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
Hundreds of Egyptian activists staged a demonstration on Saturday in the Christian-dominated Shubra neighborhood in Cairo to protest what they perceive as the lack of security measures to protect churches across Egypt.
The protesters, who...
A year ago, Cairo’s Agriculture Museum was only a Lonely Planet suggestion for Spanish artist Asunción Molinos. Today, a model of the museum stands on its own in a Downtown Cairo space, bearing Molinos’ name.
When Al-Masry Al-Youm...
When the word “modern” was used in Egypt to refer to Mohamed Ali’s rule (1805-1948), agriculture was at the heart of his development strategy.
Agricultural strategy was seen in exports of long-staple cotton, rice and sugarcane...
“No one in Egypt has any certainty about who will succeed Mubarak,” reads one May 2007 diplomatic cable from the US embassy in Cairo. “Whoever ends up as Egypt’s next president likely will be politically weaker than Mubarak....
Information released by the WikiLeaks cables serve only as raw material, but are not policies, Jeffrey Feltman, US Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs said in a conference call to a group of Middle-East based journalists.
“...
In "Heliopolis," Ahmad Abdalla’s fiction debut, a seminal scene depicts a couple gazing at each other for a moment in a noisy hypermarket sprawling with LCD screens, fans, and kitchen machines.
Their ominous gaze left viewers...
US pressure for democracy in Egypt has encountered much skepticism from Cairo, according to a US Embassy cable sent to the Secretary of State in February 2010.
“The GoE [Government of Egypt] remains skeptical of our role in democracy promotion...
In a newly-leaked US Embassy cable, American officials report concerns over the arrest of three senior Muslim Brotherhood members in Egypt.
The cable, dated February 2010, highlights the growing attention US officials have been paying to Egyptian...
Egyptian officials have been pressuring the United States to delay a referendum on South Sudanese independence, a newly-leaked US Embassy cable has revealed.
In the October 2009 cable, obtained today by Al-Masry Al Youm and not yet released by...
In an August 2009 meeting, the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs used classified court documents to convince US officials that Islamic militant Hani al-Sibai should not be de-listed from the UN’s Al-Qaeda and Taliban Sanctions Committee, a...
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...
