Algerian President Abdel Aziz Bouteflika has ordered 42 private French-language schools to be closed for “linguistic deviation,” Le Figaro reports. Algerian police have been told to enforce a presidential decree that stated that “any private institution which does not give absolute priority to the Arabic language is bound to disappear.” The policy is revival of [...]

Very, very evasive answers from Ismail Haniyeh in this WaPo interview. Every question led him to state Israel’s position rather than Hamas’… The lack of clarity may be strategic, but it hardly encourages trust or even comprehension of Hamas’ standards for peace. Maybe it’s just too early in the game.

Another fine editorial calling attention to the shutting down of Voice of America’s English-language service and its replacement with pop music channels like Radio Sawa.
Thus, it is with growing dismay that I read news of the latest spending plans being discussed by members of the Bush administration and their advisers for how best to influence [...]

A group of theology students from Qom in Iran has launched a blog about the attack on the holy shrine of Al Askariyeen in Samarra. They seem to think — and imply — that the US was behind the attack (but produce no evidence for this).

Check out Baheyya for all you wanted to know about judges but were afraid to ask.

I was looking to see what had been done in the infamous Holocaust cartoon contest launched by an Iranian contest and ran across this site, which has a wonderful collection of cartoons, including pretty tame ones on Holocaust (the one above seems to be a reference to Finkelstein’s Holocaust Industry)– and many others about other [...]

So it seems that the Gamal and Khadiga story was true after all:
CAIRO (Reuters) - The son of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, ruling party politician Gamal Mubarak, will get engaged on Friday to the daughter of a prominent building contractor, the state-owned newspaper al-Ahram said on Sunday.
Gamal, 42, is the assistant secretary general of Mubarak’s [...]

I won’t go into the events in Iraq themselves, but this latest escalation of conflict between Sunni and Shia in Iraq is deeply worrying. I can’t say I have had much hope for Iraq anyway over recent months (receiving news several times a day of riots and deaths on my mobile phone has that effect), [...]

Very good of Knight Ridder’s Hannah Allam to have picked up on one of the most talked about aspects of Egypt’s new political landscape: the presence of Al Masri Al Youm, an independent liberal daily newspaper. She writes:
Even as the traditional, state-backed papers try to liven up coverage to compete, the upstart dailies still stand [...]

I’ve noted it before, but isn’t it odd that in a year that has seen Hamas come to power in the Palestinian occupied territories, AIPAC is focusing its annual meeting on Iran? And whatever happened to the fallout there was supposed to be from those convicted spies anyway?
(The above ad was posted on the Haaretz [...]

Yesterday, a senior Israeli military official, Major General Yair Navah, predicted that King Abdullah might be the last Hashemite monarch, causing a stir in Amman:
Naveh noted that at least 80 percent of Jordan’s citizens are Palestinian and said that, due to regional threats including Hamas’ rise to power, King Abdullah is liable to be [...]

There is something surreal and weirdly compelling about this interview with Condoleeza Rice that appeared on Egyptian state TV:
QUESTION: Just before you came, you said no FTA, you pushed for more reform and called for turning down Hamas. What’s in it for us?
SECRETARY RICE: Well, in fact, on the FTA, we will continue to [...]

The Egyptian edition of the Daily Star (originally a Lebanese paper now attempting to go regional) is now online.

It must be that time of the month again. The WaPo has a new attack on the Egyptian regime, and US policy towards it, in Mr. Mubarak’s Rollback. This time, their beef is the “tepid” response to the cancellation of municipal elections. They think it’s because Egypt is helping out with Hamas and all that.
So [...]

Nur Al Cubicle writes of a new Turkish movie, Valley of the Wolves, that is highly critical of the US in Iraq and seems to be a form of revenge for the curt treatment given Turkish troops in northern Iraq in 2003:
So this is what happens after 40 years of NATO membership. The US partnership [...]

Megan Stack of the LA Times has a very nice story on the Shia of Bahrain, or Ajam, and their struggle for political recognition. It focuses on one family that has returned from exile in Canada and tries to find its footing in the midst of promises of reform. As always with Megan, it is [...]

I’d like to highlight some of arguments made by Sir Derek Plumbly, the British ambassador in Cairo, in the letter to former ambassador to Cairo John Sawers that was revealed by the New Statesman as we reported yesterday. The letter is dated 23 June, 2005, or just after Condoleeza Rice delivered a lecture that was [...]

This baited breath tone of this article by Martin Bright in the New Statesman is pretty stupid:
The British government has a terrible dilemma. Should it refuse to deal with radical Islamic movements altogether, and so risk alienating large parts of the Muslim world, or should it make overtures towards the leaders of these movements and [...]

Newsweek has an interview with Mohammed al-Asaadi, the editor of the Yemen Observer who was recently jailed for reprinting the Danish cartoons of Prophet Muhammad. His situation seems just ridiculously unfair:
When we ran our article on the Danish cartoons, it was all about how the Prophet should be honored, with quotations from famous people about [...]

Condoleeza Rice gave a roundtable interview to Arab journalists before leavng on her tour of the region. Most of it was about Hamas and Iran, but I thought her response on Egypt’s cancellation of municipal elections and the critique of the Bush administration’s “Arab democratization” policy were interesting:
On Egypt, well, of course, we were disappointed [...]