President Hosni Mubarak

CAIRO — Egyptians gathered in living rooms and cafes Thursday night to mark another first in their troubled political odyssey toward a new democracy: a televised presidential debate that was as captivating as it was surreal. The two leading candidates, former Foreign Minister Amr Moussa and Islamist favorite Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, clashed in an exchange that would have been fiction during the 30-year rule of deposed President Hosni Mubarak. The spectacle was a rare moment in a region enthralled by Arab uprisings but largely dominated by autocrats and political uncertainty.

CAIRO — Egyptians gathered in living rooms and cafes Thursday night to mark another first in their troubled political odyssey toward a new democracy: a televised presidential debate that was as captivating as it was surreal. The two leading candidates, former Foreign Minister Amr Moussa and Islamist favorite Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, clashed in an exchange that would have been fiction during the 30-year rule of deposed President Hosni Mubarak. The spectacle was a rare moment in a region enthralled by Arab uprisings but largely dominated by autocrats and political uncertainty.

"Mission Accomplished" read the hauntingly familiar phrase from Egyptian activist Wael Ghonim on Thursday when the first word came that President Hosni Mubarak might step down. Ghonim delivered the words by Twitter, unlike George W. Bush, who had them printed on a banner. But in both cases, they were premature. As Richard Haass, a former top State Department official who now heads the private Council on Foreign Relations, said in a conference call with reporters last week, if Egypt's revolution were a baseball game, this would only be the third inning.

CAIRO - The decorum of diplomacy has devolved into embarrassing headlines and testy one-liners in the increasingly strained relations between Egypt and Israel. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday that Egypt's Sinai peninsula had become a "kind of Wild West" overrun by militants, terrorists and arms smugglers. Over the weekend, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman had suggested massing more Israeli troops along the border with Egypt. That drew a bit of mafia parlance from Egypt's military ruler, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi: "Our borders, especially the northeast ones, are inflamed.

In a narrow-street slum of Egypt's capital, a man went campaigning. He drew a crowd, as a worthy campaigner might. Unfortunately it is illegal for a candidate to draw a crowd here, and the man was arrested. In a tony neighborhood of Alexandria, nine men filled a car with 50,000 campaign leaflets. Security police, however, deemed those materials anti-government, and the men were arrested.

Not everyone in Egypt wants President Hosni Mubarak to go. While those with revolutionary fervor gathered Tuesday by the tens of thousands a mile down the Nile at Tahrir Square, a small but vociferous band of Egyptians more easily counted by the hundreds marched up and down a two-block stretch of the corniche hours before Mubarak announced that he would not seek re-election. "Hosni Mubarak is our father. We are the Egyptian people," Ahmed Ismail, 33, a teacher and wrestling team captain, screamed into the face of a reporter who was surrounded, pulled and poked at by two dozen citizens eager to have their views heard.

In the ancient seaside city of Alexandria, more than 100,000 people took to the streets Tuesday in protest, so many that there was no place large enough in Egypt's second-largest city to accommodate the crowds. So they gathered in different areas, from the Ibrahim Mosque to Masr Square, and eventually formed a mile-long procession that wound its way through the city like a victory parade. Young men draped Egyptian flags over their shoulders. Old women clapped and waved from balconies.

His anger hides in the mask of a smile. President Hosni Mubarak does not tolerate dissension. He is inclined to crush it rather than compromise. Those born since his rule began in 1981 have lived entirely under emergency law, among the spookily omnipresent security forces that can pluck a soul from the street and vanish in an instant. The bloodshed between Mubarak's supporters and anti-government demonstrators Wednesday in Tahrir Square was not a spontaneous act of political passion but an orchestrated mission, opposition leaders say, by thugs hired by the ruling party to put fear into those clamoring for change.

Within minutes, the buoyant mood inside Tahrir Square turned into a fight for survival ? and for Egypt's future. Like two medieval armies, screaming, enraged mobs ? both hoisting Egyptian flags and professing love of country ? clashed violently Wednesday with rocks, sticks and Molotov cocktails. Soldiers stood by passively as the pitched battle between supporters of President Hosni Mubarak and those seeking his immediate ouster threatened one of the nation's most treasured sites, the Egyptian Museum.

