the bbc blog is updating quite regularly.
BBC News - Egypt unrest
the column on the left aggregates information from various wire services and twitter and other sources...it's less repetitive than twitter so easier to follow and get a sense of things that are happening (as opposed to getting a sense of how instant reactions are forming amongst people you cannot see or know anything about...twitter is so so strange). the attempt to eliminate observers is proceeding pretty systematically it seems. and there have been arrests of people associated with the protest leadership. surveillance is obvious excedingly high.
===
my friend could, i think, use all the energy and hopes directed her way. this is a scary moment.
it is a hall of mirrors, the information-scape around cairo.
the gap between what appears granular from the various perspectives that make it onto al jazeera, for example, and the micro-situations in a particular block of cairo just around the corner from where the cameras are...it's a chasm. and the information-scape is full of them.
what we know, what we don't....the boundary is so intimate. al jaz uses cameras that are high up and wide angle, so you get an overview; they use telephotos to narrow the field. i just saw a tank wheel around moving from one brown geometrical space toward another; black shapes that correspond to human beings moving out of the way...armored personnel carriers and a wave of people rushing forward that might be happening now or might have happened yesterday or both. you're there but you don't know anything. you're watching like a little god except that you can't reach through, can't change anything. you're just watching.
i couldn't point out on a map where my friend is exactly. there's stuff happening outside her building that isn't on camera. when i look at the gmail chat list i can see that she's online--but she said something about sending an email, presumably about hamdy and the others (who?) that were arrested this morning by the military from her apartment/circle. so i don't bother her. there's chasms in the most intimate of spaces. sometimes they feel every bit the size of the bigger ones that separate what's in frame from what's out.
in the end, though, she's the one in danger. not me. i just watch.
finally people in congress are starting to talk openly about cutting off the money that the united states has given mubarak. but i don't know what'll happen from that.
it's all very strange. disconcerting. i think most things are like this for someone or another. this one just happens to involve me at a remove. not much of a remove, really, but still.