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 [...]

OK, here’s a somewhat better story on a pretty depressing day. The chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, tried to put a hold on foreign aid to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. It was a manifestation of the same old AIPAC-driven politics, where the US acts punitively toward one side [...]

Despite widespread reports of abuse and troubling signs of suppressing dissent, the Egyptian military will get their US funding restored, at least in part. The State Department plans to make the announcement today. The United States supplies Egypt with $1.3 billion in military aid, plus another $250 million in economic assistance. Congress included language in [...]

Two major year-end pieces of legislation were readied yesterday, and in this case, House and Senate negotiators reached agreement on the measures, expecting to pass them by the end of the week. First, appropriators agreed to a $1 trillion omnibus spending bill covering the rest of the fiscal year (to September 30 of next year) [...]

For the next several months, every public appearance by a member of the Obama national security team will be accompanies by a warning about how allowing triggered cuts to the Defense Department would threaten the United States. The amount of cuts, combined with the up-front cuts in the debt limit deal, aren’t even as much [...]

Leon Panetta is absolutely trying to set up Pakistan publicly. Yesterday he said in an interview that the US never told Pakistan about the forthcoming mission into Abbottabad to kill bin Laden because they would have tipped him off. Implicit in that statement is the idea that at least some Pakistani officials knew where bin [...]

The military airdrops of seawater onto the Fukushima Daiichi plant continued throughout the day today, and Tokyo Electric Power Co. was nearing completion on a new power line that would restore the cooling systems in the reactors. The outlook remains bleak after a week of crisis, but Japanese officials appear to have settled on a [...]

Here’s what the President managed to put out regarding the shameless murder of citizens today in Bahrain, Libya and Yemen: I am deeply concerned by reports of violence in Bahrain, Libya and Yemen. The United States condemns the use of violence by governments against peaceful protesters in those countries and wherever else it may occur. [...]

First of all, great work by Christiane Amanpour to get this interview. We don’t have the transcript or video yet and can only go by her recollection of events, but a few things jump out at me: • Mubarak blamed the Muslim Brotherhood for yesterday’s violence. That’s an answer designed for a Western audience, particularly [...]

The state TV interview with Egyptian Vice President Omar Suleiman was kind of a joke. Suleiman rejected the early departure of Hosni Mubarak from the government due to the risk to “stability and security” (because Egypt looks so stable). He intimated that satellite TV stations like Al Jazeera “are arousing you against your country.” He [...]

An Obama Administration official told Reuters that they would “review” the $1.5 billion in annual aid sent to Egypt, in the wake of anti-government protests across the country. That doesn’t mean that anything will come of this in terms of actual reductions or eliminations in foreign aid, at least not right away. But just saying [...]