blood and fear in cairo streets

The Independent | "President" Hosni Mubarak's counter-revolution smashed into his opponents yesterday in a barrage of stones, cudgels, iron bars and clubs, an all-day battle in the very centre of the capital he claims to rule between tens of thousands of young men, both – and here lies the most dangerous of all weapons – brandishing in each other's faces the banner of Egypt. It was vicious and ruthless and bloody and well planned, a final vindication of all Mubarak's critics and a shameful indictment of the Obamas and Clintons who failed to denounce this faithful ally of America and Israel.

The fighting around me in the square called Tahrir was so terrible that we could smell the blood. The men and women who are demanding the end of Mubarak's 30-year dictatorship – and I saw young women in scarves and long skirts on their knees, breaking up the paving stones as rocks fell around them – fought back with an immense courage which later turned into a kind of terrible cruelty.

Some dragged Mubarak's security men across the square, beating them until blood broke from their heads and splashed down their clothes. The Egyptian Third Army, famous in legend and song for crossing the Suez Canal in 1973, couldn't – or wouldn't – even cross Tahrir Square to help the wounded.

As thousands of Egyptians shrieking abuse – and this was as close to civil war as Egypt has ever come – swarmed towards each other like Roman fighters, they simply overwhelmed the parachute units "guarding" the square, climbing over their tanks and armoured vehicles and then using them for cover.

One Abrams tank commander – and I was only 20 feet away – simply ducked the stones that were bouncing off his tank, jumped into the turret and battened down the hatch. Mubarak's protesters then climbed on top to throw more rocks at their young and crazed antagonists.

I guess it's the same in all battles, even though guns have not (yet) appeared; abuse by both sides provoked a shower of rocks from Mubarak's men – yes, they did start it – and then the protesters who seized the square to demand the old man's overthrow began breaking stones to hurl them back. By the end of the day there were reports of three deaths in Cairo, and widespread accounts that the pro-Mubarak crowds were deliberately targeting Western journalists.

social networks the tyrant's weapon of choice too...,

The Independent | We've seen the incredible potential for technology to empower citizens and the dignity of those who stand up for a better future," said President Obama on Tuesday night, after he had just come off the phone from speaking to Egypt's embattled leader, Hosni Mubarak. To which one can say: yes and no. For the sense in which Mr Obama is correct may be quite limited. Undoubtedly, it is much easier to organise a demonstration than it used to be. You can call people from your mobile phone, send text messages, use Facebook, dispatch a tweet to your friends or fire off email messages. We are all connected now.

But also note what the head of police in Iran, Esmaeil Ahmadi Moghaddam, is doing. A few days ago, he proudly announced the launch of cyber-police units throughout the country to confront internet crimes and to counter social networks that spread "espionage and riots". The police chief said the cyber-police would take on anti-revolutionary and dissident groups who used internet-based social networks in 2009 to trigger protests against the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. "Through these very social networks in our country, anti-revolutionary groups and dissidents found each other and contacted foreign countries and triggered riots." Iran is not going to put up with that, he was saying.

So the technology to which the US President was referring is available equally to friend and foe. Take the mobile phone, for instance. The Egyptian government had a crude answer to all this potential-for-technology-to-empower-citizens stuff. Once the demonstrations became serious, it swiftly closed down all mobile phone services. Only yesterday did mobile phone communications begin to come back. In fact, governments don't have to shut down the whole mobile network; they can content themselves with switching off a single city or even parts of it. And while News Of The World journalists have proved adept at hacking into voicemail messages, many authoritarian governments can do better than that. They can use technology that allows them to interrupt the delivery of text messages that contain what they consider to be suspicious words.

There is a further aspect of mobile phones of which organisers of demonstrations need to be aware. Your location can be established by joining up the "lines" between local base stations. This is not an obscure technique. As Evgeny Morozov points out in his important book, The Net Delusion: How Not To Liberate The World, published last month, mobile companies have strong economic incentives to improve their location-identification technology so that they can sell geographically targeted advertising. If businesses can use it, so can police forces. When you are standing in the middle of Cairo's Tahrir Square, squashed among thousands of demonstrators, with your mobile in your pocket, switched on, you are not necessarily as well hidden or anonymous as you might wish.

Mr Morozov gives a frightening analysis of how authoritarian governments can harness the new technologies of the internet age. Social networking sites, for instance, make it easy to find one's friends who are already members, but cyber-police can use the same facilities for their own purposes. Nor do authoritarian governments try to do everything themselves. They force the companies that run the internet to police the web according to broad guidelines. This is the way Chinese censorship is going. In its essence, it is not so very different from the way in which the US Government went about putting pressure on companies that extended financial services to Julian Assange's whistleblower website, WikiLeaks. From the point of view of the authorities, the nice thing about this is that the companies get blamed, not them.

armchair revolutionaries be careful what you wish for...,

The Independent | During a long hard winter, nothing warms the cold blood of the Western armchair revolutionary more than the sight of a bunch of attractive dark-skinned people out on the streets having a right old revolution. In a country where public schoolboys swinging on the Cenotaph passes as righteous insurrection, the sight of so many ordinary people protesting is understandably exhilarating. The recent 95-page report by Human Rights Watch, "Work on Him Until He Confesses": Impunity for Torture in Egypt, shows how the Mubarak government has consistently failed to investigate and prosecute police accused of the most vicious attacks. Whereas the only wounds one can imagine Charlie Gilmour sustaining would be if he fell off his pony and landed face down on that silver spoon he keeps secreted in his gob.

Nick Clegg has just popped up on breakfast TV gushing on about how "exciting" events in Egypt are, with all the wide-eyed wonder of a tweenager experiencing Bieber Fever. Even me, as an evil Zionist cheerleader – I find it hard not to cheer at the thought of Mubarak being toppled from his perch. This alleged friend of democracy and Israel has overseen a rotten time in the country he dictates to, during which persecution of Christians and silly slanders against Israel – the Zionist sharks of Sharm el Sheikh – have flourished.

It would be wonderful to think that what replaces Mubarak will be better. But here's the thing about Middle Eastern regimes: they're all vile. The ones that are "friendly" are vile and the ones that hate us are vile. Revolutions in the region have a habit of going horribly wrong, and this may well have something to do with the fact that Islam and democracy appear to find it difficult to co-exist for long.

It's hard to believe now, but I recall being 19 and delighted when the Iranian Revolution happened. As a good Communist kiddy, I'd grown up with my dad's fairly accurate horror stories of how SAVAK, the Shah's secret police, burned the arms off of opponents, leaving them as "human snakes". I remember how disgusted I was when Andy Warhol said "It bothers me that people are being tortured in Persia – but the Empress is a personal friend" as an excuse for hanging out with the Pahlavi family.

And now look at Iran. It's not strictly Middle Eastern, but its Islamism brings it into the orbit of the region, so much so that – naughty! – WikiLeaks recently revealed that certain Muslim countries actually want Israel to attack it and wipe out its nuclear potential. And its revolution has led to it being run by an even more vile regime than that of the late, unlamented Peacock Throne. As reported in this newspaper earlier this week, Iran now executes an average of one person every eight hours.

a wikileak on the u.s. and al jazeera

Video - Al Jazeera's live feed of the violence taking place in Tahrir square.

Counterpunch | The United States has had it in for al-Jazeera at least since 2000, when the Qatar-based news network began reporting on Israel’s harsh treatment of Palestinians during the intifada and, a year later, covered the start of U.S. war-making in the Middle East, revealing to the Arab world a graphic picture of U.S. and Israeli brutality. During the Iraq war, U.S. planes bombed the al-Jazeera station in Baghdad and killed one of its correspondents, in what clearly appeared to be an attempt to silence the network. CounterPunch can show, through a Wikileaks-released cable from the U.S. embassy in Doha, Qatar, where al-Jazeera is based, that U.S. officials were still ragging the network in February 2009 in the wake of Israel’s three-week assault on Gaza, because, alone of news networks the world over, al-Jazeera had actually shown what was happening on the ground to Gazan civilians besieged by an unrelenting Israeli air, artillery, and ground attack.

