syrian society.

AMMAN/BEIRUT (Reuters) – Syrian security forces fired live ammunition to break up a protest against President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus on Saturday, killing at least one person, opposition activists said.

A Chinese envoy met the Syrian leader earlier in the day and urged all sides to end 11 months of bloodshed, while backing a government plan for elections.

The shooting broke out at the funerals of three youths killed on Friday in an anti-Assad protest that was one of the biggest in the capital since a nationwide uprising started.

“They started firing at the crowd right after the burial. People are running and trying to take cover in the alleyways,” said a witness, speaking to Reuters in Amman by telephone.

The opposition Syrian Revolution Coordination Union said the gunfire near the cemetery had killed one mourner and wounded four, including a woman who was hit in the head.

Up to 30,000 demonstrators had taken to the streets in the Mezze district of Damascus, witnesses said.

Footage of the funeral broadcast live on the Internet showed women ululating to honor the victims. Mourners shouted: “We sacrifice our blood, our soul for you martyrs. One, one, one, the Syrian people are one”.

AMMAN/BEIRUT (Reuters) – Syrian President Bashar al-Assad prepared to welcome a senior Chinese official to Damascus Friday, a show of support from one of the few foreign friends he still has after the U.N. General Assembly voted for an Arab League plan telling him to step down.

Assad showed no sign of heeding calls to halt the repression of the 11-month uprising against his rule. His forces Friday resumed pummeling opposition strongholds in the city of Homs, which has now been under fire for two weeks.

At the U.N. assembly in New York, 137 states voted in favor, 12 voted against and 17 abstained Thursday on a resolution endorsing the Arab League plan. Russia and China voted against, after vetoing a similar text in the U.N. Security Council on February 4.

The assembly vote, unlike Council resolutions, has no legal force but it increased Assad’s isolation and reflected global revulsion at the ferocity of the crackdown in which government security forces have killed several thousand civilians.

“Today the U.N. General Assembly sent a clear message to the people of Syria – the world is with you,” U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice said in a statement.

Beirut-based political commentator Rami Khouri told Reuters that the vote was important even though it was symbolic.

“There’s overwhelming global support for the opposition. It keeps the pressure on and the opposition can say they have global legitimacy. I think his days are numbered. But we still don’t know how long he can hold on,” Khouri said.