CAIRO — Mubarak has fallen. The regime didn’t. We still have the same cabinet appointed by [Mubarak]. The emergency state is still enforced. Old detainees are still in detentions and new ones since the 25th of January remain missing. There is no public apology for the killing. We hear several executives are being prosecuted, including minister of Interior Habib El Adly. Process not transparent. Parliament has not been dissolved. Nor has the Shura council. etc.

Aida Seif El Dawla is with the Nadeem Center for Victims of Torture in Cairo. She was profiled by Time magazine as a global hero in 2004.

RAFAH, Feb 9, 2011 (IPS) – Mustapha Suleiman, 27, from J Block east of the Rafah crossing with Egypt, crosses through gaps in the iron fence on the border carrying bread, water, meat cans and a handful of vegetables for Egyptian soldiers stationed on the other side. [See at Inter Press Service]

A Bedouin youth casually spreads out a piece of cloth before a police headquarters in Sheikh Zwayyed town in Sinai, the vast desert area to the east of Cairo across the Suez. “I will leave when Mubarak leaves,” he says. [Full piece from Inter Press Service]

From Alex Ortiz in Cairo: “The army is beginning to come into Cairo … tens of thousands converged in midan al-gala’ coming from three different protest marches. Total communication blackout. Reports of senior police officers ordering their men to stand down and not beat or fire tear gas at protesters in Midan al-gala an hour ago.”

CAIRO, Egypt [11 p.m. local time] — 1-Some government media figures appear to be joining ranks with the protesters. Mahmoud Saad, a talk show host in the Egyptian state-run TV, has announced that he will no longer appear on TV starting tonight after he came under pressure from top government officials to report “untruths” about the protests. Mahmoud Saad, a popular TV host, has told other journalists that his disappearance from his daily show, Masr El-Naharda (Egypt Today), comes in protests against pressure to defame protesters as rioters “destroying the country”. The state is clearly starting to launch a media campaign against the protests. My guess is that they will try to scare off the rest of Egyptians from joining the protests in the future by labeling protesters “saboteurs”. [Read more...]

Between 2008 and 2009, unemployment increased from 5.8 percent to 9.3 percent, the largest one-year increase on record (which goes back to 1948). Over the same period, the number of Americans without health insurance coverage rose by more than four million — from 46.3 million in 2008 to 50.7 million in 2009 — and low-income people lost insurance at a greater rate than Americans overall. Thus, it isn’t surprising that the Census Bureau’s official poverty estimates show that the number of people who were impoverished in 2009 increased by 3.74 million, and the poverty rate increased from 13.2 percent in 2008 to 14.3 percent in 2009.

More surprising is an “alternative” poverty estimate Census quietly released earlier this month. This estimate, highlighted [Wednesday] in a New York Times editorial, shows no increase in poverty between 2008 and 2009. Given the record increase in unemployment and huge decline in health insurance coverage, especially among low-income people, could this alternative estimate showing no increase in poverty really be correct? [See CEPR.net]