Egypt Feature: The Muslim Brotherhood Comes to America (Bohn)

Sondos AsemSondos Asem has butterflies, formulating answers to questions she expects to be asked and practicing her diction with the devotion of a high school debate champion. The gentle 24-year-old graduate student at the American University in Cairo is in a hotel room in downtown New York, figuring out what to wear on national television. ("This blazer would look good, right?" "Should I wear more color?")

Like many young Egyptians, she's been tweeting the fallout after the 2011 uprising that brought down former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. The stakes are higher than 140-character dispatches might suggest. Asem has emerged as an unlikely unofficial spokeswoman for the Muslim Brotherhood, helping to run its English-language Twitter feed, @Ikhwanweb, and in turn revamp the group's image in the West.

Click to read more ...

Egypt 1st-Hand: Nine Views of a Country's Future (Bohn)

Photos: Lauren BohnBefore the revolution, Ayad says he didn't fit in. And now, he says he still doesn't. He's "not pumped up enough to be a revolutionary." But he's not apathetic enough for the popular Hezb al Kanaba, the party of the couch. In fact, he wishes he were more indifferent. Like many, he's frustrated, if not angry, by a regime he says is still running the show. Back then, days spent in Tahrir seemed like the beginning of an exciting story, one where anything could happen. Now, he feels the square's more like a bad sequel.

"It's sad because maybe it shows the majority of Egyptian people don't deserve better, because they're not fighting for it," he says. "You can't want something for them more than they do." Still, after he larks around the world by sea, he hopes to return to Egypt. He's developed a love-hate relationship with the place he can't seem to shake. And he still has hope, he reassures me -- or perhaps himself -- every five minutes.

Click to read more ...

Bahrain 1st-Hand: The Café Where Lattes Have an Extra Shot of Tear Gas (Ellick)

Bahraini security forces fire tear gas outside Costa Coffee on 15 December

---

The repression has hardly let up, even as the kingdom says it is instituting reforms. And with no place to legally organize, this coffee shop has become an unlikely gathering place for human rights activists and opposition leaders. Indeed, the manager says business has recently increased by 50 percent.

“We disappeared because we had never seen tanks and bullets,” said Ala’a Shehabi, 31, an economics lecturer who avoided the cafe until recently. “But now we have removed the cape of fear and come into the public once again.”

Click to read more ...

Egypt, Bahrain, Syria (and Beyond): Attacking the Protesters

Insurgents fire a rocket-propelled grenade at a Syrian tank in Al Bukamal

See also Bahrain Interview Special: 17 December 2011 --- A Day in the Life of a Protester
Syria (and Beyond) Feature: Missing the Stories Behind the Numbers
Bahrain Video Special: The Police Attack Protesters at Budaiya
Saturday's Syria, Egypt, Bahrain (and Beyond) LiveBlog: Beyond a "Return" to Protest

---

2205 GMT: The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and the Local Coordination Committees activist network said at least 15 civilians were killed by Syrian security forces today in Homs Province, the Jabal al-Zawiya area, and Maaret al-Numan in the northwest.

The Observatory earlier claimed that six soldiers, including an officer, were slain by defecting troops in Qusair in Homs Province, near the border with Lebanon: "Three armored vehicles were destroyed, and those inside were killed and wounded."

On the diplomatic front, the Qatari Prime Minister reportedly said that the Assad regime will agree to an Arab League plan allowing observers into the country. The Omani foreign minister of also said he is "optimistic" that Syria will sign the protocol within 24 hours "and save the Arab world from foreign intervention".

This weekend the League said Syria must accept the agreement or it would refer the matter to the United Nations Security Council.

Syria's state-run news agency SANA quoted Assad, speaking in front of an Iraqi delegation, that Damascus has "dealt positively with proposals presented because it's in our interest for the world to know what is happening in Syria".

Click to read more ...

Egypt Feature: The Political Battle Beyond Cairo (Bohn)

Election Day in Assiut, November 2011Assiut feels far away from the famed epicenter of Tahrir Square. The oft-neglected peripheral region of Upper Egypt (the cultivated valley of the Nile from Cairo in the north to Aswan, 535 miles south) has been plagued by institutional apathy for years, long dismissed as a dead-end, from where one travels to the capital for work and never returns. When Egypt's contentious de-facto leaders, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), speak of a silent but loyal majority, or "liberals," fret about the backward religious and violence-prone rural areas, they have cities like Assiut in mind. But the reality is far more complicated. Assiut and Tahrir are bound together by personal connections and shared concerns -- inextricable ties that suggest a far more nuanced emerging Egypt than is generally felt from the central nerve of Cairo.

Click to read more ...

Egypt LiveBlog: The Fighting Resumes

Men form a protective circle around a woman, amidst reports of abuse by security forces of female protesters

See also Egypt Analysis: So What Happens Now?
Egypt LiveBlog: The Fighting Resumes
Wednesday's Bahrain (and Beyond) LiveBlog: The Report of the Commission of Inquiry

---

1700 GMT: News has just arrived that Kamal Ghanzouri has been appointed as the new prime minister of Egypt by SCAF. Ghanzouri is a former prime minister, who served under ex-President Hosni Mubarak from 1996 to 1999 and has a PhD from the University of Michigan. 

Click to read more ...

Egypt Feature: Activists Try to Bridge Digital Divide by Taking "Tweets to the Streets" (Bohn)

The impact of social media on revolutionary movements like Egypt’s has been hashed out to the precipice of cliché, with scholars still puzzling over how networks online and off contributed to the ousting of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. As Egypt’s transitional period drags on, staggering obstacles lay ahead for the architects of the post-Mubarak Egypt, with Twitter laying bare divisions both within the activists’ ranks and between the relatively small number of activists using the Internet to organize and the “silent majority” on the street. Some of Egypt’s young revolutionaries are still trying to find a way to merge their online presences with street level politics and outreach in time for the approaching parliamentary elections.

Click to read more ...