Here we go again. Another attempt at local English-language news reporting, this time in Palestine, according to AP.
The Palestine Times, available on the internet in crude but workable PDF format, is on issue no. 4 as of today.
If, as the editor claims, the Palestine Times isn’t going to be beholden to any particular political or [...]

Abou Bakr Jamai, editor of Morocco’s only truly independent publication, Le Journal Hebdo, has an interesting post on his WaPo blog about the biggest political controversy of the moment in Morocco: polls that indicate the Islamist PJD party is set to come about 30% ahead of the next party in next year’s parliamentary election.
When first [...]

Trust Patrick Cockburn to see the big pictures that papers like the Post and the Times don’t seem to want to admit.
Civil war is raging across central Iraq, home to a third of the country’s 27 million people. As Shia and Sunni flee each other’s neighbourhoods, Iraq is turning into a country of refugees.
The UN [...]

The craziest and most dangerous article I have seen in a long time. If the Saudis really started massively arming and financing Sunni insurgent groups in Iraq, we’d probably have a 20-year Persian Gulf war.
Over the past year, a chorus of voices has called for Saudi Arabia to protect the Sunni community in Iraq and [...]

I’m going to regret putting this up, but Oprah is doing a show in Cairo right now on MBC4. It’s full of Mama Suzanne cronies, naturally.

Always good to be reminded that there are many anti-free speech idiots writing libelous stuff out there:
If Al-Jazeera English had wanted to impress people with its first week or so of programming, including a David Frost interview with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, it failed. The channel was very quick out of the chute [...]

Very disturbing:
Cairo - Egyptian police have uncovered a gang of beggars that raped and killed several homeless children, the official al- Akhbar newspaper reported on Tuesday.
The suspects have admitted to murders in several governorates.
So far the police have found two bodies and are looking for more.
The investigation began when a group of homeless children filed [...]

The Economist Intelligence Unit has released an index of democracies [PDF] in which it ranks full democracies, flawed democracies, “hybrid systems” and authoritarian regimes. Egypt and Morocco are both at the same rank (115) in the last category — here’s Moroccan blogger Larbi’s take on it — while the US, UK, France or Japan don’t [...]

Yesterday Hossam quoted al-Destour for some interesting figures about how much the interior ministry is spending. It’s worth highlighting that, in fact, a lot more than that is available. For several years now the Egyptian government has been improving its statistics gathering and dissemination, and a lot of these figures come from what is probably [...]

Ahmadinejad writes another letter. This time, he writes directly to the American people. I’m sure this will make the rounds of late-night comedy shows, but however much you may mistrust the Iranian regime, the letter’s interesting to read and hardly insane (the only quirky touch is calling us “Noble Americans”).
(P.S. I posted this and then [...]

Bloomberg is reporting that the Carlyle Group — the biggest buyout firm in the US, famous for having allegedly held a meeting on 11 September 2001 that included both a representative of the Bin Laden clan and George H.W. Bush — will shortly be opening offices in Cairo and seeking to buy out Egyptian companies, [...]

Kefaya is calling up on civil society and environmental activists to join the movement’s anti-corruption demo, Sunday 3 December, 1pm, in Matarriya Square to protest the unfair garbage collection fees.
دعوة عامة الى كل القوى الوطنية الشريفة واحزاب المعارضة ومؤسسات المجتمع المدنى والجمعيات الاهلية وجمعيات حماية البيئةتدعوكم الحركة المصرية من اجل التغيير كفاية وبمشاركة لجنة الاحياء [...]

I received news that leftist academics are holding a protest tomorrow Wednesday, from 11am to 12 noon, at Ain Shams University to protest the state-sponsored thuggery against activist students over the past couple of weeks. The professors will assemble in front of Qasr el-Za’afarana, the university’s administration building.

In recent weeks, Ain Shams University campus has [...]

Must-read Anthony Shadid story on a new ad campaign satirizing sectarianism in Lebanon.

The ECES has an interesting paper by Robert Mabro on a question that’s been bugging me for a long time: why is Egypt sticking (and hiding the facts and figures) about its bad LNG export deal with the Spanish firm Union Fenosa, which is causing it to lose money on the gas it exports?
There are [...]

And on the same (well, kind of the same) note, Banksy does Disney does Gitmo. Check out the video of how he got the job done.

Politics through Beirut’s street art. Or make your own online.

It’s about two weeks old, but Baheyya has written a beautiful portrait of the recently deceased Marxist intellectual and public servant (in the best sense of the term) Ismail Sabri Abdullah.
I wish Baheyya would write more these days, but then again things are so much more depressing than they were last year. I can’t blame [...]

November 24, 2006
It was just such a classic Baghdad return. The sky was hazy and overcast as we drove back from the airport. The traffic was bad, a convoy of SUVs featuring guys with assault rifles hanging out of the window came blaring past. And then back at the office a bombing that killed 25 [...]

The Economist thinks that if things don’t go smoothly, a Shia uprising could take place.