Lina Attalah
Chief Editor
Lina studied journalism at the American University in Cairo. Before joining Al-Masry Al-Youm English Edition, she wrote for Reuters, Cairo Times, the Daily Star, and the Christian Science Monitor, among others. In 2005, she worked as radio producer and campaign coordinator with the BBC World Service Trust in Darfur, Sudan. She also worked as project manager for a number of research-based projects with multi-media outputs around the themes of space, mobility, and intellectual history. Lina is particularly drawn to border areas, where human geography issues of conflict and desire are rampant.
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News
This piece was written for Egypt Independent's final weekly print edition, which was banned from going to press. We offer you our 50th and final edition here.
When I signed my contract with Al-Masry Al-Youm in April four years ago, I was...
Images of the sea and its vociferous waves speak to the uncharted experiences it holds. Images of advertisement billboards in Ramallah speak to a fabricated state of normalcy.
These and some others make of Omar Robert Hamilton’s “...
With dramatic headlines, today’s newspapers agonized over the fires and violence that spread throughout Cairo and beyond following the verdict pronounced on the Port Said football massacre.
The massacre, where 72 Ahly Club fans were killed in...
For more laid-back travelers, Sharm el-Sheikh has been traditionally associated with charter tourism, over-development, loss of uniqueness, and overcrowdedness — the product of intensive, sometimes unchecked investment in the area since the...
Today's papers, like yesterday's, make an industry out of the political polarization between the Muslim Brotherhood and their opposition. With the violence raging in the streets, papers have been doing more than just reporting about it....
PORT SAID — While wall graffiti in Cairo is fixated on the dead, those of Port Said are fixated on the would-be dead.
The faces of Homos, Outa and other defendants from among the ultras of the Port Said football massacre are stencilled on the...
“Today I lost part of my life. Farewell, Samer,” scholar Amr Abdel Rahman wrote of of his longtime friend Samer Soliman, who family, friends, students and readers lost Sunday after a battle with cancer.
Soliman’s death at a...
After long hours of article-by-article voting on the Egyptian constitution by the Constituent Assembly, the draft was passed on early Friday.
The current draft has been submitted to President Mohamed Morsy, who in turn will put it up for a...
Signs of “La,” Arabic for “No,” have already swarmed Facebook profiles and Twitter avatars; a visual reminiscent of the March 2011 Constitutional Declaration thrown out by the then ruling military council, to which many...
President Mohamed Morsy has often celebrated the fact that he has seldom used his legislative powers, using that fact as an index of his care not to abuse his expansive authorities.
Those powers were acquired by the president in August after he...
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Opinion articles
I don’t expect the state to be creative, because power is an end in many ways, and only a threat to power is conducive to the state going outside of its comfort zone.
I don’t expect the state to be creative, because creativity is put...
I spent days grappling with the difficulty of identifying ways of remembering 25 January — and we’re only down to the second anniversary. Every possible story seems to have been told and retold. Barracks have been cast on both...
During the painful Ettehadiya battle earlier this month between Brotherhood supporters and youthful opposition, the violence was not just physical. The scene was also a battlefield of chants. We chanted, “horriya” (freedom). They...
Bashing the Egyptian state for its utter failure in Sinai is no longer news. But some microcosmic incidents still illustrate the state’s impotence in dealing with the tumultuous border area.
Indeed, Sinai can serve as a laboratory in which one...
Amid Egypt's troubled transition, news from Sinai is emerging again, albeit in its old familiar form. Lawlessness is the story of the arid peninsula, which is home to an intricate set of historic, political, social and economic conditions that...
I was recently sipping a cup of tea in Café Riche, Downtown Cairo’s 100-year-old café. I sat next to one of its windows, fenced with interlocking iron wires to close it off from the hurling sounds of the busy heart of town. As I was gazing at the...
