An exchange student spending the school year with a host family in Egypt claims he was starved by the family. Johnathan McCullum, as part of an AFS program, was placed with an Egyptian family who, as Coptic Christians, fast over 200 days a year. His weight went from 155 to 97 pounds during his stay. He says friends and teachers wanted him to change his host family, but he felt he had to "tough" out the year. Others in the exchange program feel that Johnathan and his family are simply out to make a buck.
posted on Feb 29, 2008 - View this thread

Much of the Middle East has been without reliable internet access recently due to the somewhat suspicious cutting of four seperate underwater cables, in seperate locations, within a few days of each other. The problem has been alleviated by re-routing of traffic until ships can reach the cables to repair them, a process which may take several weeks. The problem was initially believed to be caused by anchors of passing ships, but that has since been retracted and deals have already been signed by several companies for new cables.
posted on Feb 5, 2008 - View this thread

Wael Abbas is an Egyptian blogger and anti-torture activist who recently won a journalism award for his documenting police brutality in Egypt, which led to the conviction of two police officers. In Egypt, blogging can get you arrested, and Abbas has taken enormous risks. But now YouTube has removed his videos and suspended his account after receiving complaints (possibly from the Egyptian government) about their graphic content, and Yahoo has disabled his email account. Evidently YouTube is not the ally human rights advocates had hoped it would be.
posted on Nov 29, 2007 - View this thread

Zombie Attack at Hierakonpolis
posted on Nov 12, 2007 - View this thread

King Tut's face revealed to the world The face of Egypt's most famous ancient ruler, King Tutankhamun, has been put on public display for the first time.
posted on Nov 4, 2007 - View this thread

Most have forgotten Abdallah Higazy, but he's proceeded with his lawsuit against the FBI. In an interesting twist, the details of the threats made against his family by FBI Agent Michael Templeton have been classified. Sadly for the Second Circuit, they released the unredacted version briefly before withdrawing and replacing it with the classified decision. Good on How Appealing for keeping the opinion online.
posted on Oct 23, 2007 - View this thread

Lessons from Past Western Incursions in the Middle East. A speech by Juan Cole at the New America Foundation in which he discusses his new book, Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East, and the relevance and lessons of Napoleon's expedition in Egypt to the current American occupation of Iraq. A shorter version, covering many of the same points, is in this article: Pitching the Imperial Republic.
posted on Aug 26, 2007 - View this thread

Bush the Dissident. (WaPo) Background (and previously) here here here here and here.
posted on Aug 19, 2007 - View this thread

Forty years on. After a quick buildup, the Six Day War started 40 years ago today and reshaped the Middle East. At the time, Israel's quick win looked like a triumph, but after 40 years the war is still being fought and it looks like it may have been a pyrrhic victory.
posted on Jun 5, 2007 - View this thread

Fascinated by Egyptian archaeology? View and learn all about the discoveries in Giza, the Valley of the Kings (and Queens), Memphis and Saqqara and the Sphinx from the comfort of home. Depending on today's pesky sandstorms and time of day, you may even be able to see the pyramids from the comfort of your couch. Want to go inside? Yeah, me neither.
Previously.
posted on May 16, 2007 - View this thread

Take this cooked with this and mix it with these and these and this, top it off these?!?, smother it in this and you have this: كشري. Pronounced kusharī, you can also find it spelled kushary, koushari, koushary, koshari, or koshary. However you spell it, it is one of Egypt's most popular dishes. Throughout Cairo you can find restaurants devoted this this humble, cheap (a filling bowl costs 3LE, around 50 cents), usually vegetarian dish. Of course, if you're not in Cairo you can always make your own.
posted on Apr 19, 2007 - View this thread

For anyone with even a passing interest in Islamic history or cartography, 'The Book of Curiosities of the Sciences and Marvels for the Eyes' site at Oxford University's Bodleian Library will provide a thoroughly interesting timesink. This recently discovered 13th/14th century copy of an 11th century Egyptian manuscript was partly based on Ptolemy and includes the oldest rectangular map of the world...not to mention the famed human-bearing Waq-Waq tree. [via]
posted on Apr 5, 2007 - View this thread

