The Pakistani government was forced into a dramatic climbdown yesterday as the political crisis surrounding President Pervez Musharraf deepened, with international condemnation of harsh new media laws and the first signs of serious dissent within his own party.

As thousands of people demonstrated in four cities - some in defiance of a ban - the government overturned a decree signed by Mr Musharraf on Monday empowering the government to close television stations, revoke licences and impose large fines. The decree brought international protests. Human Rights Watch said it would “muzzle” the free press and European ambassadors issued a rare statement of concern. The prime minister, Shaukat Aziz, responded by suspending the decree yesterday.

Mr Musharraf appears increasingly isolated as he battles through the greatest political challenge of his career. Lawyers, journalists and opposition parties were already openly hostile when, two days ago, he rounded on his Pakistan Muslim League party for failing to support him. “You always leave me alone in time of trial and tribulation,” he berated followers at a party meeting, according to the News newspaper.

Ishaq Khakwani, one of 77 ministers in the federal cabinet, said Mr Musharraf complained: “Things happen, but I have to face the brunt alone.”

Several party officials told the Guardian they were unhappy with Mr Musharraf’s handling of the crisis provoked by the attempted sacking of the chief justice, and feared it might bring the government down. A senior figure, speaking on condition of anonymity, said: “Mistakes are being made and we don’t want it to spin out of control. This is an election year.”

Kabir Wasti, one of the party’s 40 vice-presidents, said: “The president has lost the support of the majority of the people of Pakistan, if not the whole.”

Analysts said party activists sensed that the public mood had turned. “Musharraf is trying to insert steel rods inside their spines to stand up and defend him. But he fails to recognise they are politicians, and they understand there is great anger on the streets,” said Abbas Nasir, editor of the Dawn newspaper.

Several hundred journalists rallied in Islamabad yesterday despite a ban on meetings of more than five people. Meanwhile Mr Musharraf took his fight with the chief justice back to the courts. His chief of staff and the heads of two intelligence agencies filed affidavits in the supreme court supporting Mr Musharraf’s allegations of corruption.

Major General Mian Nadeem Ijaz Ahmad, head of military intelligence, said the chief justice had sought information about other judges for his personal “database”.

Analysts said Mr Musharraf might resort to more drastic steps. “Any attempt to impose emergency rule and suspend fundamental rights would be pouring petrol on the fire,” said Samina Ahmed of the International Crisis Group, citing rumours of military rule.

The president was expected to address the nation on television.

Mr Musharraf’s hopes for re-election by the current parliament, whose term expires next autumn, are fading. PML officials privately advocate a prospect the president recently ruled out - sharing power with the exiled opposition leader, Benazir Bhutto. “We could have a German-style grand coalition,” said the senior party official.

(02-20) 10:47 PST El Centro, Calif. (AP) —

The Imperial Irrigation District approved a $74 million transmission line to link renewable energy generators in the Salton Sea area to larger power grids.

The line is part of the district’s four-phase power transmission expansion plan slated to be completed by 2011. The first phase will cover the first eight miles of line.

District officials said the transmission line will generate $1.6 million in revenue a year. At full development the line could generate $14 million in revenues.

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Information from: Imperial Valley Press, «www.ivpressonline.com»

WHEN THE SCOTTISH ARCHITECT Basil Spence was told in 1951 that he had won the competition to design the new Coventry Cathedral, he fainted, telephone in his hand. “He was extremely vulnerable, deeply sensitive, and curiously insecure,” Sir Hugh Casson, fellow architect and president of the Royal Academy, would remember.

Spence’s stunned shock was not misplaced. The decade-long Coventry project would earn him a knighthood, a score of other honours, and more major commissions. He was president of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) before it was completed.

Coventry remains his monument. But when he died, in 1976, the then president of the RIBA, Eric Lyons, reflected what was an ambiguous judgment on his career, at a time when modernist architecture was falling out of favour. His buildings reflected the “spirit of vitality and enthusiasm” after the war, Lyons said. “Throughout history the architecture and architects of any period cannot be adequately assessed by their contemporaries,” he added, “but I am certain that the stature of this man will be recognised by future generations.”