The U.S. ambassador’s scolding of al-Jazeera is particularly relevant today in view of the network’s running coverage of the popular uprising in Egypt against U.S. ally Husni Mubarak. Mubarak himself has tried to shut down the network, and one can assume that U.S. officials, undecided just how to kathyrespond to this crisis and which side to support, are at least biting their fingernails over what to do about this latest instance of al-Jazeera’s honest reporting. There is no way to hide this uprising, even with press censorship, and U.S. networks are also reporting non-stop, but al-Jazeera is the network watched throughout the Arab world, and it is easy to imagine U.S. policymakers ruing the fact that it is once again exposing the U.S. alliance with dictatorships and oppression of Arabs.

Accordig to the cable from Doha, on February 10, 2009, three weeks after the Gaza assault ended, U.S. Ambassador Joseph Lebaron arranged a meeting with al-Jazeera’s director general, Wadah Khanfar, to express concern that the network’s reporting from Gaza was harming the U.S. image “in the Arab street.” Lebaron’s contorted reasoning went as follows: al-Jazeera’s coverage “took viewers’ emotions and then raised them to a higher level through its coverage.” Then Qatar’s ruling royal family, which provides funding to the network, would point to anger on the Arab street as “a call to action,” which Lebaron contended created a vicious circle leading to “more graphic coverage, more emotion, more demonstrations, and then more calls to action” -- as if the emotion-raising images from Gaza that started this circle revolving were somehow not real and not the basis of the story. There would obviously have been no emotion and no demonstrations if Israel had not launched the assault in the first place (using U.S. arms).

Lebaron simply did not like the fact that al-Jazeera had shown what was happening in Gaza. With jaw-dropping illogic, he complained that al-Jazeera provided no balance in its reporting because on one side it showed Israeli talking heads, while “on the other side of the scale, you are broadcasting graphic images of dead children and urban damage from modern warfare.” Lebaron was not convinced by Khanfar’s point that, even though al-Jazeera had attempted to provide both perspectives by running reports in every news bulletin from correspondents in Israel as well as in Gaza, it was still impossible to “balance” coverage because it was Gazans who were being killed and Israelis who were talking.

In answer to Lebaron’s argument about the vicious circle, Khanfar noted that demonstrations in other sizable Muslim countries such as Turkey and Indonesia had also been very large, despite the fact that there was not a big market for al-Jazeera in these countries. But Lebaron thought this argument “extraneous.”

It is of course in the nature of any war-making country to wish no one were looking over its shoulder reporting on the atrocities it and its allies are committing. U.S. policymakers and the U.S. media have long regarded al-Jazeera’s television coverage of Israeli and U.S. actions as “incitement” -- as if al-Jazeera rather than we and the Israelis were the perpetrator, as if al-Jazeera rather than U.S. and Israeli actions were the cause of anti-American and anti-Israeli sentiment among Arabs. This cable is one of the most blatant examples of this effort to manage the news, avoid responsibility, and blame the messenger.

the bbc goes in on wikileaks and assange

Counterpunch | The campaign by the establishment press against Julian Assange is intensifying. CBS’s 60 Minutes tried to trash him last Sunday, but Assange left CBS’ interviewer, Steve Kroft, floundering. Last Sunday also saw New York Times editor Bill Keller consume several thousand words in the NYT’s Magazine abusing Assange with disgraceful lack of scruple, Assange being a man who gave the New York Times some actual news scoops, instead of its regular staple of gastroporn from Sam Sifton. Here Israel Shamir reports, with some personal involvement, on the impending slurring of Assange on the BBC, and the attacks on him in The Guardian.

I picked up the phone on the third ring, and a melodious British voice informed me that the BBC wanted to include me in its Panorama program. The BBC wanted to hear my views on the world, and was especially interested in Wikileaks. Oh what a glorious moment! I felt myself puff with pride. There is something about “the Beeb” that makes my heart flutter! I have always been partial to their style, and I considered it an honour to have the BBC listed on my CV, even though it was over thirty years ago. When I worked in Bush House on the Strand, the BBC’s Panorama was one of the best investigative programs anywhere - and suddenly here they are, soliciting my comments! Eager to build a relationship of trust, I answered all their preparatory questions with an unvarnished honesty. I thought I had done well; they offered to fly me to London, or if that were inconvenient they would fly out and speak to me in Moscow – civil chaps, aren’t they?

Looking back, the signs of danger were easy to see. They were producing a program about Wikileaks, but they had no plans to interview Julian Assange. Perhaps he is too busy? Furthermore, the questions began to take on a sinister tone. I shrugged off the feeling as a by-product of all the dirty politics we were discussing, but a few telephone conversations later my ill feelings finally seeped into my swelled head and it dawned on me what was going on. These nice chaps from the BBC were actually collecting dirt to use against Wikileaks! I was being played for a sucker. Suddenly I felt like Julian Assange, face to face with the honey trap.

The clincher was a letter I just received from producer John Sweeney, outlining the substance of the broadcast. It does not read like a television show, it reads like a criminal indictment. Every wild accusation is listed, and those without a shred of evidence are given pride of place. Most amazing of all, the Sweeney letter includes some lines lifted from a missive I had sent to Julian some time ago. The words were taken out of context and they were a misquotation of the original, but I recognise my prose. Some questions immediately spring to mind. How did the BBC get their hands on my private correspondence? Does the BBC actually steal private mail, or do they hire out? Ominously, this is not the first time this has happened to me. Another private letter of mine was (mis)quoted by The Guardian’s investigative editor David Leigh. Is it too conspiratorial of me to recognise a disturbing pattern? Could it be that the alleged three stolen laptops of Julian Assange found their last resting place at Leigh&Sweeney after a brief sojourn at Langley?

John Sweeney and David Leigh are cut from different cloth, but they both know how to play the journalism game. Leigh smoulders with jealousy. He plays the Salieri to Assange’s Mozart, but he thinks of himself as the unsung hero of Wikileaks. A hero? Rather, a villain. As Bill Keller of the New York Times admitted it was Leigh who “concluded that these rogue leaks (he engineered them) released The Guardian from any pledge”. Since then, he’s started his own private war against Wikileaks. His liaison with Sweeney was a convenient one. Sweeney is the sort of guy you assign to smear Mother Theresa. He has skated along thus far because only the very rich might contemplate suing the BBC, but he has been found by a court to be a libeller at least one time. Sweeney’s lunatic outbursts of fury are calculated to intimidate interviewees and have been preserved for posterity. It is all too plain to me now why Assange and company refused to have anything to do with Panorama and its pre-planned outcome. It is all too obvious to me now why they came hunting for your humble narrator.

The Panorama program on Wikileaks will run on February 7, 2011, the very day that the trial of Julian Assange will be reopened. The result of the trial is unpredictable, not so the program. Assange has more than a chance before the British courts, but if this Sweeney letter is anything to judge by, Panorama will leave no survivors. This is the British version of The Empire Strikes Back, the ultimate response to those who try to challenge mainstream corporate media’s hold over the public mind. In the meantime, the FBI and Scotland Yard have been keeping busy, making as many as 45 raids on various premises connected with Wikileaks, so that the alliance between the BBC and The Guardian is an ethereal mirror of some very earthy, if not subterranean, activity.

american hypocrisy in the middle-east

Counterpunch | The hypocrisy of the US government is yet again demonstrated in full bore force. The US government invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, laid waste to much of the countries including entire villages and towns, and massacred untold numbers of civilians in order "to bring democracy" to Iraq and Afghanistan. Now after days of Egyptians in the streets demanding "Mubarak must go," the US government remains aligned with its puppet Egyptian ruler, even suggesting that Mubarak, after running a police state for three decades, is the appropriate person to implement democracy in Egypt.

