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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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  • Greece: Assassination of Hip-Hop Artist and Rise of Neo-Nazi Party

    “The murder of Greek anti-fascist activist and musician Pavlos Fyssas by a supporter of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party is the latest reminder of the threat to Greek democracy that this party, as well as the brutal austerity policies that have fueled its meteoric rise in the last two years, represents. Fyssas’ murder is only…

  • With Record Number in Poverty; Food Stamp Cuts?

    “The poverty report for 2012 just released by the Census Bureau indicates that the poverty rate was 15.0 percent in 2012, the same as in 2011, but well above the 12.3 percent rate in 2006, the year prior to the beginning of the ‘Great Recession.’ The 15 percent rate was the fourth highest in the…

  • Poverty: “Utterly Unresponsive” Economy and Political System

    The national poverty figures were released today by the Census Bureau. JENNIFER JONES AUSTIN, Bich Ha Pham, bhpham at fpwa.org Executive director of the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies, Austin said today: “Today’s release of the national poverty figures shows that 21.8 percent of our nation’s children and 15 percent of the population overall are…

  • What About the U.S. and Russia’s Massive WMD Stockpiles?

    Vice President Joe Biden claimed over the weekend that Syria has the “largest stockpile in the world of chemical weapons.” Nass runs the Anthrax Vaccine blog and has been regularly debunking false claims about biological and chemical weapons. She said today: “First, the U.S. stockpile is admittedly three times larger than Syria’s. The Army says…

  • Two Years Later, What Happened to Occupy Wall Street?

    “Occupy has been both a surprising success and a disappointing failure. It succeeded in drastically expanding the political imagination of a generation, but doing so set up expectations that could never be reached in such a short time. Now, the remnants of the movement are dispersed and frustrated, though many are continuing on in struggles…

  • “The Threat to Attack Syria Is STILL Illegal”

    “Unless President Obama would like to risk seeing Syria, at some point in the future, renounce its signature on the chemical weapons convention, which it has recently pledged to sign under the threat of attack by the United States, he should rescind the threat of force. This is because Article 52 of the Vienna Convention…

  • * American Exceptionalism * UN Manipulation

    AJAMU BARAKA, ajamubaraka2 at gmail.com Baraka is a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies who is based in Colombia. He recently wrote: “The normalization of white supremacist domination and its prerogatives are so completely inculcated in U.S. and Western consciousness that not only is the question as to what right the U.S. and the…

  • NSA Shares Raw Intelligence Including Americans’ Data with Israel

    “The National Security Agency routinely shares raw intelligence data with Israel without first sifting it to remove information about U.S. citizens, a top-secret document provided to the Guardian by whistleblower Edward Snowden reveals. “Details of the intelligence-sharing agreement are laid out in a memorandum of understanding between the NSA and its Israeli counterpart that shows…

  • CIA Veterans: Obama Should Show Syria Evidence

    “The Obama administration has been able to mislead most Americans by conflating (1) the undisputed reality of chemical agent exposures near Damascus on August, and (2) the unsubstantiated claim that the U.S. has persuasive evidence that the event was a chemical weapons attack ordered by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The ‘mainstream media’ had prepared Obama’s…

  • Syrian Independent Opposition: “Ignored by the World”

    “At this very moment, courageous Syrian women and men are working for a peaceful settlement. They are mostly ignored by the world. Most of them are opposed to the government. Some lean toward the regime. They are doing peacebuilding and reconciliation work. They are establishing local cease-fire zones. While differing in viewpoints, they share a…

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