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/ 31 January 2008
Damage to undersea internet cables hit businesses across the Middle East and South Asia on Thursday, including the vital call-centre industry, prompting calls for people to limit their surfing. About 70% of internet users in Egypt have been affected since two submarine cables in the Mediterranean Sea were damaged on Wednesday.
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/ 23 January 2008
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said on Wednesday he had given his security forces orders to let Palestinians in from Gaza to buy food and then return home. ”I told them: ‘Let them come in to eat and buy food’, then they go back, as long as they are not carrying weapons,” Mubarak told reporters at a Cairo book fair.
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/ 17 December 2007
Neither censors nor ”Orientalist” stereotypes have dampened demand for the cartoon adventures of Belgian boy reporter Tintin, who has stoked the imagination of generations of Arabs from the Atlantic to the Gulf.
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/ 14 December 2007
In an act that has sparked outrage among Egyptian women’s rights activists, a controversial Islamic scholar filed a lawsuit against the minister of health protesting against a recent ban on female circumcision, a practice referred to by rights groups as female genital mutilation.
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/ 28 November 2007
Egyptian police arrested 25 members of the opposition Muslim Brotherhood organisation late on Tuesday in the oasis city of Fayoum on charges of holding meetings to prepare for upcoming local elections. Long ignored and left to supporters of the ruling party, municipal elections have gained in importance following a 2005 change in the electoral law.
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/ 26 November 2007
A rising tide of travellers seeking out the new frontier of Egyptian tourism is threatening priceless rock art preserved for millennia in one of the most-isolated reaches of the Sahara. In Egypt’s south-west corner, straddling the borders of Sudan and Libya, the elegant paintings of prehistoric man and beast in the mountains of Gilf Kabir and Jebel Ouenat are as stunning in their simplicity as anything by Picasso.
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/ 22 November 2007
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was hosting a summit with the Palestinian and Jordanian leaders on Thursday as Arab foreign ministers mull whether to join a United States-sponsored peace conference next week. Mubarak met Jordan’s King Abdullah II in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh to discuss preparations for the conference.
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/ 20 November 2007
Egyptian bloggers, long at the forefront of exposing rights abuses, are planning an online festival of torture videos to run alongside the 31st Cairo Film Festival, local media reported on Tuesday. The parallel festival is the brainchild of a blogger named Walid, the Egyptian Mail reported.
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/ 12 November 2007
Egyptian prosecutors have charged two detectives with sodomising a suspect in a drugs case in the Nile Delta. A report on the case quotes the suspect, 27-year-old Ahmed Sayed Hussein, as saying the detectives in Kalyoubia province tied him up with ropes, thrashed him with a belt and sodomised him with their hands.
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/ 10 November 2007
Etoile Sahel of Tunisia stunned title holders Al-Ahly of Egypt 3-1 on Friday to win a first African Champions League title. No one outside Tunisia gave Etoile a chance at Cairo Stadium after they were held 0-0 two weeks ago in the first leg of the African Football Confederation club showpiece.
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/ 5 November 2007
An Egyptian court on Monday jailed two police officers for three years for sodomising a detainee with a stick in torture shown in widely distributed video footage that sparked nationwide outrage. ”It’s not very common for an Egyptian court to convict police officers,” Human Rights Watch said.
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/ 5 November 2007
Egypt’s ruling party gave ageing politician Safwat el-Sherif another term as party secretary general on Monday, ending speculation that President Hosni Mubarak’s son Gamal might take that position. Sherif (73) has been near the top of the National Democratic Party (NDP) since its foundation in 1977 and has been secretary general since 2002.
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/ 3 November 2007
From lewd looks to inappropriate touching, experts say Egypt’s growing street harassment of women is a deep-rooted and largely ignored problem shackling the country’s progress. Sexual harassment in public areas is not limited to a specific age category or social class, says the independent Egyptian Centre for Women’s Rights.
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/ 29 October 2007
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said on Monday his country will launch a programme to build several civilian nuclear power stations. He did not say when the government would start building the stations but added Egypt would cooperate with the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency.
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/ 24 October 2007
Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden called for a holy war against a proposed peacekeeping force in Sudan’s war-torn region of Darfur in a message that appeared on jihadi websites on Tuesday. The audio recording was accompanied by a still picture and excerpts were aired by pan-Arab satellite news channel al-Jazeera on Monday.
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/ 16 October 2007
United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived in Egypt on Tuesday to brief sceptical Egyptian leaders on US plans for a Middle East peace conference in November. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has said the conference must have an outcome assured in adavance.