On January 30, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that "freedom and democracy" America neither seeks nor supports the ouster of the Egyptian dictator. Israeli prime minister Netanyahu told the US and Europe that criticism of Mubarak must be curbed in order "to preserve stability in the region."

By "stability" Netanyahu means the unimpeded ability of Israel to continue oppressing the Palestinians and stealing their country. Mubarak has been for three decades the well-paid enforcer for the US and Israel, sealing off Gaza from the outside world and preventing aid flows across the Egyptian border. Mubarak and his family have become multi-billionaires, thanks to the American taxpayer, and the US government, both Republicans and Democrats, do not want to lose their heavy investment in Mubarak.

The US government has long corrupted Arab governments by paying rulers installed by the US to represent US/Israeli interests rather than the interest of Arab peoples. Arabs put up with American-financed oppression for many years, but now are showing signs of rebellion.

The murderous American-installed dictator in Tunis was overthrown by people taking to the streets. Rebellion has spread to Egypt and there are also street protests against the US-supported rulers in Yemen and Jordan.

These uprisings might succeed in ousting puppet rulers, but will the result be anything more than the exchange of a new American puppet ruler for the old? Mubarak might go, but whoever takes his place is likely to find himself wearing the same American harness.

What dictators do is to eliminate alternative leadership. Potential leaders are either assassinated, exiled, or imprisoned. Moreover, anything short of a full-fledge revolution, such as the Iranian one, leaves in place a bureaucracy accustomed to business as usual. In addition, Egypt and the country's military have grown accustomed to American support and will want the money to keep flowing. It is the flow of this money that ensures the purchase of the replacement government.

Because the US dollar is the world reserve currency, the US government has financial dominance and the ability to financially isolate other countries, such as Iran. To break free of America's grip, one of two things would have to happen. Revolution would have to sweep the Arab world and result in an economic unity that could foster indigenous economic development, or the US dollar has to fail as world currency.

Arab disunity has long been the means by which the Western countries have dominated the Middle East. Without this disunity, Israel and the US could not abuse the Palestinians in the manner in which they have for decades, and without this disunity the US could not have invaded Iraq. It is unlikely that the Arabs will suddenly unite themselves.

The collapse of the dollar is more likely. Indeed, the policy of the US government to maximize both budget and trade deficits, and the policy of the Federal Reserve to monetize the budget deficit and the fraudulent paper assets of the large banks, have the dollar heading for demise.

As the supply of dollars grows, the value diminishes. Perhaps the time is not far off when rulers cease to sell out their peoples for American money.

u.s. power elite covets internet kill-switch

Video - Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins co-sponsor Internet Kill Switch bill.

TheRegister | US lawmakers plan to try once more to equip the president with an internet “kill switch,” a controversial measure that's become even more incendiary following last week's move by Egypt to pull the plug on the global network.

In April, when similar bills circulated on Capitol Hill [1], industry groups warned they gave the president too much power to disconnect critical infrastructure and didn't include enough oversight. The vague wording of the bills meant the president would in effect be allowed to cause widespread disruptions for a host of reasons. Those bills were eventually tabled.

Fast forward to last week, when the Egyptian government switched off virtually all internet access and mobile phone coverage [2] in an attempt to quell protestors calling for the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak, who has ruled the country for 30 years. Five days after the draconian outage was put in place, the Egyptian government has only tightened its grip on internet communications [3].

Senator Susan Collins, one of the sponsors of the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act, recently told [4] Wired.com the legislation was a far cry from the powers exercised by Mubarak because it could only be used in times of significant “cyber” emergency.

“My legislation would provide a mechanism for the government to work with the private sector in the event of a true cyber emergency,” Collins told the publication. “It would give our nation the best tools available to swiftly respond to a significant threat.”

The latest public version of the bill, which Collins has said she intends to introduce “soon,” contains language saying the federal government's designation of vital internet or other computer systems “shall not be subject to judicial review,” according to [5] CNET.

Pundits have wasted no time attacking the measure as heavy handed and a serious threat to American liberty. With the internet serving as an important way to communicate and gather news, its disruption during emergencies means the public could lose an important source of information when they need it most.

“The most specious reason for this mechanism is that if some evil worm or attack on the National infrastructure— a.k.a. "Cyberwar" — would be underway, the Internet would need to be shut down to prevent further damage to the country, which apparently can no longer function without the Net,” uber tech columnist John C. Dvorak wrote here [6]. “This is kind of a weird tautology. The country can't function without the Net, so we need to secure the it, which includes having the ability to shut it down. But with the Net down, how can the country function?”

Good question.

gates states the obvious...,

TheRegister | When the revolution comes, someone's always ready to tell you how Facebook and Twitter are powering history.

The problem is that while they're still standing, governments can snuff out Facebook and Twitter whenever they like. All they need do is flip the "off" switch on the servers, routers, and wireless equipment used by local service providers.

Just ask Bill Gates.

When US TV anchor Katie Couric asked the Microsoft co-founder and chairman if he was surprised that Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak could take the unprecedented step of killing the entire Egyptian internet, Gates responded with an emphatic: "no".

Sometimes, he knows what he's talking about.

"It's not that hard to shut the Internet down if you have military power where you can tell people that's what's going to happen," Gates said. "Whenever you do something extraordinary like that you're sort of showing people you're afraid of the truth getting out, so it's a very difficult tactic, but certainly it can be shut off."

Web traffic analysis firm Renesys tracking the black out encapsulated the enormity of the situation here:

Every Egyptian provider, every business, bank, Internet cafe, website, school, embassy, and government office that relied on the big four Egyptian ISPs for their Internet connectivity is now cut off from the rest of the world. Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt, Etisalat Misr, and all their customers and partners are, for the moment, off the air.

And yet the Egyptian protests continue - without Twitter and Facebook.

As US chat-show host Conan O'Brien, himself the victim of a botched power struggle, apparently put it: "If you want people to stay at home and do nothing, why don't you turn the internet back on?"

Next stop: the leader of the free world contemplates its own internet kill switch.

alone together

WaPo | In "Why the West Rules, For Now," his excellent and amusing survey of the last 70,000 years or so of human history, Ian Morris discusses an event we can look forward to in 2045: the Singularity, "effectively merging carbon-and-silicon based intelligence into a single global consciousness. . . . We will transcend biology, evolving into a new, merged being as far ahead of homo sapiens as a contemporary human is of the individual cells that merge to create his or her body." With 35 years to go, we now have Sherry Turkle's "Alone Together" as a progress report from the biotechnological front lines. And it is not amusing.

Turkle is a psychoanalytically trained psychologist at MIT who has specialized for years in studying artificial intelligence and its effect on humans who invent it, use it and enjoy it. Her new book considers robots, Facebook, iPhones and the Internet, and explores questions pertinent to each. Since the 1980s, she has made good use of her access to the foremost thinkers in the AI world, and she has devised experiments for observing how people of all ages - most instructively children and the elderly - interact with and relate to machines that in some ways mimic how humans or animals act, think and talk. "Alone Together" is not statistical, it is anecdotal. It is therefore vivid, even lurid, in its depictions of where we are headed, but the reader comes away unsure whether Turkle's anxieties are warranted.

It is clear throughout that a new technology has a cost and a momentum that are never considered when that technology is introduced - tractors looked easier than plows, iPhones seem more convenient than landlines. Only long after each innovation is introduced do humans bother to ponder things like soil erosion or texting while driving. Decades after the introduction of the Internet and of AI, Turkle is beginning to have second thoughts. She focuses first on robots: humans are determined to relate to them. No matter how old or young the humans are, no matter how sophisticated in their experience of AI, they begin to have feelings for robots they come in contact with and to feel that their feelings are reciprocated. A mechanical question elicits an answer, large painted eyes elicit compassion, a metallic touch elicits a responding touch, and the emotions that go along with human responses cannot be controlled. Turkle does not include pictures of the robots she mentions, but looking at them on the Internet after reading about them is disorienting - surely that is not Kismet, the prototype robotic girlfriend that many of Turkle's subjects are attracted to? But it is.

