A number of unrelated popular protests erupted on Wednesday in South Sinai and in certain provinces of the Nile Delta. Some 400 nurses at the Tanta Hospital in the Nile Delta province of Gharbiya continued a labor strike for the second consecutive day to protest unpaid bonuses. Officials promised to meet their demands if they ended their strike. In Daqahlia, also in the delta, roughly 150 lawyers protested against recent assaults on their colleagues by employees of the first instance court. "What happened is an insult to all lawyers," said Moheb el-Mekkawi, secretary-general of Daqahlia's provincial Bar Association. Also in Daqahlia, hundreds of farmers protested against a decision by the state-run Agricultural Reform Authority (ARA) to increase taxes on land ownership. According to a source at the ARA, taxes were increased in an effort to meet rising administrative expenses. In the delta province of Kafr el-Sheikh, hundreds of farmers staged demonstrations to protest ongoing shortages of irrigation water. Irrigation Ministry Undersecretary Mohamed Biltagi promised to "look into" the matter. In the southern Sinai Peninsula, meanwhile, a woman entered her eighth day of a declared hunger strike to protest the state's refusal to grant her husband a housing unit in the Hosni Mubarak public housing project, to which, she claims, he is entitled. Translated from the Arabic Edition.