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/ 14 October 2007
Thirty-five Muslim Brotherhood members were arrested on Saturday after police fired tear gas at hundreds of worshippers in a northern Nile Delta village shortly before prayers celebrating the festival that marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan, police and the group’s website reported.
It looks like a mirage but the lush fields of cauliflower, apricot trees and melon growing among a vast stretch of sand north of Cairo’s pyramids is all too real — proof of Egypt’s determination to turn its deserts green. While climate change and land overuse help many deserts across the world advance, Egypt is slowly greening the sand that covers almost all of its territory.
Sudanese government forces and militia groups razed a town in central Darfur where African Union soldiers were attacked, rebel leaders said on Friday, adding the troops were also threatening to raid a nearby town. Sudan’s army and Darfur rebel movements blame each other for last week’s assault on the AU base in Haskanita in which 10 African Union soldiers were killed.
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/ 17 September 2007
The Egyptian government has banned the Muslim Brotherhood’s largest annual social gathering for the first time in 20 years, part of a concerted crackdown against the country’s opposition. Every year, the Brotherhood invites a group of about 1 500 people to one of Cairo’s five-star hotels for a gala dinner.
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/ 15 September 2007
Rights groups on Saturday accused Egypt of curbing press freedom after a Cairo court this week sentenced four editors each to one year in prison for criticising the president. ”Egypt continues to imprison journalists and editors who publish stories critical of President Hosni Mubarak and other high officials,” Human Rights Watch said in a statement.
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/ 13 September 2007
An Egyptian court sentenced four newspaper editors to one year in prison with labour on Thursday for defaming President Hosni Mubarak and his politician son Gamal. The court also ordered Ibrahim Issa, Adel Hammouda, Wael el-Ebrashi and Abdel-Halim Qandil to pay fines of 20 000 Egyptian pounds each.
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/ 11 September 2007
The editor of an Egyptian daily is to face trial accused of damaging the ”public interest” by publishing rumours on President Hosni Mubarak’s health, the public prosecutor said on Tuesday. Ibrahim Eissa, the outspoken editor of al-Destur, is to appear in court on October 1.
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/ 3 September 2007
The editor of an independent Egyptian daily is to face prosecution over his paper’s coverage of the state of President Hosni Mubarak’s health, the head of the journalists’ union said on Monday. Recent speculation about Mubarak has included his hospitalisation, travel abroad for medical treatment and even death.
Twelve-year-old Mohammed Abdelaziz’s brother said he screamed in pain as he was tortured in Egyptian police custody, but his screams are now silent. Pictures recently published on a popular Egyptian blog showed Mohammed dead with signs of torture all over his skinny little body.
Marc wears a New York Yankees cap, loves rap music and has ”Los Angeles” scrawled in black ink across his forearm, but he will probably never see the United States. The 21-year-old is one of an estimated one million Sudanese refugees living in Cairo. Poor, jobless and subject to racist abuse, he has few aspirations other than to leave Egypt.
Torture is common in Egyptian police stations and prisons and three victims have died so far this year, the Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights said on Wednesday. A report released by the organisation documented hundreds of cases of torture and ill treatment by the authorities from 1993 to July 2007 through eyewitness accounts, complaints from family members and police records.
When an elder was kidnapped in a clan dispute in conservative southern Egypt, the Al-Arab family’s worst fears were soon realised — they received a package containing his moustache. The man himself was returned uninjured, but the use of the new shaving tactic sent shockwaves through the town of Mahrusa.
Egyptian officials have found torture gear including a whip, clubs and a barbed wire-studded stick at a police station in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria, a security source said on Tuesday. An investigating team found that 40 people had been kept in custody ”illegally” at the Montaza police station after receiving complaints from the families of those detained.
Osama bin Laden praises martyrdom in a new videotape posted on a militant website on Sunday by al-Qaeda’s media-production wing. The Bin Laden clip, which lasted less than a minute, was undated and part of a 40-minute video featuring purported al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan paying tribute to fellow militants who had been killed.
An Egyptian engineer who was convicted in 2002 of spying for Israel has died in jail in unclear circumstances. Sherif al-Filali had initially been found innocent of espionage in 2001, and a judge called him a true patriot because he turned himself in as soon as he realised he may have been involved in a crime.
Egypt on Thursday finally banned all female circumcision, the widely practised removal of the clitoris that just days ago cost the life of a 12-year-old girl. Officially the practice — which affects both Muslim and Christian women in Egypt — was banned in 1997, but doctors were allowed to operate ”in exceptional cases”.