A robot in the room, acting animated and interested, draws us out of ourselves, but social networking tends to push us apart, Turkle says, because humans on the Internet behave (or can behave or are pushed to behave) inhumanely. The Internet gives people the cover to indulge in hate speech, to present phony personas, or simply to avoid relating in real space and time.

Turkle's subject is so vast that she cannot address every facet of it, and of course the missing facet that struck me as a novelist is that every robot and every networking app is a work of art, designed to express the psyche of the artist and to shape the response of the user. We are not entirely unversed in responding to things that don't exist - Odysseus, Macbeth and the woman portrayed in the Mona Lisa don't exist, either. We could say that when we read "David Copperfield," we agree to a joining of minds that is pleasurable and enlightening, and that as we read and experience many works of art, we clarify the boundaries between each one and between art and ourselves. Turkle's research subjects are at the very beginning of the next phase of the human journey. It may be that we will gain self-knowledge from our experience that we can't yet imagine.

For those who recoil, though, Ian Morris has an alternative - the collapse of civilization. He makes a good case that mankind has approached climate/energy/population ceilings before and that breakthrough is less likely than self-destruction; in fact, the melding of human and machine intelligence may be our only salvation. Turkle doesn't ponder this issue, but when you read her engrossing study, you will.

digital dopamine hegemony

WaPo | The decision by Egyptian officials to virtually shut down Internet access to the country Friday marked an audacious escalation in the battle between authoritarian governments and tech-savvy protesters. It was also a direct challenge to the Obama administration's attempts to promote Internet freedom.

Internet access was cut off in Egypt shortly after midnight Friday, apparently after authorities ordered the country's five service providers to block it, according to experts. Cellphone service was also severely disrupted.

"The Egyptian government's actions ... have essentially wiped their country from the global map," James Cowie of Renesys, a New Hampshire-based company that monitors Internet data, said on the company's Web site.

The move came roughly a day after Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had publicly urged Egypt not to close off access to the technology and social media that were being used to organize demonstrations. On Friday, the administration denounced Egypt's action - first by using Twitter.

"Govt must respect the rights of Egyptian people & turn on social networking and internet," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs warned in a tweet.

U.S. officials concede that Twitter does not a revolution make. But they believe that such platforms have accelerated the pace of protest movements, citing the rapid coalescence of the Tunisian demonstrations that toppled that country's longtime leader, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, and the Egyptian demonstrations that erupted this week.

"From now on, any and all dissent movements will have technology as a core component," said Alec Ross, Clinton's senior adviser for innovation.

The Obama administration has elevated Internet freedom in U.S. diplomacy, and Clinton gave a major speech on the issue last year. The State Department is currently working on plans to spend $30 million on Internet freedom projects, including software that enables activists to break through firewalls imposed by oppressive governments.

google and twitter defy egyptian social media blackout

WaPo | As Egypt moved Monday to shut down its sole operating Internet service provider, Google and Twitter teamed up to create a service for people to send tweets from the nation through a phone call.

Over the weekend, a small group of engineers from the companies got together to create the service that allows anyone with access to voice service -- landline or mobile -- to leave a messsage that automatically gets transmitted into a tweet, according to the Google blog. People cut off from Internet and mobile services in Egypt could call +16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855. Tweets from the call would be sent with the hashtag: #egypt.

"Like many people we’ve been glued to the news unfolding in Egypt and thinking of what we could do to help people on the ground," wrote Ujjwal Singh, cofounder of Google company SayNow and AbdelKarim Mardini, a Google product manager for Middle East & North Africa.

"We hope that this will go some way to helping people in Egypt stay connected at this very difficult time. Our thoughts are with everyone there," they wrote.

The service comes as Egypt's ministry of information told CNN Monday evening it has shut down Noor the remaining ADSL service, according to CNN. Noor had appeared to be offering Internet connections to a limited number of institutions within Cairo, global network experts said.

The move effectively cut off any communications in the nation to the Internet ahead of planned protests Monday. The Egyptian government also said it had cut off all mobile services Monday ahead of the protests.

gut microbes influence behavior

TheScientist | Gut microbes acquired early in life can impact brain development in mice and subsequent behavior, such as decreasing physical activity and increasing anxiety, according to a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"This paper opens the door to new studies in at least two directions," Yale University microbiologist Andrew Goodman, who was not involved in the research, told The Scientist in an email. "First, determining how differences between complete host-associated microbial communities lead to differences in behavior, and second, exploring the contributions of microbes during specific developmental periods in the host."

Gut microbiota often colonize their hosts early in life, either during pregnancy or following birth, and play an integral role in the health of developing organisms. Previous research has shown that the bacteria affect the development of liver function, the protection epithelial cells afford underlying digestive tissue, gut regulation and the growth of new capillary blood vessels. But this is the first time gut flora have been linked to brain development and behavior.

Harmful microbial infections, on the other hand, have been linked to neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism and schizophrenia. And rodents infected by microbial pathogens before and after birth demonstrated behavioral abnormalities, such as anxiety-like behavior and impaired cognitive function, leading Rochellys Diaz Heijtz, a neurobiologist at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, and her colleagues to wonder if the gut's normal microbial residents may similarly influence brain development.

The researchers tested exploratory activity in germ-free mice and mice with normal gut microbiota by tracking their movements across open space. They also tested anxiety of the two groups in two classic rodent behavioral tests -- the light-dark box and the elevated maze. Spending more time in lit areas and along unwalled, elevated maze portions equated to less anxiety.

Germ-free mice appeared to be more exploratory than mice with normal microbiota, venturing farther and to more areas of the space provided. Germ-free mice also spent more time in the light and engaged in riskier behavior in the maze, indicating they suffered from less anxiety than their microbe-filled counterparts.

The team then infected germ-free mice with normal gut microbiota when they were born to test whether the gut flora could alter the mice's activity and anxiety levels. Sure enough, the newly infected mice spent less time exploring and engaging in risky behavior, like the normal mice in the initial experiments. The results further supported the argument that the microorganisms can affect brain and behavior when introduced early enough in development.

"These microorganisms communicate in a systemic fashion to the developmental programming of a new individual and can influence fundamental aspects of behavior," said Diaz Heijtz. "We should start to consider the possibility that the microbiome and/or its composition may contribute to psychiatric problems."

in the bowels with dopamine hegemony

WSJ | A group of Nestle SA researchers here are on an unusual mission: They hope to create new foods based on gut instinct.

Not the type of instinct one normally equates with intuitive decision-making, but the sophisticated processes that take place in our digestive tracts to let us know when we're hungry. There, a collection of nerve cells work together and communicate much as the neurons in our brain do. It's essentially an autonomous and self-governing second brain that we all carry in our belly.

Nestle says products using its new science could be available within five years. Widely known for its chocolate, the company makes a broad array of foods including cereal, drinks, coffee, frozen meals, bottled water and pet food.

This avenue of food science, which is also being pursued by other food companies, could represent a fresh assault in the fight against flab. One in four Americans is obese, and obesity rates are also rising dramatically in parts of Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Although food companies have long tried to make effective fat-fighting food, their results have been modest.

Nestle and other food giants are now on a push to decipher the language of satiety—the complex signals our gut brain sends to the big brain—and use that knowledge to make better satiety-inducing foods, or foods that make you feel full longer. Nerve cells in the gut are located in the tissues lining the esophagus, stomach, small intestine and colon. Like the central nervous system, the gut brain makes use of neurotransmitters such as serotonin and dopamine.

those IMF data clearly delineate jordanian vulnerability...,

LATimes | King Abdullah II of Jordan fired his Cabinet on Tuesday and ordered his new prime minister to pursue political reforms to "correct the mistakes of the past" following massive anti-government protests around the Arab world and smaller demonstrations at home.

