Hosni Mubarak

Last week, the Obama administration started releasing the $1.3 billion in U.S. military assistance to Egypt that’s been on hold since October.

Despite the violence from street protests that left some 38 people dead over the last two weeks, Egyptians went to the polls today for the first round of parliamentary elections.

Since the revolution in January, Egypt has been in a constant state of unrest. While the protests have been mostly peaceful, there are exceptions. The other week, dozens in one of Cairo’s slums—known as “Garbage City”—were throwing rocks at passing cars, demanding housing they had allegedly been promised by the government. This episode—as well the regular demonstrations on Tahrir Square—reveals that the revolution continues.

Three months after the uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak, the new Egypt is still sorting itself out—and perhaps will be for some time to come.

Former Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak has reportedly been placed under detention in his hospital room in Sharm el-Sheikh. Mubarak has been there since last night, when he is thought to have had a heart attack. The AP reports:

Beirut

The Lebanese seem to be keeping mum after Bashar al-Assad’s speech this afternoon. Sure, there are no doubt plenty of opinions to go around, but why bring unnecessary attention to Lebanon’s own problems?

Hillary Clinton is a big booster of Internet. Indeed, she is making Internet the central – and as best one can tell, the only – thrust of the Obama administration’s democracy policy. But even she acknowledges that in the wrong hands, technology is “not an unmitigated blessing,” as Clinton said in Washington last year.

The president has wistfully been thinking about how easy it would be to be the leader of the People's Republic of China, the New York Times reports. And one unnamed official told the Times's reporters that "No one is scrutinizing [Chinese leader] Hu Jintao's words in Tahrir Square."

The quotations are part of a piece aimed at explaining the president's thinking on the crisis in the Middle East. And his envy for the Chinese leader is meant to demonstrate the difficulty of balancing so-called "pragmatism" with "idealism."

Unconfirmed reports are circulating that former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak has fallen into a coma in Sharm al-Sheikh. The independent Egyptian daily Al Masry Al Youm's English-language website says that Mubarak fainted twice during his final speech Thursday night.