[Late graffiti artist Hisham Rizq, killed in July 2014, painted by Ammar Abu Bakr. Captured 12 September 2014]By Mona Abaza, 25 January 2015 Clearly Cairene graffiti has lost momentum during this year. Having been the faithful barometer of the revolution over the past three years, graffiti has recently faced transmutations and drawbacks that run parallel with the political process of restoring “order” in the street. The heartbreaking story of the recent death of a cheerful and bright young graffiti artist, nineteen-year-old Hisham Rizq, completes this sad picture.
Heba Afify, a Mada Masr reporter. Photograph: David Degner Mada Masr was formed just before military coup of 2013. Amid growing censorship, its staff have risked their lives to continue reporting. Can they stay true to their mission? Leslie T Chang
Tuesday 27 January 2015
On the afternoon of 17 June 2013, a group of friends gathered in a fourth-floor apartment in downtown Cairo. They sat on the floor because there were no chairs; there were also no desks, no shelves, and no ashtrays.
In this Thursday, Dec. 4, 2014 photo, Egyptian lawyer Ragia Omran speaks on her mobile phone after a trial session of activists facing charges on organizing unauthorized protests, at a courtroom in Cairo, Egypt. Each time a group of activists is arrested in Egypt, the call for help goes most often to Omran. She then starts a long trek through police stations and prosecutors' offices, trying to get their release or at least some respect for their rights.
Omar Robert Hamilton London Review of Books Vol. 36 No 19 · 9 October 2014 page 30 | 1717 words After the shock and awe tactics of the Rabaa massacre last summer, when Egypt’s military regime murdered around a thousand supporters of the deposed president, Mohamed Morsi, the rolling counter-revolution has played out mostly within the justice system, between police stations, prisons and courtrooms. The system is self-contained and unaccountable: graduates of the Police Academy are automatically granted a law degree and can move fluidly from police station to prosecutor’s office to judge’s bench.
Alaa Abd El Fattah with his wife and intellectual partner, Manal Hassan. Photo by Lilian Wagdy via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0) 22 August 2014 Written by Nani Jansen and Adrian Plevin. After imprisoned Egyptian blogger and human rights defender Alaa Abd El Fattah went on hunger strike this past Monday, the Media Legal Defence Initiative (MLDI) and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) petitioned the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (UNWGAD) to take all necessary steps to secure Abd El Fattah’s immediate release.
By Omar Robert Hamilton Wednesday, August 20, 2014 - 07:33 After three spells of imprisonment since the start of the revolution, Alaa Abd El Fattah has declared that he is starting a hunger strike. Alaa is one of 25 people who were sentenced to 15 years in prison for attending/organizing a protest in November. A protest in which a policeman who was filmed strangling a young woman fell over and lost his walkie talkie.