The new government of Prime Minister Marouf Bakhit has been told to take "practical, swift, and tangible steps to launch a real political reform process, in line with the king's vision of comprehensive reform, modernization and development," according to a statement carried by the state-owned Petra news agency.

In neighboring Syria, the toppling of an Arab dictator in Tunisia and the continuing popular revolt against Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak has inspired talk of staging anti-government protests against the reign of President Bashar Assad.

Several online campaigns have been launched on Twitter and Facebook calling for protests. One group has called for a "day of rage" on Saturday, similar to the Jan. 25 demonstrations in Egypt that sparked the current uprising there. Another Web page with more than 6,000 members calls for protests in Damascus on Friday and Saturday.

"We want to end oppression and torture and insult [to] people," said a 38-year-old Damascus resident who asked that he be referred to only by the honorific Abu Tamaam. He said he would attend protests later this week.

"We want to achieve our freedom," he said. "Syria deserves this."

Jordanians have taken to the streets in recent weeks demanding the government respond to popular concerns over unemployment and corruption, although their demands are markedly more modest than those of their Tunisian and Egyptian counterparts, who called for complete regime change.

The Jordanian grievances have been aimed for the most part at Prime Minister Samir Rifai, who was replaced by Bakhit on Tuesday.

oil, food, and the wealth of countries in play...,

EarlyWarning | I thought it would be helpful (at least to me) to put up some very basic statistics about all the Middle East and North African (MENA) countries. Firstly, from the IMF, we have the GDP/capita for twenty MENA countries (2009 figures, expressed in dollars at PPP).

It's good to be clear which MENA countries actually produce the oil. Here are the 2009 data from BP:Tunisia is a minnow in the global oil market, Egypt slightly more important. Algeria, however, matters a lot as its oil production is probably close to total demonstrated OPEC spare capacity. Thus serious social instability in Algeria would have major effects on global oil prices. If instability spread to bigger oil producers than that (eg Kuwait or UAE), the effects could be very dramatic.

Presumably, the regimes in those countries are in a much better position to buy their populations off, being much wealthier. I must admit to feeling slightly dirty writing that sentence. Staring at this list of countries makes clear what we already know: about a third of global oil production comes from this array of nasty autocratic regimes, and thus the global economy is utterly dependent on their continued stability.

Next, here are unemployment rates (for those countries the IMF has stats for - most don't provide them).The stats are high everywhere except Kuwait. Though, if the official figures are to be believed, comparable to the US currently. The countries currently experiencing unrest do not have obviously massively higher unemployment than other countries in the region, suggesting the potential for further unrest. For example, Saudi unemployment is apparently higher than Egypt's.

Finally, here are the IMF's estimates of inflation rates. In this case, I have taken 2008 figures, both because they are the last year for which actuals were available for all countries but Tunisia, but also because conditions in oil and food markets in 2008 seem like the best guide for events in the next few years.

flames and fighting on the nile

The Australian | It is hard to grasp the sheer size and weight of Egypt in the Arab identity: with 80 million people, it is the most populous nation, the fount of classical Arabic, an ancient centre of Sunni Muslim learning and a fertile source of newspapers, books, music, films and soap operas adored from Casablanca to the Gulf.

Yet an undercurrent of terrorism lurks on the fringes of Egyptian civilisation. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's right-hand man who helped plan the September 11 attacks, was born in Cairo. Terrorists killed 58 Western tourists at Luxor in 1997 and at least 88 people died in a bomb attack at the Sharm el-Sheikh resort in 2005.

Egypt embodies the woes of other Arab nations: economic deprivation, an oppressive political system, a super-wealthy elite and a family that has ruled for decades.

Its armed forces, once the most powerful in the region, consume billions in American aid but 30 years of peace with Israel have left them indolent and riddled with corruption. They do, however, command patriotic prestige, an asset that could now become crucial.

So the warning signs were there. But none of President Hosni Mubarak's generals or secret policemen seems to have expected the torrent of events last week.

On Tuesday, thousands of mostly young men poured into the streets, taking the government by surprise and overwhelming the security forces, who broke ranks and ran.

On Wednesday, the authorities outlawed public gatherings and detained hundreds of demonstrators and political activists. The protesters held their nerve. Skirmishes ignited in the afternoon, with riot police chasing people to clear streets, beating some with bamboo staves and lengths of rubber hose.

In the northern city of Suez, protesters set fire to a provincial government office and a fire station. Satellite television relayed images to a restive Arab world. At that point, governments and markets across the globe took notice, because Suez commands the strategic canal that carries trade between Europe and the booming economies of the Far East.

Thursday was tense but quiet, except for a bizarre protest in Cairo by lawyers who started throwing rocks from inside the neo-classical building of their union at riot police on the streets outside.

In fact, the eerie calm of Thursday was just the sound of people regrouping, via Facebook, Twitter and mobile phone messages. They called for a day of rage on Friday, the Muslim holy day.

After prayers, the word went out to head for Tahrir Square at the heart of old Cairo, which had become the centre of the protests.

Few details were on Facebook, as it had become clear the authorities were monitoring the site. But, as it turned out, few details were needed.

As crowds spilled out of the mosques they scorned the anodyne sermons they had heard as proof that the clerics were in the pay of the government. "We must express our opinion as individual human beings without bloodshed or destruction of property," the speaker at the Fatih mosque said, telling the faithful that the leader should "be your guide".

The time had passed for that. The anger of the crowds was directed at Mubarak personally: his rigged elections, the corruption of his circle and his ceaseless grip on power. "Mubarak must go!" they chanted. Rasha el-Sayed, 36, said: "There are no jobs, and the prices are so high we cannot afford bread. The women are becoming spinsters and the men are sitting at home doing nothing."

Within half an hour the police started firing tear gas. Only a few brave young men stood their ground, throwing rocks and at one point hurling a tear-gas grenade back towards the police.

After that, protests swelled like the Nile in flood.

Buildings burned, cars were set ablaze, clouds of tear gas hung in the air and gunshots punctuated the chants of protest in towns and cities across the country.

By midnight on Friday, when a haggard Mubarak went on television to say he had listened to his people and sacked his government, pledging to make things better, Egypt was in flames.

The wind of change in the Arab world -- predicted by both bin Laden and George W. Bush--had come. So important is Egypt in the region that the future of the whole Middle East could now be forged on the streets of Cairo and Suez.

Western governments and Islamic revolutionaries from Tehran to Peshawar are holding their breath this weekend. There appear to be three possible outcomes: a transition to democracy; a new dictatorship, perhaps led by a general around whom the old guard would coalesce; or an Islamic state.

However, nowhere has technology combined with peaceful protest beaten a truly ruthless regime, as the Burmese could testify.

From Tehran there came predictions that Muslim fundamentalists would triumph in Tunis and Cairo, as they did over the liberal and leftist factions in the Iranian revolution.

will the arab revolutions spread?

ForeignPolicy | The end of the Tunisian story hasn't yet been written. We don't yet know whether the so-called Jasmine Revolution will produce fundamental change or a return to a cosmetically-modified status quo ante, democracy or a newly configured authoritarianism. But most of the policy community has long since moved on to ask whether the Tunisian protests will spread to other Arab countries -- Egypt, of course, but also Jordan, Yemen, Algeria, Libya, and almost every place else. Most experts on each individual country can offer powerful, well-reasoned explanations as to why their country won't be next. I'm skeptical too.

But I found it unsatisfying to settle for such skepticism as I watched the massive demonstrations unfold in Egypt on my Twitter feed while moderating a panel discussion on Tunisia yesterday (I plead guilty). As I've been arguing for the last month, something does seem to be happening at a regional level, exposing the crumbling foundations of Arab authoritarianism and empowering young populations who suddenly believe that change is possible. There are strong reasons to expect most of these regimes to survive, which we shouldn't ignore in a moment of enthusiasm. But we also shouldn't ignore this unmistakable new energy, the revelation of the crumbling foundations of Arab authoritarian regimes, or the continuing surprises which should keep all analysts humble about what might follow.

