Had a few things I wanted to post — notably the verdict against Ayman Nour, which is going to be a repeat of the Saad Eddin Ibrahim case — but alas, no time. My immediate reaction is sympathy for Nour’s two teenage sons, which are the clearest sign I’ve seen that he is a good [...]

The secret to Saddam Hussein’s dashing style:
Things may be going poorly for Saddam, on trial for genocide in Baghdad, but, ironically, the ex-despot’s misfortune has been the making of the tailor. On television channels across the Middle East, the Cesur brand gets free advertising worth millions every time Saddam is shown, attired in a dark [...]

So Algerian President Abdel Aziz Bouteflika decided to resurface [Le Monde, subscription] after weeks of rumors that he was on his deathbed. Bouteflika chose the 8pm newscast of the state TV channel on Saturday, during which he only appeared for a few minutes and looked haggard. His doctor, Messaoud Zitouni, a former minister of health, [...]

Guess which MP wants to ban the sale of alcohol during Christmas and New Year? What’s that? The Muslim Brotherhood? Nope. It’s Ragab Hilal Hameida, the only elected Al Ghad MP (from the dissident faction, naturally).
Hemida denied that his call for the ban was the idea of the Muslim Brothers who have made similar demands [...]

Here’s an interesting take, by a Lebanese journalist, on why young Syrians don’t really get the Lebanese independence movement because than can’t begin to imagine it as a separate place:
In clear imitation of the one expression of Lebanese political will that had been most painful to the Syrian regime, the authorities commandeered one of Damascus’ [...]

There is an excellent story from the current issue of The American Prospect that is making the rounds on American political blogs on John Bolton’s role as US Ambassador to the United Nations. It covers a lot of ground, but there is one thing
I’d like to pick out and focus on in particular, because I [...]

“Controlled Reform in Egypt: Neither Reformist nor Controlled” is a long article I just wrote on the elections for Middle East Report Online. It looks at the elections from the perspective of the regime’s attempts to control the reform process over the past year, when it had repeatedly seized the initiative on major reform steps [...]

Some Iranians have been making nasty remarks lately, but this goes too far:
TEHRAN (AFP) - An extremist Iranian Islamist group announced it was working on a film about the 1981 assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat entitled “34 Bullets for the Pharoah”.
The documentary, produced by the “Committee for the Glorification of Martyrs for the World [...]

I have been collecting material written on the Egyptian elections and will publish a list tomorrow. But to get things started, here is a damning indictment of the elections by my old friend Khairi Abaza (yes, I have friends even in that institution). I don’t agree with him on every point (more on that tomorrow) [...]

Bouteflika’s situation seems to be worsening in light of the absence of information about his health. Today’s Le Monde has a report from Algiers:
In the absence of television footage of the recovering president, alarmist rumors are spreading. Memories of the long months of whispering that accompanied the sickness and death of Houari Boumedienne at the [...]

I don’t really have anything to add on the death of Gibran Tueni, apart from saying that it moved me more than Rafiq Hariri’s, both in a personal sense and in the realization that the Syrian-Lebanese situation seems to be spinning out of control. Or perhaps more accurately, that Syria, a country I know better [...]

It’s rather pathetic, but Mubarak has decided to the enormous imbalance in the composition of the People’s Assembly by appointing five women and five Copts.
That means that out of six Coptic MPs, only one (Minister of Finance Youssef Boutros-Ghali) has been elected, and that election was fixed in 2000 and probably fixed again in 2005! [...]

The Lebanese journalist and MP Gibran Tueni, who headed the excellent newspaper an-Nahar, has been killed:
Anti-Syrian journalist and lawmaker Gibran Tueni was killed Monday in an explosion that targeted his convoy, according to two Lebanese TV stations that are allied with him. Police did not immediately confirm.
LBC and Future TV said Tueni was killed in [...]

I used to follow Israeli politics much more closely a few years ago, but reading Haaretz recently reminded me that there is nothing more exhilarating than following the ups and downs of politics over there. This amusing article (shame about the racist ads, though) is just a small reminder of the high-stakes game being played [...]

So he’s not gay after all: earlier this week, Al Midan, an Egyptian tabloid that rarely ventures out of the gutter, published pictures of what they said was Gamal Mubarak’s fiancée. Gamal, 41, has been Egypt’s most eligible bachelor for years but was never spotted with any companion. That had led to rumors spreading that [...]

For the last few days, this ad has been displayed prominently on the website of Haaretz, the Hebrew and English-language Israeli newspaper. It reads, “if the Arab population in Israel reaches 40%, the Jewish state will be nullified. For the only solution, click here.” All that above a picture of Benyamin Netanyahu, the former prime [...]

I forgot to link last week to Zibniew Brzezinski’s well thought-out article about why the Bush administration should not refer to Islamism as the same as communism.
By asserting that Islamic extremism, “like the ideology of communism . . . is the great challenge of our new century,” Bush is implicitly elevating Osama bin Laden’s stature [...]

Asia Times Online describes an Al Qaeda compilation CD (why call it state-of-the-art, though?) that is being sold illegally in South Asia and the Middle East. The CD is quite well put together, apparently, reminding me of the high production quality of an Iraqi insurgency video a few months ago. That seemed to have been [...]

Arab leaders are notoriously cagey about their personal health, and right now, Algeria has not one but two top officials receiving treatment from French doctors amidst high levels of secrecy, says Le Figaro.
Yazid Zehrouni, 67, the minister of interior, has been in a French hospital since October, ostensibly for a kidney transplant. He has appeared [...]

The web editor of balady.net, an Egyptian Islamist website, has been arrested:
Egyptian authorities have arrested the second online journalist in six weeks, closing his website and confiscating work material.
Ahmed Mahmoud Abdallah, also known as ‘Abu-Islam’, is editor of the Balady Net news site and former editor of the now defunct opposition newspaper Al-Shaab. He is [...]