

Egypt comes back online after government backs down - chegra
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2011/02/nearly-a-week-after-the.html

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rst
Not so much backing down as switching tactics. The demonstrators in Cairo's
Tahrir square are now under assault from what the news is describing as "pro-
government demonstrators", who are throwing stones. They're marching with
slogans like "thirty years of stability, nine days of anarchy", but things
only turned violent when they showed up. There are multiple reports of these
people being found to be bearing police IDs.

Perhaps Mubarak's idea is to say, "it's me or this chaos." But it may very
well be his police (otherwise invisible over the past few days) that are
creating the chaos...

EDIT: U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon seems to think that's what's going
on; he was just on al-J English saying that violence against peaceful
demonstrators is unacceptable...

~~~
shareme
hopefully the Military backs the people against the pro-government secret
police force

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nkassis
A Egyptian friend of mine had this to say about the current events:

"My guess is that it was something planned by the government. You have four
things that happened pretty concurrently:

1\. Speech yesterday, concessions made

2\. Army backs out of the square, supposedly doing crowd control, but just let
these people walk

3\. Internet is back up

4\. A pro-Mubarak rally

Seems like somebody wanted this to happen and wanted as many people to hear
about it as possible."

~~~
sfphotoarts
it's equally possible to come up with other non causal correlations. Sometimes
things just progress and are utterly unrelated. Seeing patterns where there
aren't any is a human survival characteristic.

~~~
kingkawn
This is politics, not spots on the wall that look like faces.

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Qz
Latest crazy development: anti-mubarak protesters using laser beams as defense
to blind pro-mubarak supporters trying to throw molotov cocktails. This just
gets more and more insane/interesting...