The arguments for skepticism are strong ones. Without belaboring the obvious, every Arab country is different. Each has a distinct political history and culture, a distinct political economy, a distinct demographic profile and urban geography. Many compelling articles have now shown precisely why Tunisia was different -- its robust middle class, its highly educated population, its relatively small size, its ties to Europe through labor migration and remittances, its vulnerability to the global financial crisis, its particularly censored media, its relatively small and under-nurtured military, its relative insignificance to U.S. strategic interests. But those aren't the only reasons to doubt that the Tunisian model can spread.

Another argument for skepticism is authoritarian learning. Simply put, most Arab regimes are quick studies when it comes to their own survival, and quickly adapt when challenged. Unlike tightly controlled Tunisia, states such as Egypt and Jordan have been grappling with protests movements for going on a decade now and have an all-too-rich experience with how to repress, divide, and defeat the new protest movements. Yesterday's massive demonstrations in Cairo may have shocked everyone -- outsiders, Egypt's government, even the protestors -- but in a country which has been rocked by pro-Palestine and anti-Iraq war protests, the Kefaya movement, the April 6 movement, the judges and lawyers protests, and massive labor unrest, the difference is in scale, not type. The same is true across many of the Arab countries which have struggled with restive societies over the last decade.

Dictators learn from each other, not just from the past. The Arab Summit last week displayed this very clearly. Every Arab leader is on red alert at the moment, determined not to repeat Ben Ali's mistakes. They are frantically offering concessions on economic issues, reversing price rises and increasing subsidies. And of course they are ramping up the repressive apparatus, on the streets and online, to try to stop any snowballs from rolling before they get too big. The lesson most seem to have learned is not "be more democratic," it is "be tougher." No Arab leader seems likely to be taken by surprise, or to disregard the early signs of trouble. The success of Egypt's protestors yesterday doesn't mean that they won't be violently crushed today.

And then, of course, there's the international context. Where Tunisia may be relatively insignificant to the great international strategic issues in the region -- Israel, Iran, Iraq, oil -- other potential dominoes have a greater claim on the support of the world's Realists. These authoritarian regimes are the foundation of the America-led regional order. For all the U.S. talk about democracy promotion, the goal has always been to strengthen and legitimize these allies -- to prevent, not to nurture, the kind of popular mobilization exploding today. It's not the least bit surprising that the Washington Post, which has obsessively focused on democracy in Egypt, today finds itself deeply worried by instability there and the strength of Islamists.

Finally, most of the regimes seem to retain the foundations of their overt strength. Oil prices are tolerably high, security services loyal, elections thoroughly manipulated, Islamists repressed, international support strong. In short, there are plenty of reasons to see Tunisia as a one-off.

And yet… it doesn't feel that way. The scenes in Cairo yesterday stand as a sharp rebuke to any analytical certainty. The Egyptian regime was fully prepared, its security forces on alert and deployed, the internet disrupted and al-Jazeera largely off the table… and yet tens of thousands of people still poured into the streets and put together one of the largest demonstrations in contemporary Egyptian history.

better listen to juju...,

Video - eight year old girl tugs Mubarak's sleeve.

how much longer can mubarak hang on?

Independent | The old lady in the red scarf was standing inches from the front of am American-made M1 Abrams tank of the Egyptian Third Army, right on the edge of Tahrir Square. Its soldiers were paratroops, some in red berets, others in helmets, gun barrels pointed across the square, heavy machine guns mounted on the turrets. "If they fire on the Egyptian people, Mubarak is finished," she said. "And if they don't fire on the Egyptian people, Mubarak is finished." Of such wisdom are Egyptians now possessed.

Shortly before dusk, four F-16 Falcons – again, of course, manufactured by President Barack Obama's country – came screaming over the square, echoes bouncing off the shabby grey buildings and the giant Nasserist block, as the eyes of the tens of thousands of people in the square stared upwards. "They are on our side," the cry went up from the crowds. Somehow, I didn't think so. And those tanks, new to the square, 14 in all that arrived with no slogans painted on them, their soldiers sullen and apprehensive, had not come – as the protesters fondly believed – to protect them.

But then, when I talked to an officer on one of the tanks, he burst out with a smile. "We will never fire on our people – even if we are ordered to do so," he shouted over the roar of his engine. Again, I was not so sure. President Hosni Mubarak – or perhaps we should now say "president" in quotation marks – was at the military headquarters, having appointed his new junta of former military and intelligence officers. The rumour went round the square: the old wolf would try to fight on to the end. Others said it didn't matter. "Can he kill 80 million Egyptians?"

Anti-American sentiment was growing after Mr Obama's continued if tepid support for the Mubarak regime. "No, Obama, not Mubarak," posters read. And Mr Mubarak's face appeared with a Star of David superimposed over his face. Many of the crowd produced stun-gun cartridge cases fired last week with "Made in the USA" stamped on the bottom. And I noticed the lead tank's hull bore markings beginning "MFR" – at this point a soldier with a rifle and bayonet fixed was ordered to arrest me so I ran into the crowd and he retreated – but could "MFR" stand for the US Mobile Force Reserve, which keeps its tanks in Egypt? Was this tank column on loan from the Americans? You don't need to work out what the Egyptians make of all this.

hush now, and don't forget your "genuine" interests...,

Haaretz | Israel urges world to curb criticism of Egypt's Mubarak. Jerusalem seeks to convince its allies that it is in the West's interest to maintain the stability of the Egyptian regime. Israel called on the United States and a number of European countries over the weekend to curb their criticism of President Hosni Mubarak to preserve stability in the region.

Jerusalem seeks to convince its allies that it is in the West's interest to maintain the stability of the Egyptian regime. The diplomatic measures came after statements in Western capitals implying that the United States and European Union supported Mubarak's ouster.

Israeli officials are keeping a low profile on the events in Egypt, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu even ordering cabinet members to avoid commenting publicly on the issue.

Senior Israeli officials, however, said that on Saturday night the Foreign Ministry issued a directive to around a dozen key embassies in the United States, Canada, China, Russia and several European countries. The ambassadors were told to stress to their host countries the importance of Egypt's stability. In a special cable, they were told to get this word out as soon as possible.

EU foreign ministers are to discuss the situation in Egypt at a special session today in Brussels, after which they are expected to issue a statement echoing those issued in recent days by U.S. President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Obama called on Mubarak to take "concrete steps" toward democratic reforms and to refrain from violence against peaceful protesters, sentiments echoed in a statement Saturday night by the leaders of Britain, France and Germany.

"The Americans and the Europeans are being pulled along by public opinion and aren't considering their genuine interests," one senior Israeli official said. "Even if they are critical of Mubarak they have to make their friends feel that they're not alone. Jordan and Saudi Arabia see the reactions in the West, how everyone is abandoning Mubarak, and this will have very serious implications."

Netanyahu announced at yesterday's weekly cabinet meeting that the security cabinet will convene tomorrow to discuss the situation in Egypt.

aljazeera english blacked out across most of the u.s.

HuffPo | Canadian television viewers looking for the most thorough and in-depth coverage of the uprising in Egypt have the option of tuning into Al Jazeera English, whose on-the-ground coverage of the turmoil is unmatched by any other outlet. American viewers, meanwhile, have little choice but to wait until one of the U.S. cable-company-approved networks broadcasts footage from AJE, which the company makes publicly available. What they can't do is watch the network directly.

Other than in a handful of pockets across the U.S. - including Ohio, Vermont and Washington, D.C. - cable carriers do not give viewers the choice of watching Al Jazeera. That corporate censorship comes as American diplomats harshly criticize the Egyptian government for blocking Internet communication inside the country and as Egypt attempts to block Al Jazeera from broadcasting.

