No Real Estate Taxation Without Representation?

Some Background

Something potentially important just happened in Egypt. President Hosni Mubarak personally announced that a planned new real estate tax, expected to come into effect this year, would be postponed until after upcoming elections. This came after the bill had provoked a furious outcry in both parliament and the press. While the decision has garnered plenty of hot air and a fair amount of righteous indignation, we haven’t seen much analysis of the decision’s longer term implications, which is what we aim to provide.

TBE Assignments Editor

The Muslim Brotherhood's favorite bank?

Dear Foreign Correspondents,

It’s a journalistic and academic commonplace to maintain that the Muslim Brotherhood derives some (or a lot) of support by providing social services for the poor-middle classes.

It’s also a journalistic and academic commonplace to maintain that the government is heavily involved in licensing and generally sticking its nose in everything. And it’s not exactly possible to run a medical clinic or whatever in secret, even if you’re totally deمحظورة out like مظاهر محظورة . (That’s a Kriss Kross reference.)

Where these two common places overlap lies an interesting story angle.

Bonus incentive: Al-Baradei will return on the 19th, and you’ll surely get a story out of it. But between now and then nothing is likely to happen that will get your name in the newspaper/magazine.

The Mazloom Files

In these dark days, (Muhammad) Mazloom Street is living up to its name. A series of unfortunate and strange events have plagued the street, making locals wonder whether the street is cursed, writes our correspondent.

Time For A Journalism Ethics Panel?

TBE doesn’t usually engage in journalism, much less (open source) investigative journalism, but sometimes we decide not to simply pass a story on to someone else, as we usually would.

This tale begins with our catching up on some reading. We were looking at some neglected feeds on our RSS reader and came to Stephen Walt’s FP blog. Innocently scrolling down we came to a post about an Iran conference convened by the Israel Project, a US propaganda outfit that toes the “stopping settlements is “a kind of ethnic cleansing”” line, according to J Street. Not having attended the conference, we don’t know what was said. But if the materials on the group’s website are any indication, it was probably quite similar to a little ditty sung by former presidential candidate John McCain in one of his more unguarded moments. None of this is altogether shocking in a US context.

What did surprise us, however, was a panel, “How to Get Published and Write a Letter to the Editor with journalist and Reuters Editor Alan Elsner.” Why, we wondered, would an editor at Reuters, which, as far as we know, hews to US journalistic standards of objectivity, lead a panel at a conference run by a group that is almost certainly attempting to influence the coverage of the news organization for which he works? A quick google news search indicates that he is an editor at Reuters’ Washington, DC bureau. Past postings, according to his personal website, have included stints as Jerusalem correspondent (1980-85) and chief political correspondent (1994-2000).

With those facts in mind, and lacking any contact information for Mr. Elsner himself, we contacted Reuters’ public relations department. After a little back-and-forth, we received the following email:

TBE Saves Journalism

"Even if now she got a perm..."

TBE has long been fascinated by the way information spreads in settings, like Egypt, where the media tends to focus on official utterances and big scandals and events, with very little attention paid to more localized developments, both at the neighborhood level and in localities outside the capital or other major cities. A generalization, to be sure, but we think the reception of the exceptions, like Pakinam Amer’s great reporting in the aftermath of the Naga Hamadi murders, and this story we translated a while back, prove the rule.

Verily the Boursa Exchange was started as a means of remedying this sorry lack of local news, as a fake newspaper providing coverage of Boursa events, though we readily admit we’ve strayed quite far from our original mission statement. Anyway, the immediate occasion for this rueminiscence was the news that al-Masri al-Youm has started publishing an Alexandria edition, with al-Shorouk’s set to start on February 1^st, a welcome development in the Egyptian media scene and one that we hope will continue. And we’ve got a brilliant idea how to “git r done,” as our mentor Larry the Cable Guy would say.

Local Developments: Downtown

As promised yesterday, we’re back with some important Downtown news.

Supermarket Sweep

WILL SHOP 4 FOOD.

Local Developments: Zamalek

This post has been on hold forever because our camera’s been on the fritz. Special thanks to TBE reader “Sara(h) Smith,” without whose intercession we would never have been able to finally bring you these no-longer-breaking developments, whose importance remains undiminished.

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Another One Bites the Dust

It's difficult to take a photo of something that's not there.

Downtown Architectural Preservation

Here is a screencap. Complete document coming soon.

Thanks to the good offices of the indefatigable Humphrey Davies, who not only translates novels but also keeps an eye on the Official Gazette of Egypt, TBE has learned that the government, in a move that can only be described as laudable, has set aside a large number of Cairo’s buildings and villas for architectural preservation. We weren’t able to find a copy of the Gazette on the government’s website, and the file is rather too large to post here, but will post a link if we find one, or send a copy via email to interested parties.

Some details after the jump.

Introducing… al-Masri al-Yum

Photo Credit: Nadim Audi

TBE is branching out. Like all of our blog ideas, the new one began when we thought of a clever play on words. In this case, al-Masri al-Yum. As you might’ve guessed, this new venture will focus exclusively on food.

Since the site is still in beta, and to forestall accusations of postlessness, we’ve cross-posted all the old TBE items dealing with the culinary arts to the new site. We haven’t yet decided whether we’ll continue posting food-related content on the main site, or put them exclusively on our new “Dining & Wine (You should be imagining drop shadows on this title)” site. Probably the latter.

Also, we’re hiring. So if you’ve got a bevy of food and bevvie pitches at the ready, please don’t hesitate to email us at almasrialyum@gmail.com.

Get Elected; or, al-Baradei Tryin’ (Omnibus)

Not no Parkay, not no margarine...

As promised, TBE is now publishing the full al-Baradei interview – straight, no chaser – in one convenient place. We’re terribly sorry that TBE doesn’t have a “print view” to facilitate reading it on your commute back to Matareyya or Grosvenor or wherever. May we suggest this brilliant application, which renders almost any texty web page printer-friendly?