22 basic suggested readings on the Middle East from history professor and informed commenter on Middle Eastern affairs Juan Cole.
posted on Mar 7, 2007 - View this thread

The Last Jews of Cairo As soon as we saw the guns, we knew we’d arrived at the synagogue. Egyptian policemen thronged behind barricades, white uniforms in the dusk, handguns at their hips. Above them, on stairs, Special Forces soldiers in black with red armbands held machine guns as easily as we did point-and-shoot cameras.
posted on Feb 13, 2007 - View this thread

Religious popular music from Upper Egypt Munshidin sing devotional songs, Tartil (a melodic recitation of the Qur'an), and Tawashih, which uses call-and-response . One of a number of interesting music resources at bolingo.
posted on Dec 24, 2006 - View this thread

Silphium was the wonder plant of the ancient world. Originally identified by Greek colonists in North Africa, the plant - a species of Fennel (Foeniculum vulgare) - grew only in a dimunitive area near the coast and could not be cultivated. Silphium was popular as a spice for cooking, but its notoriety stems from its alleged medicinal qualities, particularly its use as an herbal contraceptive (the "I love you" heart symbol may have originated from the shape of silphium's seed pods and its use in sex). So valuable was Silphium that it became an important component of the ancient world's economy and appears on coins. It's also among the first species recorded (by Pliny the Elder) as going extinct, probably by grazing sheep or uncontrolled harvesting. Or is it?
posted on Dec 7, 2006 - View this thread

Is King Tut's tomb cursed? On February 16, 1923, Egyptologist Howard Carter, his financier George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon, and Herbert's daughter Lady Evelyn Herbert entered the just-discovered tomb of the Egyptian boy-king Tutankhamen. Newspapers sensationalized the discovery, and told of a curse. Herbert dies in a Cairo hospital at 2 AM on April 5, 1923, only several months later. Supposedly, right at that moment, lights in Cairo go dark, and his dog at his estate back home in England howls and also drops dead.

However, Carter and Lady Evelyn contine living healthy lives, and examination shows that on average, everyone associated with the discovery lived normal-length lives. Herbert was not in good health even before the discovery, and died of blood poisoning from an infected mosquito bite. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, among others, thought it was fungus.

So now, when scientists perform a CT scan of the body, strange stuff happens: “one researcher's vehicle nearly hit a child. Then a huge storm hit. The CT machine, usually reliable, wouldn't work at first. And when researchers finally began the CT scan, one scientist came down with such a violent coughing attack he had to leave.” Discoveries made? King Tut was 5'10' an 18-20 years old when he died. He probably died of gangrene from a broken femur, not with a blow to the head as previously thought. His head is cut off, his body is cut in two, and his wrist, shoulder, and elbow joints are disconnected. Oh, and his penis is missing.
posted on Nov 29, 2006 - View this thread

"Life is wise to deceive us," he once wrote, "for had it told us from the start what it had in store for us, we would refuse to be born." --Naguib Mahfouz, RIP --and more from when he won the Nobel in 1988
posted on Aug 30, 2006 - View this thread

Hamza el Din, hailed as "the father of Nubian music," has died. El Din's death has not yet been reported in the news, but I'm told he passed away from complications of brain surgery. It's a great loss for music lovers all over the world. "Escalay," performed on oud with the Kronos Quartet on their album Pieces of Africa, is probably his best-known work, but "Ollin Arageed," his haunting piece for handclaps and tar -- a goatskin drum -- was played numerous times onstage with the Grateful Dead, who championed el Din's music and jammed with him at the Great Pyramid in 1978. Eclipse provides an excellent introduction to his work, the ethereal sounds of one of the oldest continuously-inhabited regions on the planet. In the 1960s, el Din's own home village in Egypt was drowned underwater by the construction of the Aswan Dam, as archeologists tried to save what they could.
posted on May 23, 2006 - View this thread

