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Politics/headline
news
Home sweet home
A handful of the Egyptians who were among the 1200 or so people --
mostly Muslims and Arabs -- being held without charges in US jails
since the September 11 terrorist
attacks, under suspicion of either being involved or having some
information that could benefit the US authorities, have returned
home. Two young men -- one from Nasr City, the other from
Alexandria, both taking classes at flight schools in the US -- came
home from the States on the same plane as Egyptian Foreign Minister
Ahmed Maher, who was in Washington and New York on a diplomatic
mission earlier in the week, reports Al-Wafd on its front page on
Thursday. Al-Ahram puts the number of returnees at four. Egyptian
authorities have been trying to secure the release of the Egyptians
amongst those incarcerated, and still have a lot of work ahead of
them.
(December 6, 2001)
Traffic
Will
monitors help?
Cairo's traffic police now have an added tool in their
quest to solve the city's seemingly insolvable traffic problems. A
high-tech traffic control center went into operation last week,
featuring 17 cameras filming roads 24 hours a day, and being watched
by a monitoring unit, which should help police locate trouble spots
and send over the necessary resources to redirect traffic to less
crowded routes. Al-Ahram recently headlined a story on the new
center "The Capital in a quandary", reporting that 1.5
million cars crowd the city's streets on a daily basis, even though
the streets themselves only have a capacity for a half million cars.
"In 10 years, if the third metro line isn't built, the streets
will completely stand still," the story warns.
(December 6, 2001)
Movies
Hollywood on
the Suez?
Actor Ahmed Zaki -- who seems to have decided to dedicate
himself to major national film projects like the life stories of
Egypt's presidents Gamal Abdel-Nasser and Anwar
Sadat (he played both with equal panache) is now trying to put
together a major epic on the 1973 October War between Egypt and
Israel. An item on the back page of Al-Ahram claims that Zaki wants
to make the production so big that he is actually trying to get
Michael Bay -- who directed the Holywood blockbuster Pearl Harbor --
to help out with the film's battle scenes, which will encompass some
30 minutes of the movie's duration. It is a well-known fact that Bay's
epic Pearl Harbor was one of the most expensive films ever made
by Hollywood, and was a relative disappointment for Bay and the
studios at the box office. Will the Egyptian October War epic be his
comeback film? One can onl
(December 6, 2001)
Music
Too much
Shaaban
The Shura Council's Media Committee, reports Al-Wafd, is upset that
shaabi singer Shaaban Abdel-Rehim appeared on 6 different talk shows
in just one week during Ramadan. Sahaaban does not represent a high
value cultural product, argued some of the deputies, that should get
so much coverage on state-run TV. The deputies felt that allowing Shaaban's
voice and opinions to be heard by every Egyptian home in such
volumes would certainly lower the cultural thresholds of people's
minds. Amongst Shaabola's harshest critics were popular columnists
Salah Montasser and Sekina Fouad.
(December 6, 2001)
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