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 As a rebuttal to the recent Iranian documentary in which late Egyptian president Anwar Sadat is shrugged off as a traitor, an Egyptian writer announced that he was putting together a movie script that dismisses Ayatollah Khomeini as a “terrorist.”
“This movie aims to glorify President Sadat and show that the ideas, advanced by Khomeini, stood behind his assassination,” said Mohamed Hassan El-Alfy, screenwriter. “Khomeini’s ideas sowed the seeds of terrorism and extremism in the region.”
El-Alfy said he was already working on his script “The Imam of Bood” (in reference to Khomeini) long before the Iranian documentary “Execution of the Pharaoh” came out. “However, the fury that I and many Egyptians felt made me rush to finish the script and produce the movie.” added El-Alfy, who expects his feature movie to be out in a few months.
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Another footnote to the absurdity of daily life in Iraq: On a recent Thursday I dropped by the Rafidain Bank in Amarah. I was surprised to find it closed. I was more surprised when I noticed bank employees moving about inside.
I told the guard I needed to get in to conduct some business.
"Today is a holiday," he said.
I knew of no holiday, and the weekend in Iraq begins on Friday.
"But there are employees inside," I protested.
"Today is just to do the Ministry of Finance work," he said.
No matter how hard I pressed him, he wouldn't let me in.
Asking around for an explanation, I learned that despite two weeks of military operations to restore the rule of law, Maysan province had retained its outlaw status in one respect. Of all Iraq's 18 provinces, Maysan is the only one that hadn't yielded to Baghdad's definition of the workweek.
Everywhere else, Friday and Saturday were the days of rest. Friday is the Islamic Sabbath. A few years ago, the government added Saturday as a second day off.
Under pressure from the followers of Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada Sadr, the provincial council of Maysan, a predominantly Shiite region, declared Saturday unacceptable because it is the Jewish Sabbath. The weekend in Maysan was officially made Thursday and Friday.
With the return of government authority, the Maysan weekend became problematic for institutions such as banks that are under federal regulation. They had to decide whether to defy the authorities in Baghdad or the ones nearby in Maysan's capital, Amarah. Adopting a prudent course, Rafidain Bank decided to serve both masters.
The bank had employees come into work on Thursday, but did not open its doors. As a consequence, its customers got a three-day weekend away from bank services, whether they wanted it or not.
It has now been a month since the beginning of Operation Herald of Peace the central government's military campaign to tame Amarah. If a clear sign of its success is needed, it appeared a few days ago when the Maysan council quietly capitulated to Baghdad. It decided that Friday and Saturday would be the province's official weekend.
Now I can do my banking on Thursday again.
By Haydar al-Alak in Amarah
Photo: Rafidain Bank in the southern city of Amarah is closed as officials work out when the weekend starts. Credit: Haydar al-Alak / Los Angeles Times
The disclosure of an alleged draft bill that would grant the Egyptian government wider authority in controlling the media and silencing political opponents, including Facebook activists, has drawn quick condemnation from journalists and human rights groups.
The bill, which was leaked to the independent daily newspaper El-Masry El-Youm, would give the government of President Hosni Mubarak control over all visual and audio transmissions in the country, as well as on the Internet. It stipulates that the media should respect "social peace, national unity, citizenship, public order and morals" -- vague terms that journalists view as an attack on freedom of expression. El-Masry El-Youm reports that Parliament will deliberate the bill in the fall.
"The law aims at shutting up all mouths; it is a law to terrify, intimidate, control and destroy," wrote prominent broadcast journalist Tarek El-Shamy in independent daily El-Dostour. The Egyptian Organization for Human Rights condemned the bill as "a new step to violate freedom of opinion and expression."
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This time, the U.S. envoy to Lebanon was not a politician or a security official but a messenger of "peace and love" straight from the world of American rock.
Coming to Lebanon to sing for the "regeneration" of the city of Beirut and to voice her rejection to war, the U.S. singer and poet Patti Smith performed this week in Lebanon a mixture of antiwar and rebellion songs, including "Because the Night", "Gloria" and "Helpless."
The celebrated 1970s rock icon turned political activist performed near the old Phoenician port at the opening of the Byblos music festival, one of numerous music events taking place this summer in Lebanon after violence has subsided in the country and tourists have started to flood in again.
"To all mothers and children who lost children, all unnecessarily in war, which seems to me in our time something we can make obsolete," Smith said before dazzling the audience with "Qana."
The song is pointedly political. It's about the children who died in an Israeli air strike on a Lebanese village during the summer 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah. Here are some excerpts: There's no one in the village, not a human nor a stone... Children are gone and a mother rocks herself to sleep. Let it come down, let her weep… Some stayed buried, others crawled free... Little bodies, tied head and feet, wrapped in plastic, laid out in the street… The new Middle East… The dead lay in strange shapes… Wine to blood, Oh Qana, the miracle is love.
At one point, Smith wore a kaffiyeh, a scarf with black and white patterns that has become a symbol of the Palestinian upheaval.
-- Raed Rafei in Beirut
Credit: Patti Smith performs in Byblos, Lebanon. Credit: Associated Press
 By Saad Fakhrildeen in Samarra
It was the place where Iraq’s sectarian war began. This week, the city of Samarra and its ruined shrine once again became a place of peaceful pilgrimage for thousands of Shiite Muslims.