Fantazy Land Alexandria, Egypt. [coral] The worst theme park in the world?
posted on May 19, 2006 - View this thread

Solved: the case of the disappearing royal member. King Tut's penis was there all along.
posted on May 3, 2006 - View this thread

The Valley of the Kings not done yet? British archaeologists have discovered a new tomb in the Valley of the Kings - the first such find since Howard Carter found Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922. Ironically, the new tomb was a mere 5 meters from Tutankhamun's. The tomb includes unopened sarcophagi and 5 undisturbed mummies. Patricia Podzorski, curator of Egyptian Art at the University of Memphis, said "People have been saying the valley was done for 100 years. They said it before Howard Carter found King Tutankhamun's tomb and they said it after. But, obviously, they are still wrong."
posted on Feb 10, 2006 - View this thread

Locked in a Timeless Embrace: A third possibility. First documented gay couple (manicurists to the King) or just a case of conjoined twins? Same-sex closeness in historical Egypt.
posted on Dec 21, 2005 - View this thread

Death in Sakkara: An Egyptian Adventure (flash).
An Indiana Jones style web-based game from the BBC's Ancient History department.

Egypt, 1929. Journalist Charles Fox plunges into a darkly sinister world of intrigue, murder and mysticism in the hunt for a missing archaeologist.

Oh yes, it's really hard.
via Wonderland
posted on Oct 28, 2005 - View this thread

After decades of denial, official honors for terror bombers of Lavon Affair infamy. See also Liberty, USS.
posted on Apr 5, 2005 - View this thread

Earlier this month, Condoleezza Rice discussed reforms and democracy with Egyptian foreign minister Abu al-Ghait, and joined the international voices urging the release of Ayman Nour. Nour's opposition party—al-Ghad ("Tommorrow")—supports open elections and limiting President Mubarak's terms in office, which has garnered unprecedented activist support in Cairo. When Rice canceled her trip to Cairo three days ago to protest Nour's imprisonment, President Hosni Mubarak did a surprising thing: he revised the Egyptian constitution to allow for multi-party presidential elections—the first since succeeding Anwar Sadat in 1981. (some links via BigPharaoh)
posted on Feb 27, 2005 - View this thread

Coptic Christans comprise 15-18% of Egypt's population, and are the MidEast's largest Christian minority. Violence between Muslims and Coptics in Egypt has flared up before, but relations inside American borders have been civil, most say. This month, an emigrated Coptic family of four were murdered in New Jersey just months after the father received death threats for his remarks about Islam in a chatroom on which Christians are allegedly "monitored". Did Armanious Hossan's comments about Islam put his life in jeopardy, ala Salman Rushdie, or Theo Van Gogh, or Geert Wilders (login req), or Rachid Ben Ali?
posted on Feb 2, 2005 - View this thread

Terrorists strike tourists in Egypt...again. At least 30 people have been killed, 114 injured today when a truck bomb blew up the Hilton hotel in Taba, Egypt, a resort town in the Sinai. A concurrent explosion occurred nearby in Nuweiba, Egypt, and early casualty reports there are 4 dead, 40 wounded. The apparent target? The many Israeli families who were vacationing in the area, celebrating Simchas Torah. The less-apparent target? The $4 billion/year 7 million people/year Egyptian tourism industry, a crucial part of that country's economy. While this is not the first time that tourists from Israel have been singled out worldwide, it's also part of a decade-long pattern of mass-casualty terrorist attacks against tourists from multiple countries within Egypt. Keeping in mind that one of the most devastating economic after-effects of 9/11 was the blow it dealt to air travel and tourism worldwide, not to mention close calls and tragic events at famed tourist destinations, is tourism-terrorism going to become the wave of the future?
posted on Oct 7, 2004 - View this thread