The result of the Al Jazeera English blackout in the United States has been a surge in traffic to the media outlet's website, where footage can be seen streaming live. The last 24 hours have seen a two-and-a-half thousand percent increase in web traffic, Tony Burman, head of North American strategies for Al Jazeera English, told HuffPost. Sixty percent of that traffic, he said, has come from the United States.

aljazeera in cairo shut down...,

HuffPo | Egyptian state TV reported Sunday morning that the Al Jazeera office in Cairo is being shut down and Al Jazeera reporters are losing their press credentials in Egypt.

Al Jazeera correspondent Dan Nolan tweeted the news at about 11 a.m. local time, adding that Al Jazeera's licenses were revoked, per state media.

Nolan quickly added, "Don't worry we'll still report what's happening in #Egypt no matter what new restrictions they put on us."

Another Al Jazeera employee Evan Hill put the news this way: "State TV announces Al Jazeera's broadcasting license and press cards are being revoked. Our bureau is packing up."

Al Jazeera released a statement on Sunday that it "strongly denounces and condemns the closure of its bureau in Cairo by the Egyptian government." The network says it received notification from authorities on Sunday morning that information minister [Anas al-Fikki] had ordered the suspension of Al Jazeera. It also vowed to "continue its strong coverage regardless."

Follow the latest developments in Egypt by watching the Al Jazeera English livestream here and following our live blog here.

archaic superorganisms in the social media age...,

quoth Tom: I'm asking things about the superorganisms. Have they always been there, and it will take some kind of insight to recognize them? Or are they very difficult to see? Or very easy to see, like are they ethnic nations or something, just like huge anthills? Attacking each other when under collective stress. And, each ant seems to belong to only one anthill. Is that true of people too, or can one person belong to more than one superorganism at the same time?

quoth I: I think I'll begin watching what happens across the Islamic world between Shia and Sunni now that hegemonically sanctioned "establishments" have been put in play.

NYTimes | Mr. Suleiman has run Egypt’s General Intelligence Service since 1993, taking over as the nation was battling Islamic extremists. He is 74 years old and, like Mr. Mubarak, fought in two wars with Israel.

He is said to hold a similar worldview, deeply distrusting Iran, favoring close relations with Washington, supporting the cold peace with Israel, and against easing up on the Muslim Brotherhood, the principal opposition group in Egypt. He has managed most of Egypt’s hottest issues, including dealing with Hamas, Hezbollah and Sudan.

With the choice of Mr. Suleiman, experts said it was clear that Mr. Mubarak was playing to what he now views as his most important constituency, perhaps the only one that can ensure his safety and a smooth exit from power — the military.

with the soldiers' consent...,

NYTimes | Thousands of army troops stepped in late Friday to reinforce the police. By Saturday morning, a sense of celebration took over the central squares of the capital as at least some members of the military encouraged the protesters instead of cracking down on them.

It was unclear whether the soldiers in the streets were operating without orders or in defiance of them. But their displays of support for the protesters were conspicuous throughout the capital. In the most striking example, four armored military vehicles moved at the front of a crowd of thousands of protesters in a pitched battle against the Egyptian security police defending the Interior Ministry.

But the soldiers refused protesters’ pleas to open fire on the security police. And the police battered the protesters with tear gas, shotguns and rubber bullets. There were pools of blood in the streets, and protesters carried at least a dozen wounded from the front line of the clashes.

Everywhere in Cairo, soldiers and protesters hugged or snapped pictures together on top of military tanks. With the soldiers’ consent, protesters scrawled graffiti denouncing Mr. Mubarak on many of the tanks. “This is the revolution of all the people,” read a common slogan. “No, no, Mubarak” was another.

One camouflage-clad soldier shouted through a megaphone from the top of a tank: “I don’t care what happens, but you are the ones who are going to make the change!”

By Saturday night, informal brigades of mostly young men armed with bats, kitchen knives and other makeshift weapons had taken control, setting up checkpoints around the city.

Some speculated that the sudden withdrawal of the police from the cities — even some museums and embassies in Cairo were left unguarded — was intended to create chaos that could justify a crackdown. And reports of widespread looting and violence did return late Saturday night, dominating the state-controlled news media.

“How come there is no security at all?” asked Mohamed Salmawy, president of the Egyptian Writers Union. “It is very fishy that the police had decided to leave the country completely to the thugs and angry mobs.”

The Mubarak government may have considered its security police more reliable than the military, where service is compulsory for all Egyptian men. While soldiers occupied central squares, a heavy deployment of security police officers remained guarding several closed-off blocks around Mr. Mubarak’s presidential palace.

how do you attack an organisation? you attack its leadership

Guardian | Julian Assange awakes to talk, from the nap he has stolen in an armchair at the Norfolk country house where he is staying. He has been up all night disseminating, on his WikiLeaks site, US State Department cables and documents relevant to the momentous events unfolding in Egypt, and they make remarkable reading.

The American diplomats writing the cables leaked to Assange report many of the reasons for the Egyptian uprising: torture of political dissidents, even common criminals, to obtain confessions; widespread repression and fear; and – of special interest to anyone who follows WikiLeaks – the increasingly important role of internet activism, opposition blogging and communication with democratic movements within and without the country over the web.

As ever with the diplomatic memorandums published by WikiLeaks – an act of dissemination for which Assange has become public enemy number one in the US – the cables are, ironically, testimony to the professionalism and straight- talking of the US State Department. Assange concedes that the cables contain "a relative honesty and directness, and quite a lot of wannabe Hemingway".

This is exactly what WikiLeaks considers itself established to do, exactly the kind of moment in history that Assange's organisation feels it can illuminate for the world – and to which it may even have contributed, he claims, "by creating an attitude towards freedom of expression", and by being read by Egyptians themselves. This should be one of the great days in the history of his organisation: Assange and a group of his colleagues huddled over a thicket of laptop computers, downloading, following events, sharing news and occasionally whooping at it. It is one hell of an hour in WikiLand, but a weird one, too, for other things are also on Assange's mind.

Tomorrow a book he considers to be an attack on him will be published by journalists with whom he once closely collaborated at the Guardian, sister newspaper to the Observer. Neither the Guardian nor Assange now speaks of one another with affection. The front page of the International Herald Tribune on the kitchen table next door carries an article of record length by the executive editor of the New York Times, Bill Keller, charting what Keller sees as an odyssey through the dealings with a difficult man, after which a "period of intense collaboration and regular contact with our source" came to a close – and an acrimonious one at that. Keller's article appears reasoned, I say to Assange, who retorts that he finds it "grotesque".

Moreover, in eight days' time Assange must face an extradition hearing instigated by authorities in Sweden, wishing to question him over alleged sex offences, a subject that his lawyers had advised him not to speak about in this interview. The hearings in London are due for 7-8 February – and on the first night, "right in the middle of the hearings", says Assange, "BBC Panorama will broadcast a sleazy piece" about Wiki-Leaks. "It's a mad scramble to get books out that self-justify their roles in all this," claims Assange, "instead of getting on with the job of writing about the information and the cables themselves." It was not, he concedes, always this way.

egypt: death throes of a dictatorship

Independent | The Egyptian tanks, the delirious protesters sitting atop them, the flags, the 40,000 protesters weeping and crying and cheering in Freedom Square and praying around them, the Muslim Brotherhood official sitting amid the tank passengers. Should this be compared to the liberation of Bucharest? Climbing on to an American-made battle tank myself, I could only remember those wonderful films of the liberation of Paris. A few hundred metres away, Hosni Mubarak's black-uniformed security police were still firing at demonstrators near the interior ministry. It was a wild, historical victory celebration, Mubarak's own tanks freeing his capital from his own dictatorship.

