ABC News Former Kuwait Lawmaker Detained for Tweets Critical of Egypt Kuwaiti authorities detained a former liberal lawmaker overnight for questioning and on Wednesday ordered him held for 10 days for tweets criticizing the Arab Gulf country's ruler and his support for Egypt's president, a defense lawyer said. Abdallah Al Ahmad said prosecutors began questioning Saleh Al Mullah late Tuesday about tweets he wrote on Monday, when Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sissi was in Kuwait for an official visit. Al Mullah who was an independent and liberal lawmaker for three years until 2011 ? wrote on Twitter that Kuwaitis have grown tired of the country's money being given to boost other governments. Kuwait has pledged at least $4 billion to Al Sissi's government following the ouster of Islamist President Mohammed Morsi from power in mid-2013. "Your highness, we won't accept billions more handed out to other countries. We have donated enough. This is the money of the people of Kuwait," Al Mullah wrote in Arabic in one tweet. Read more: http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/kuwait-lawmaker-detained-tweets-critical-egypt-28050770 Arutz Sheva Egypt's 'Gush Katif': Sinai Border Residents Evicted The only way to put an end to terror in Sinai, according to Egyptian officialAbdel Fattah Harhour, is to completely raze the Egyptian side of Rafiach. In an interview Thursday, he said that weather conditions in recent days had slowed the rate of evacuation, but that the government must redouble its efforts to remove residents from the area – otherwise it would be impossible to destroy all the terror tunnels from Gaza into Sinai. The Egyptian army is doing just that, with over 1,000 families to be evicted in the coming days in the interest of fighting terror. Families have been given eviction orders, and over 1,000 houses are to be destroyed in the current phase of the evacuation. Each family will be compensated 1,500 Egyptian pounds in addition to "basic" compensation. Read more: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/189665#.VK45fCuUdqU World Bulletin Egypt denies rights report about 2014 deaths A high-level security official on Wednesday dismissed as "incorrect" a recent statistic issued by an independent rights group about the number of people killed by Egypt's security forces during the past year. Assistant Interior Minister for Human Rights, Abu Bakr Abdel-Karim, said Egypt's security forces had not killed 283 people in 2014 as the London-based Arab Organization for Human Rights claims in a recent report. "The organization has been keen on issuing faulty and biased reports," Abdel-Karim told The Anadolu Agency. The organization claimed that as many as 283 people were killed by Egyptian police in 2014, including 27 children and eight women. Read more: http://www.worldbulletin.net/news/152463/egypt-denies-rights-report-about-2014-deaths The Washington Post Migrants in post-revolution Egypt Egypt is a major receiver of migrants and refugees from the Horn of Africa and other Arab states. Although the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees' official number of registered refugees in Egypt is about 250,000, the Egyptian government's count is closer to 350,000, in addition to about 1 million migrants. Compared to the 8 million Egyptian emigrants abroad, this number is relatively small, but that does not mean that migrants and refugees fly under the government's radar. "Of course we know about them," one government official told me. "We let them stay. Even those without papers or who come illegally." Why would the Egyptian government allow this? Refugees and migrants also often provide economic benefits to host countries. In a country such as Egypt, which has a large informal economy, some migrants and refugees have found jobs in the garment, food, artisanal and industrial sectors, in addition to others who do domestic work in wealthy Egyptian households as cleaners, nannies and drivers. Egyptian landlords also know they can charge migrants and refugees inflated rental prices. A Sudanese migrant told me that Egyptian simsars (housing brokers) will size up migrants or refugees based on nationality and show them neighborhoods accordingly. Alluding to this informal system, the Sudanese migrant noted, "They know each type of customer, they know how much they have in their pocket." Yet another benefit mentioned by a representative from the International Organization for Migration are remittances from the Persian Gulf region, Europe and North America to migrants and refugees living in Egypt who then spend the money locally. Finally, the policy of ambivalence helps Egypt on the international level. Refraining from mass deportations allows Egypt to assert that it is fulfilling its various international commitments, a claim that the government can use as a bargaining chip in advocating for the welfare of Egyptian emigrants residing in Western countries. Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2015/01/07/migrants-in-post-revolution-egypt/ Xinhua News Analysis: Fragile Egypt under pressure in paying off huge foreign debts Egypt's foreign currency reserves might slide more as the North African country is set to pay back around two billion U.S dollars of its foreign debts this year, economic experts warned on Wednesday. "Egypt's central bank is bleeding foreign currency reserves as the country is paying off too much debt installments," Professor Ehab El-Desoky, Director of the Center for Research and Consultancy at Sadat Academy, told Xinhua. This will have grave consequences on the already fragile Egyptian economy that urgently needs to be repaired, he added. Read more: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/world/2015-01/08/c_133903643.htm