A bombing on Feb. 22, 2006, destroyed Al Askari shrine’s famous golden dome and unleashed a cycle of revenge killings between Shiites and Sunnis in which countless numbers perished. Another bombing on June 13, 2007, collapsed the two minarets.
But with security improving, I took my place Monday on one of more than 100 buses carrying worshipers from the southern holy city of Najaf north to Samarra to commemorate the death of the 9th century imam Ali Hadi, who is buried there with his son, Hassan Askari.
Each bus had room for 50 passengers, in addition to those who stood in the aisles for the five-hour journey, so eager were they to participate in the pilgrimage.
"We haven't witnessed such a procession for a long time," civil servant Abdul-Kareem Ali told me along the way. "The former regime banned them, and then they were banned by the terrorists."
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 An Iranian film dismissing former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat as a "traitor" has elicited a storm of anger in Egyptian circles, a development that further reduces prospects of rapprochement between the two countries.
The Egyptian press quoted the Iranian newspaper Jomhuri Islami as saying that the recent movie "Assassination of the Pharaoh" rejected Sadat as a "traitor" for his 1979 peace accord with Israel. The film, which has has been screened in Iran, praises the assassination of Sadat and calls his radical Islamist killer a "martyr," according to the Egyptian press.
The film comes at a critical juncture as Iran is seeking to resume diplomatic relations with Egypt in an attempt to penetrate the lines of U.S. allies in the region. Diplomatic relations between Iran and Egypt have been broken since 1980 after Egypt had recognized the state of Israel and hosted the ousted Iranian shah. Egypt remains averse to any hasty rapprochement with the Shiite state that still names one of its streets after Sadat's main assassin.
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 The Egyptian interior ministry called on Sunni religious leaders to train state security officers on how to fight the proliferation of Shiite doctrines, according to a news report that appeared Thursday in the well-respected El-Masry El-Youm daily .
The report quoted a prominent scholar at Al-Azhar University as saying that the state security apparatus is concerned about the creeping influence of Shiite Islam since the influx of thousands of Shiite Iraqis to Egypt.
Egypt has been one of the major destinations of Iraqis who fled the violence at home. About 150,000 Iraqis are believed to have moved to Egypt since the 2003 outbreak of the war in Iraq and last year, when Egypt closed its borders.
Sheikh Mohamed Abdel Moneim El-Berry told the paper that his lectures to police officers focused on the dangerous nature of Shiite beliefs and the dire need to protect Egypt’s national security against such a threat. Several Shiite groups have already settled in a number of Egyptian provinces and have filed requests with the government to build their own mosques, added El-Berry.
Egypt has predominantly Sunni Muslims; however, the number of Shiites is estimated at 1% of the country’s 76 million inhabitants. Like other minorities in Egypt, Shiites are usually discriminated against and their loyalty is often questioned.
However, the Sunni-Shiite animosity has recently become more of a sensitive issue in most Sunni Arab countries due to the rising regional influence of Shiite Iran and the growing popularity of Lebanon’s Shiite Hezbollah group.
-- Noha El-Hennawy in Cairo
Photo: Shiite pilgrims visit shrines in Karbala, Iraq. Credit: Getty Images
 Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe flew into the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el Sheik nattily dressed and unapologetic, and left the same way, avoiding censure last night by the 53 nations attending the African Union summit.
Some of his peers chastised him for violently stealing the June 27 election that silenced opposition parties and won Mugabe his sixth term. But many African leaders remained publicly quiet, reacting to the 84-year-old former guerrilla the way one winces at a friend who shows up with trouble behind his smile.
Perhaps it was a desire to avoid comparison. Egypt and Libya, for example, have also been criticized repeatedly over the years for repression, torture and jailing political opposition figures. Washington has vilified Mugabe and is seeking broader U.N. sanctions against Zimbabwe. Meanwhile, the Bush administration gives about $2 billion in annual military and economic aid to the government of President Hosni Mubarak, a strategic ally in the region.
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The number of Iraqi civilians killed in violence dropped from 504 in May to 448 June, despite several high-profile bombings last month, according to figures released by the government.
The number of U.S. service members killed in the same period rose from 19 to 29, according to the independent website icasualties.org. A soldier from Georgia and another from Azerbaijan also died in June.
The American toll in May was the lowest since U.S.-led forces invaded Iraq in March 2003, according to the website. It followed a spike in the number of U.S. deaths to 52 in April, which coincided with an uprising of Shiite Muslim militants in the Baghdad district of Sadr City.
The U.S. military says that the number of attacks nationwide is at its lowest level since 2004, but warns that insurgents remain capable of lethal strikes.
Here are the figures released by the Iraqi government on Monday:
- The Ministry of Health reported that 448 Iraqis were killed in June, compared to 504 in May.
- The Ministry of Interior reported that 41 policemen were killed in the same period, compared to 32 in May.
- The Ministry of Defense said that 21 Iraqi soldiers were killed in June, compared to 27 in May.
The Baghdad Operations Center reported that 123 suspected militants were killed and 948 arrested for the month. In May, 192 suspects were killed and 2,419 detained.
-- Alexandra Zavis in Baghdad
 The school exam season in Egypt has turned to scenes of suicide and privilege.
