Live blogging the Egypt uprising: Jan. 30
Events in Egypt are moving so fast, with so much information, speculation, and disinformation flying around, that I'm going to take another shot at live blogging. The key takeaway from today (Jan. 30) so far is that the military continues to tolerate protests, and protesters have not in any way been mollified by Hosni Mubarak's shuffling of his cabinet and appointment of his first-ever vice president, Omar Suleiman.
5:00 p.m. EST (12:00 a.m. Cairo) SIGNING OFF live blog blogging for today. I probably won't be doing this tomorrow, since I'm helping to write a cover story for our magazine on events in Egypt and am still hoping to take off for Cairo on Tuesday. (I fear that flights will still be screwy, though.) I plan to post a piece later this evening reflecting on the protests that drove Soeharto from power in 1998 – I covered them and lived in Indonesia for 10 years – and similarities to the unfolding events in Egypt.
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Staff writer
Dan Murphy is a staff writer for the Monitor's international desk, focused on the Middle East. Murphy, who has reported from Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, and more than a dozen other countries, writes and edits Backchannels. The focus? War and international relations, leaning toward things Middle East.
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4:46 p.m. EST (11:46 p.m. Cairo) US ACADEMICS WEIGH IN. Josh Stacher, a friend and really sharp follower of Egypt's politics at Kent State, forwards this open letter to President Obama signed by about 100 mostly US-based academics. "Tens if not hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in Egypt and around the world have spoken. We believe their message is bold and clear: Mubarak should resign from office and allow Egyptians to establish a new government free of his and his family’s influence. It is also clear to us that if you seek, as you said Friday 'political, social, and economic reforms that meet the aspirations of the Egyptian people,' your administration should publicly acknowledge those reforms will not be advanced by Mubarak or any of his adjutants."
4:35 p.m. EST (11:35 p.m. Cairo) THE US IS PREPARING for post-Mubarak Egypt says this piece from the Los Angeles Times. Marc Lynch says on his Twitter feed the drift of the piece "sounds right." Well, that's a good enough endorsement for me. "One former senior administration adviser said he had spoken to his old colleagues inside the Obama administration in recent days about the unrest in Egypt. As early as last Wednesday, the Obama administration recognized that they would not be able to prop up the Mubarak regime and keep it in power at all costs, the former official said. 'They don't want to push Mubarak over the cliff, but they understand that the Mubarak era is over and that the only way Mubarak could be saved now is by a ruthless suppression of the population, which would probably set the stage for a much more radical revolution down the road.' "
3:20 p.m. EST (10:20 p.m. Cairo) VIDEO OF THE F-16 FLYOVER at Tahrir Square, via Wael Abbas. A second video follows:
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