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The brutal attack came during the early hours of 3 February, and with it, what Abdel Kader describes as “a wake-up call. I realized these weren’t a bunch of sissy kids, and that they weren’t just having fun. They were fighting for something, and they were putting up a brave fight.”   Abdel Kader pauses before continuing. “They were willing to die for what they believed in, and I was fighting them because I had been paid LE200. The thought of it broke my heart.”

“I am a drug dealer,” he admits. “I am not going to deny it. But I am only a drug dealer because the police bullied me into becoming one.”

“They threw me in jail to show me what it would be like, and then took me back out so I could sell their drugs for them.”

In a statement on their Facebook page that has some 255,000 followers, Ultras Ahlawy said last week that it would defy the spectator ban in the match against Ismaily  to deliver a message to “all remnants of the ousted regime” that they would not obey their “manipulated regime.” In their statement, the ultras said: “The issue is bigger than football. We want to settle the score with remnants of the former regime, under the leadership of Samir Zaher, and their oppression of Egyptian youth.” UWK issued a similar statement saying that “we suffered a lot from injustice and repression in the past, but we stood up to that with pride. We fought with all our might to maintain our principles and freedom. We thought justice and freedom would come after our revolution. We will continue in our defense of freedom even with our blood. Our war with the EFA will continue until we win and see the corrupt people in prison.”

As the frontline in the ‘Battle of the Dakhliya (interior ministry)’ or alternatively dubbed the Battle of Mohammed Mahmoud – the epicenter of the confrontation just off Tahrir Square -- moved at times closer to and then further away from the ministry, Chinese-made motorcycles carried the wounded to safety. Shamarikh, the controversial, colored fireworks employed by the ultras during soccer matches lit up the sky at night replacing street lights that had been turned off. Theirs was as much a battle for karama or dignity as it was part of the fight to hold the military to its pledge to lead the country to democracy. Their dignity is vested in their ability to stand up to the dakhliya, the knowledge that they no longer can be abused by security forces without recourse and the fact that they no longer have to pay off each and every policemen to stay out of trouble.

It's the same old problem for us in the West. We mouth the word "democracy" and we are all for fair elections – providing the Arabs vote for whom we want them to vote for.

For years, this wretched man had been talking about a "slow liberalising" of his country. But all dictators know they are in greatest danger when they start freeing their entrapped countrymen from their chains.

The torture chambers will keep going. We will maintain our good relations with the dictators. We will continue to arm their armies and tell them to seek peace with Israel. And they will do what we want. Ben Ali has fled. The search is now on for a more pliable dictator in Tunisia – a "benevolent strongman" as the news agencies like to call these ghastly men. And the shooting will go on – as it did yesterday in Tunisia – until "stability" has been restored. No, on balance, I don't think the age of the Arab dictators is over. We will see to that.

Maybe Ben Ali will continue urging his security forces to redouble their efforts, but cooler heads in the police and army ought to be telling him (if they are not doing so already) that there is now only one action that can quell the riots: the departure of Ben Ali himself.

نجح بن علي في تحجيم المعارضة لكنه فشل في خنقها. كذلك، أخفق في تجسيد حلم سلفه المجاهد الأكبر، الحبيب بورقيبة، بتحويل الاتحاد العام التونسي للشغل إلى "نقابة صفراء"، فاحتفظ هذا التنظيمُ، على تواطؤ زعامته مع الحكومة، بهامش حرية يمكنُّه من معارضتها أحيانا، كما بقي مجالَ نشاط رئيسي لليسار. لهذا رأينا أعضاءه يساندون الحركة الشعبية لا بالاعتصامات والتجمعات فحسب (منها اثنان أمام مقرها العام بالعاصمة في 25 ديسمبر و7 يناير الماضيين)، لكن أيضا بنشر أخبارها في الفضائيات ووكالات الأنباء، التي تستقي أغلب معلوماتها من "مصادر نقابية". صحيحٌ أن زعامةَ الاتحاد ساندت ترشيح بن علي للرئاسة في 2004 و2009 لكنَّ كثيرا من كوادرها وقيادات هيئاتها الوسيطة (النقابات القطاعية والإقليمية) شاركت في المعارك الديمقراطية للسنوات الأخيرة. راديكاليةُ هذه الكوادر والضغوط التي تمارسها على قيادة النقابة هي إحدى تفسيرات ضمّ هذه القيادة صوتَها لصوت المعارضين المطالبين بوقف القمع وفتح باب الحريات (بيانا 4 يناير و11 يناير).

In a remarkable shift, the police, previously the enforcers of Mr. Ben Ali’s rule, organized a protest of their own on the city’s central artery, Bourguiba Boulevard. They wore red armbands in solidarity with the revolution, complained that Mr. Ben Ali and his family had put cronies in charge of the security forces and demanded a trade union that could negotiate for higher wages. Tunisians were stunned to see police officers, once silent and terrifying, complaining about their working conditions in interviews with Al Jazeera.

