Poll progress ELECTIONS within the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) continues. NDP Secretary-General Safwat El-Sherif said the party chairman, President Hosni Mubarak, had received a report on Saturday which said more than 90,000 party members in 3,569 units, or 45 per cent out of a total 7,555 units, were vying to fill more than 50,000 positions, 25 seats being allocated to each village. El-Sherif added that more than half a million NDP members had participated in the vote so far. The elections, according to El-Sherif, resulted in more than 1,000 women managing to win seats and that there was more than a 50 per cent change of officials. El-Sherif added that elections in 219 units had been postponed for reasons ranging from irregularities to the fact that quorums of party members for the elections to be considered valid had not been met. El-Sherif also said meetings between senior NDP officials and cabinet ministers would be held to prepare for the ruling party's ninth congress scheduled 3-5 November. "The meetings will also review how far the government has gone in meeting the pledges made by President Hosni Mubarak's 2005 presidential election platform." This is the third consecutive year the NDP stages elections. Ricciardone in uproar FRANCIS Ricciardone, the US ambassador to Egypt, has said that press reports claiming he said he was worried about the health of President Hosni Mubarak were entirely unfounded, Gamal Essam El-Din reports. The ambassador said he did not express at anytime or anywhere that he was worried about the health of President Mubarak. During a visit to the north Delta governorate of Damietta on Tuesday, Ricciardone said he was surprised "by how a national newspaper decided to publish wrong information about him and without contacting the US Embassy first to check whether this information is true or not." Al-Gomhuriya newspaper alleged on Saturday that Ricciardone told a number of European diplomats at the beginning of August that after he had met President Mubarak he felt that Mubarak was not in good health. Ricciardone also said the US does not have any kind of discreet contact with the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood. "Any contacts were made in the context of organising meetings between US congress people and Egyptian MPs, including Brotherhood deputies, in the presence of parliamentary speaker Fathi Sorour," Ricciardone said. He also dismissed reports that the US Agency for International Development (USAID) bases its assistance to Egypt on sectarian criteria. "I would like to indicate that American laws ban USAID from granting money on a sectarian basis and that all money should be provided on a secular basis," Ricciardone said. In recent weeks, some American and Egyptian newspapers have claimed that USAID was granting financial assistance to villages in Upper Egypt with a Christian majority and that more than $200 million had so far been allocated by USAID to such villages. Ricciardone said USAID was currently establishing integrated libraries in more than 39,000 schools in Egypt. Egyptians arrested TWO Egyptian students living in the US have been charged with carrying explosives across Florida state lines. Ahmed Abdel-Latif Mohamed, 24, an engineering graduate student and teaching assistant at the Tampa-based University of South Florida, and engineering student Youssef Samir Megahed, 21, have been held in South Carolina since 4 August after they were stopped for speeding and authorities found explosives in the car trunk. The FBI is investigating whether there is a terrorism link. Both denied the accusations and said they were heading to the beach with fireworks they bought from the chain store Wal-Mart. The US authorities have refused to allow the Egyptian Embassy and cultural office in the US to contact the pair. Muslims assaulted, again ANOTHER cartoon has lampooned the Prophet Mohamed. On 18 August the Swedish newspaper Nerikes Allehanda published a cartoon depicting the prophet as a dog. Swedish Muslims staged a series of peaceful protests at home, especially in Oerebro, a town west of Stockholm where Nerikes Allehanda is published. "Swedish Muslims do not want to escalate the situation," Mohamed Al-Khalafi, head of the Muslim Association of Sweden, said. " Nerikes Allehanda is a small newspaper that has sought to provoke Muslims for publicity reasons." The paper published the cartoon, part of a series made by Swedish artist Lars Vilks, after art galleries in Sweden declined to display them. Khalafi said that the blasphemous drawing infuriated Swedish Muslims, estimated at 500,000 of the country's nine million population. Muslim countries, including Iran, Pakistan, Egypt, Afghanistan and Jordan, condemned the cartoon, which is viewed