Poll Shows Growing Arab Rancor at U.S. Arab views of the United States, shaped largely by the Iraq war and a post-Sept. 11 climate of fear, have worsened in the past two years to such an extent that in Egypt -- an important ally in the region -- nearly 100 percent of the population now holds an unfavorable opinion of the country, according to two polls due out today... More within
posted on Jul 24, 2004 - View this thread

Planning your journey into the afterlife? Then you might want to try The Theban Mapping Project, Eternal Egypt or Tour Egypt if you need some help getting on the Ancient Egyptian property ladder.
posted on Jun 25, 2004 - View this thread

The Alexandria Declaration. Between March 14 and 17, 2004, intellectuals, scholars, economists and activists from around the Arab world met at the new Alexandria Library in Egypt for the Arab Reform Conference. Among the recommendations of the conference was that all Arab governments should ratify "all international conventions on the rights of women providing for the abolition of all forms of discrimination against them."
posted on Mar 29, 2004 - View this thread

A result of three years of cooperation between I.B.M. and Egypt's government and major museums, the country's considerable museum collections were digitized and loaded onto www.eternalegypt.org - Thousands more artifacts are to be added over time. I.B.M. expects the concept and the scanning and database technologies developed for the project to be applied at other museums and cultural collections worldwide.
posted on Mar 3, 2004 - View this thread

The new Islam. Husam Tammam and Patrick Haenni in Le Monde (English version) describe the new forms of Islamic culture taking shape in Egypt. I follow the Islamic world fairly closely, but this was news to me. Does it herald an Islam that can live with the rest of the world (and vice versa)?

This entry, both with the hijab [veil] and the nashid [religious chant], into consumerism and syncretism with non-Arab models, has led to an implicit questioning of the old puritanism of the 1970s and 1980s - and above all a questioning of the principle of the ideologisation of religion. The change is important: we could trace similar patterns in the Islamic economy, increasingly affected by the ups and downs of international finance; or in Islamic charity, which has been rethought, within a framework of neoliberalism, as a security net to replace the state's withdrawal from this area (a withdrawal the Islamists have widely supported).

(Via Path of the Paddle.)
posted on Oct 9, 2003 - View this thread

The August 9, 2003 edition of the Egyptian weekly Al-Ahram Al-Arabi featured an interview with Dr. Nabil Hilmi, Dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Al-Zaqaziq who, together with a group of Egyptian expatriates in Switzerland, is preparing an enormous lawsuit against "all the Jews of the world."
For material stolen from the Pharaonic Egyptians during the Exodus ...
(link via The Daily Grail)
posted on Aug 29, 2003 - View this thread

From a theft at the U.S. Mint to a scam artist in Philly, from a playboy Egyptian king to a Secret Service sting at the Waldorf-Astoria, ending up at a record-breaking $7.59 million auction: the fascinating history of a coin. (via BoingBoing)
posted on Mar 8, 2003 - View this thread

Ushabtis are small mummiform dolls that the ancient Egyptians buried with the dead. 'Ushabti' means 'Answerer'. [more inside]
posted on Mar 5, 2003 - View this thread

Tour Egypt. "Egypt is an exciting country, both for its antiquities, and modern high culture. Tour Egypt is an Egypt guide with over 10,000 pages of information about every aspect of travel, ancient and modern Egypt." Two of my favorite links are the Hieroglyph Converter and Ikhernofret's Description of the Osiris Passion Play at Abydos. The current feature is about the Monastery of Jeremiah at Saqqara . Actually, quite a nice resource.
posted on Feb 3, 2003 - View this thread

Ancient Egyptian Wisdom for the Internet by Anna Mancini.
posted on Jan 29, 2003 - View this thread

"Please accept these as a Christmas gift, for I too am a Christian!" Then you added apologetically "But please don't mention this outside my shop, I could lose all if my neighbors found out."
Coptic Christians in Saudi Arabia, and The Christian Coptic Orthodox Church Of Egypt, and why the Embattled Coptic Christians Are Fleeing Egypt.
posted on Jan 24, 2003 - View this thread

