Arab Spring

Pro-Russian rebels handed over the two black boxes of the Malaysian Airlines' Boeing 777, which crashed in eastern Ukraine on Thursday leaving all 298 on board dead.

Malaysian experts received the flight-data recorders containing information of the time and altitude of the plane when the incident happened and also the conversations in the cockpit.

The International Press Institute (IPI) Board has called on Egypt’s president to immediately grant a full presidential pardon to all journalists convicted in the country in connection with their work.

The international community has expressed its deep concerns with Monday’s verdicts of the Egyptian court, which handed lengthy jail sentences to 3 Al-Jazeera journalists.

An Egyptian court Monday sentenced three Al-Jazeera journalists including Australian Peter Greste to jail terms ranging from seven to 10 years after accusing them of aiding the blacklisted Muslim Brotherhood.
      

When Egyptians were flooding to Tahrir Square, I was fascinated with the Arab Spring. Like many others, I too wrote in praise of the movement at the time. Then an experienced Turkish diplomat warned me.

Egypt's prosecutor general on June 16 ordered the release of Al-Jazeera journalist Abdullah Elshamy, who has been on hunger strike for nearly five months, the official MENA news agency reported.

Egyptian prosecutors on Thursday demanded the "maximum" penalty, ranging from 15 to 25 years in jail, for all 20 defendants in the trial of Al-Jazeera journalists accused of aiding the blacklisted Muslim Brotherhood.
      

The question is not whether the elections in Egypt and Syria are democratic or not. They are clearly not. But when did democracy visit these countries anyway? The closest Arab countries in the Middle East have come to democracy is in Iraq and that is only because the old mold was broken by the U.S. invasion.

Former army chief Abdel Fattah al-Sisi was declared Egypt's president-elect June 3, winning 96.9 percent of the vote in an election nearly a year after he toppled president Mohamed Morsi, whose Islamist allies boycotted the polls.