as a flagrant assault on the sanctities of over 1.3 billion Muslims, but the newspaper has refused to apologise. Egypt's Minister of Religious Endowments Mohamed Zaqzouq referred to the publication of the caricature as "irresponsible and offensive and such an irresponsible act is not conducive to friendly ties between the Islamic world and the West." The ministry is also reported to have urged Swedish authorities to apologise and to take measures against the newspaper. Other Muslim calls urged the Swedish government to punish the artist and the publisher. Vilks said he had no intention of apologising. "You must be allowed to criticise religion, but I am not opposed to Islam," Vilks told the Danish agency Ritzau. Vilks had in the past drawn a "Jewish sow." He claimed he had received death threats. The Swedish government said it regreted any harm but could not apologise as it was not responsible for the drawing and could not prevent its publication. "In line with our freedom of speech, our democracy and our way of doing things, others make these kinds of [editorial] decisions," Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt said in a radio interview. In September 2005, Denmark's mass-circulation daily Jyllands-Posten printed 12 cartoons, including portrayals of a man the newspaper called the Prophet Mohamed, wearing a bomb-shaped turban and another showing him as a knife- wielding nomad flanked by shrouded women. The insulting cartoons triggered a firestorm of protests across the Muslim world and strained Muslim-West ties. Muslim scholars, priests and rabbis have called for a UN Security Council resolution criminalising blasphemy. Insulting the PA THE STEERING office of the People's Assembly (PA), led by parliament speaker Fathi Sorour, has decided to refer Muslim Brotherhood MP Alameddin El-Sakhawi to the Ethics Committee for insulting the parliament. In a letter sent to Sorour, El-Sakhawi described the PA, or parliament, as toothless and sarcastically called on Sorour to "do something good for the country before he dies." El-Sakhawi said he was surprised that his letter to Sorour had found its way to the pages of a state-owned newspaper. "This was a private letter in which I wanted to show sympathy towards Mahmoud El-Khoudri, chairman of Alexandria's Judges Club, and so I wonder how it found its way to a newspaper which is fond of attacking the Muslim Brothers," El-Sakhawi said. El-Khoudri also recently lashed out at the PA but later apologised to Sorour. On Sunday, three leading parliamentary members of the Muslim Brothers met Sorour and urged him not to take tough measures against El-Sakhawi. Sorour replied that the matter was no longer in his hands and that it would be left entirely up to the steering office to decide what to do next. The Ethics Committee, led by PA deputy speaker Zeinab Radwan, will meet next week to decide whether El-Sakhawi should be taken to task. Punishment could go as far as stripping the MP of his membership. Actor in trouble THE EGYPTIAN Actors' Union (EAU) is to question a local movie star for working with an Israeli actor, writes Reem Leila. "We discovered that Amr Waked was participating in a movie with an Israeli actor, so when he returns from abroad he will be questioned," union chairman Ashraf Zaki said. "The EAU is against normalisation with Israel," Zaki added. The controversy began when the EAU learnt that Waked, who starred in last year's Hollywood film Syriana, was in Tunisia filming a four-part series on Saddam Hussein's life opposite Yigal Naor, an Israeli of Iraqi descent. Last week, Zaki said that Waked, one of the country's brightest young film stars, would be questioned by a committee made up of two members of the union's board, for appearing in an upcoming mini-series with Naor. The investigation could have serious implications for Waked's career in Egypt, where the majority of his films are still made. Nearly a dozen articles have appeared over the past week condemning Waked for participating in the series. Waked declined to comment, but in earlier interviews with Egyptian media, he said he did not know the nationalities of every person involved in the movie. Waked also said he had no intention of leaving the series, in which he plays the role of Saddam's son-in-law Hussein Kamel, who defected from Iraq to Jordan but eventually returned and was executed. Naor, who played a Palestinian in Steven Spielberg's film Munich, stars as Saddam in the series. Many in the Egyptian press found it disturbing that an Israeli was playing the former Iraqi leader. Though Egypt was the first Arab nation to sign a peace treaty with Israel, in 1979, professional and artistic associations have resisted opening up to Israel, citing the continued occupation of Palestinian lands.
