let's listen to this report from our middle east correspondent, jon leyne. >> at this polling station in cairo, egyptians fighting to have their voices heard, determined to have a say in how their country is rebuilt. queuesmore are forming patiently. after years of virtually one party rule,, as everyone here is voting for the first time. >> i'm so happy to see something like this. >> i want to say my country, so i have to vote. i have a voice. i have to use it. >> some of the queues are caused by polling stations opening late, but no one here seemed to care very much. the last election i covered exactly one year ago, the polling stations were deserted. it was not worth voting. now they have to fight them off. follow me around the corner. the queue goes on and on and around the streets. people are seizing the opportunity with both hands. >> once they get inside, voters are faced with a bewildering choice. they have to choose from 146 candidates and then they have a second ballot on which to choose from 15. the whole process will take more than three months. the heavy turnout, a snub to

. >> thanks very much, live from cairo and our middle east correspondent, jon leyne. this doesn't leave relations between damascus and cairo, between damascus and the a reason league in a very good place. >> no, and that allows ministers in, which was supposed to be in the peace plan original peace 10 days ago, and that's late. there's been a response from syria, not just this news conference, but also the huge rallies, pro-government rallies for the government organized over the weekend, and, of course, the attacks on embassies, saudi arabia, qatar, and turkey. if they are trying to make friends, it's not a great way to go about it. so, i don't think they're going to get much joy from it the arab league. i think we've come to the end of any dialogue between the league and syria. whether or not the arab league will agree to the meeting request by syria, i very much doubt. again, i think the belief in the arab league is that syria is just trying to place a time. and so, this really intensifies the confrontation both within syria and, of course, between syria and the ot

jon leyne reports from cairo. >> well, i'm not sure there's been much tear gas flying in the last few hours. there were reports of a cease-fire overnight. i haven't been down there to check whether there were still holding. so there were some attempts at conciliation. i think the military realizes that the address by field marshall tantawi dent help very much. he did promise earlier presidential elections, but apart from that, he was not very conciliatory at all, and it seems to have further angered the protesters. last night, two of the slightly more junior generals came out and offered an apology and said very insistently that they were not the same as the regime of hosni mubarak, to which they're increasingly being compared. so they are trying to either conciliate the protesters or at least to undermine them in the rest of the country. they're not going away and could even be building up. >> yeah, we also have, of course, the elections planned for monday. what is your sense as to how that will plan out? military are absolutely determined to press ahead with elections if they possib

the chances of that, according to jon leyne, our correspondent in cairo, particularly in relation to one individual within the military regime, the military interim administration, virtually zero. we'll keep an eye on those developments for you and get you right up to date with lyse doucet, if we can, before the end of this half-hour. let's get more on what's going on in bahrain as well. our correspondent, rupert wingfield hayes following that. we're expecting this report. what are the chances that it could be pretty incendiary? >> peter, i think everybody is expecting this report to be fairly critical of the bahraini government, of the way that it behaved during and after the crack down on protests here in february and march. but the devil is in the details. what people here are waiting to see is in the wording of the report, whether it says that torture was used in a wide spread and systematic fashion by the authorities when they arrested hundreds of people and interrogated them during the period where torture was used systematically. it's really the word systematic that people are