Worried that he bombed his math final, 16-year-old Hassan Mohamed Youssry recently hanged himself in Cairo. Mirhan Hany Salem, 18, jumped from a sixth-floor balcony in Port Said the morning she was to take her mechanics exam. Both students were poor, and their families claim the stress of exams overwhelmed them amid accusations that wealthy parents were buying leaked copies of tests to help their children cheat.
“He was a wreck the past few days,” Youssry’s mother told Al-Masry Al-Youm. “He told me that proctors at the exam hall told them that the exam was leaked [to students in the Menya region] because ‘they are rich people but you are poor.’ ”
The Egyptian Ministry of Education has denied that students in Menya were given an edge, but those accusations are circulating on a high school Internet forum. Corruption has long been a part of university placement exams, and the publicity around the Menya case and the suicides has further damaged the system's reputation.
“Why are they doing this to us?” reads a student's post from the Internet forum quoted by Daily News Egypt. “We study all year round and at the end we can’t answer any of the questions, while other people whose parents are important get the exam questions beforehand. They don’t even need the good grades to get into university because their parents will pay their way through it too.”
Exams have become a torment to students in a country where schools are under-funded. And many teachers, who earn as little as $40 a month, spend less energy in classrooms than they do making extra money tutoring in the evenings. Rich and poor families are forced to pay for tutoring or risk the likelihood their children will score low on the exams, known as Thanaweya Amma.
--Jeffrey Fleishman in Cairo
Photo: Egyptian classroom. Credit: www.unv.org
It was, on the weighted scale of Iraq's horrors, one of the less serious attacks: Two people killed and as many as 90 injured. A footnote in the day's news reports.
Such cold calculations mean little to those who survived Tuesday's attack in the northern city of Mosul, where Iraqi security forces are waging a crackdown against Sunni Arab insurgents.
The suicide car bomber could not penetrate the defenses of his apparent target, a police station in the relatively secure Bab Jedeed neighborhood. But the blast destroyed a nearby coffee shop and severely damaged a number of homes, many of them in older buildings.
Policeman Ahmed Mohamed was collecting water bottles from a storage room when he heard his colleagues shouting that a car bomber was approaching.
"I didn't know how to react or what to do," he said. "In my astonished state, the explosion happened. I didn't have a chance to think. I found the entire storage [contents] on top of me. I passed out and now I'm in hospital with a broken hand and leg."
One of those killed in the blast was a policeman, hospital officials said. The other was a boy no older than 10.
In another hospital bed, Saman Subhi lay crying.
"The hardest thing during the moment of the explosion was the death of Omar, the child," he said. "He's my neighbor's son. I saw his body parts [scattered] near me. Moments before, he was playing with his companions and buying a snack ...
"My God what happened in those seconds!"
Two days later, tragedy struck again. Read here about the latest Mosul attacks.
- A Times special correspondent in Mosul.
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In the midst of continuing sectarian tensions between Muslims and Coptic Christians in Egypt, the Coptic diaspora has recently called for demonstrations in the U.S. and European cities.
Hundreds of Coptic migrants took to the streets in the Netherlands, France and the U.S., raising banners reading "Save Christians in Egypt," "Stop Islamic Terrorism" and "Help! Christians of Egypt are under attack."
The protests follow an eruption of violence between Muslims and Copts in several parts of Egypt. Last month a land dispute involving a Coptic monastery left one Muslim man killed in the southern province of Menya. Four Copts, including two monks, were injured. The clash arose after the monastery began building a wall around neighboring farming land, saying it belonged to the church. Days earlier in Cairo, four Copts were shot dead in a jewelry shop by two gunmen who fled without stealing anything.
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 By Saif Hameed in Baghdad
I stepped out of the airplane and headed to claim my suitcase after my two-week vacation in Turkey, when the bureau manager called me: "Did you hear? A car bomb went off at the airport lot. The driver who was waiting for you had to go. You should find your way out back to the bureau."
I ended the call and said to myself, "I'm definitely home!"
As I found out later, it was only mortars. In fact, by Baghdad standards, it wasn't that big of a deal. Mortars killed and wounded a few people, but it was like being bitten by reality: Everything is still not OK.
During my vacation in Turkey, I had quickly adapted to the mellow and comfortable lifestyle in Istanbul. I forgot my life back home.
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 Pressure from the U.S. and fears that soaring energy prices are hurting the global economy are forcing Saudi Arabia to consider significantly boosting oil production.
The Saudis are contemplating a “sizable additional increase” in oil production, according to The Middle East Economic Survey. An announcement on possible measures to bring down prices that have reached nearly $140 a barrel is expected later this month when King Abdullah meets with oil producers and consumers in the Red Sea city of Jidda.
In May, the king rejected a request by President Bush to make more oil available, saying that markets should dictate production levels. But costs have since dramatically climbed. Saudi concerns of a global economic slowdown and fears that escalating prices would compel countries to develop alternative sources, which ultimately would hurt the kingdom, have led to a shift in Saudi thinking.
Finance ministers for the Group of Eight nations -– the U.S., Germany, Britain, France, Canada, Japan, Italy and Russia –- urged oil-producing nations on Saturday to increase production.
Rising prices have shaken the world: Gas in the U.S. has reached as high as $4.43 a gallon and India, Indonesia and other Asian nations have cut fuel subsidies, creating anger and panic among drivers.
