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Here is the newly installed Egyptian Vice President Omar Suleiman, a longtime partner of U.S. intelligence agencies, on Egyptian television this morning describing foreign journalists as enemies of the state. “I blame some friendly states who are hosting …
Next month will mark the eight-year anniversary of the Iraq war’s shock-and-awe opening. And as Egypt descends into political turmoil, the meaning of that war is getting a new assessment. But the old battle lines are familiar. Some conservatives say the fall of Saddam Hussein and the emergence of a fragile democracy in Baghdad set …
In the ArenaUncategorized
As Massimo notes below, we are reaching a crucial moment in the Egyptian convulsion. There is a major demonstration scheduled for tomorrow–and a major question: which way does the army go, for Mubarak or for the protesters?
We’ve been here before. We’ve seen the tanks stand down, as they did in Moscow in 1991–when Boris Yeltsin …
President Hosni Mubarak apparently told ABC’s Chrisiane Amanpour today that he’s fed up with leadership and would step down if he could, but that he fears for his country’s safety. Mubarak and his son Gamal, who had been rumored to have left the country, met with Amanpour at the Presidential palace in the Heliopolis neighborhood of …
TIME’s Andrew Lee Butters files this report from Cairo:
The Egyptian government denies that it had anything to do with orchestrating attacks against democracy protesters by crowds supporting Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. But during my attempt to reach the protests, it became clear not only that the police are doing nothing to stop
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In 1924, the U.S. Congress passed a law that created a quota for the number of immigrants that could be admitted to the U.S. from any given country. The math worked out like this: Between 1924 and 1927, the annual number of immigrants from any nation could not exceed 2 percent of the number of foreign-born residents from that country in …
Ever since they pledged to cut spending by $100 billion during their first year in control of the House, Republican leaders have slowly backpedaled away from that promise. For one thing, it was never entirely precise; the figure was measured against President Obama’s 2011 budget, which was never adopted. (As a result, the government is …
President Obama has spoken three times at the National Prayer Breakfast, and there has been a pattern to his speeches. He thanks his guests, speaks briefly about the history of the National Prayer Breakfast, and then delivers what amounts to a essay on faith in light of current events. In 2009, he quoted Jesus, the Torah and the Koran, …
Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer recently tweeted the fact that has defined life in the White House this morning. Like democracy activists in Cairo, White House staff are without access to non-classified emails. “Verizon is working to solve the problem,” writes Pfeiffer on Twitter, which is just about the only way the communications …
After a week of dodging questions about why they thought the Hyde Amendment exceptions needed to be limited to victims of “forcible rape,” the GOP authors of H.R. 3 are dropping the word “forcible” from their bill. In an unrelated development, their wives and daughters have agreed to stop changing the locks at home.
The New York Times is reporting that Egyptian authorities have forced one of the country’s cellular providers to send out mass text messages in support of the Mubarak regime.
The cellphone service provider Vodafone acknowledged that the government had invoked emergency powers to force it to send out text messages. Some of the messages
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Protesters clash outside the National Museum in Cairo early on February 3. (REUTERS/Yannis Behrakis)
–Our colleague Vivienne Walt recounts a harrowing night in Tahrir Square:
I heard heavy rounds of automatic gunfire. Hundreds of pro-Mubarak supporters seemed to be fleeing the square in terror, running through the streets and
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In the ArenaUncategorized
Why do we keep on getting stuck with creeps like Mubarak and Karzai?
