I received alarming news from veteran labor activist Kamal Abbas, the director of the Center for Trade Union and Workers Services. The government has cracked down on the center’s branch in Naga’ Hammadi, Qena, on Thursday. Read the statement below…
Serious Escalation in the Relationship Between the Government and Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs)
Decision to Shut Down [...]

The strike sit-in that started in the North & South Cairo, Giza Grain Mills Company in Talbeya (Faisal St, Giza) spread to the company’s branch in Sharabeyya district in Cairo, bringing a total number of 9000 workers on strike into the sit-in. Click on the workers’ photo below to read more details in Arabic by [...]

The new issue of L’Ishtiraki, The Socialist, is now available online. Click on the pic below to download it in PDF format…

The second day at Cairo’s 5th Anti-War Conference and 3rd Cairo Social Forum brought earthshaking surprises at it’s Anti-Torture Forum, held on Friday afternoon.

[Above: Abu Omar in the Press Syndicate, Photo by Hossam el-Hamalawy]
Abu Omar–the Alexandrian cleric kidnapped 2003 by the CIA in Milan and rendered to Egypt where he was brutally tortured–showed up today [...]

The children of MB detainees will also voice their hopes and fears, during the Cairo Anti-War Conference on Saturday….

More than 1,000 workers at the state-owned Grain Grinding Mills in Talbeya, Giza, have started a sit-in Thursday morning, protesting the government’s decision to reduce the supply of wheat to the company, in favor of privately owned firms, in what the workers fear as the first step towards privatizing or closing down the mills.
More details [...]

It was a great evening ya shabab, with hundreds of activists filling the syndicate’s entrance and main hall, listening to representatives of Egyptian leftist and Islamist parties, leaders of Arab resistance groups, and international anti-war activists…

The Press Syndicate’s was buzzing with movement, as young students and activists from the Muslim Brothers, Karama, Revolutionary Socialists, and [...]

Here’s another video of the NYC anti-Mubarak’s constitutional amendments protest, recorded by Sherif Sadek… (Thanks Shehab)

Two weeks ago, a Giza police force from Warraq Police Station broke into the house of 43-year-old Fekri Mohamed Abbas at 2:30am, and tortured him, his wife and children, searching for hash. The torture not included the usual beatings with fists, kicks and whipping with sticks, etc… but the police forced the citizen’s wife and [...]

From the BBC…
A US court has dismissed a lawsuit against former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld over claims prisoners were tortured in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The court accepted that the nine men who sued had been tortured - and detailed the torture in its ruling.
But Judge Thomas Hogan ruled the five Iraqis and four Afghans did [...]

Pathetic!
The very devoted dean of the faculty law in Assuit University, Dr. Essam el-Zanaty,  took part himself in chasing Kefaya students on campus who were chanting against the constitutional referendum circus. The amazing Dr. Zanaty defied reason age, and accompanied the university security guards in hunting down the Kefaya students. Dr. Zanaty grabbed two of [...]

From Al-Jazeera…
The US Senate has by a small margin voted to keep a measure tying funding for the war in Iraq to a timetable for withdrawing US troops.
Tuesday’s vote of 48 to 50 saw senators reject a Republican amendment that would have stripped language imposing a March 2008 deadline from an emergency funding bill for [...]

The Administrative Court decided Tuesday afternoon to transfer the lawsuit to block 21 blogs and websites that “harm Egypt’s national interests and defame Hosni Mubarak” to the Sixth District Court, to be looked into sometime in April.
The court session ended in a circus, with judge Abdel Fattah Mourad who filed the lawsuit requesting the blocking, [...]