Watching the Egyptian protests for two days

[badgerbag]

Still obsessed with the Egyptian protests/revolt today. Though I didn't follow it as intensely as yesterday. I have been fighting off bronchitis.

Here is a good aggregator of photos, video, and tweets efficiently organized on one page:

http://solidari.tv/jan25

I like how they laid that out. You can feel the impact and see quite a lot without having to click a hundred times.

RNN News on Facebook is very good though mostly in arabic. Look at it even if you can't read it, you can click its links and see the photos.

You can also look on google realtime and search #jan25 to see the live stream of news. Or search on twitter itself. Add other hashtags or plain words to that search like #suez or #tahrir or "journalist" or "arrested" to narrow down the topic.



Here is a crash course in what's going on. People in Egypt in many cities went out into the streets for peaceful protests and marches on Jan. 25th, which was officially something like We Love the Police Day. People are upset about poverty, unemployment, corruption, police abuse and torture, and Mubarak being in power for 30 years. About 80K people were in the facebook group to spread word about the rallies. During the course of the day bystanders joined and people came out from their houses and from everywhere to join in. Thousands of people were in Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo.

Riot cops were everywhere with green armored trucks and blue armored trucks to put people in. Also trucks with water cannons. They have rubber-coated steel bullets and electric shock sticks along with batons. They fired off tear gas several times during the day but the big tear gas crackdown in Tahrir Square was around midnight on Jan. 25th. There were two people, cairowitness and nouranflying, transmitting live video of the square, on usstream and then later on livestream and justin.tv. Thousands of people were twittering and in chat rooms and posting photos and video from the protests, despite overloaded networks, filtering and blocking, and power outages.

There were huge protests in Alexandria and many many other cities. People were out all night long.

I saw one terrible video in which I thought someone was comign to help a freaked out woman to get away. The guy took her arm. Then I realized he was a cop arresting her and marching her off. Little teams of plainclothes police or just plain hired thugs (balatagiya) would surround a person and just march them away. It was chilling.

Terrible twitters that just say "Help!" or "I've been beaten a lot". (He got away)

The plan seems to be to keep people going out into the streets in 8 hour shifts. This will keep the riot cops exhausted. The big, big protest will be after prayers on Friday.

Today, Suez was locked down, land lines, net, and mobile networks were reportedly cut off, and roads in and out were blocked. Past the time around mid-day our time, when the police station was on fire and people were rioting outside the morgue trying to break in to get people's bodies who had died, to have funerals and bury them, no one is sure what is happening in Suez. There were some scattered, panicked twitters and one news show with an interview over the phone with someone who had been arrested and then got away or was released. Al Jazeera in Arabic was still reporting from Suez though (but I can't understand it).

There are good twitters out there. I really appreciated the people who are not well known, and maybe have a few hundred followers. MennaGamal is particularly great at live reporting. It was very dramatic when a girl named Rowand was twittering from the back of a police van. People retweeted her, called the lawyer hotlines, she was scared but pretty confident, and she did get out a few hours later. I like AmoonaE's twitter reporting a lot too. Also @Zeinobia, NadiaE. Dima Khatib - a journalist and great twitterer. So many more! Little bloggers who post about their lives and post their snapshots online and like to twitter - like me.

Also Mona Eltahawy! She is great.

If you want more regular reporters you can follow @bencnn, 3arabawy... Alshaheeed.

THE video to sum up the past couple of days... with dramatic music: Revolution

Great video of protesters chasing riot police, with rocks: rock throwing brave people!

The people who got in front of a water cannon truck (at about 1:20 in) very Tank Man.

Dramatic video of guys falling off a water cannon truck: on mayomo (click around in sidebar for more)

Guardian journalist arrested He recorded a bunch of stuff from the back of a police van with 50-60 people crowded in. The son of an opposition parliamentary candidate, Noor, was in the van too. The guards at some point wanted to pull him out and let him go because they didn't want the bad press. But Noor refused to leave the other people arrested. At the point where they stopped to get him out, everyone inside rushed the doors, broke through, and escaped.

There were people trapped in I think an opera house (in Cairo or Alexandria) who were suffocating from tear gas. The guy twittering from there did finally get out.

There was something going on at the journalist building in downtown Cairo and then some journalists went to do a sit-in at a building where there were people detained. They got 200 people released. A journalist who is the head of a news association's committee on civil liberties was arrested and dragged off.

There are reports that they are arresting unusually high numbers of women and that that will cause a big backlash. I have seen scattered reports on twitter of women being sexually assaulted by police in the street.

Please follow some twitters listed above and retweet or blog about it all if something catches your eye. Use the hashtag #jan25.

Tunisia, Egypt and Palestine (plus a bit of Wikileaks)

[the_future_modernes]

Listening Post - The revolution was not televised...

As events in Tunisia unfolded, it was evident that media - new and old - were playing a huge role. We analyse that media angle of the story in our show this week. Also, we have a report on satellite imagery and its growing role in modern journalism.

When protesters took to the streets in Tunisia back in December, the Ben Ali government cracked down hard on the media - shutting down news outlets, arresting bloggers and locking out foreign journalists. But through sites like Facebook and Twitter, pictures of the protests were able to get out and were picked up by satellite TV channels. The images spread like wildfire through the Arab world, reaching audiences across the region and binding them to the ever changing story. Western news outlets on the other hand, at least initially, failed to give the story the coverage it deserved.MORE

Meantime Egyptians ignored a No Protest order And continue to protest their government

A protester and a police officer were killed in central Cairo as anti-government demonstrators pelted security forces with rocks and firebombs for a second day, according to witnesses.

Activists had called on people to rally again on Wednesday after a "Day of Wrath" the previous day had seen thousands of people take to the streets across Egypt to complain of poverty, unemployment, corruption and repression.

A total of six people, four protesters and two policemen, have been killed so far in the largely unprecedented mass anger at the 30-year rule of Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian president.

"The people want the regime to fall," protesters chanted. MORE

Also, CBS has a roundup of all the stories that we heard from Wikileaks so far:


How WikiLeaks Enlightened Us in 2010

However, WikiLeaks' revelations also have many major implications for world relations. The following is a list of the more impactful WikiLeaks revelations from 2010, grouped by region.
The United States
- The U.S. Army considered WikiLeaks a national security threat as early as 2008, according to documents obtained and posted by WikiLeaks in March, 2010.
- Then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his top commanders repeatedly, knowingly lied to the American public about rising sectarian violence in Iraq beginning in 2006, according to the cross-referencing of WikiLeaks' leaked Iraq war documents and former Washington Post Baghdad Bureau Chief Ellen Knickmeyer's recollections.
- The Secretary of State's office encouraged U.S. diplomats at the United Nations to spy on their counterparts, including collecting data about the U.N. secretary general, his team and foreign diplomats, including credit card account numbers, according to documents from WikiLeaks U.S. diplomatic cable release. Later cables reveal the CIA draws up an annual "wish-list" for the State Department, which one year included the instructions to spy on the U.N.MORE

The Palestine Papers

Al Jazeera and The Guardian continue to release interesting stuff, which include such gems like this:

( Read more... )