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.
Contributions
News
“The catching of the three [infiltrators] occurred in the early morning, a few tens of meters from the border, inside the Egyptian territory. We guarded the three a few hours and afterwards we marched them along the border, on the Egyptian...
In a fictional scoop shortly before the presidential election, the daily newspaper Al-Dostour revealed a nefarious plot by the Muslim Brotherhood to dismantle the state.
Al-Dostour renewed its smear campaign a few days later after Brotherhood...
When the late Basseem Nabki, a Christian man of Syrian descent, sold shawls and scarves in the popular quarter of Moski in Al-Azhar area of Cairo in the first part of the 20th century, he acquired a nom de guerre, Hag Hussein. The more Egyptian and...
Towards the end of the presidential elections, Egypt Independent met with a group of nine young activists to take stock of the revolution. Recent developments have been less than kind to them and those who have for the past 17 months demanded...
Manei Mohamed was buying a mobile phone at a kiosk in downtown Arish on the afternoon of 19 May when he suddenly heard gunfire. He looked around and saw a man with his face covered by a scarf run out of a barbershop, hop on a motorbike driven by...
While being often remembered in the news as the home of lawlessness, Sinai also had its two days of voting hype this week.
While the turnout is moderate to low and the choices are not deemed too revolutionary by the revolution’s standards,...
Today’s papers are still taken by the presidential elections mayhem, focusing on the excluded candidates’ quest to re-enter the race.
The Muslim Brotherhood’s mouthpiece, Freedom and Justice, defiantly runs a home page of only...
The local press in Egypt are still fiery about 16 American NGO workers, banned from travel by an Egyptian court after being accused of working illegally in the country and receiving illicit funds, being allowed to leave. Many see the case as clear...
Privately-owned dailies are still running follow-ups on last week’s police raids of NGOs accused of illegally receiving foreign funds. The government has been investigating 17 Egyptian and international NGOs. Al-Shorouk, a privately-owned...
Amid the parliamentary elections hype, the ruling military council's statements about its role in the writing of the constitution continue to make headlines.
In the privately-owned Al-Shorouk, a front-page headline reads, “Opposition to...
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...
