UPDATE: Al Arabiya and Al Jazeera reporting now that there were two bombings that killed three and injured eight. The second bombing was near Sayida Aisha, a working class Egyptian neighborhood about 15 minutes by car from the site of the first bombing. Al Jazeera is interviewing somebody now saying that it was carried out [...]

While looking for more info about today’s bombing, I saw this item:
CAIRO, April 30 (Reuters) – The cousin of an Egyptian man wanted in connection with a bombing in Cairo this month has died in police custody, police sources said on Saturday.
Mohamed Suleiman Youssef, 40, was the cousin of Ashraf Said Youssef, identified by the [...]

Shit:
CAIRO, Egypt – A bomb was thrown from a bridge in Cairo to the street below, killing an Arab man and injuring four foreigners, police said.
Remains of a body, covered with newspapers, were seen beneath the bridge a few minutes after the 3:15 p.m. (7:15 a.m. ET) explosion was heard through downtown Cairo. The blast [...]

Yesterday, along most every other journalist I know, I attended the latest Kifaya protest. Pictures I took can be found here. Another first-hand account of yesterday’s demo is from Manal & Alaa’s blog.
The protest was scheduled to be held at Egypt’s Supreme Court (Dar al-Qada’ al-Uliya) off of Ramsis street, downtown (Perhaps, a symbolic reference [...]

The third installment, as reported previously, ended anti-climatically with Mubarak saying he has not decided if he was running for a fifth six-year presidential term. Mubarak said that the people should have their voice be heard. If they want him and his experiences to serve as a guide into the next part of Egyptian history [...]

Pro-Mubarak banners have been spreading across the city for the last month at least. I have seen them in Garden City, near Abdeen Square, in Bab Sharia and in plenty of other arease. It seems like many local NDP officials are taking the initiative (oh wait they don’t do that) and putting up “Nam Mubarak” [...]

I still need to write up the summery of part three of the Mubarak Reality show, but according to these banners hanging downtown, some people are already expressing their wishes to (re?)-elect Mubarak. The banner reads “Yes…for the Man of Peace”.

I doubt this showed up this morning as a reaction to his interviews. [...]

Sigh.
Amman – A Jordanian man shot dead his divorced sister after seeing her photo on his friend’s camera-equipped cellphone in the latest “honour” killing in the kingdom, hospital officials said Monday.

Bahrain’s Ministry of Information has decreed that webmasters in the country must apply for a license number that they will have to display on their sites. This applies not only for people who are technically webmasters (i.e. operate their own servers) but also people who host abroad. Failure to do so would result in prosecution [...]

More comments tomorrow but the last question tonight in the final installment was – –
Adib: So you have not decided if you are running for another term?
Mubarak: Not Yet
_________________
That said, I have an idea of what will happen.
What do you think?

Last night’s second installment of “My Word for History” was more of the same. The good news was it was only 90 minutes (rather than 120). So there was some mercy on those of us watching. I am actually not as hacked off as others are watching the series. Naturally, parts are absurd and way [...]

Last night President Mubarak sat down with the plump `Amad al-Din Adib for the first installment of three nights of interviews. Al-Ahram boasted yesterday that Adib would ask Mubarak 199 questions over the three days.
Each night it is 2-hours and as these were produced earlier, there can be no wardrobe malfunctions. The interviews are [...]

Al-Ghad’s secretary-general Mona Makram Ebeid penned an opinion article in today’s Daily Star.
It is more of a plea that their party is a home-grown answer to political reforms, which she in her position as party S-G, sees as currently stifled under the current political regime. It presents al-Ghad as a unified and cohesive bunch. Yet, [...]

Politique arabe de la France is a blog on, er, France’s Arab world policy. In French of course. Rather wonky but useful to follow — after all, the Us is not the only Western country whose Arab world policy matters.
One item of note is an explanation of the significance of an open letter by [...]

If you read French and are interested in Morocco, take a look at Amina Talhimet’s new blog. She’s a journalist at the French left-of-center daily Liberation and already has a few interesting entries.
Yesterday she reported that Morocco voted in favor of the abolition of capital punishment at the UN Human Rights Commission, and the day [...]

As an addendum to our discussion of Thomas Friedman the other day, I highly recommend this review of his new book, The World is Flat, by Matt Taibbi. Hilarious and comes with a cool picture of the Hamster.

A long dialogue/interview with President Hosni Mubarak, estimated at 7 hours, will be broadcast on Egyptian TV on Sunday, 24 April (according to an article from Islam-Online).
Islam-Online reports that Sunday’s interview is the longest with Mubarak since 1982 when the Sinai was liberated (also he was fresh in office).
The broadcast will discuss the [...]

More coverage that depicts the National Human Rights Council report as a whitewash: the Al Ahram Hebdo has article in which human rights NGOs criticize the report, and point out that only two of its 6 chapters directly address human rights issues (and they are the shortest)–the goal seems to be to bury the bad [...]

As Ursula pointed out, a new issue of Cairo is out, and as well as her story it has a quite interesting feature by Charles on Islamic reform and the whole “Islam and democracy” debate. It covers various issues, but to me the most important one was how the Egyptian state has appropriated Islam for [...]

This week’s issue of Cairo is out and for those of who were interested in the National Human Rights Council report, there is an article I did with quotes from Bahaedding Hassan, Hafez Abu Saada and Kamal Abul Magd. (Many thanks to Josh who also gave me much useful information.) Please also check out [...]

There have been some interesting debates recently on whether the university boycott of Israel would be productive or not. Although I am generally in favor of boycotting Israel on the same grounds as I would have supported boycotting South Africa during Apartheid, an intellectual boycott poses more complicated problems than merely not buying Israeli wine [...]

