Letter to head of the Judges’ Club Zakariya Abdel Aziz from the three Mahalla detainees, Kamal El-Fayyoumy, Tareq Amin, and Karim El-Beheiry:
We would like in the beginning to correct certain information which has reached the press about our (the three of us) having been transferred to the prison hospital as a result of our hunger [...]

Syrian Blogger and opposition activist Ammar Abdulhamid has a very different take on prospects for change in Syria, which he says will be driven by economic factors. I would not be so optimistic (I see the same kind of thinking over Egypt’s current economic crisis) because just like you can’t control a country entirely through [...]

Yesterday several of the opposition-minded papers in Egypt ran with front-page stories about Bilal Diab, a Cairo University student who heckled Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif as the latter was delivering a speech to students about how great things were going in Egypt. I love this story, as does the Egyptian media, because it is reminiscent [...]

From Electronic Intifada:
A pro-Israel pressure group is orchestrating a secret, long-term campaign to infiltrate the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia to rewrite Palestinian history, pass off crude propaganda as fact, and take over Wikipedia administrative structures to ensure these changes go either undetected or unchallenged.

A series of emails by members and associates of the pro-Israel group [...]

Keep clicking on that refresh button at Hossam’s for updates on Mahalla, where tensions are extremely high as we might head into a third day of riots. In the meantime, a repeat of the general strike is being called for May 4, the date of Hosni Mubarak’s 80th birthday. I’m heading there this afternoon. In [...]

As the khamseen winds blew into town today, a strange thing happened. A general strike that has been called for weeks went missing. People went out on the streets, asking, “have you seen the general strike?” “Are people striking over there?” “Do you know where the general strike went?”
It was all rather odd, because opposition [...]

The Moroccan who was jailed for putting up a fake profile of Prince Moulay Rashid has been freed. This is great news, and while it should have never gotten to this, better late than never. I suppose the king wanted to make sure the message got across that the royal family is a no-go area [...]

Khaled Hamza is the editor of www.ikhwanweb.com , the Muslim Brothers’ impressive English website. I met Khaled several months ago and he’s a very affable, intelligent man. Last week he was arrested after meeting a human rights activist in the Nasr City neighborhood of Cairo and thus become the latest Egyptian web activist to be [...]

The Winter 2008 issue of Bidoun, the Middle Eastern arts and culture magazine, has been out for a few weeks now. For some weird reason I can never access it directly from Egypt, it only works through a proxy like proxyfellow.com or hidemyass.com, but it’s worth the trouble to check out the striking cover (below) [...]

Al-Ahram announced this morning that Mahmoud Gabali, the chairman of Mahalla for Spinning and Weaving, has been sacked and that workers would be given 135 days of pay. The decision, taken by the company’s board, was based on accounting inconsistencies detected by the Central Auditing Agency, a government watchdog. Apparently the audit uncovered irregularities in [...]

The Guardian’s Brian Whitaker has highlighted YouTube’s decision to block the Egypt torture videos page, which we recently covered. In his post Brian says points how this removes a crucial tool at the hands of bloggers to distribute and publicize cases of human rights abuses and build a campaign against Egypt’s systematic use of torture.
Reading [...]

Just got wind of this:
Fifty Israeli peace and human rights activists have approached Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, via the Egyptian embassy in Tel Aviv, calling upon him to immediately open the Rafah Border Crossing between Egypt and the Gaza Strip to free movement of persons and goods, and thus break the siege imposed at the [...]

Middle East Online has a translation of a Monde Diplomatique article I’d previously linked to on the reversal of agrarian reform in Egypt. This excerpt deals with the new law passed in the 1990s that has led to many farmers losing land and helped former landlords regain land they had been forced to sell under [...]

A new letter from the imprisoned blogger Karim is available here in English, follow the links for the Arabic original.

Below are some anti-Mubarak activist videos, some quite funny.

YouTube - The Mubaraks to children’s songs
YouTube - Gamal at NDP conference
YouTube - To President Mubarak: sankyoo
YouTube - Egypt’s Shittiest Family
YouTube - The Mubaraks in cinema

The very last one is the best, to the tune of the theme song from a movie (I forget its name) about [...]

As part of the Why Democracy? project, a documentary has been made on Egypt’s Shayfeenku, an anti-corruption watchdog borne out of the Kifaya movement in 2005. It will be playing on different TV networks and cinemas across the world (on al-Arabiya in the Middle East on 5 November at 2100 GMT), check the listings for [...]

Middle East Report Online: The Militancy of Mahalla al-Kubra by Joel Beinin.

Two posts I put up recently featuring opposition figures — Iran’s Akbar Ganji and Syria’s Maamoun al-Homsi — generated an interesting response: attacks on these activists as being cowardly, formerly close to the regime, or having some other negative side. It could be that these criticisms are fair — I really don’t know that much [...]

Blogging Egypt’s Factory Strikes:
Whether or not this is picked up in the American press shouldn’t matter. It’s a story to pay attention to, however you can.
The textile factory at Ghazl el-Mahalla in the Nile Delta is Egypt’s largest, with over 27,000 workers. Nearly all of the factory’s workers went on strike last December to demand [...]

Hossam is writing a lot today about a massive strike taking place at Ghazl el-Mahalla, apparently the biggest such strike at a major textile factory since the beginning of the year. He has videos and complains the issue is not getting international press coverage. From an activist’s account:
After the first day of the strike and [...]