Egyptian journalist's retrial adjourned as UN warns of 'assaults on press freedom'
A criminal court in Cairo has postponed the retrial of the prominent Egyptian journalist Lina Attalah, whose case has drawn international condemnation.
Wednesday's opening hearing was adjourned until 18 November after defence lawyers representing the editor-in-chief of the news outlet Mada Masr requested a new judge.
The UN has warned of "widening assaults on press freedom by Egyptian authorities, including the targeting, persecution and harassment of independent journalists". Attalah told the BBC that a recent crackdown was meant to "send a chilling message" to "the very few newsrooms that are left".
She warned: "Everybody should be careful, everybody should be scared, everybody should be wondering if they are next." Set up 13 years ago, Mada Masr became Egypt's leading independent news site with Attalah as its editor-in-chief and co-founder.
Last month, the New Cairo Misdemeanours Court convicted her of running a website without a licence - which she said she had tried in vain for years to obtain. She was issued a hefty fine of 3 million Egyptian pounds ($56,000; £42,000) and Mada Masr was ordered to shut down.
After that trial, Attalah found that a court had previously given her a one-year prison sentence, without her knowledge, for "spreading false news" - a charge often used against journalists and dissidents - as well as operating a website without a licence. It was issued in absentia in 2024, even though she was in the country at the time. Attalah is now being retried in that case by the same judge.
At the opening session, Attalah's defence team requested the judge's recusal, arguing that he had "already formed a conviction in mind against the defendant", Mada Masr cited its lawyer Hassan al-Azhar as saying. The judge went into recess before adjourning proceedings for a week to allow the court to consider the defence's request, he added.
Mada Masr also said Attalah's appeal against last month's conviction was scheduled to take place on 25 November.
Egypt has largely stifled freedom of the press, ranking 169th out of 180 countries for press freedom, according to Reporters Without Borders' 2026 analysis. The group says that at least 26 journalists who were arrested in recent years remain in detention.
FULL ARTICLE AT: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cmkg5jr59835o
Today in History: Russia Breaks the Muslim Yoke Today in history, on November 11, 1480, the Tatar yoke over Russia, which began over two centuries earlier, finally came to an end, at the Ugra River, where the forces of Grand Prince Ivan III of Moscow faced the army of Akhmat, Muslim khan of the Great Horde.
The struggle had begun under very different circumstances. The Mongols who devastated the Russian principalities beginning in the 1220s were originally pagan. Their Golden Horde eventually became Turkic and Muslim, with Islam firmly established as the ruling religion under Uzbek Khan in the early 1300s. Russian princes remained tributaries; their lands supplied wealth, captives, and an endless supply of slaves to their Islamic overlords.
The usual religious hostility that defined earlier (Seljuk) and later (Ottoman) Muslim-Christian interaction was par for the course. For example, in 1327, Uzbek Khan’s cousin Shevkal—“the destroyer of Christianity,” according to a Russian chronicle—asked a boon of his khan: “allow me to go to Rus to destroy their Christian faith, to kill their princes and to bring you their wives and children.” Uzbek consented.
At the head of a vast horde, Shevkal invaded Russia “with great haughtiness and violence. He inaugurated great persecution of the Christians, [using] force, pillage, torture, and abuse.” Fifty-three years later the Russians were finally strong—or just desperate—enough to face the Horde head on. On September 8, 1380, Grand Prince Dmitri Ivanovich led his men against the Horde and its commander, Mamai, at Kulikovo Field, near the Don.
Dmitri rejected his nobles’ pleas to remain safely behind the fighting: “I want to die for Christianity ahead of anyone else, with deed as well as word, so that all others who see it will become bold.”
After hours of savage combat, a Russian reserve emerged from the woods and helped rout Mamai’s army. The victory bestowed immense prestige on Moscow and demonstrated that the Horde could be defeated.
Even so, full liberation was still a century away. For in 1382, the regrouped and recovered Tatars invaded Moscow, nearly burning the entire city to the ground and leaving some 24,000 corpses in their wake. Kulikovo had opened the road to liberation; another century of struggle remained. FULL ARTICLE AT: https://raymondibrahim.substack.com/p/today-in-history-russia-breaks-the-755?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=6873559&post_id=219135252&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1v9n4o&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
 AI researchers are talking about radical life extension and medicine that could make cancer, Alzheimer’s and heart disease relics of the past. But as ambition moves from longer life to a digital afterlife, Christians must ask whether a machine can preserve a person—or only imitate one.
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