Egyptian court sets November 4 trial date for ousted President Morsi

An Egyptian court has set November 4 for the trial of ousted President Mohamed Morsi along with 14 other senior Muslim Brotherhood figures on charges of inciting the murder of protesters. On December 5, 2012, an estimated 12 people were killed in clashes in front of the presidential palace sparked by Morsi’s decree expanding executive powers. He is additionally facing charges for insulting the Egyptian judiciary, according to state media. Morsi has been held in a secret location since he was overthrown by a military coup on July 3. The military-backed government has since launched a severe crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood.

Syria

The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) said on Tuesday it will send a second team of inspectors to Syria. The OPCW, tasked with overseeing the elimination of Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal, said it has made "a constructive beginning" to "a long and difficult process." The experts are expected to arrive in Damascus on Wednesday, but the size of the new team is unclear. They will supplement the efforts of the 19 inspectors that began work last week, only some of whom are expected to remain in Syria. Syrian state television has released video purportedly showing two inspectors examining an undisclosed site. Meanwhile, clashes broke out on Tuesday between rebel fighters and government forces near a strategic supply route to Aleppo, which had been reopened over the weekend. Additionally, opposition fighters and Assad’s forces are fighting in Idlib Province over a large military base. 

Headlines

• According to U.S. officials Tuesday, the Obama administration is planning to suspend most financial aid to Egypt, however, the White House said "reports that we are halting all military assistance to Egypt are false."
• Britain and Iran are moving to repair diplomatic channels announcing they will appoint non-resident charge d’affairs and work toward reopening their embassies.
• A Turkish appeals court upheld the convictions of 237 military officers charged for a 2003 plot to overthrow the government, but overturned the convictions of 88 others.
• Libyan Prime Minister Ali Zeidan is seeking Western assistance to curb the spread of militants and expansion of weapons proliferation and transfer.

Arguments and Analysis

‘Gulf Cities Emerge As New Centers of Arab World‘ (Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi, Al-Monitor)

"An old Arab saying goes, ‘Cairo writes, Beirut publishes and Baghdad reads.’ These three capitals, along with Damascus, were long the hubs of culture and education in the Arab world. Arabs from across the region flocked to these cities to study and work. Sculptures such as the 1958 Monument of Freedom in Baghdad by the great Iraqi artist Jawad Salim and ‘Egypt’s Renaissance,’ unveiled in 1928 in Giza by the pioneering artist Mahmoud Mokhtar, embodied the ambitions of these Arab cities.

However, over the past few years, as these traditional Arab capitals became more embroiled in civil strife, a new set of cities started to emerge in the Gulf, establishing themselves as the new centers of the Arab world. Abu Dhabi, its sister emirates of Dubai and Sharjah and the Qatari capital, Doha, have developed as the nerve center of the contemporary Arab world’s culture, commerce, design, architecture, art and academia, attracting hundreds of thousands of Arab immigrants, including academics, businessmen, journalists, athletes, artists, entrepreneurs and medical professionals. While these Gulf cities may be unable to compete with their Arab peers in terms of political dynamism, in almost every other sense they have far outstripped their sister cities in North Africa and the Levant."

‘History reconstructed: Rival realities in Egypt‘ (Sarah Carr, Mada Masr)

"On Sunday, October 6, Egyptians were invited to take to the streets to celebrate Egypt’s victory against Israel in 1973. While people are intensely proud of this day (one in the eye for Israel), in ordinary times citizens usually celebrate it on the beach.

But these are not ordinary times, and on Sunday the army mobilized the people to celebrate the army mobilizing its troops and defeating Israel 40 years ago as a way of saluting the military on winning a war on terrorism that is still ongoing and correcting the path of Egypt’s toddling infant democracy by rescuing it from the clutches of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The celebrations were a jouissance of passionate nationalism and adulation for army chief Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who on July 3 unseated former President Mohamed Morsi and since then has promised that the military wants no say in political affairs. Egyptian citizens in Tahrir Square thought differently on Sunday, and were gathering signatures insisting that Sisi nominate himself for president. There was very little mention of the October War anywhere.

Sisi himself looked out from posters plastered on tanks, in between people’s hands and on their t-shirts. Near a row of tanks with flowers in their canons behind barbed wire, civilians lined up to look, and next to them hundreds of Sisis were for sale on the ground where in years past vendors sold revolution merchandise, overlooked by walls where layers upon faded layers of graffiti fight for space, each seeping into and obscuring the other, the blood of dead enemy soldiers mixed on a battlefield."

–Mary Casey & Joshua Haber