“The most rapid revolution in history,” he wrote. “Because we are connected. Synchronized.”

As it torments what before it had appeared as solid, immovable authority, a revolution also contests established knowledge.

a longing is not an act, and a general condition of unhappiness does not predict any specific action

If revolutions could be predicted, they would never happen: the science that does this work of prediction would immediately become the science of government. The fact that regimes are always on the lookout for opposition does not mean that they know in what way they will meet their end.

«Thawretna Thawrat Zawali, Lé Sebsi we Lé Jebali»

leur choix de rejoindre le nouveau parti ne correspond pas aux espérances créées par le soulèvement qui a mis fin à la dictature de la bande de Ben Ali

Caïd Essebsi a déjà réussi à créer une rupture politique au sein même du large conglomérat imprécis qualifié de laïque par les médias et par certains intellectuels

We secured ourselves and our connections, but I can tell you in many cases we didn’t for different reasons: slow connections, the need to update from a public device, etc. Luckily, the state security were not that smart, because I know ways in which they could have pinpointed our location and identity, but they didn't. Even the arrest of Wael Ghonim, as far as I know, was not related to his Khaled Said activity; it was something that was discovered during their interrogation of him on a different matter.

During the revolution I was the only person using their real account to administer the page, so I was terrified and took extra measures

Facebook in Egypt is very limited in its outreach. You can only reach certain areas (mostly neighborhoods in Cairo and Alexandria) and a certain segment (the middle class youths). We had only around 400,000 members on the page, mostly from Giza and the surrounding region, and mostly in their twenties and 30s. This is a very homogeneous group, but, clearly, given some conditions, they can start something significant.

Tunisia's president has left power for good, the president of the country's Constitutional Court said Saturday, declaring that the leader of the lower house of parliament will assume power until elections are held in two months.

Constitutional Council President Fethi Abdennadher said Saturday that Ben Ali has permanently vacated his position and lawmaker Fouad Mebazaa has up to 60 days to organize new elections.

Overnight, public television station TV7 broadcast phone calls from residents of working-class neighborhoods on the capital's outskirts, recounting attacks against their homes by knife-wielding assailants.Ghannouchi — who held power for less than 24 hours — told TV stations overnight that he had ordered the army and other security forces to intervene immediately in those neighborhoods.

One key factor was missing, though, at least early on. Al Jazeera has played a vital, instrumental role in framing this popular narrative by its intense, innovative coverage of Tunisia and its explicit broadening of that experience to the region. Its coverage today has been frankly baffling, though. During the key period when the protests were picking up steam, Al Jazeera aired a documentary cultural program on a very nice seeming Egyptian novelist and musical groups, and then to sports. Now (10:30am EST) it is finally covering the protests in depth, but its early lack of coverage may hurt its credibility. I can't remember another case of Al Jazeera simply punting on a major story in a political space which it has owned.

More broadly, it's astonishing how much is now in motion in Arab politics after such a long period of seeming stagnation. There's a vivid sense of an era coming to a close and an uncertain new vista opening. Even if Al Jazeera's release of the so-called "Palestine Papers" doesn't bring down Abu Mazen's negotiating team or the PA it feels like the autopsy of a long-dead peace process. Hezbollah's Parliamentary maneuver to bring down the Hariri government and replace him with veteran politician and businessman Najib Miqati, a response to the Special Tribunal's reported indictments which has sparked violent protests by Hariri backers, may mean an end to the era of U.S. alliance with a March 14-led Lebanon. It's hard to know where to focus --- but in fact I continue to see these seemingly unrelated events as part of a broader story of the crumbling of an Arab status quo which has long seemed unsustainable.

3pm:  Al-Jazeera's lack of coverage of the protests has become a major story.   It doesn't seem to have gotten any better since this morning --- since getting back on line I've seen an episode of a talk show, more Palestine Papers, and only short snippets of breaking news on Egypt.  Al-Arabiya apparently hasn't done any better.  My Twitter feed and email are full of comments like "AJ Arabic is covering childrens gymnastics programs in Indonesia right now. Good call." (@mwhanna1) and "Exposed. Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya's failure in covering #Jan25" (@SultanAlQassemi).   Egyptian activists are complaining bitterly, and most seem to think that Mubarak cut a deal with the Qatari and Saudi governments. 

He said France was so close to Tunisia that it had been unable to stand back and see the situation clearly. "Behind the emancipation of women, the drive for education and training, the economic dynamism, the emergence of a middle class, there was a despair, a suffering, a sense of suffocation. We have to recognise that we underestimated it," Sarkozy said.

