Protests and attacks continued at Western embassies across the Middle East and North Africa today, and at this point they have little relationship to the anti-Muslim film “The Innocence of Muslims.” A reporter for the Times of London asked protesters outside the US Embassy in Sanaa, Yemen, yesterday if they watched the clip of the [...]

Given the mysteries of the Benghazi attacks on the US consulate (not an embassy, and not an entity that was guarded by Marines, apparently), I’m going to step lightly before attributing any Middle East incident to anything else in a direct through-line. But we do know that riots/protests/attacks are proliferating. Today they have spread to [...]

We can discuss why protesters decided to kill four American diplomatic personnel in Benghazi, Libya. The stated impetus concerns a badly produced movie displaying insensitivity toward Mohammed and Islam. In reality, this may have been a last straw for populations angered by anti-Islamism coming from the United States. I would expect that to be a [...]

A tragedy in Libya provoked by a film insulting Islam has turned into an attempt by Mitt Romney to take umbrage with the White House. The US Ambassador to Libya and three other Americans were killed in Benghazi at an attack on the US consulate, hit by a rocket-propelled grenade as they tried to flee. [...]

Egypt’s President, the Muslim Brotherhood-backed Mohammed Morsi, sacked Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi and set in motion a series of other orders expanding the power of the Presidency and curbing the power of the military. This is basically the resumption of a battle for power that has consumed Egypt since the revolution, when Hosni Mubarak was [...]

Thousands of protesters have returned to Tahrir Square after a series of decrees from the ruling military government that grabbed more power, dissolved the current Parliament and de-emphasized the role of the President in the government. The moves threatened to extinguish hopes of a new dawn after the Egyptian revolution, and the revolutionaries have responded [...]

As the situation in Greece is just too depressing to contemplate, let’s divert our attention for a moment to the other two big global elections yesterday. In France, Francois Hollande’s Socialists took an absolute majority in Parliament, meaning Hollande will have a fairly easy time implementing his agenda. The question that will now be answered [...]

The fear of unrest and chaos related to the results of the first round of the Egyptian Presidential election has already been realized. The offices of Ahmed Shafiq, the former Air Force General and Hosni Mubarak’s last Prime Minister, who finished second in the voting and made the runoff, burned last night. The presidential campaign [...]

What many see as the worst-case scenario for the Egyptian elections has come to pass, with the first round ending in the most polarizing result: The runoff vote for Egypt’s next president will pit the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate against the last prime minister to serve under Hosni Mubarak, according to full official results released Monday [...]

Official results in the historic Egyptian Presidential elections will not be revealed until Monday. But based on early returns and exit polls, it looks increasingly like a runoff will ensue, with the choice coming down to a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hosni Mubarak’s former Prime Minister. The Guardian has the best rundown of [...]

It is not going to be fun watching Kofi Annan get increasingly exasperated over the next week. Annan, the former UN Secretary-General, delivered a cease-fire agreement in the Syrian uprising, to which the Assad regime signed off. However, ever since the signing, the violence has continued, including today, with renewed assaults by military forces on [...]