Tax Striker Islam (L) at his family house in el-Minya, with a relative and a colleague…

The Giza school teachers are protesting the govt’s employment reforms package tomorrow Thursday 1pm, in front of the Teachers’ Syndicate in El-Gezira….

MAK blogging the Mahalla 49 Trial…

The second edition of the left-leaning daily el-Badeel was censored by the govt, coz of its coverage of the Shura Council fire…

A bomb attack near a major US base in Afghanistan left at least one US trooper and 13 insurgents dead, officials said Tuesday, and later..

Ten French soldiers have been killed in fighting with Taliban insurgents east of the Afghan capital, an Afghan military official said today.
The soldiers, part of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), were killed in a major battle with insurgents that began on Monday about 30 miles east of Kabul, he said.
It was the biggest single loss of French troops in Afghanistan since US-led and Afghan forces toppled the Taliban after the 11 September 2001 attacks in New York.
France has 1,670 troops in Afghanistan having sent an extra 700 soldiers this year, responding to a US call for its NATO allies to send more forces to check a surge in violence.

Click on Latuff’s cartoon below to read the full report…

The Shura Council, in downtown Cairo, is on fire! You can watch live footage on Al-Jazeera..

UPDATE 7:15pm: Al-Jazeera correspondent in Cairo is saying that the fire has extended to parts of the People’s Assembly (Parliament, Lower House). At least six are injured up till now. The correspondent quotes police sources suggesting the fire was the result of electric short circuit. “Some important files and documents might be lost in the fire,” said Al-Jazeera correspondent.

The Daily News Egypt has a report about the Imbaba neighborhood in Giza…

Imbaba, an elaborate squatter area in Giza, Egypt, records 23,000 newborn babies annually, compared to the least fertile upscale Zamalek area with its 235 yearly births.
According to a recently published report by the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAMPAS), Imbaba, which has a population of 1.1 million living on an area of 17,000 square km, contributes 1.1 percent to Egypt’s annual population rise.
Official statistics claim that Egypt’s population grows by 1.9 million every year, denoting a birth rate of 25.8 percent. The number is expected to go down to 1.2 in the next few years. The annual death rate of 6.3 percent (452,000 people) means that the overall natural population increase rate is at 19.5 percent.

Imbaba is also witnessing an anti-gentrification fight. The govt is planning to gentrify Ezbet Matar Imbaba (The neiborhood of Imbaba’s Airport). The area, where the airport that stopped operating since 2001 exists, is surrounded by more than 35,100 inhabitants according to govt figures (I heard double and triple that estimate from others, but may be the other bigger numbers I heard include the neighboring Bashtil and Madinet el-Amal which are under threat too.). The authorities are working on “developing” the area, without any coordination with the locals, who are accusing the govt of planning in secrecy to demolish the neighborhood and turn it into an upscale housing integrated with Mohandessin. A solidarity committee of activists and local citizens in the neighborhood has been set up, trying to fight back. More about that later…

Portraits of children in Mahalla…

From the Daily News Egypt…

The Ministry of Interior has agreed to pay compensations of up to LE 25 million to approximately 1,000 detainees from Islamist organizations who were convicted and detained in the 1990s, reported the local press.
However, when contacted by Daily News Egypt, the media department at the interior ministry refused to confirm, deny or comment.
“We haven’t released an official statement regarding this issue so we have no comment on it,” said the interior ministry official.
A member of the ministry’s legal affairs department, however, told Al-Masry Al-Youm on condition of anonymity that “the ministry has every intention of paying the compensations,” adding that it had paid thousands in compensation in the past few years.
Each detainee is expected to receive between LE 20,000 and LE 50,000.
Yet the detainees’ lawyers complain that while the ministry has announced it will give out the compensations, it has failed to do so.

Click on Fathi Abul Ezz’s cartoon below to read the full report…

There are a couple of errors in the above report, when you read it on the DNE website. The title says “Interior ministry to pay million in compensation to Islamist detainees, say reports” while the article text says LE25 million… Also the report mentions “Islamist terrorism had reached its climax in Egypt in the 1990s mainly targeting political figures, Christians and foreigners. The worst attack came in November 1998 when armed men shot down 71 tourists at the Hatshepsut Temple in Luxor.” Actually, the Luxor massacre happened on 17 November 1997, and those killed as far as I know were 59 tourists and four Egyptians..

To read more about the plight of Islamist detainees, during the 1990s Dirty War, check out those two links…

They are back!