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 After weeks of heated deliberations, the Egyptian parliament on Saturday passed new pieces of legislation that impose relatively harsh legal restrictions on female circumcision and allow women for the first time to register their babies even if the father’s identity is unknown.
One law imposes a sentence of a maximum of two years and a fine of a maximum of $1,000 for performing female genital mutilation. This issue has caused much stir in the people’s assembly, especially among the Muslim Brotherhood, which holds one-fifth of the parliamentary seats. Conservatives maintain that Islam condones the removal of a girl’s clitoris to tame her sexual desires and condemn the amendment as a western import.
Attention-getting opposition to the bill came from an ostensibly secular MP a couple of weeks ago. Mohamed El-Omda, a member of a marginal opposition party, appeared before the people's assembly with his three daughters to protest the ban. One of his young daughters raised a banner reading: “No to any attempt to forbid what is divinely allowed. No to any attempt to allow what is divinely forbidden.” El-Omda said that two of his daughters were already circumcised.
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 The call to prayer is a pervasive, comforting echo across the Middle East, but a fatwa by a prominent Islamic cleric urges Muslims to spend less time prostrating and more time working. Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi said worshippers often use prayer to slip away from their jobs longer then they should.
“Praying is a good thing . . . 10 minutes should be enough,” according to an edict posted on Qaradawi’s website. The sheikh’s opinion is shared by many clerics and highlights the dilemma between economic productivity and religious devotion in a part of the world where piety is prized.
Devout Muslims pray five times a day, two of which fall during working hours. They kneel in mosques or unfurl prayer mats and recite the Koran in offices, clogging aisles and bringing work to a halt. The time between ablution -– washing hands and feet -– and a prayer can take 10 minutes, but many Muslim spend as many as 30 minutes on the ritual.
Companies and store owners have been complaining for years about lost labor minutes and inefficiency. The problem goes well beyond prayer time. A recent government study found that Egypt’s 6 million government employees, a massive platoon of bureaucracy, are each estimated to spend only 27 minutes a day working.
If frustrated citizens or customers ask to speed things up, they are met with a sigh, a roll of the eyes and the centuries-old reply: "Inshallah" (God willing).
--Jeffrey Fleishman in Cairo
Photo: Muslims at prayer. Credit: Associated Press, Hasan Sarbakhshian
 They wear hard hats and rags over their faces; they hammer in the dust and, at night, they are silhouettes in the blowtorch light. They are the migrant workers turning Abu Dhabi and Dubai into metropolises of skyscrapers that uncoil from the desert sands like exotic plants of steel and glass.
These futuristic cities along the Persian Gulf in the United Arab Emirates have been criticized by human rights groups and threatened with labor strikes over the low pay and poor living conditions faced by Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans and other workers from across Asia.
Responding to this pressure, the Abu Dhabi government announced this week that dormitories and apartments would be built for as many as 800,000 “limited-income workers,” including laborers, cleaners, technicians and housekeepers. An act of compassion? Partly. But the move is aimed at ensuring that nothing disrupts the frenetic pace of construction or spoils the image of a region that markets itself as a hip crossroads of globalization.
An official spokesman said the new dormitories will become cities unto themselves: “All utilities will be provided, there will be air conditioning and everything needed for decent living conditions will be available.”
Human Rights Watch and other groups have blamed the United Arab Emirates for allowing a system in which migrant workers are paid as little as $175 a month, are forced to pay high fees to recruitment agencies, have their passports confiscated and live in crowded rooms, many of them with no air conditioning, on the outskirts of cities. The sons of rich sheiks driving Bentleys and Mercedeses are as telling here as the faces of migrant workers peering from bus windows on their journeys to their living quarters far from the glamour they are building.
Jeffrey Fleishman in Abu Dhabi
Top: living quarters for Dubai's migrant workers. Credit: marketplace.publicradio.com
Bottom: An architect's sketch for a new high-rise in Abu Dhabi. Credit: bestwaytoinvest.com
Egyptian culture minister Farouq Hosni has thrown himself into a fierce confrontation with Israel when he allegedly vowed to burn Israeli books if found in Egyptian libraries.
The minister made the comment last month in parliament after an MP accused him of normalizing relations with Israel by allowing Israeli books in Egyptian libraries. Hosni's rebuttal was as follows: "[I] would burn Israeli books himself if found in Egyptian libraries."
Egypt was the first Arab country to sign a peace agreement with Israel in the late 1970's.
Hosni is known for his opposition of cultural normalization with the Jewish State. His comment came to add more fuel to fire.
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 The Egyptian parliament on Monday renewed the 27-year-old state of emergency for two more years, dashing the hopes of the nation's human rights activists.
In all, 305 of the Parliament's 454 members voted in favor of the renewal after President Hosni Mubarak issued a decree a day earlier calling on the nation’s representatives to extend the notorious state of emergency. One hundred three MPs did not heed Mubarak's call.
Under the emergency law, the police are authorized to detain people indefinitely without charges, refer civilians to military courts, close dissident publications and thwart demonstrations.
In 2005 Mubarak promised to lift the state of emergency and pass an anti-terror act instead, but he has yet to deliver on his pledges. The act has not been passed, and Mubarak's regime has used that fact to justify the extension of the emergency law. The state of emergency was due to expire May 31.
