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 release on bail of Hosni Mubarak associate Hussein Salem continues to get front page coverage, some quite contradictory.
On today’s front page of state-owned Al-Ahram, a small headline reads, “A diplomatic source: Complete...
Rafah and Arish – In the first week of June, a group of Bedouin tribesmen living on the Palestinian side of the border in Rafah reportedly crossed through the tunnels to Egypt, killed fellow members of the Remeilat tribe and then returned to...
Like other border towns, Rafah misses certain details of everyday city life. Lying at Egypt’s most northwestern tip, Rafah seems to be the frontiers of reality, where the state ceases to be and where the sight of bordering Gaza’s...
Arish - If Egypt's revolution put an end to a longstanding feud between police and the Bedouins of North Sinai, it also meant greater liberty for the thriving underground economy of the governorate.
However, some imminent post-uprising threats...
In Abla al-Roweiny’s first editorial in Akhbar al-Adab, Egypt’s weekly literary journal, she writes about a different “space” that is the city today.
“The city is no longer the monopoly of concrete structures, passing...
The National Dialogue Conference, which yesterday ended in chaos due to the participation of former ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) members, made headlines in today’s papers.
The meeting is meant to be a forum for politicians and...
In a press conference on Saturday, US Ambassador to Egypt Margaret Scobey reiterated that no revisions will be made to the US-Egyptian security partnership.
Egypt’s military receives US$1.3 billion in support from the US in the framework of a...
The Egyptian television building at Maspero on the Nile corniche has looked nothing short of a street-based church for the past 12 days. Posters of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary are hung on ropes from one end of the street to the other. Christian...
Amnesty International’s report on killings, detentions and torture during the 25 January revolution, released on Thursday, reveals the Mubarak regime’s common practice of resorting to excessive use of force, albeit magnified by the...
“Egypt is Back!” wrote activist Shahir George on his Facebook page on 29 April, the day news broke that rival Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah were to sign a reconciliation accord brokered by Cairo.
“One of the great...
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...
