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  • Mubarak, Army, U.S., Israel vs Egyptian People

    [As government forces have attacked peaceful protesters in Tahrir Square, Emad Mekay from Cairo reports] Mubarak is clearly backed by the Americans. He took some moves after speaking with Obama and a visit by a former U.S. Ambassador to Egypt Frank Wisner. Mubarak, the army, the Americans and the Israelis are clearly on one side.…

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  • Unrest Spreads to Sinai

    A Bedouin youth casually spreads out a piece of cloth before a police headquarters in Sheikh Zwayyed town in Sinai, the vast desert area to the east of Cairo across the Suez. “I will leave when Mubarak leaves,” he says. [Full piece from Inter Press Service]

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  • Chomsky: Strategic and Economic Objectives, Not Anti-Islamization, Drives U.S. Policy

    [While many are claiming that a central goal of U.S. policy is to minimize influence of groups like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Noam Chomsky contributed this to our blog] It is well-established, including the major scholarly literature, that the U.S. supports democracy if and only if that accords with strategic and economic objectives.  Following…

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  • An Open Letter to President Barack Obama

    ————————————————————————————————————————— [To sign; for recent news releases on Egypt from the Institute for Public Accuracy] Dear President Obama: As political scientists, historians, and researchers in related fields who have studied the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy, we the undersigned believe you have a chance to move beyond rhetoric to support the democratic movement sweeping…

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  • Report from Cairo

    From Alex Ortiz in Cairo: “The army is beginning to come into Cairo … tens of thousands converged in midan al-gala’ coming from three different protest marches. Total communication blackout. Reports of senior police officers ordering their men to stand down and not beat or fire tear gas at protesters in Midan al-gala an hour…

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  • Report on Latest from Cairo

    CAIRO, Egypt [11 p.m. local time] — 1-Some government media figures appear to be joining ranks with the protesters. Mahmoud Saad, a talk show host in the Egyptian state-run TV, has announced that he will no longer appear on TV starting tonight after he came under pressure from top government officials to report “untruths” about…

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  • Police in Cairo Beating up Jounalists

    [From 9:28 a.m. ET]: Police started beating up journalists protesting outside the Press Syndicate in downtown Cairo. They beat up women journalists too who were screaming and crying for help. “Do not club women. Do not club women,” some of the men rushed to the police asking them not to target women. “You’ll make things…

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  • From Alex Ortiz in Cairo

    [The Egyptian government has apparently block Twitter, Facebook (as of Wed. morn U.S. ET) and other internet tools, though apparently some people are able to get around such restrictions. Email from 8:45 a.m. ET:] Downtown Cairo today remains in a state of high alert. There are many security forces and plainsclothed policemen visible on every…

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  • Video from Cairo

    Phone lines are intermittent and Twitter has reportedly been blocked in Egypt. Here is a live video feed: ustream.tv/channel/cairodowntown [update: ustream has been blocked, streaming now intermittently at livestream.com/cairowitness — further update, now at: www.justin.tv/cairowitness] Here is a YouTube video from earlier today:

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  • Ukraine’s Assault on a Free Press

    In Ukraine, where media diversity is often defined by which powerful oligarch controls which TV station, one network, TVi — known for its independent investigative style — is under intense legal pressure, with its owner not part of Ukraine’s power circles. TVi faces a court hearing on Tuesday over a legal claim that the station’s…

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  • Istanbul Attacks and Syrian “Nation Destruction”

    “A big change in international relations is that virtually everyone is reachable. After the Paris attack, [French President François] Hollande said this is an ‘act of war.’ Well how would you describe what we’re doing in Syria? Clearly someone is unhappy with what we’re doing, given the Istanbul airport attack. We don’t want to blame…

  • Despite Juno Arriving at Jupiter, NASA Still Pursuing Nuclear Power

    “NASA had maintained that to provide on-board power and heat on spacecraft in deep space, plutonium-powered systems were required — ­despite the disaster if there were an accident on launch or in a fall back to Earth and the plutonium was released. I broke the story 30 years ago about how the next mission of…

  • Benghazi: Was the Consulate a CIA Front?

    “When congressional Republicans complete manipulating the Benghazi tragedy, it will be time for the virtually silent Senate intelligence committee to take up three major issues that have been largely ignored. The committee must investigate the fact that the U.S. presence in Benghazi was an intelligence platform and only nominally a consulate; the politicization by the…

  • Brexit Freak Out and the Reaction to Interventions and Austerity

    “Only because the establishment has hitched our economic destinies to the whims of financial markets is there any need to worry that Brexit might trigger yet another global meltdown. Only because the establishment failed to implement prudent, financial regulation in the seven years since the last financial crisis crashed the global economy is there any…

  • Orlando Shooter’s Motive

    “When I was a kid, the U.S. was not bombing Muslims and Muslims were not attacking us. Now we bomb many Muslim countries, with our secret CIA drone assassination campaign. These presidential-sanctioned bombings remain secret only to the American public. The Muslim victims on the receiving end know immediately what happened and who did it.…

  • Brexit!

    “The vote in favor of Brexit has been a rejection of the EU’s vision of a world run by and for big business. It is also a rejection of the European political elite and their contempt for ordinary people, clearly seen in the promotion of the EU-US trade deal, TTIP, in the face of massive…

  • Slain Activist Reportedly on Honduran Hit List; State Dept. and Clinton Facing Scrutiny

    “The U.S. government has not only given millions of dollars for military and security programs to the government of Honduras, but they have actively supported the conservative regimes that have allowed and encouraged corruption to flourish since the U.S.-supported coup in 2009 that removed a democratically-elected president from office. For this tacit support, the conservative…

  • A Banner Year for Third Parties with Clinton and Trump’s Negatives?

    “Conventional wisdom in this most unconventional year of all suggests that the Libertarian nominee will almost certainly be the most serious threat to two-party hegemony in November, but that role might actually be filled by Jill Stein, a Harvard-educated physician and pioneering environmental and health activist waging her second bid for the White House on…

  • Orlando: FBI Only Releasing What Makes Government Look Good

    “Predictably, the FBI censored details that should have led them to raise questions about Mateen’s invocation of ISIS. It made no mention of what [FBI Director James] Comey did: that Mateen also invoked al-Nusra and the Tsarnaev brothers (presumably in the calls to the crisis negotiation team), which doesn’t make sense. So rather than elucidating,…

  • Post-Coup Brazil: Indigenous Killings, Land Grabbing, TIAA Profits

    “Historically, Indigenous and peasant communities in Brazil have resisted against violence and displacement. Land concentration is a root cause of social and economic inequality, in a country where 1 percent of large landowners control over 90 percent of agricultural land. In the past 12 years,390 Guarani Kaiowa Indigenous people were assassinated in the state of…

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