"It is sad that Egypt remains under state of emergency for more than 27 years," said Bahey Eddin Hassan, general director of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies. "We fear that the extension of the state of emergency aims at crushing the peaceful political opposition, which has recently increased."
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In less than 10 days, Egypt’s 27-year-old state of emergency, which gives the police absolute authority to arrest and detain, is expected to expire.
The state of emergency dates to the 1981 assassination of President Anwar Sadat. Human rights advocates complain that the emergency law has become a convenient tool for crushing political opponents. However, President Hosni Mubarak’s regime insists that it is only there to fight terrorists and drug dealers.
A hot debate is going on: If the government allows the law to expire, will Egypt’s record on human rights improve? Human rights activists are skeptical.
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The sentencing of a fugitive Al Qaeda in Iraq leader to hang for the slaying of Chaldean Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho has drawn mixed responses in Iraq.
The U.S. Embassy and U.S.-led military force praised Iraqi authorities Sunday for bringing to justice the person responsible for the kidnapping and death of the archbishop in the northern city of Mosul more than two months ago.
But today, Chaldean Archbishop Louis Sako of Kirkuk protested the sentence, saying, "Christianity is the religion of tolerance." Sako was troubled by the government's failure to release details of the investigation that led to the conviction of Ahmed Ali Ahmed, also known as Abu Omar.
"Was he the only one who killed four men? Why did he kill him? For religious or political reasons? Who was behind that?" Sako asked.
Rahho was kidnapped Feb. 29 by gunmen who killed his driver and two guards. His body was found two weeks later, though officials said at the time that it was unclear whether the ailing archbishop had been killed or had died of natural causes. His death prompted an outpouring of grief among Iraq's dwindling Christian community and drew international condemnation.
Tell us what you think.
--Alexandra Zavis in Baghdad
 No more letters home for Ayman Nour. An Egyptian court has ruled that the jailed political dissident and leader of the Tomorrow Party can no longer write to his wife. The reason: Nour has angered officials by mailing home essays critical of the government that ended up in the nation’s independent newspapers.
"This decision shows a determination to deny him every right as a prisoner," Nour's wife, Gamila Ismail, told AFP.
The ruling is the latest attempt to silence Nour, a lawyer who ran against President Hosni Mubarak in 2005 and was later sentenced to five years in prison for forging political documents. His cause was quickly taken up by human rights organizations that frequently criticize Egypt for political repression, torture and the jailing of activists, especially members of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Nour was on the minds Egyptians on Sunday, when President Bush, speaking in the Red Sea resort of Sharm El-Sheikh, criticized Middle East governments for silencing their opponents: "Too often in the Middle East, politics has consisted of one leader in power and the opposition in jail," he said.
—Jeffrey Fleishman in Cairo
Photo: Ayman Nour ran against Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in 2005 and was later sentenced to five years in prison for forging political documents. (AFP)
 By Raheem Salman in Baghdad
Iraqi soldiers pushed deep into Sadr City without resistance today, and I went to see how the operation was going.
I entered from the west side, near the 3-mile-long wall erected by U.S. forces to prevent militiamen loyal to radical Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada Sadr from using the southern portion of the vast Baghdad slum to shell the Green Zone and other targets.
As I moved into the neighborhood, the destruction from weeks of fighting was horrible. Most of the shops and kiosks have been damaged. Doors are knocked off their hinges. Windows are shattered. The walls are riddled with bullet holes. Some buildings are blown apart by missile fire.
Close to the wall, some young men were cleaning out the debris from their charred shops. Meters away, a funeral was under way for a man who was killed by a sniper's bullet on May 17. He was on his way home from work, the shopkeepers told me. As he turned into the alley where he lives, he was shot dead.
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On May 8, we posted an item on this blog looking at what the United States was and was not saying about the alleged presence of Iranian weapons in Iraq. We noted that the chief U.S. military spokesman, Maj. Gen. Kevin Bergner, had not cited Iran or Iranian influence during a news briefing May 7, when he gave a rundown of weapons caches uncovered during several weeks of fighting between Iraqi and U.S. forces, and Shiite militiamen.
This omission was notable because in the previous two weeks, both U.S. and Iraqi officials had been very vocal in accusing Iran of providing weapons -- some manufactured just this year -- to fighters involved in the latest battles.
Recently, we've been alerted to an item that appeared May 12 on MSNBC's Countdown program using that blog item as the basis for an inaccurate report attributed to the Los Angeles Times. Here is the link to the MSNBC piece.
This should set the record straight for those who have no plans to read the blog item or view the MSNBC report: the Los Angeles Times did not report that Bergner's May 7 briefing was supposed to be "the big day" that the American military showed off the Iranian weapons it has long said are being smuggled into Iraq. The Times did not report that Bergner had told us this briefing was going to be a "dog and pony show" offering conclusive evidence of Iranian involvement in Iraq's unrest.
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 A number of opposition MPs and independent activists have recently launched a campaign to pressure President Hosni Mubarak’s regime to stop exporting natural gas to Israel. Under the Slogan “No to the Gas Setback”, the opposition gave the government an ultimatum of 30 days to go back on a deal that obliges Egypt to provide Israel with gas for 15 years.
Under the contract, Egypt is committed to pump 1.7 billion cubic meters of natural gas a year into Israel. For the opposition, the deal is another blow similar to the “1967 setback” under which Israeli forces occupied Egypt’s Sinai, among other Arab territories. If the government does not heed the opposition’s call, campaigners are threatening to take to the streets.