"I am the first to say that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a forgery, but what is strange is that they [the Israelis] perhaps read it and decided to implement it." Mohammed Sobhi, screenwriter of The Horse without Horseman, reacts to charges that his Egyptian mini-series is anti-semitic. The program tells the story of an Egyptian who leads the struggle against the British colonizers until he finds a book that provides proof that the true enemy is not the British, but the "Elders of Zion".
posted on Nov 8, 2002 - View this thread

Egyptian leader jailed for promoting democracy; Bush admin "disappointed."
posted on Aug 6, 2002 - View this thread

The best site on the web just got better. You'll need plenty of time to go through this attractive, useful, and encyclopedic work.
posted on Aug 1, 2002 - View this thread

'A Tale in the Desert' seems to be shaping up into a rather interesting game. Not just another MMORPG, it's based upon the ancient Egyptian 'Seven Disciplines of Man'. From the FAQ:

It contains no combat: no monsters, no player-killers, no swords or armor. Your character advances by completing, participating in, or leading large projects. Negotiation and politics play a very large role. The game has a plot that unfolds in response to player actions, and when the story is over, the game ends.

posted on Jul 16, 2002 - View this thread

"Writer William Langewiesche, a pilot in his own right, explains why a jet packed with 217 passengers plunged 33,000 feet into the Atlantic Ocean in the dead of night--and why it took so long for the U.S. and Egyptian governments to issue an explanation. Using black-box transcripts and radar records, Langewiesche meticulously reconstructs the last minutes of the so-called suicide flight. In a feat of storytelling, he reveals the nasty combination of politics and culture clashes that delayed the official investigation."
posted on May 3, 2002 - View this thread

Robert Young Pelton, At first the media complains because they're not getting enough information, they're not being allowed to cover the war. Then when they get to know everything, after the 120-day window, nobody cares anymore. Because once they start spelling it out and saying, "Wait a second, these guys are all from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Why aren't we fighting a war in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and Egypt? Why are they our allies?" And then those are the tough questions that never really get asked, because the public doesn't really care at that point. Is disbelieving major news organization reports a neccessity to get the real stories?
posted on Apr 24, 2002 - View this thread

Norway Briefly Lead By Gay Prime Minister whilst Egyptian Human Rights Groups Cannot Defend Gays Compare and contrast: this cannot be seen simply as another East/West culture clash, when we know that there are a variety of views in the 'West' about gay 'rights', and indeed within Egypt itself. However, once achieved for homosexuals in western Europe (note the support of the French President), is the march to progressive equal rights going to have any effect on friendly countries elsewhere in the world? What's the situation like in your neck of the woods? (hint: we've done Alabama...)
posted on Feb 24, 2002 - View this thread

An ancient 3,200-year-old papyrus map has led to the discovery of pharoanic gold mines in Egypt's eastern desert that will give Egypt one of the top 10 gold reserves in the world. The original pharaonic map, which is the world’s earliest surviving geological survey, was discovered in Luxor in 1820 and has since been on display in a Turin museum.
posted on Dec 30, 2001 - View this thread

Egyptian plane crashes and U.S. says pilot a suicide Egypt denies suicide as cause of plane that crashed just off our coast. Any connection to WTC?
posted on Sep 19, 2001 - View this thread

Notifications to Congress of Pending U.S. Arms Transfers 1992-2001
Check out Egypt and Israel.
Database at this site.
posted on Sep 17, 2001 - View this thread

Queen Nefertiti found in the attic. Well, not exactly but the mummy of Nefertiti, the most famous queen of ancient Egypt except for Cleopatra, has been found kicking around in a museum unrecognized for a hundred years. Also, you can own your own Nefertiti for only $39.99 (gold costs a lttle more).
posted on Jun 20, 2001 - View this thread