The government has partially met one of the hunger-strikers’ demands, while prison authorities continued cracking down, as other detainees joined the strike in a revolving door fashion.
Hours after the detainees started their strike on Sunday, Mohamed el-Sharqawi was referred to the forensic medical department, where he was examined and x-rayed. On Monday, he was provided [...]

May 31, 2006
The other day I got to experience one of the few perks of the job out here and attended a monthly lunch for journalists thrown by Baghdad division commander, Major General J.D. Thurman of the 4th Infantry Division.
I had to use his name in a story once and asked a subordinate what the [...]

Right now, the Brotherhood has other problems, with continuous arrests taking place and PM Nazif thinking that they should not be in parliament in first place.
But a while ago, I thought it was time to document what the Brotherhood thinks about how to regulate the Egyptian economy. After all, with 88 seats in the People’s [...]

The US-based rights watchdog has slammed the Egyptian government, in a statement today, over the torture of Mohamed el-Sharqawi and Karim el-Sha3er, calling for an independent judicial investigation into the incident, and asked Hosni Mubarak to “put a stop to repeated outrages by agents of the state.”
Egypt: Police Severely Beat Pro-Democracy Activists  One Activist Also [...]

Gamal Tag el-Din, Lawyers’ Syndicate council member, is holding tomorrow Wednesday 11am a press conference on the democracy detainees, at the syndicate’s conference hall.
Tag is a Muslim Brotherhood activist, who played a major role in publicizing the infamous “Blacklist of Judges,” that included the names of pro-government judges accused of rigging the vote during last [...]

The Prison authorities cracked down on the hunger-striking detainees in Tora, as the strike escalated, with 13 activists in total taking action on its second day.
The strike started on Saturday night/Sunday morning, with six detainees in Mahkoum Tora, refusing to eat. The prisoners, according to activist and legal sources, made it clear to the prison authorities the [...]

The Hisham Mubarak Law Center has called for a demonstration in front of Qasr el-Nil Police Station, (located in Garden City, downtown Cairo) on Thursday, 5pm, to protest the torture of Mohamed el-Sharqawi and Karim el-Sha3er, the two Youth for Change activists.
The announcement came during a press conference held by the Liberties’ Committee at the [...]

At the WEF in Sharm last week, Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif fed the national press with some projects to be announced soon, in tourism, real estate and transportation, which will mostly be financed by UAE or Kuwait based investment groups. I am under the impression that the government over the past months has focused its [...]

Mohamed el-Sharqawi has sent a testimony on his arrest and torture, from Tora Prison.
Here’s the English translation of it:
A Letter from Mohamed el-Sharqawi
Kidnapped on 25 May, Currently in Cell 8-1, Mahkoum Tora
How I was kidnapped, beaten and tortured for eight hours?
I went through many moments of fear and horror in my life, but nothing [...]

Statement by Detainees in Tora Prison
Released 27 May 2006

We, the detained in Tora Prison, charged of insulting the president and blocking the traffic, condemn police violence, the kidnap and torture of our colleagues Mohamed el-Sharkawy and Karim el-Sha’er, and condemn the complicity of the Regime Security Prosecution (formerly known as State Security Prosecution).
 

The regime has [...]

I was contacted by one of the detainees’ wife, who called me this afternoon to say the incarcerated activists will start a hunger strike as the clock strikes midnight today, demanding: a) the examination of Mohamed el-Sharqawi and Kareem al-Sha’er by the Forensics Medical Authorities, b) an investigation into the torture and abuse incidents the [...]

I should have a copy of Sharqawi’s full testimony later, but the AP is covering the story:
CAIRO, Egypt — Egyptian police allegedly tortured two protesters - sexually assaulting one of them - after a peaceful demonstration in support of pro-reform judges, a lawyer and an opposition group said Friday.
Activist Mohammed el-Sharkawi, 24, was sodomized “using [...]

Forget about Cairo’s Abdel Khaleq Tharwat St. where people are increasingly getting into the bad habbit of “disappearing.” Once again, Kefaya strikes in Seoul..
Socialist activists in South Korea held a demo in front of the Egyptian embassy in Seoul, supporting the Egyptian judges and denouncing the crackdown on pro-reform activists.
Last March, President Roh Moo-hyun of South [...]

Activists in Cairo are planning events this week in solidarity with the detainees, and to protest the sexual assault on Youth for Change activist Mohamed el-Sharqawi last Thursday, in Qasr el-Nil Police Station.

A press conference by the Liberties Committee (Lagnet el-Hurriyat) will be held at the Press Syndicate on Sunday, 5:30pm.

There will be also a [...]

Did Iran offer recognition of Israel according to the Beirut Declaration in 2003? Some top experts on Iran at no less an establishment institution as Johns Hopkins’ SAIS think so:
WASHINGTON, May 24 (IPS) - Iran offered in 2003 to accept peace with Israel and to cut off material assistance to Palestinian armed groups and pressure [...]

Here’s what happens when you get a (presumably) Arab-American journalist to do a story about something to do with Islam: a balanced, nuanced story that shows the full complexity of the question at hand for an audience not familiar with the topic. And it reads well and has a saucy lead.
Fatwas: Muslim religious edicts are [...]

So Egyptian media moguls the Adib brothers are talking to Robert de Niro on the sidelines of the Cannes Film Festival, where they are presenting the Yacoubian Building, about making a movie about Osama Bin Laden:
The pipeline movie about Osama bin Laden, head of the Al-Qaeda network and the world’s most wanted man, has also [...]

Hany Abu-Assad, director of Paradise Now, responds to the Angry Arab’s critique of his film:
I attempted to repaint the story no longer from the mythological point of view but from that of current reality. To kill yourself with your enemy is a Biblical story. The story of Samson already tells us that people prefer to [...]

It’s not the first time that Egyptian police rape people they arrest — it happened several times a few years ago when the security services were conducting a pogrom against homosexuals. But the sheer barbarity of using sticks to sodomize dissidents (a claim now verified by several rights activists) tells you a lot about the [...]

Sumita Pahwa, one of the organizers of the Washington, DC, 25 May demo, writes about the day:
Ustaz Ibrahim and I got there a bit early to set things up, and within a few minutes there were two police-type cars there, which read “United States Secret Service - Uniformed Division” and the cops asked us what [...]