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Government officials had been talking about it for months. But when the offensive finally began Saturday to clear the northern city of Mosul of insurgents, residents were caught off guard.
Authorities imposed an indefinite curfew as they went house to house, searching for weapons and fighters.
"My main concern is that I did not buy any groceries since Thursday," said Safa Ahmed, a mother of four. "I don't know what to feed my children until the end of the operations."
Musleh Abdul-Baqi, a high school teacher, was worried about his students, who are supposed to start their final exams soon.
"I think the timing of the military operation is not right," he said. But he added, "The operation is a must because the situation in the city has become intolerable."
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 In a sudden move, the Egyptian parliament voted Monday in favor of a package of price hikes and tax surges in order to pay a recently-announced 30% wage raise.
The new package increased primarily fuel prices and imposed higher license fees on cars with high-capacity engines. The diesel prices were raised by 47%; Octane 90 by 35%; Octane 92 by 32%; Octane 95 by 57%. The new hikes are expected to generate extra revenue of US$ 2.25 billion to pay for the pay raise that President Mubarak announced last week. The government claims that the package would affect the haves for the sake of the have-nots, as only car owners would be the ones mostly affected.
“We could not provide the big wage raise that the President asked for without having real revenues. Otherwise, the wage raise would lead to inflation,” Prime minister Ahmed Nazif told reporters shortly after the endorsement of the new increases in parliament.
Nazif claimed that his government’s package would not trump Mubarak’s wage raise.
While the increase of fuel prices are expected to elicit more public outrage, the government insists that the poor have nothing to worry about. “The citizen should not feel frustrated because I simply took money from the financially capable to give to the less capable,” Nazif said.
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 Cyberspace activists calling for nationwide protests to upset Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s 80th birthday found sparse turnout and little passion.
Few took to the streets, few boycotted work and few wore black. It was another setback for opposition groups and bloggers who have been unable to ignite sustained protests against low wages, rising food prices and political repression.
As word of the protest circulated in recent days over the Internet and in cellphone text messages, the Mubarak government countered with old-school, low-tech politics: Police and security forces were mobilized and the president announced a 30% pay raise for all public employees.
Many Egyptians were temporarily satisfied; others were scared to cross a regime that in April had put down similar protests.
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 By Said Rifai in Baghdad
I grew up abroad and used to take traveling for granted.
From the day I was born, my family and I traveled several times a year. There were summer and winter vacations to exotic islands in the Far East, European road trips, shopping sprees in Hong Kong and the annual trip back to Iraq to visit with family, getting acquainted with the fatherland so to speak.
I traveled so much that I got sick of it at one point and just wanted to settle down. My wish came into being when my father retired and we moved back to Baghdad in 1993 - finally, a place to call home.
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By Usama Redha in Baghdad
When I feel bad or uneasy, the only thing that relaxes me is to go shopping in my neighborhood bazaar.
The busiest time is about 5 p.m. Lots of people come to buy groceries, glasses of fruit juice and snacks to enjoy as the heat of the day begins to ebb. But the last time I went, the bazaar wasn't nearly as crowded as it should have been. The vendors had piled up their fruit and vegetables in neat rows and were polishing them to make them shine. But few people were buying.
I always look around first to see who has the best stuff. But this time I was stunned by the prices, which are supposed to be cheap this time of the year. Most fruits and vegetables had gone up 30% or 40%. So my search was for the cheapest price, not the best quality.
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Under the headline "Impulse to Lust," one can ponder old men, anxious grooms and the value of cufflinks. Diverse topics to be sure, but not when looked at through the enticing, blue prism that is Viagra. Gamal Nkrumah writes in the Al-Ahram Weekly about Egypt’s 10-year love affair with a pill that has “saved marriages and ruined others.”
Hag Ahmed, a 68-year-old Viagra devotee, gives the pills as presents to his closest associates. “My friends appreciate it far more than a tie or expensive cufflinks,” he says. Nervous grooms have come to rely on it, as well as young men looking to, shall we say, inflate their prowess.
“There are perfectly healthy young men that want to experiment with Viagra to enhance their sexual abilities,” said pharmacist Manal El-Shazli. “Pornographic films have become readily available on satellite television channels and the Internet. An ever-increasing number of young men want to try everything they watch, and they believe that Viagra is their best friend; that is the ideal instrument to realize their dreams."
When it comes to sex and its accoutrements, the world, despite frictions between Islam and the West, is pretty much the same from Cairo to Los Angeles, a landscape of angst, joy, desire, wonderment and pharmaceuticals.
—Jeffrey Fleishman in Cairo
Photo credit: viagra-picture.org
Men were humming verses from the Koran, gently moving their heads back and forth. Others were murmuring prayers while fumbling with strands of beads to keep count. The scene in Cairo's metro, on my first ride to the office here, was revelatory of the wave of religious fervor that Egypt has known in the last few years.
 The contrast with an Egyptian movie from the 1970s I had seen in Beirut last week was staggering. The film featured women wearing miniskirts and dancing disco extravagantly. It was set at a time when the society in Cairo was embracing modernity and opening up to the West.
But witnessing the crowds of veiled women and bearded men on the metro, that permissive, open Cairo seems a distant recollection. In fact, Cairo does not resemble at all that idyllic image of the glamorous glitzy city we, in the rest of the Arab world, have repeatedly seen on our movie and TV screens.
