PARIS – The city of Paris is filing legal complaints against a group of fundamentalist Christians who have been protesting a play currently showing at the municipal theater, claiming it is blasphemous, the mayor said Friday.

Riot police have been called in to chase off demonstrators bearing crosses loudly protesting in front of, and sometimes inside, the Theatre de la Ville since the Oct. 20 opening of the play.

“Sur le Concept du Visage du fils de Dieu” (“On the Concept of the Son of God’s Face”), by Italian Romeo Castellucci is a provocative story centering on a young man caring for his aged and incontinent father. A portrait of the face of Christ looms large onstage throughout and projectiles are ultimately thrown at it.

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AMMAN (Reuters) – Syrian forces shot dead at least 24 civilians on Friday when they fired on demonstrators demanding international protection from President Bashar al-Assad's crackdown on seven months of unrest, activists and residents said.

Most of the killings took place in the central cities of Hama, where Assad sent tanks and troops to crush dissent three months ago, and Homs, a center of increasingly armed opposition to his autocratic rule.

"A no-fly zone is a legitimate demand for Homs," read banners carried by protesters in the Khalidiya neighborhood.

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Thailand’s King Bhumibol Adulyadej asked late Thursday that no special measures be taken to protect royal palaces from advancing floodwaters, as the deluge pressed closer to the heart of the capital. The military, meanwhile promised to deploy 50,000 soldiers around Bangkok to try to divert water and help with evacuations. Regional officials have already urged Bangkok residents to leave the city for their own safety this weekend, when high tides and a surge of water from northern provinces are expected. Many residents have already left, leaving Bangkok’s famously clogged roadways nearly empty.

Flood waters are already knee-high outside the Temple of the Emerald Buddha and the old Grand Palace on the banks of the Chao Phraya River on Friday morning. Several old temples and palaces line the river that snakes down from the inundated central provinces, through the capital and out to the Gulf of Thailand. In Nonthaburi, just north of the city, Buddhist monks and residents at a riverside temple caught one of dozens of crocodiles that escaped from farms upcountry when the flooding began last month. Meanwhile, water surged over flood walls along a canal in Sai Mai, a district in northeastern Bangkok, prompting Governor Sukhumband Paribatr to order residents to evacuate immediately. The governor has said that all of Bangkok can expect to be flooded by early next week.(See photos flooding north of Bangkok.)

King Bhumibol, 83, has been living at Siriraj Hospital, also on the banks of the Chao Phraya River, since falling ill in September 2009. The neighborhood surrounding the hospital was under two to three feet of water Friday. The king communicated his desire through Army Commander-in-Chief Gen. Prayuth Chanocha that the palaces be left to flood and priority given to helping the nearly 2.5 million Thais affected by the disaster. According to the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 373 people in Thailand have perished, more than 100,000 are living in shelters, 700,000 are in need of medical assistance and 28 of the country’s 76 provinces are inundated. Floods have also affected neighboring Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam where cumulatively 350 people have died. Flash floods have also been reported in Burma.

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Texas Governor Rick Perry’s troubled campaign announced on Monday that it would be adding staff — veteran national GOP strategists Nelson Warfield, Curt Anderson and Tony Fabrizio. But Perry’s campaign in Austin was quick to swat down accusations of a tumultuous shake up. “This is the natural expansion of a growing campaign,” said communications director Ray Sullivan, sitting in his office, comprised of four blank walls and a desk scattered with a few papers and a laptop. “No one is leaving, no one is being demoted or forced out.”

The Perry campaign prides itself on running a low-key, outside-the-Beltway campaign. The very thought of hiring national Republican strategists once seemed out of character for the Tea Party darling who once accused Ben Bernanke — a Bush appointee — of treason. His campaign headquarters in Austin are discrete — there are no “Rick Perry for President” banners here — and the campaign isn’t even named in the building directory. It’s been two months since Perry launched his campaign and his relatively small staff — fewer than 50 people with just five or so staffers in each of the early primary states — aren’t even hawking paraphernalia yet, though you can pick up bumper stickers and window signs from the main office, if you can find it. (Barack Obama, by contrast, ordered tens of thousands of t-shirts, cups and bumper stickers ahead of his 2007 campaign announcement and had hundreds of staff and volunteers already installed in Chicago by the big day.) (Watch TIME’s video “Rick Perry Is Ready to Run for President.”)

But what had effectively been a beefed up governor’s campaign was struggling to manage the rigors of a presidential one. And that’s what led to Monday’s hires. “Team Perry was overwhelmed,” says Mark McKinnon, a longtime Austin GOP strategist and former adviser to President George W. Bush. “They just didn’t have enough horses. Now they do.”

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“I am sick, I cannot sleep,” says Hervin Ose, fighting back tears as she remembers her friend and fellow Syrian Kurdish activist, Mashaal Tammo. “Till now I cannot believe he is not here. Sometimes I even try to call him, sometimes I wait for him to call me.”

On Friday Oct. 7, Hervin met Tammo at a friend’s house in Qamishli, a Kurdish-majority town in northeastern Syria, just across the border from Turkey. “He had a sadness about him,” she recalls, speaking via Skype. Tammo, one of the few Syrian Kurdish leaders to have openly called for the overthrow of Syrian President Bashar al Assad, had recently escaped an assassination attempt. Now he spoke as if he was going away on a long trip. “My message is finished in this life,” he told her. Before taking his leave Tammo even snapped a few pictures of his friend. “I wondered,” says Hervin. “He’d never taken a photo of me before.” (See pictures of Syria’s ongoing protests.)

It was the last time she was to see him alive. Hours later, according to reports, masked assailants gunned down Tammo inside his Qamishli home, leaving his son and another Kurdish activist wounded. Hervin, who insisted on being quoted by her real name — “I am a wanted person already… I am tired of being afraid,” she says — has no doubts as to who ordered her friend’s murder. “Bashar,” she says, “he made this decision.”

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