Update: Here is an excerpt from an email sent to me by Italian journalist Silvia Tagliabue:

We have had a strong and courageous fight in Brescia city: five immigrants settled up on a crane for 17 days, stopping the building yard of the local underground.
The police crushing has been hard. To help these comrades, others five immigrants climbed up and settled on a tower in Milan since 5th of November.
During a meeting under the tower between the immigrant’s committees of North of Italy, the Egyptian comrades decided to protest outside the Egyptian consulate in Milan because it was collaborating with Italian Government to catch “illegal immigrants” with a trick. In the last few days about ten comrades have been arrested, detained in CIE (Identification and expulsion Center) and deported to Cairo. One of the leader of Brescia protest has been deported yesterday too. His name is Mohammed “Mimmo”. He’s a very brave and generous comrade.

Below is a video where Mimmo was interviewed:

I don’t know anything about Mimmo’s fate, and whether it went smooth for him yesterday at the Cairo International Airport, or was he detained for further interrogation. It’s important however to note, as Sylvia wrote above, that the Egyptian government seems to be involved in helping Italy round up those Egyptians abroad. I still await more info.

In a stormy meeting with their union representatives, the flight attendants complained from abusive treatment by their bosses:

1-The attendants demanded increasing the value of their health insurance, and to make it include work injuries and diseases not covered by the current one. They are also demanding they see this insurance contract EgyptAir has with Misr Insurance, which the management insists on keeping its documents secret!

2-Those who lose their flight licenses for medical reasons, are transferred to desk jobs, with 50% loss in income. The flight attendants want that changed.

3-The attendants are also charging that management is infested with corruption, and that “flight managers” are chosen according to their personal contacts with senior managers, not according to a specific work regulation or experience.

There will be another meeting for the association on 29 May, where union officials promised they’ll get back to the attendants with answers from the management regarding their demands.

There are between 2000 to 2,500 flight attendants with the govt-owned carrier EgyptAir. The union officials in today’s meeting were not welcoming to the presence of the media, and refused to allow journalists to photograph inside the room. We had to stay outside and follow the meeting through the window. The union officials told the attendants also that they insisted on keeping today’s meeting limited in numbers, though hundreds more wanted to attend, so as not to “disrupt work in the company, and not to stir troubles with the security.”

One of the things I thought was extremely interesting was one flight attendant who stood up during the meeting, shouting angrily at his union officials saying: “If we want to get our rights, we have to act as the textile workers.”

Also, the air-hosts working for EgyptAir will also stage a sit-in tomorrow at their association’s headquarters in Heliopolis.