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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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  • “Pandora Papers” Experts: U.S. Now a Billionaire Tax Haven

  • How Milton Friedman Aided Segregationists in Quest to Privatize Public Education

    The essay reveals how the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman allied himself with southern white efforts to defy the 1954 Supreme Court decision barring racial segregation in U.S. public schools. The iconic American academic hoped that the segregationists would advance his crusade to end public schools in the U.S. with vouchers for private schools.

  • New DeJoy Policy Will Permanently Slow Down Billions of Pieces of Mail

    Ironically, after widespread delays under DeJoy’s tenure, degrading service guidelines will allow the U.S. Postal Service to claim improved performance due to the extended window for on-time delivery. With the Postal Service facing a number of financial challenges — notably the unique burden of massively pre-funding its retirees’ health benefits — reducing service will only…

  • Call to End the War on Terror at Home

    Since 9/11, the government’s powers to conduct surveillance have been dramatically expanded. At times the executive branch has operationalized mass surveillance within the United States without any authorization from Congress or the courts, like the President’s Surveillance Program or the creation of terror watchlists. …

  • Report: CIA Plotted to Assassinate WikiLeak’s Assange

    “What the Yahoo! News report confirms is that the CIA’s plot to destroy WikiLeaks went up to the highest levels. After the ‘Vault 7’ materials were published, CIA director Mike Pompeo was obsessed with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. He had the CIA label WikiLeaks as a ‘hostile entity.’ He proposed kidnapping Assange. He considered putting…

  • U.S. Policy on Haiti Branded Racist, Humanitarian Crisis Caused by Interventions

    “That the Biden administration has ordered federal authorities to mass deport thousands of Haitians, which will probably have the effect of driving many of them who will resist deportation back into Mexico and Central and South America, is both massive in its scope and fundamentally racist.”

  • Behind Biden’s Rhetoric of Peace at UN: U.S.’s 750 Bases Around the World

    “While President Biden’s UN speech promised some additional humanitarian assistance globally… many of his actions internationally — other than withdrawing U.S. forces from Afghanistan — have been downright awful.”

  • Generals: Space War “All But Inevitable” as U.S. Blocks UN Effort to Stop Weaponization of Space

    “The world is at a crossroads as to war in space. President Biden has not pulled back on the Trump-initiated U.S. Space Force which Trump demanded to ‘have American dominance in space.’

  • Occupy Wall Street’s Legacy

    “With the tenth anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, it is clear that the movement was far from a failure.” Gupta was the only journalist to cover Occupy across the country, reporting from 41 occupations in 26 states over the course of a year. He says Occupy Wall Street influenced the last decade of dramatic protests…

  • Ban Killer Drones: Kabul Drone Atrocity Latest in Ongoing U.S. Drone Killing Cover-up

    “The Pentagon’s and Biden administration’s efforts to cover-up the truth about the slaughter of 10 civilians in Kabul on Aug. 29, seven of them children, is simply an example of the on-going cover-up of killer drone atrocities that have been perpetrated by every U.S. administration since the first U.S. drone attack, in Afghanistan, on October…

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