Newspapers monitored the developments of the judicial authority law with some saying the Shura Council's referral of the law to its Constitutional and Legislative Affairs Committee for examination was an act of defiance towards the judiciary. However, the two-week ultimatum given by the council for the Supreme Judicial Council (SJC) to examine the proposed amendments may ease the tension between the council and the judiciary. Al-Shorouk on Monday had ‘Shura declares temporary truce with judges'. Al-Watan noted that the 14-day battle between the judiciary and the MB started in reference to the two-week ultimatum that the Shura gave to the judiciary to give its views on the law. Al-Ahram wrote, ‘Conflict over judiciary law on the rise, elections and political rights law with Council and the right of the police and army to vote causes another crisis'. Al-Youm Al-Sabei on Sunday bannered ‘Shura defies judiciary and refers law to legislative committee' while Al-Wafd described the start of the debate on the law as ‘a black day for the Shura Council'. Writers looked into the significance of that conflict. Wagdi Zeineddin said he was confused by the policies of the Muslim Brotherhood “which waits for the situation to calm down then comes up with things that reignite it to distract public attention from its absolute failure in ruling”. Zeineddin noted there was a covert grudge against Egypt in general and the media and the judiciary in particular on the part of the MB. The president's promise not to debate the judiciary law before referring it to the judiciary is the best proof of the writer's argument. Moreover, Zeineddin continued, the president called for a conference to debate visions and views in order to draft another law. Nevertheless, to the surprise of many parties, the Shura Council started debating the widely opposed judiciary law. “The MB wants a weak judiciary so that it can abort the institution and start Brotherhoodising it,” Zeineddin wrote in the daily Al-Wafd, the mouthpiece of the opposition Wafd Party. He concluded his regular column by saying “the only hope to reform this ailing country can be realised if the MB was forced to step down and return underground”. Writers expressed bewilderment and failure to understand why the kidnappers of the seven soldiers in Sinai were not arrested and that no details have been disclosed about them. Makram Mohamed Ahmed wrote that the official story was that the kidnappers had become frightened after the army surrounded them and local tribes prevented them from passing through their land. They thus had no option except to release the soldiers. However, if the official version is true, why hadn't troops followed the kidnappers? They could have arrested some or all of them. In that case, there would have been no room for speculation of an agreement with the kidnappers to leave their captives in the desert and escape without being pursued by the army. And because the identity of the kidnappers has not been disclosed, Mohamed Ahmed continued, that opened the door for speculation and contradictory stories about them. In general, stories reflected scepticism and the absence of trust in the whole affair. While the writer ruled out that the truth about the kidnapping would remain hidden for long because of the number of people who were involved in it, including the kidnappers and the chiefs of the tribes that mediated in the release arrangements, he called for transparency as the right way to deal with that issue. “People are still asking who killed the 16 soldiers in Rafah in Ramadan last year and where are the police officers who witnessed the attack on police stations in Rafah and Sheikh Zuweid. People will never forget these questions and will not stop asking until they get satisfactory answers,” Mohamed Ahmed wrote in the official daily Al-Ahram. Recurrent power cuts were another cause of confusion for some writers. Mohamed Barakat pointed to incomplete facts due to partial or complete absence of information. He bought the power cuts as an example. “Power outages have become a phenomenon in all cities and villages of Egypt. It has become a reality we have to coexist with,” Barakat wrote in the official daily Al-Akhbar. The problem, he added, is in line with other related issues namely the shortage of fuel. “In that context, we cannot draw a line between electrical cuts and the shortage of diesel, petrol and gas especially if power stations run on petrol.” These problems, Barakat elaborated, cannot be in isolation of the acute shortage in foreign currency and the difficult political situation facing Egypt at present as a result of the fall in production and investment, subsiding revenues of tourism, the absence of stability and the various protests and million-man marches. Although all these are known to the officials, Barakat summed up his argument, “no one has come out to talk to us frankly and with transparency about the problems we are facing and how and when they would be solved”. The debate on the timing of the parliamentary and presidential elections is still igniting differences between political groups. Political analyst Amr Hamzawy posed an important question in his regular column in the independent daily Al-Watan: why doesn't the MB want elections now? Hamzawy said he sensed a conspiracy on the part of the MB and its political wing, the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) to postpone the parliamentary elections because the party enjoys the majority in the Shura Council in a way that makes it easy for it to pass draft laws including the judiciary law and laws related to running the Suez Canal. And, the writer added, this is a comfortable situation they are not in a rush to change. Hamzawy elaborated, “the Shura Council does not have the right to monitor and question the executive authority represented by the president and the government. That is another comfortable situation that the FJP is not willing to alter soon.” The third reason that the writer brought was the fall of the MB popularity. As such, Hamzawy explained, they are in need of dealing with the problem by improving their performance in the service sectors like food supply, especially bread and butane cylinders. “The only way to get out of the MB-FJP scenario is through popular pressure for early presidential elections or by a ruling from the Constitutional Court to dissolve the Shura Council for the same reasons it disbanded the People's Assembly.”