Another stunning aspect was the characteristic bruise on the forehead of many men here. These marks are supposedly formed by the repeated contact between the forehead and the floor during prayers. These prayer bumps have become like fashion statements and are derisively referred to as "Zebiba," the Arabic word for a raisin.
—Raed Rafei in Cairo
Photo: Man reading the Koran. Credit: AFP
You search our pope; we frisk your dignitaries.
Such is the messy tenor between Egypt and Britain in this spooked era of terrorism and high security.
It began, perhaps not surprisingly, with a holy man. Earlier this month, Egypt's Coptic Pope Shenouda III was forced to go through security checks, including stepping through a metal detector, at London's Heathrow Airport.
The Egyptian Foreign Ministry was outraged and has retaliated by proclaiming that British officials entering Egypt will be subject to the same measures. The British government attempted to make nice by stating that no offense was meant to the pope, but “in light of the terrorist threats,” even a frail 84-year-old man with a staff has to be considered a potential threat.
Such is a world where nuns take off their shoes to have them scanned by airport X-ray machines and clerics give up their toothpaste and hair gel if they’re an ounce or two over the see-through-bag limit. And, yet, the bearded man in the cave in Afghanistan or Pakistan eludes us.
—Jeffrey Fleishman in Cairo
Photo: Pope Shenouda III leaves a hospital in November after being treated for a gall bladder infection. Credit: AFP
It appears that Prime Minister Nouri Maliki's ultimatum to Shiite Muslim militiamen to surrender to the Iraqi government might not be working precisely as he had intended.
When nobody had turned up by Friday, Maliki gave members of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr's Mahdi Army militia 10 more days to turn in their weapons and renounce violence.
Instead, about 40 members of the Shiite-dominated Iraqi army and National Police offered to surrender their AK-47s and other weapons this morning to Sadr's representatives in the cleric's east Baghdad stronghold of Sadr City.
One of the police officers told journalists assembled at Sadr's office that he was heeding a call by an Iraqi cleric based in Iran, Ayatollah Fadhil Maliki, to stop fighting fellow Muslims.
"We came here to tell our brothers, the followers of Sadr, that we will not be against you," said the officer, who was dressed in civilian clothes and had his face covered with a scarf and dark sunglasses.
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With Iraqi government troops struggling to quell Shiite Muslim militiamen, the Sunni speaker of parliament summoned legislators to an emergency session. But most lawmakers failed to show up.
Friday’s session, which took place amid rocket and mortar fire, highlighted how persistent divisions between Iraqi political factions continue to stymie progress.
Those present agreed that a committee should be formed to find a negotiated solution to the fighting, which has claimed more than 150 lives.
“It is our duty as a legislative and oversight authority to intervene in order to salvage the situation,” parliament speaker Mahmoud Mashhadani told the Arabic-language satellite news station, Al Arabiya.
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When you walk the streets of Baghdad, the results of five years of war are inescapable.
U.S. airstrikes and insurgent bombers have ripped huge, gaping holes out of office blocks. Miles of concrete blast walls separate Sunni from Shiite neighborhoods and encase markets, police stations and government offices. Convoys of armored SUVs with machine guns at the ready careen down streets choked with traffic. Iraqi soldiers armed with AK-47s stop you at every turn to check your ID or search your car for bombs. And U.S. military helicopters roar overhead.
But step into one of those helicopters and another side of the city emerges. The dust and grime soften in the pink glow of the sun as it sets over the Tigris River, and signs of normalcy appear amid the debris.
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A couple hundred of the city's most elite women — and a smattering of poor women who wandered in to sell traditional bathing products (above) — made it to Baghdad's Alwiya Club to celebrate International Women's Day with music, dance and food.
 The women included the city's upper crust, at least those who haven't fled to Amman or Damascus yet. Among them was the famous Iraqi actress Awatif Naeem (right), now a director and writer. She sat eating her lunch beneath a blue sky. We asked her what Women's Day means in Iraq:
It's only one day in the life of women annually. The rest of the days are the property of men. During this day we try to remind men that women are one half of the population and any marginalization of us is unfair.
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 Sunday marks one year since the disappearance of Florida businessman Robert Levinson during a quick trip to Iran. The former FBI agent went to the Persian Gulf island of Kish to look into contraband cigarette smuggling. He hasn't been seen or heard from since.
His family and friends have organized a campaign to find him. They're holding a vigil in Coral Springs, Fla., on Sunday to mark his disappearance as well as his 60th birthday.
His wife, Christine, traveled to Iran late last year in an unsuccessful quest for information. Iranian authorities say they don't know where he is.
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Iraq's most powerful guy claims he's stepping back from politics, at least for now.
Muqtada Sadr, the guerrilla leader turned political party boss, is trying once again to reinvent himself, this time as a serious religious cleric.
He says he's removing himself from day-to-day politics and devoting himself to "scholarly" pursuits for a while. The radical cleric who fought Americans in 2004 issued a lengthy and rambling statement the other day to his supporters. He said he had delegated day-to-day affairs of his organization to a committee to oversee offices and community centers.
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The mood was ugly outside the Mercaz Harav yeshiva in Jerusalem Thursday night. Inside the seminary lay the bodies of eight students, along with the body of the Palestinian gunman who killed them.
