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Egyptian police have arrested 27-year-old human rights activist Patrick George Zaki after he spoke out against President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi’s government. Lawyers for Zaki told the Italian press that the student—who was studying in Bologna, Italy—was detained at Cairo International Airport on Friday and roughed up by police. He is still in custody. Zaki had recently waged a campaign in Italy for greater transparency into the death of Italian Cambridge grad student Giulio Regeni, who was tortured and killed in Cairo in 2016 after researching opposition politicians and labor unions in Cairo. Zaki’s arrest is being described as a product of an unprecedented crackdown on dissident voices. Zaki had taken leave from the NGO Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights to work on a master’s degree in gender studies at the University of Bologna.

Police transferred an Egyptian activist who was arrested upon arrival at the Cairo airport from Italy to a “less favorable” detention facility Thursday, a local rights group said, just as his parents showed up for visiting hours.Officials detained Patrick George Zaki, 28, a human rights advocate and student at the University of Bologna in Italy, after he landed in Cairo for a brief trip home.When Zaki’s parents arrived at the police station to catch a first glimpse of their son, police directed them to another, more crowded facility a short drive away. By the time they found Zaki, less than a minute remained of visiting hours, his lawyer said.

Zaki has told his lawyers that while in custody he has been blindfolded, beaten and tortured with electric shocks while interrogated about his activism. There was no immediate response from Egypt’s Interior Ministry about the allegations.

accusations of spreading fake news and calling for unauthorized protests

Tunisia’s leader claimed Sunday that some desperate youths are being paid to try to leave Tunisia illegally for Europe, saying the goal is to damage the country from within and hurt its ties with Europe.President Kais Saied made the remarks during a stroll down the iconic Avenue Bourguiba, the main axis in the Tunisian capital of Tunis, a week after firing the prime minister and other top officials and freezing parliament. He listened to passersby calling out his name and shouting “Tunisia!” but said nothing about his much-awaited next steps.

He claimed that some of his countrymen with political motives are paying desperate youth to make the trip, saying their intention is to repeat the mass illegal migration that began after the Tunisian revolution a decade ago.

Saied made the same assertion earlier Sunday when he formally accepted 1.5 million doses of anti-COVID-19 vaccines from Italy, warning against any “political exploitation” of the country’s youths.

Zaki’s arrest and trial became front page news in Italy and sparked a wave of student protests there. For many Italians, his detention was reminiscent of the death of Italian doctoral student Giulio Regeni, who was kidnapped in Cairo, tortured and killed in 2016. Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi has vowed to continue following Zaki’s case.

The parallels between Lebanon and Sicily are many, and may hold clues for why the judiciary has struggled to impose the law on societies that, in many regards, were built on foundations opposing the state. Both are places that have been conquered over the centuries by multiple powers, so that they have absorbed contradictory, even clashing, political legacies. In Sicily and Lebanon, traditional social ties have tended to displace mediation by the institutions of the modern state, while religion has been an instrument of debilitating illiberalism as well as an occasional driver of reform. And in both, the preferred traditional response to the abuses present all around has generally been silence

The mafia and the political class that so thoroughly dominated Lebanon at the end of the country’s civil war in 1990 had a very similar trajectory. Both exploited major transitional periods in their country’s history to, schizophrenically, anchor their criminal networks in the mechanisms of legitimate governance.

political leaders neutralized popular outrage by manipulating sectarian sensitivities, so that the investigating magistrate, Tareq Bitar, became a target of the political forces whose officials he later sought to question. Sicily was ahead of Lebanon in having a judiciary that was willing to go all the way, despite the tremendous risks, and politicians with residues of self-respect.

Since Kais Saied's assumption of the Tunisian presidency in 2019, the number of African migrants who have arrived in Tunisia without being stopped or registered has dramatically increased. “Officially, 10,000 irregular migrants have crossed the borders from Libya to Tunisia during the first half of 2022”, M.E., a former UNHCR employee in Medenine revealed. In reality, the numbers are much bigger.

it is believed foreign migrants in Tunisia far exceed a million. 

Since the start of his tenure, Saied has put the army and the police at the behest of his political project. After his referendum on a new constitution, Saied sacked and replaced nine high-ranking police officers. Furthermore, Saied's Interior Minister Taoufik Charfeddine has been appointing his own friends to key positions in the police and the National Guard.

Tunisia reached a preliminary deal with the International Monetary Fund a year ago on a $1.9 billion loan programme, but 12 months later it has yet to receive any money and seems unwilling to implement the reforms needed to do so.

The one-year lag is a record delay between a preliminary deal and the final signoff, according to public data on over 80 cases compiled by Reuters. This compares to the median 55 days it took low- and middle-income countries between the two steps, and exceeds even the long waits of countries like Chad, Zambia and Sri Lanka.

