News Items

  • 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. That’s one camp. The people of Egypt (most of them now) are the other. The Americans want Mubarak to stay on for longer while they look for a suitable successor that would be best for U.S. interests. Mubarak’s tactic is to make Egyptians choose between…

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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 that principle, in the Arab/Muslim region it has generally supported radical Islamists in fear of secular nationalism (as has the UK).  Familiar examples include Saudi Arabia, the ideological center of radical Islam (and of Islamic terror), Zia ul-Haq, the most vicious of Pakistan’s dictators, Reagan’s…

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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 over Egypt. As citizens, we expect our president to uphold those values. For thirty years, our government has spent billions of dollars to help build and sustain the system the Egyptian people are now trying to dismantle.

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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 ago.”

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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 the protests. Mahmoud Saad, a popular TV host, has told other journalists that his disappearance from his daily show, Masr El-Naharda (Egypt Today), comes in protests against pressure to defame protesters as rioters “destroying the country”. The state is clearly starting to launch a media…

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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 worse if you use violence” many journalists were telling police officers outside the building. In the industrial city of Mahala, police virtually cordoned off the city. My sources in the city tell me the police ordered early dismissal of textile factory workers to preempt any…

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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 street in the center of the city. There have been minor clashes with protesters in various parts of Cairo, as well as in Assiyut – a city to the south. At the moment, security forces are cordoning off Tahrir Square. Private security guards in the…

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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 frequencies were not legally authorized. But critics, including many from abroad, have accused the Kiev government of using the case as a way to bludgeon a troublesome media voice into silence. … [See full piece on consortiumnews.com]

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  • Drone Assassination: Inconvenient Facts

    Author Laurie Calhoun says, “We have been assured by President Biden that Ayman al-Zawahiri was killed alone, and no one else was injured by the strike, not even his family. What a curious claim to make, given that family members were considered fair game for attack throughout the ‘war on terror.'”

  • Pelosi “Playing with Fire” Regarding China

    James Bradley, author of many bestsellers concerning U.S. policy in the Pacific and Asia says, “Pelosi is indeed ‘playing with fire’ as Xi says… military conflict regarding Taiwan will happen if the U.S. government starts or provokes it.”

  • 77 Years After Hiroshima, Public “Shockingly Oblivious” to Threat of Nuclear War

    Co-founder of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki Peace Committee of the National Capital Area, John Steibach says, “The public is shockingly oblivious to the threat of global nuclear war. This is the most dangerous period, even exceeding the Cuban missile crisis.”

  • Health Advocates Say “We Can’t Fail” to Accurately Frame Monkeypox

    Days after the World Health Organization declared monkeypox a global emergency, the U.S. has reported more than 3,000 confirmed cases of the virus. The Biden administration is likely to follow the WHO’s lead by the end of the week in a move that would expand the nation’s ability to respond to the virus.

  • Healthcare Companies Fighting Drug Price Reform

    New reporting shows that Republican lawmakers are working behind closed doors to “tank” the Inflation Reduction Act’s drug-pricing provisions. Public Citizen advocate Steve Knievel says that Democrats “should do what they can now––full stop.” 

  • Big Tech’s “Corporate Welfare” and $1 Trillion Spent on Stock Buybacks

  • Amazon Acquires One Medical, Expanding the Company’s “Data-opoly”

    Amazon announced last week it would buy primary health care provider One Medical for nearly $4 billion. Maurice Stucke, a professor of antitrust and privacy law, says that the concern here is not that major companies “are getting the same data but more of it… the concern is that they’re getting another important piece of…

  • AIPAC Targeting Pro-Israeli Jewish Congressman

    Ronald Aronson says that AIPAC’s targeting of Rep. Andy Levin is because of his proposed Two-State Solution Act, something which has been neglected “except as a shibboleth to which lip service must be given to undercut accusations of ‘apartheid.'”

  • Democrats Keeping Greens Off Ballot in North Carolina

    Legal counsel for the Center for Competitive Democracy, Oliver Hall condemns the North Carolina State Board of Elections for failing to attest the North Carolina Green Party as a new political party.

  • Researchers Learning More About the Neurological Effects of Long Covid

    Recent research is shedding light on how SARS-CoV-2 “readily forms aggregated protein clumps that look very similar to amyloid deposits seen in the brains of people with neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.”

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