Outside, a right-wing activist complained to me that the U.S. was preventing Israel from simply killing or exiling all the Palestinians. Even the cooler heads in the crowd said there was no hope ever for a negotiated peace and that the government should end all negotiations with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
But one young man, whose friend had escaped the attack by diving under a parked car, proposed a solution so startling that I had to track him down later and confirm that I heard him right.
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The aftermath of the bloodiest attack in Israel in two years continues to ripple through the region. In West Jerusalem, thousands commemorated the shooting deaths of the eight young Jewish seminary students in what became a national day of mourning.
In the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Jabal Mukaber, the family of 25-year-old Alaa Abou Dheim held their own somber service for the man who Israeli police say opened fire in the library of the Mercaz Harav yeshiva Thursday night. Abou Dheim was killed on the scene, and several of his family members were arrested within hours. Abou Dheim's family is stunned and confused, saying they didn't see this coming and the young man appeared calm just hours before the attack.
In Lebanon, the attack was hailed by religious leaders during several Friday sermons. "The heroic operation in Jerusalem proved that jihadists in Jerusalem were capable of striking tough blows to the Zionists," said Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, Lebanon's most senior Shiite cleric.
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 The drab concrete barriers that protect against gunfire and explosions have become a defining feature of the Iraqi capital in the nearly five years since U.S.-led forces invaded. They snake between warring neighborhoods, loop around marketplaces and shelter police stations and government offices from attack.
Iraqis grumble sometimes about living in a prison. But the U.S. military says the walls have made it difficult for insurgents to stage the massive bombings that used to claim dozens of lives every day, and it has exported the strategy to other strife-torn areas. Work is now nearing completion on the mother of all walls, a 50-mile barrier that will protect the network of pipes delivering crude from the Kirkuk oil field to the refinery in the city of Baiji, at a cost of nearly $30 million.
The oil industry is the government's main revenue source and a frequent target of insurgents. There have been more than 460 attacks against oil infrastructure and personnel since the war started, according to the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security.
Work on the new barrier, which already stretches as far as the eye can see, began in July and is scheduled to be completed in May. Iraqi companies have been contracted to put in the ditch, berm, chain-link fence and razor wire that make up the barrier on either side of the pipeline.
Opinion about the project seems to be mixed. An official reached at Iraq's North Oil Co. welcomed the extra security but said the price tag was steep, and suggested that the money could have been better spent on hiring more guards to patrol the length of the pipeline.
U.S. officers say the barrier will quickly pay for itself by preventing attacks that cost the government millions in lost revenue and repair bills. They are also working with the Defense Ministry to mentor and train the Iraqi security forces that protect oil infrastructure.
Abdul-Rahman Amir, a 55-year-old Kirkuk resident, suggested that the authorities might want to follow Saddam Hussein's example and recruit local tribal leaders to secure the pipeline. "If a number of tribesmen had been recruited into the security regiments, then it would have helped in quelling the attacks," he said.
Sound familiar?
— Alexandra Zavis in Baghdad and a Times special correspondent in Kirkuk
Photo: The U.S. military is building a gigantic barrier between the cities of Baiji and Kirkuk to prevent saboteurs from damaging oil pipelines. Credit: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
Vocal dissent against the increasing clout of Iran's powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has arisen from an unlikely place: the slide-rule-toting members of the Iranian Society of Consulting Engineers.
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The goalkeeper of Egypt's famous Ahli soccer club recently made front-page news after he sneaked off to Europe to play for a Swiss team, leaving his club in disarray and dividing his countrymen over the legitimacy of his action.
The passion around Essam El-Hadari intensified when President Hosni Mubarak intervened. He urged the Egyptian Football Federation to clear up the matter and allow the goalie to try his luck in Switzerland without losing his spot on the Egyptian national team.
The meddling raised questions about the 79-year-old leader’s priorities. While Egypt is being rocked by labor strikes, anti-inflation demonstrations and pro-Palestinian protests, Mubarak shows more concern for football players, some observers argued.
“There is a paradox here,” prominent writer Osama Okasha was quoted in an independent local newspaper as saying. “The president intervenes in the crisis at a time where the Egyptian people are facing many problems, most importantly, problems that pertain to getting their own food.”
The state-owned local press was also criticized for headlining Mubarak’s statement in Hadari’s favor on front pages, which was seen as an attempt to deflect people’s attention from major domestic and regional turbulence.
— Noha El-Hennawy in Cairo
Six Flags on Tuesday announced a plan to develop an amusement park in the glittery Persian Gulf city-kingdom of Dubai, which is the flashiest of seven kingdoms in the United Arab Emirates.
Reports Kimi Yoshino of The Times' business desk: The Six Flags park is the latest addition to Dubailand, a 3-billion-square-foot project that will include restaurants, hotels, Universal Studios Dubailand and DreamWorks Animation Park. Groundbreaking on the Six Flags portion is expected to begin in 2009.
A press release distributed by Tatweer, the Emirati partner in the deal, described it as "the first Six Flags project to be developed outside of North America."
That may well be. But will it encourage North American and European travelers to take their families on vacations to the oil-rich Persian Gulf?
— A Times Staff Writer
Photo: Dubai's Sheik Zayed Road. Credit: Charles Crowell / Bloomberg News
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