Who wouldn’t want to kill this guy?
Arab staff locked in kitchen
By Inigo Gilmore
The Daily Telegraph21 April 2005
A VISIT to a Jerusalem restaurant by former Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu provoked a furious reaction from the chef after security officials locked several Arab staff in the kitchens as the politician’s party dined. Mamdouh Abu Kalabin said that [...]

Christopher Hitchens has a column in Slate in which he discusses a recent conference he attended in Qatar. One paragraph leapt out at me.
“Saad Eddin Ibrahim, the founder of the Ibn Khaldun Center in Cairo, is the moral and intellectual hero of the Egyptian civil society movement. His long imprisonment, trial, and eventual vindication—for [...]

Baheyya: Egypt Analysis and Whimsy is a fantastic English-Language Egyptian blog I’m sad not to have discovered earlier. She has a caustic tongue an I’m already terrified to become its next target. I shall watch my step.
I am outside of Egypt right now (in Istanbul, the most beautiful city in the world, period) and will [...]

Shameless plug of the week…..
Last night Wael Nawara, the Assistant to al-Ghad party’s president Ayman Nor, and I participated in an interview about Egyptian reform by Alan Saunders on Australia’s ABC’s Saturday Breakfast program.
We discussed Mubarak’s announcement of amending Article 76 of the constitution, which will theoretically facilitate multi-candidacy, direct presidential elections. Also, we discussed [...]

From a link provided by the always informative Abu Aardvark, a relatively new Egyptian blog is noted. Baheyya is an Egyptian female, who is well-read on Egyptian domestic affairs. It comments in areas that carry special reference to the Kifaya movement. Being a member of the Egyptian Movement for Change, Baheyya is not afraid to [...]

For those readers of ours that have more than a passing interest in the developments in Lebanon and Syria since Hariri’s assassination, Crisis Group published a lengthly 40-page (before appendixes) report on 12 April entitled “Syria After Lebanon, Lebanon After Syria”.
Specifically, the report examines the complicated US-French-Lebanese-Syrian relationship before and after Hariri’s murder, the [...]

Reports abound this morning on the internet by such organizations as Middle East Online, al-Jazeera, and IslamOnline that detail the release of the first annual report by Egypt’s 15-month old National Council on Human Rights (NCHR).
The commonality among today’s stories is that the report is shocking because the NCHR cites that torture takes [...]

Here is an interesting article by Neil King, the diplomatic writer for the Wall Street Journal, about the US State Department’s Middle East Partnership Initiative and implementation of the program in Egypt. Titled “Democracy Drive By America Meets Reality in Egypt,” it includes some interesting details about the push and pull that occurred on [...]

Juan Cole has an important if much too polite post on why Thomas Friedman is a fucking moron. Yes, I know, not exactly stop-the-presses kind of news, but still important.

Al Araby’s page 1 top of the fold screaming red headline today read: “President Mubarak is politically responsible for the return of terrorism.” Here is a translation of much of the accompanying article written by the paper’s editor-in-chief Abdallah al-Senawy.
Among the stranger theories that have been circulating in some sectors of public opinion is that [...]

In the comments to the post below about the bombing in Islamic Cairo, Praktike asked whether there could be any links to the recent spate of arrests in Nasr City. I had meant to post about those earlier but have been overwhelmed with work, so here it is now. (Here is a Human Rights Watch [...]

This may have been widely commented on already, but if it has, I haven’t seen it. In any case, while looking for population figures for the West Bank and Gaza, I came across this US State Department human rights report for 2004. It was released on February 28, 2005. Here are the population figures it [...]

For the past few months, Saad Eddin Ibrahim has been penning op-eds in the international press denouncing the Mubarak regime and the crackdown against reformists, and even risen to the defense of Ayman Nour, a man with whom he probably shares little in common. The latest — and I believe most strongly worded — offensive [...]

An article posted to the Kefaya movement Web site claims to have a picture of the bomber. The accompanying article reports that the bomb probably went off prematurely. If true that should answer all the questions as to why he’d have set it off in the Muski, a somewhat less tourist oriented area.
A security [...]

Al Arabiya is reporting that an unknown Islamic group has claimed responsibility for yesterday’s attack on its Web site. The group calls itself “كتائب العز الاسلامية بارض النيل”, or something akin in English to “The Islamic Pride Brigades in the Land of the Nile.” Al Arabiya reports that the group said that one of [...]

This from Reuters:
“It’s a very unsophisticated type of device, typical of acts planned and executed by one individual,” [Tourism Minister Ahmed] el-Maghrabi said, quoting a cabinet report on the attack. Three U.S. citizens, four Egyptians and two French people are still in hospital, Maghrabi said. One of the French casualties is in critical condition, but [...]

I have been traveling a lot lately, which is not amenable to finishing the thesis. So I am not sure I am back to the blog on a more regular basis as there is someone in the UK looking for my chapters. But I wanted to share a recent experience. I had the opportunity to [...]

You can find it here. They’ve decided to make people pay ($10) for the English PDF version, but there a few details in the press kit. I’m hoping to get hold of a hardcopy tomorrow, so more on this later. A random quote from the press release:
The “Black Hole” State
Throughout the region, the concentration [...]

Readers may have noticed the large amount of comments on last week’s post about the death of the Egyptian actor Ahmed Zaki. The comments were quite touching and are telling of the esteem that many Egyptians had for Zaki.
Cairo magazine has this report on the funeral, which was attended by thousands (including, it is rumored, [...]