Today’s headlines were still tied to the violent events of upper Egyptian town Naga Hammadi, that resulted in the killing of six deacons and a Muslim guard on Coptic Christmas eve. Al-Akhbar newspaper stated that MPs are in Qena governorate in search of the truth behind the Naga Hammadi events. The parliamentary committee started off by meeting with Qena governor, then with Bishop Kirollos of the Naga Hammadi dioceses where they condemned the criminal act that resulted in the death of seven citizens.
On a parallel note, Al-Wafd newspaper stated that a few of Naga Hammadi’s Copts defied the statements of lawyer Mamdouh Ramzi that were published in the paper last Wednesday explaining that such is Ramzi’s personal opinion, one that is detached from the current crises, given he is not a resident of Naga Hammadi hence does not comprehend the events that turned the town to a boiling volcano.
However, Al-Ahram newspaper’s headline assured that the three suspects of the Christmas massacre shall be subjected to a rapid trial in-order to contain the "horrendous crime of Naga Hammadi."
On the other hand, as Egypt celebrates the golden jubilee of the construction of the High Dam, Al-Shorouq newspaper’s headline reads that the high dam contributes to only 8 percent of Egypt’s electricity. “According to the latest statistics, the High Dam supplies Egypt with only 7.8 percent of its total needs of electricity,” explained Mohamed Faragalla chairperson of the company of water plants for electricity production. Faragalla notes that this percentage was decreasing gradually since 1982 (where it used to supply 54 percent of electricity needs) due to the Egyptian development needs in addition to the creation of numerous electric power plants.
The independent Al-Dostour, however, highlighted the ministry of health’s latest declaration to postpone the importation of the left batches of the H1N1 vaccine. This decision, reads the paper, comes after the failure of the national vaccine campaign that targeted 2, 100,000 (Two million and a hundred thousand students) elementary students in six governorate, while only one percent of the students were vaccinated. However, the ministry declared that five more people died of swine flu which amounts to 210 deaths. From his side, Farid Ismail member of the parliamentary group of Muslim Brotherhood in the Egyptian Parliament handed an urgent official request to the prime minister, minister of health and that of education in which he accuses the government for being responsible for spreading horror among citizens and destroying the education process, wasting of public money and orchestrating the swine flu crises in favor of foreign pharmaceutical companies that used the World Health Organization to make massive profits.
The same paper highlights a grave statistics revealed by Awlad Al Ard Center for Human Rights yesterday. Through a report tackling violence against women in Egypt in the second half of 2009, the paper reads that sexual harassment is on the rise marking 2269 cases. The report reveals 21 cases of suicide of women and that 86 percent of the violence against women is domestic violence, within their families.