A former colonial power should never "make judgments" on the internal workings of countries that once made up its empire

Tunisia basically has a choice ahead: whether to continue as the IMF’s, the World Bank’s and Europe’s alleged best pupil in the Arab classroom, with the mixed resultsthat are plain for everyone to see, or to decide for itself, according to its own interests and sovereign decisions, what path and what policies to adopt, whether it be in the foreign policy, domestic policy or economic policy fields. Tunisia can chose to be like Turkey, Brazil, India or Malaysia, or it can pursue in its post-colonial striving for acceptance and the occasional pat on the head by its Western partners, a path followed by Jordan or Morocco with limited success.

For all practical purposes, this is the kind of government that Benali could have appointed himself had he had more brains – his last speech actually outlined exactly this sort of government, and he actually met with some opposition members before being deposed.

The Tunisian people have ousted the dictator, but they haven’t yet got rid of his institutional and political legacy. This is just the beginning, if democracy is to take hold.

in a post-9/11 world, any non-state actor caught throwing a stone, be it the first stone or the thousandth, risks total warfare under the guise of counterinsurgency

Mass, sustained civil disobedience at the corporate headquarters of insurance 'providers' and banks and petrol companies remains a long way off. Instead, Koch-funded campaigns continue to succeed at electing Republican governors who then refuse federal money to build high-speed rail networks . (See Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, and more to come. Special shoutout to New Jersey.) When Americans begin to thirst for health care, re-pedestrianised cities, and the return of usury laws with the same fervor that Egyptians have shown in clamouring for democracy and the rule of law, only then will we know the revolution is here.

The coming constitutional showdown between human law and divine law in the revolutionary Arab states may turn on the question of gay rights and sexual freedom generally

Before the revolution, men didn't have their rights and would take out the injustice they felt on women. If all Egyptians have their human rights, women's rights will be achieved

As a result of taking part in the revolution, Egyptian women now see themselves as equal to men and have the confidence to demand their rights. We've proved that we can organise and effect change and the challenge for us and all Egyptians is to make sure extremists don't take control

All this means nothing, however, to 25-year-old Hemmat Ahmed, who sells vegetables on a wooden cart at the side of a busy Cairo road. "I stand here from 0600 every day to feed my children and I earn more money than my husband, who doesn't have a regular job. I left school and went to work when I was eight years old, but I'll make sure my children get an education, even if I have to beg for it." She has no faith in the political system and thinks that the new president, whoever it may be, will continue to steal the country's riches. "At least Hosni Mubarak was full from 30 years of robbery. "People will soon be back in Tahrir because nothing will change. There are no jobs, no good salaries, I can't even afford oil and sugar anymore. "All I dream of is to have a home and some new clothes for my children."

plenty of commentators are drawing direct comparisons between the current events and the collapse of the eastern bloc. This approach performs an ideological function, in that it discursively integrates the current upheaval into a pre-existing approved ideological narrative – the dictatorships of the Middle East are merely the latest in a long line of tyrannies to have been undermined by the relentless march of progress and liberal democracy. Thus these upheavals represent further confirmation of the moral and organisational superiority of the western order.

The dynamic of change in countries such as Egypt is much more radical. In Marxist terms, the "political revolution" (reorganisation of the political institutions and changes among the leading state personnel) threatens to carry over into a "social revolution" (a more far-reaching reconfiguration of social relations and of the economic system). This can be seen in the way the focus of struggle, post-Mubarak, has shifted from Tahrir Square to the political-economic space of factories as workers organise strikes, articulate demands that are both political and economic, and start to challenge the power of Egypt's "little Mubaraks" – the country's economic elites. The revolution is deepening and taking on a definite class dynamic.

the pressures which are driving the revolts in north Africa are just as much systemic, economic ones as they are to do with political repression in Arab states

The Henry Jackson Society, the London-based foreign-policy think tank where I work, has spent the last several weeks investigating the Syrian opposition and talking to key figures in six major cities in upheaval. The evidence suggests that this revolution is the most liberal and Western-friendly of any of the Arab Spring uprisings. That it's also the least supported by the West is a tragedy.

The six oppositionists we spoke to in Syria all regarded the revolution as a confessionally and tribally unified endeavor. The sectarianism, they said, was wholly on Assad's side. Even Kurds have marched under the Syrian flag, something unthinkable in years past. Indeed, May 27 was nicknamed "Azadi Friday" for a Kurdish word meaning freedom, underscoring the solidarity that exists between Syrian Arabs and a long-oppressed tribal minority. The oppositionist in Hama, Syria's fourth-largest city, assured us that Christians had joined in Friday prayers at the Great Mosque in that city. "Druze, Sunni, Alawite and Kurd—we will never stop," echoed our source in Homs, in western Syria.

Signed by 150 oppositionists both inside Syria and in exile, the statement echoes the demands of the coordinating committees but also addresses how to transition Syria from a totalitarian dictatorship to a pluralist democracy. It's explicitly based on the Eastern European, Latin American, and South African models