Category: Blog

700 textile workers on strike in Alex

Posted on By 3arabawy

Seven hundred Alexandrian workers started a strike yesterday at the Syouf Spinning and Weaving Company, protesting the management’s decision to rent out parts of the production units to a private Indian investor. The workers fear the move is the first step towards their mass sacking.

The strikers are also demanding their unpaid bonuses, and are demanding the same 45-day bonus their comrades at Ghazl el-Mahalla received from the government, following their last December strike.

You can read Al-Masry Al-Youm’s report here.

Court upholds Kareem’s 4 year prison sentence

Posted on By 3arabawy

An Alexandrian Appeals court upheld the four year prison sentence given to blogger Kareem Amer, for the crime of “insulting Islam and President Hosni Mubarak.”

Moreover, the court accepted a Hessba case, filed by a fundamentalist lawyer against Kareem. Hessba, as interpreted by the regime’s theologians, gives the right to any Muslim citizen to file a lawsuit or get involved as a party to a legal case, if s/he deems something as an “assault on Islam.” (Yes, this is happening in Mubarak’s Egypt, whose regime the Western governments like to describe as “secularist.”)

UPDATE: Kareem’s defense team denounced the trial in a statement.