Hosni Mubarak

CAIRO - When filmmaker and Egyptian democracy activist Amr Salama watched Hosni Mubarak's regime collapse in 2011, he couldn't have been more heartened. Salama had been making films for years and had found himself hamstrung by the government's censorship board. This was finally the opportunity he'd been waiting for. So shortly after the regime fell, Salama resubmitted a script that had been rejected under Mubarak - one whose story centered on tension between Cairo's majority Muslim population and its Coptic Christian minority.

CAIRO - Egypt's curious gallery of presidential candidates reveals how much the nation has changed yet how deeply it still echoes with voices connected to the repressive rule of deposed President Hosni Mubarak. The country's revolution brought new faces, including Khairat Shater, onetime political prisoner now running as a candidate for the Muslim Brotherhood. But the revolt failed to sweep away prominent, if shadowy, challengers from the past, most notably Omar Suleiman, the former leader's spymaster and confidant.

CAIRO — The ragged effigy of a fallen leader dangles from a lamppost over the remnants of a dying revolution. Those left from the uprising that swelled through Tahrir Square last year and brought down Hosni Mubarak live in tents, harassed and cursed, but mostly forgotten. TV cameras no longer perch on balconies; the great banners have been spooled away. The slogans of rebellion have been pressed onto T-shirts, and tourists, their expressions saying they somehow expected more, take pictures, trying to summon the images that captivated the world those many months ago. But the joy has turned sullen, and the nation has slipped back to the burdens of life while these defiant few still hunker with their placards and rage.

Sundown Friday marks the beginning of Passover, the commemoration of the Jews' emancipation from enslavement in ancient Egypt. This year Passover falls on a day of enormous significance in the struggle for freedom in modern Egypt — April 6. That date is synonymous with the April 6 Youth Movement — formed in 2008 and named for the date of a planned strike to support Egyptian workers — that became the backbone of last year's Tahrir revolution that...

Is the  Occupy Wall Street movement going to transform America or dither and disappear? Chicago on May Day will be one place to look for answers. Plans were laid through the winter to gather 50,000 protesters in the city on that day to confront the simultaneous summits of NATO and the G8. There's one big glitch in the program though; the Obama administration has moved the G8 summit - the gathering of diplomats and financial wizards from the leading industrialized nations - to Camp David, Md. For an army of activists whose core critique is aimed at the corruption and greed of bankers, financiers and their political patrons, the G8 meeting was a perfect foil.

CAIRO - The Muslim Brotherhood chose a religiously conservative businessman as its presidential candidate Saturday, a provocative move expected to upset liberals and deepen the ruling military's suspicion over the growing political power of Islamists in Egypt. Khairat Shater, who was jailed for years under former President Hosni Mubarak, was selected after weeks of debate over whether the organization should field a candidate in the May election. The Brotherhood, which controls the parliament, had long promised not to run a contender to allay public fear that Islamists would dominate the government.

Bothaina Kamel is a novelty and a provocation in a single breath. The only woman running for Egypt's presidency, she travels without an entourage, wears a bracelet that says "Make poverty history," can outlast the most exasperating heckler in the crowd, and has no chance of winning. "I want to create culture shock. Yes, a woman is running for president," says Kamel, a television presenter and ex-wife of a former cultural minister. "Some people have come up to me and asked, 'Is it even legal for a woman to run?

Revolution 2.0 The Power of the People Is Greater Than the People in Power: A Memoir Wael Ghonim Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: 308 pp., $26 Wael Ghonim is an unlikely rebel. Born in Egypt in 1980, he began working his first Web job while studying at Cairo University, then moved to the U.S. (where he married an American) and eventually became Google's top marketing representative for the Middle East, based in Dubai. His opposition to Hosni Mubarak's regime was far down on his personal list of interests.

As Egypt marks the first anniversary of the Jan. 25 civilian revolt that eventually toppled the 30-year rule of Hosni Mubarak, there's no agreement - on how to celebrate or even whether rejoicing is in order. The current military rulers - the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, or SCAF - want to hold parades and aerial jet exhibitions to exult in the revolution, of which their main part was to ease Mubarak out of power. Youth groups and democracy activists who originally engineered the uprising are carrying on a campaign called "The Generals are Liars," with mini-demonstrations and audiovisual presentations in the streets documenting police and military abuses.