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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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  • Behind the Libyan “Success”

    Author of Arab Spring, Libyan Winter, Vijay Prashad is chair of South Asian history and director of international studies at Trinity College, in Hartford, Connecticut. He just wrote a piece on the attacks in Libya: “This is not the first such protest in Benghazi, the eastern city of Libya. Over the course of this year,…

  • Roots of Record Poverty

    Author of Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy and the Poor in Twentieth Century U.S. History, Alice O’Connor said today: “It was not too long ago in our history that news of 40-million plus in poverty spurred a call to concerted political action, and to a War on Poverty built on full employment, living wages,…

  • Pro-Mubarak Media Disinformed, Driving Cairo Embassy Protests

    A lecturer at Stanford University and an investigative journalism fellow at University of California, Berkeley, Emad Mekay returned from Egypt a week ago after three months. He said today: “In the U.S. media and the media in both Egypt and Libya, I do not see division lines clearly and perhaps almost deliberately so. The protests…

  • How Poverty Affects a Majority of Americans

    “Later this morning, when the Census Bureau releases its latest data, it is likely to show that poverty rose in 2011. Again. And while it will be tempting to explain that rise by pointing the continued effects of the Great Recession and the very slow recovery from it, poor, working-class, and middle-class Americans have all…

  • First Federal Drone Trial: “Guilty”

    Brian Terrell, one of the activists protesting Missouri’s Whiteman Air Force Base, was convicted in a federal court for trespassing yesterday. He said today, “I cross-examined the head of security, asking him if I would be deemed to be criminally trespassing if I saw a child being attacked on the base, which is in a…

  • How the Government Could Have Prevented 9/11: Read the Documents

    Coleen Rowley, a former FBI Special Agent and Division Counsel whose May 2002 memo described some of the FBI’s pre-9/11 failures, was named one of Time Magazine’s “Persons of the Year” in 2002. She said today: “In the New York Times, Kurt Eichenwald characterizes the Bush administration’s ‘Deafness Before the Storm’ ignoring of pre-9/11 warnings…

  • Chicago Strike “Tip of Iceberg” in School “Reform’s” “Disastrous Consequences”

    A policy analyst for the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest), Lisa Guisbond said today: “The Chicago strike is the tip of the iceberg of teacher frustration with so-called ‘reform’ policies, which place the blame on educators for problems largely caused by the impoverished settings in which their students must live. Instead of…

  • Obama, Romney “Playing Games” with Environmental Disaster

    Daphne Wysham is a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and is the founder and co-director of the Sustainable Energy and Economy Network. She said today: “While it is heartening to hear President Obama affirm that climate change is not a hoax, he — like his Republican opponent — seems to place a higher…

  • Democratic Party Forces Jerusalem Position on Delegates

    Ali Abunimah is co-founder of the Electronic Intifada website and author of the book One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse. He wrote the piece: “Did Democratic Delegates Just Vote Down Obama Bid to Pander to AIPAC on Jerusalem?” The piece states: “An extraordinary thing happened at the Democratic National Convention [Wednesday].…

  • Obama and Romney vs the 99 Percent?

    Arun Gupta is a co-founder of the Occupied Wall Street Journal and The Indypendent. He said today: “In terms of the protests, these security scare stories around the conventions keep the public away from substantial protest and dissent. The Olympics are about pushing the poor out through massive gentrification and infrastructure projects. What these conventions…

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