Next week the exhibition Back to the Future opens at the Dean Gallery. It includes more than 200 exhibits, many from an archive recently gifted by his family to the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historic Monuments of Scotland. They include original drawings and sketchbooks and film of Spence talking about his own buildings. The show marks the centenary of his birth, but it is also the first major exhibition dedicated to his career; 21 years after his death, will those “future generations” be convinced by his legacy?

Basil Urwin Spence was born in Bombay in 1907. At the age of 12 he was despatched to George Watson’s College in Edinburgh, a city he had never seen.

“Edinburgh is the most beautiful city in the world,” he later recalled. “I heard this first at the age of seven in India.”

Spence left his stamp on Edinburgh in a string of buildings, from the Scottish Widows building in Dalkeith Road to 1950s-style flats along the Canongate to the modernist Mortonhall Crematorium. In Glasgow his airport terminal has been outgrown but the “great umbrella of concrete vaults”, meant to open a gateway to flight, remain.

“If you are looking for the big post-war names in Scottish architecture, he is in the top three or four,” says Douglas Read, past president of the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland. The Royal Mile flats, Read says, “fit in without being fake-medieval”.

Across Britain, Spence’s projects ran from a nuclear power station to the University of Sussex campus to pavilions in the great exhibitions of the 1950s. But he left controversy in his wake. He was denounced for destroying the views from Hyde Park with the infamous 30-storey Knightsbridge Barracks block, and in Glasgow he was derided over the Hutchestown C buildings in the Gorbals - 20-storey towers, their maisonettes linked by communal balconies that he glowingly described as “hanging gardens”.

Spence, who trained as an architect at the Edinburgh College of Art (ECA), struggled to pay his way after his father’s death and earned cash by drawing for architectural firms. From early on he was a passionate admirer of the modernist designs of the Swiss-born architect Le Corbusier. On his 1934 honeymoon in Germany, he and his wife Joan visited an exhibition in Stuttgart of Le Corbusier and the German architect Walter Gropius. While still teaching at the ECA, Spence made an appeal in The Scotsman for British architects to embrace Le Corbusier’s new style.

After serving in the army in the Second World War he returned to Edinburgh in 1945 and set up his own firm in Moray Place. His work on exhibitions, with the grandeur of his sea and ships pavilion at the Festival of Britain in 1951, and his role as chief architect for the Exhibition of Industrial Power in Glasgow that year, earned him an OBE.

But the scarcity of work saw him looking south for work, and he moved his office to London after the Coventry commission. He kept an Edinburgh office, but spent his last years in Malta and Suffolk.

The new exhibition includes his original designs from the Coventry competition, a project that became the most potent symbol of Britain’s emergence from the pain of war.

“I have not tried to make an exciting building,” he wrote in 1955. “A cathedral should not arouse excitement, but a deep emotion.”

His design set the new building alongside the shattered remnants of the medieval cathedral, with its makeshift altar of broken stones set up after the bombing.

Spence’s body of work shows enormous and imaginative variety. There are the startling white and wood boxes of the Scandinavian-style home he designed for his family in Hampshire. The British Embassy in Rome was a personal favourite, while the Beehive, the executive wing of the New Zealand Parliament, also became famous.

In Scotland he was a consultant architect on Edinburgh University’s George Square for six years, his reputation not suffering as Sir Robert Matthew’s did when three sides of the square were levelled, to be replaced by modern blocks, including Spence’s lower-lying library.

An excellent salesman, he famously said of his Corbusier-inspired Gorbals project that “on Tuesdays, when the washing’s out, it’ll be like a great ship in full sail”. He was wrong. His “hanging gardens” were demolished in 1993.

Back to the Future: Sir Basil Spence, 1907-1976 is at the Dean Gallery, Edinburgh, 19 October until 10 February.