Reducing the budget deficit, reforming large state-owned enterprises and devaluing the currency to prevent the central bank from using reserves to support the dinar are among the top tasks the government needs to address,

“There was some dispute about enshrining sharia,” he said, “that’s why we had to push away the controversy and we settled for what was said in the 1959 constitution about Tunisia as an Arab country.” 

constitutions are built on what's agreed upon

Rabbi Benjamin Hatab leads Tunisia’s main synagogue and said that Ghannouchi had reached out to the country’s Jewish community. "He declared that the country would not change and that the only difference would be that it would be more democratic than Ben Ali's Tunisia,” the Jewish leader told Ynet.

the central idea of journalism — the conviction, as my old boss Peter Kann once said, “that facts are facts; that they are ascertainable through honest, open-minded and diligent reporting; that truth is attainable by laying fact upon fact, much like the construction of a cathedral; and that truth is not merely in the eye of the beholder.”

the responsibility to separate truth from falsehood, which is never more important than when powerful people insist that falsehoods are truths, or that there is no such thing as truth to begin with

a period in which the executive branch of government is engaged in a systematic effort to create a climate of opinion against the news business

The tacit contract that has defined the North African country since its independence in 1956 is the ‘bread’ provision - mostly subsidies - in return for political deference. With modest resources, Tunisia has historically funded subsidies of strategic commodities - bread, sugar, tea, coffee, kerosene - and education, health, housing in some cases, and even recreational activities, such as sport. The National Solidarity Fund and the National Employment Fund, still under centralised control, have had some successes. They have partly shifted the burden of providence from the state to society. Tunisians dug into their pockets to volunteer what little of their non-disposable income they have to the cause of poverty alleviation, and improvements of the so-called ‘shadow zones’ (bidon-villes), the misery belt suffocating the rich towns and suburbs. But even this system of quid pro quo bread and political deference has failed many Tunisians, leaving many hopeless and jobless.

The state is a control-freak to the point that it disallows the existence of any hint of an informal economy. There is one in Italy - even in America - but not in Tunisia. If the state is partly failing in its provision of jobs, then it is unwise to ban informal trade and work. A youth empowered by education but disempowered by marginalization can be the spark that ignites social upheaval and social tension. In Tunisia, marginalization is today being translated into irrational and tragic suicides.

the notion of ‘total state’ and ‘total politics’ may not be apt for successful social engineering and re-distribution. Total control can translate into loss of control.

it is one of the endless ironies of Turkey that the liberals and democrats who were among the first to oppose the putschists’ sinister attempts to overthrow the A.K.P. government would also become the first to be punished and silenced by that very same government

what we do not know are the effects of the ongoing crackdown on those of us who are “free.” As one commentator wrote on social media, “If all these writers are ‘inside,’ none of the other writers can really said to be ‘outside.’ ”

Since the Arab Spring, I have had many exchanges with writers from “wobbly geographies”—Egypt, Pakistan, Libya, Tunisia. We all know that when you are a novelist from such territories, you do not have the luxury of being apolitical. And although every discipline in the arts is susceptible to degeneration and manipulation under authoritarian regimes, fiction is particularly at risk in such circumstances—prose, rather than poetry. In “The Prevention of Literature,” George Orwell considered the fates of the two genres under nondemocratic rule. A poet could survive despotism relatively unscathed, unhurt, Orwell thought, but not a prose writer, who could neither control nor limit the range of his thoughts without “killing his inventiveness.” Orwell examined the ways in which literature had withered away in Germany, Italy, and Russia whenever autocracy was on the rise. Then he warned future writers, “Poetry might survive in a totalitarian age, and certain arts or half-arts, such as architecture, might even find tyranny beneficial, but the prose writer would have no choice between silence or death.”

At least 97 Yemeni healthcare workers have died from Covid-19 as the disease ravages the war-torn country, according to a report that gives an insight into the true scale of Yemen’s poorly documented outbreak.Yemen, already suffering from a five-year war that has caused the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, has proved uniquely vulnerable to the coronavirus pandemic, according to data published by the medical charity MedGlobal on Thursday.

Yemen’s official total number of cases is 1,610, with 446 deaths, so the high number of healthcare worker casualties outlined by the report suggests the true caseload and mortality figure is far higher. For comparison, in badly hit Italy, where 245,0362 people have caught the virus, 35,073 people have died, including about 100 doctors. Yemen currently has a 27% mortality rate from the disease – more than five times the global average.

In a country where half of all medical facilities are out of action, and aid funding shortfalls are exacerbating the existing malnutrition and cholera crises, the loss of just one medical professional has a devastating exponential effect. About 18% of the country’s 333 districts already have no doctors.

With the coronavirus pandemic further squeezing already scant economic opportunities, Algerians and Tunisians are more determined than ever to reach Europe

authorities arrested 1,433 people trying to depart illegally from Algeria’s shores in the first five months of this year — more than three times the figure for the same period of 2019

The migrants are known locally as “harraga”, “those who burn” — a reference to successful travellers setting their identity papers alight upon reaching their chosen destination, to avoid repatriation