Amid an accelerating breakdown of law and order across Egypt's capital, anti-government protesters have set the stage for a potentially explosive new confrontation by declaring that Friday, the main prayer day of the Muslim week, is the deadline for the embattled president to step aside. The crowd in Tahrir Square at dawn Friday was small but defiant. The sound of Koranic chants and nationalistic songs mingled with the morning calls of birds ? a tranquil atmosphere likely to be shattered as organizers of the anti-government protests called on Egyptians to rally after prayers Friday.

Like savvy boxers with knockout punches, Egypt's Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, or SCAF, and the Muslim Brotherhood have circled each other warily since the Arab Spring toppled President Hosni Mubarak in February 2011. But after the SCAF-appointed election commission's banning last week of 10 candidates for the May presidential elections, including the Brotherhood's nominee, Khairat Shater, the phase of circumspection may be ending. Egyptians could be in for rougher times. The SCAF abandoned Mubarak only after it realized that Egyptian protesters would not succumb to intimidation and force.

CAIRO - Egypt's volatile presidential race was jolted Saturday when the election commission disqualified three controversial front-runners - the nation's former spy chief and two impassioned Islamists - just five weeks before voters go to the polls. The commission removed Omar Suleiman, the intelligence director under deposed President Hosni Mubarak; Khairat Shater, a leading voice for the ascendant Muslim Brotherhood; and Hazem Salah abu Ismail, an ultraconservative Salafi Islamist with wide populist appeal.

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.

  Pope Shenouda III, the charismatic patriarch of the Coptic Orthodox Church whose shrewd grasp of religion and politics guided Egypt's Christians through deepening animosities with Muslims, died Saturday. He was 88. The state news agency reported that Shenouda, who led the church for four decades, had struggled with respiratory and liver ailments. There was no announcement about a successor. A stately figure with a flowing gray beard, the pope had attempted in recent months to buttressEgypt'sestimated 9 million Copts against persecution from Islamists following the revolution that overthrew former President Hosni Mubarak.

Relations between Washington and Cairo plummeted further when Egypt's military-controlled government announced that 19 Americans working for pro-democracy groups, including the son of a Cabinet official, would be ordered to stand trial on licensing and financial charges. The provocative decision Sunday by investigating judges comes as the U.S. has threatened to suspend $1.3 billion in annual aid to Egypt's military. It highlights the widening divide between Washington and one of its closest allies over democratic reforms at a time of sweeping political upheaval across North Africa and the Middle East.

It was a day of fortunes turned inside out: The Muslim Brotherhood, persecuted for decades by then-President Hosni Mubarak, moved closer Tuesday to winning Egypt's parliamentary elections while the disgraced former leader listened from a defendant's cage as a federal prosecutor demanded the "harshest penalty" for him. More than 14 million Egyptians were eligible to cast ballots Tuesday for 150 seats in nine governorates, with the Brotherhood having...

The leadership of Egypt's ruling party resigned Saturday, a purge that would have been beyond Egyptians' imaginations a few short weeks ago but was unlikely to placate a hard-core opposition frustrated by what it sees as costume changes in the government of President Hosni Mubarak. The dismantling of the National Democratic Party's power structure is a dramatic indication of the pressure on new Vice President Omar Suleiman to remove the vestiges of Mubarak's power and snip the ambitions of his son Gamal, a deeply unpopular figure who was among those resigning their posts.

Interim Egyptian Prime Minister Essam Sharaf made sweeping changes to his Cabinet on Sunday in a move to calm nine days of protests in Tahrir Square against the nation's ruling military council and the slow pace of political reform. Sharaf promised last week to reshuffle his government and purge the Interior Ministry of police officers and top officials accused in the deaths of more than 800 protesters during the crackdown on the revolution that toppled President Hosni Mubarak in February.

Hanan Milad, a house painter's wife with two children and one on the way, stood outside a polling station Monday, biting her lip and praying for patience as crowds swelled and ballots arrived late in Egypt's first free elections since the fall of Hosni Mubarak. "I can't wait all day to vote," Milad said as soldiers stood guard at the edge of a cement factory. "But I'm here because I want a future for my children. The revolution inspired us. You can see people are poor here. We don't know a lot about politics, but we have hope.

An Egyptian court Thursday sentenced a steel magnate and a former top industries official to 10 years in prison each and fined them a combined $111 million on charges stemming from the corruption that defined the era of toppled President Hosni Mubarak. The sentences handed to steel tycoon Ahmed Ezz, a confidant of Mubarak's son Gamal, and Amr Assal, deposed chairman of the country's Industrial Development Authority, struck at the core of businessmen and officials who made fortunes under Mubarak's rule.