In the pantomime world of Mubarak himself – and of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in Washington – the man who still claims to be president of Egypt swore in the most preposterous choice of vice-president in an attempt to soften the fury of the protesters – Omar Suleiman, Egypt's chief negotiator with Israel and his senior intelligence officer, a 75-year-old with years of visits to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and four heart attacks to his credit. How this elderly apparatchik might be expected to deal with the anger and joy of liberation of 80 million Egyptians is beyond imagination. When I told the demonstrators on the tank around me the news of Suleiman's appointment, they burst into laughter.

Their crews, in battledress and smiling and in some cases clapping their hands, made no attempt to wipe off the graffiti that the crowds had spray-painted on their tanks. "Mubarak Out – Get Out", and "Your regime is over, Mubarak" have now been plastered on almost every Egyptian tank on the streets of Cairo. On one of the tanks circling Freedom Square was a senior member of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mohamed Beltagi. Earlier, I had walked beside a convoy of tanks near the suburb of Garden City as crowds scrambled on to the machines to hand oranges to the crews, applauding them as Egyptian patriots. However crazed Mubarak's choice of vice-president and his gradual appointment of a powerless new government of cronies, the streets of Cairo proved what the United States and EU leaders have simply failed to grasp. It is over.

if I were in Israel and I had any influence, I'd want to make that deal now!

Video - Clinton holding forth at Davos.

TheCanadianPress | Former U.S. President Bill Clinton criticized the Republicans for their small-government policies Thursday, saying America has to stop "conducting its public policy as if it was in a parallel universe divorced from reality."

He also urged Israel to make peace with the Arabs, saying the Jewish state will never have a better partner that the current Palestinian leadership.

Clinton spoke for an hour before an adoring audience of global leaders from business, government and academia, who interrupted his words several times with applause — never more loudly than when he said Israel should seize what he described as the chance for comprehensive peace with the Arab world.

"If I were in Israel and I had any influence, I'd want to make that deal now," he said. Referring to a comprehensive peace offer mooted by the Arab League in 2002, he said: "All these countries have offered Israel a political, economic and security partnership, not just peace, not just normalization ... but a genuine partnership." In Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, Clinton said, "they've got the best partner in the West Bank that they've ever had."

"All these things should make peace more likely... Can anyone imagine the Middle East or in particular the Israelis and Palestinians, will be better off if we do not do this now?"

The sides seemed tantalizingly close to a deal in Clinton's last days as president, when he mediated actively in 2000 and 2001, but talks fell apart and the sides went through some four years of deadly violence.

Various efforts since then have failed.

Clinton said he believes the public on both sides would support an agreement, and he professed to be "struck how ... political systems continually produce governments" that go against what "all public opinion polls show would be popular."

Clinton noted that the Arab world was currently in some turmoil, after the revolution in Tunisia and given the anti-government rioting in Egypt.

"It is a manifestation of the yearning for change and accountability and shared progress moving throughout the world, particularly throughout the Middle East and North Africa ... to be part of a modern world that works," he said. This, too, should "animate the parties to make a peace agreement" that could yield economic benefits for all sides, Clinton argued.

now the guardian's post hoc narrative on wikileaks

Guardian | Back in the days when almost no one had heard about WikiLeaks, regular emails started arriving in my inbox from someone called Julian Assange. It was a memorable kind of name. All editors receive a daily mix of unsolicited tip-offs, letters, complaints and crank theories, but there was something about the periodic WikiLeaks emails which caught the attention.

Sometimes there would be a decent story attached to the emails. Or there might be a document which, on closer inspection, appeared rather underwhelming. One day there might arrive a diatribe against a particular journalist – or against the venal cowardice of mainstream media in general. Another day this Assange person would be pleased with something we'd done, or would perambulate about the life he was living in Nairobi.

In Britain the Guardian was, for many months, the only paper to write about WikiLeaks or to use any of the documents they were unearthing. In August 2007, for instance, we splashed on a remarkable secret Kroll report which claimed to show that former Kenyan president Daniel Arap Moi had been siphoning off hundreds of millions of pounds and hiding them away in foreign bank accounts in more than 30 different countries. It was, by any standards, a stonking story. This Asssange, whoever he was, was one to watch.

Unnoticed by most of the world, Julian Assange was developing into a most interesting and unusual pioneer in using digital technologies to challenge corrupt and authoritarian states. It's doubtful whether his name would have meant anything to Hillary Clinton at the time – or even in January 2010 when, as secretary of state, she made a rather good speech about the potential of what she termed "a new nervous system for the planet".

She described a vision of semi-underground digital publishing – "the samizdat of our day" that was beginning to champion transparency and challenge the autocratic, corrupt old order of the world. But she also warned that repressive governments would "target the independent thinkers who use the tools". She had regimes like Iran in mind.

Her words about the brave samizdat publishing future could well have applied to the rather strange, unworldly Australian hacker quietly working out methods of publishing the world's secrets in ways which were beyond any technological or legal attack.

Little can Clinton have imagined, as she made this much praised speech, that within a year she would be back making another statement about digital whistleblowers – this time roundly attacking people who used electronic media to champion transparency. It was, she told a hastily arranged state department press conference in November 2010, "not just an attack on America's foreign policy interests. It is an attack on the international community." In the intervening 11 months Assange had gone viral. He had just helped to orchestrate the biggest leak in the history of the world – only this time the embarrassment was not to a poor east African nation, but to the most powerful country on earth.

It is that story, the transformation from anonymous hacker to one of the most discussed people in the world – at once reviled, celebrated and lionised; sought-after, imprisoned and shunned – that this book sets out to tell.

Within a few short years of starting out Assange had been catapulted from the obscurity of his life in Nairobi, dribbling out leaks that nobody much noticed, to publishing a flood of classified documents that went to the heart of America's military and foreign policy operations. From being a marginal figure invited to join panels at geek conferences he was suddenly America's public enemy number one. A new media messiah to some, he was a cyber-terrorist to others. As if this wasn't dramatic enough, in the middle of it all two women in Sweden accused him of rape. To coin a phrase, you couldn't make it up.

Since leaving Nairobi, Assange had grown his ambitions for the scale and potential of WikiLeaks. In the company of other hackers he had been developing a philosophy of transparency. He and his fellow technologists had already succeeded in one aim: he had made WikiLeaks virtually indestructible and thus beyond legal or cyber attack from any one jurisdiction or source. Lawyers who were paid exorbitant sums to protect the reputations of wealthy clients and corporations admitted – in tones tinged with both frustration and admiration – that WikiLeaks was the one publisher in the world they couldn't gag. It was very bad for business.

At the Guardian we had our own reasons to watch the rise of WikiLeaks with great interest and some respect. In two cases – involving Barclays Bank and Trafigura – the site had ended up hosting documents which the British courts had ordered to be concealed. There was a bad period in 2008/9 when the high court in London got into the habit of not only banning the publication of documents of high public interest, but simultaneously preventing the reporting of the existence of the court proceedings themselves and the parties involved in them. One London firm of solicitors over-reached itself when it even tried to extend the ban to the reporting to parliamentary discussion of material sitting on the WikiLeaks site.

Judges were as nonplussed as global corporations by this new publishing phenomenon. In one hearing in March 2009 the high court in London decided that no one was allowed to print documents revealing Barclays' tax avoidance strategies – even though they were there for the whole world to read on the WikiLeaks website. The law looked a little silly.

But this new form of indestructible publishing brought sharp questions into focus. For every Trafigura there might be other cases where WikiLeaks could be used to smear or destroy someone. That made Assange a very powerful figure. The fact that there were grumbles among his colleagues about his autocratic and secretive style did not allay the fears about this new media baron. The questions kept coming: who was this shadowy figure "playing God"? How could he and his team be sure of a particular document's authenticity? Who was determining the ethical framework that decided some information should be published, and some not? All this meant that Assange was in many respects – more, perhaps, than he welcomed – in a role not dissimilar to that of a conventional editor.