As Egyptian anti-government protesters battled security forces for a second day, the fight over the flow of information was becoming a fascinating side battle. On Tuesday, when a 10,000 strong protest overwhelmed police forces and took control of...
A few memorable snapshots from today’s “Day of Rage” protests in Egypt: • A group of about 100 protesters is marching along the Nile corniche chanting anti-government slogans. From the other direction comes a much larger group of demonstrators. The...
I’m in the Red Sea resort of Sharm El Shiekh covering the 2nd Arab Economic Summit --- a chance for Arab ministers and business magnates to gather and discuss the economic future of the region. But the elephant in the room this week is Tunisia,...
It’s no surprise that the Western media was a little slow to catch up to the unrest in Tunisia. The tiny country sandwiched between Libya and Algeria has always been notoriously opaque to outsiders. Known as one of the world’s most quietly...
For months in advance of Sunday’s parliamentary elections, Egyptian officials waged a rather strident campaign to fend off calls to allow international election monitors to observe the vote. The issue, they said, was out of the question and an...
Parliamentary elections are Sunday in Egypt, so here’s a heavily Egypt-centric collection of related links, plus some other happenings around the region In advance of parliamentary elections in Egypt, the regime is cracking down on opposition...
It started out as a routine night on the Egyptian parliamentary campaign trail, and ended as a clear lesson in the methods that a police state uses to control, intimidate and generally confuse journalists. Along with several colleagues, I traveled...
Online free expression activists around the world are rejoicing at the news that jailed Egyptian blogger Kareem Amer has been freed and had returned to his family’s Alexandria home. Amer won the Hugo Young Award for Journalism at the Index on...
Morocco’s on-again off-again ban on the Al Jazeera satellite news channel is apparently on again. The kingdom is famously touchy about certain issues --- last year it banned a magazine for publishing an opinion poll about King Mohammed II’s...
These are uncertain times in the Arab world’s most populous nation. President Hosni Mubarak is 82, fresh from major gall bladder surgery and in uncertain health. There’s a parliamentary election coming next month, a crucial presidential vote next...