The beating that John McCain continues to take over his assertion that Petraeus goes out everyday in an “unarmed Humvee” and that Americans can stroll about downtown Baghdad in shirt sleeves might be old news now, but it still has entertainment value.
“I think you ought to catch up” McCain told Wolf Blitzer when he [...]

Interesting to be on the outside looking back into Egypt at the moment. BBC is still airing that great Egypt tourism ad—the one with the scantily clad babes emerging from the pristine sea and the romantic (I suspect CGI) shots of Cairo, while at the same time the news is of another rigged referendum and [...]

Coming up on the anniversary of the liveliest expression of popular dissatisfaction with the Mubarak regime in recent memory–the March 2003 demos–it seems like the moment to wheel out some old photos. I’ve scanned a (rathered battered) roll of negatives, and strung them together with some captions here.
I think the moral of the story is [...]

Syria—well, Damascus—doesn’t feel like a place ready to come apart at the seams just yet. The mess of swish new cafes and expensive clothing stores, the shiny new cars and a general air of confidence belie the rumors of fraying domestic security and an unhappy economy. Maybe the feeling is deceptive. The flash is largely [...]

Ok ok. My apologies to the fine boys who come out to make sure that law and order are maintained during these demos. Sometimes you just can’t resist though.
Today’s Kefaya demo at Sayeda Zeinab mosque, marking the thirty-year anniversary of the Bread Riots, was more energetic than usual, and the crowd seemed more diverse. At [...]

It’ll be interesting to see whether the IHT hits Cairo newstands (has hit the newsstands? when does the print edition come out?) with a Michael Slackman piece intact. The article is more than a little critical of the Egyptian regime and of Condi’s support for it, and, while it is posted on the IHT and [...]

The odd but occasionally amusing Nation of Pearls blogzine has dug up a cartoon that shows bright red Palestinians undermining nice green IDF troops along the Gaza border. No prizes for guessing who the baddies are here.
Mind you, one wonders how the truck on the left, the one marked with the huge skull and cross [...]

The midan in front of Mustafa Mahmoud in Mohandiseen was packed Saturday morning. I’ll post a few more pics from the weekend on my flickr.

A State Security Major told me this evening that sometimes these demonstrations get violent, which explains why the park in front of Mustafa Mahmoud mosque had to be sealed off with three truckloads of riot police and a couple of gangs of stick toting beltagaya tonight. “The Muslim Brotherhood sometimes comes,” he told me and [...]

Nasty weather for demonstrating tonight, but around seven o’clock this evening there were half a dozen Ayman Nour supporters stamping their feet and yelling nasty things about State Security in Midan Talat Harb. Three trucks full of soldiers watched from the other side of the street and the usual array of nice young men in [...]

Today’s demo calling for the release of detained MB member Ahmad Ezzedin wasn’t exactly hopping when I passed by around one. The usual battalion of riot police were there, though, along with a couple of truckloads of beltageya.
There’s one other shot on my flickr site.

Security was heavy but well controlled for Kefaya’s second anniversary demo at the Journalists’ Syndicate yesterday. One CSF guy got carried away. Rumor had it that he got kicked in the whats-its. You would have thought, with all that padding…

I’ve put a couple more shots on my flickr site.

Reuters piece up at the moment on the police-sodomy video that did the rounds a few weeks back. Elijah Zarwan gets in some good quotes on behalf of the human rights community, and Hisham Kassem pops in at the end to point out that, surprise surprise, apathy reigns.
However, the piece, which appears with a December [...]

Bidoun magazine editor Negar Azimi has a good piece in the NYT magazine today on homosexuality and repression in Egypt.
Maybe I just liked it because yellow press shill-artist Mustafa Bakry comes off badly in the lead, but Negar also deals in some refreshingly unjournalistic nuance. Whether she gets it right or not I don’t know, [...]

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 [...]

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.

Today’s pro-judges demo called by Kefaya was noisy and vociferously defiant of the security forces who lounged on the opposite side of the street, but it wasn’t very big. Are the arrests, beatings and sexual assaults taking their toll?
I’ll post at least one other pic from the afternoon on my flickr site.

Today’s protest outside the Arab League was not particularly well attended, except by the police. The beltagui were lined up and large men in cheap suits were brought in to push the women around.
Look for a more substantial posting from Hossam soon on 3arabawy.

Authorities are warning this morning of a new threat to the safety of Cairene motorists—angry hippies.
“We think they’re coming from California,” confided Mohamed El Jalaad of the Traffic Safety Division of State Security. “It’s the sandals that tip us off. But do not worry. We will crush them beneath the wheels of our Jeeps.”
While rumors [...]

The New York Times, which, despite its manifold faults, has at least remained reasonably critical of the trough-feeding manner in which the Iraqi “reconstruction” business has been funded, is retailing a report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Construction that criticizes contractors for spending too much on “overhead.”
There seem to have been a bunch [...]