Cairo

HOSNI Mubarak's authoritarian regime in Egypt is a necessary but embarrassing U.S. aid client and partner in the quest for Middle East peace. The latest curtailment of domestic freedom was the kangaroo trial and seven-year sentence of a civic activist and scholar, Saadeddin Ibrahim, for monitoring elections, championing free speech and exposing discrimination against Coptic Christians. Sentences against 20 other employees of his Ibn Khaldoun Center for Social Development Studies show how adamant the regime was to silence the sociology professor at American University in Cairo, who has U.S. citizenship.

WASHINGTON -- After a week of examining the cockpit voice recorder and other evidence from EgyptAir Flight 990, federal investigators remain focused on the actions of a reserve pilot who they believe may have deliberately crashed the jet into the Atlantic Ocean, government officials said yesterday.Investigators continue working to develop what one called "a verified, acceptable transcript" that the Egyptians and Americans can agree to, one government official said. They are not expected to finish for at least a few days.

WASHINGTON -- The Egyptian government escalated yesterday its condemnation of U.S. officials investigating the EgyptAir crash, saying that, by focusing suspicion on a backup pilot, they were rushing to judgment about the cause.Egypt's principal spokesman said that a statement attributed to a relief pilot in the cockpit was being misinterpreted and did not show that he was about to commit suicide by sending the plane into the Atlantic.The criticism came as a federal official said that aviation investigators were unsure of the significance of the utterance, in Arabic, by the relief pilot as captured on the cockpit voice recorder in the seconds before the Boeing 767 crashed into the sea, killing all 217 on board Oct. 31. The chief spokesman for the Egyptian government, Nabil Osman, said in a telephone interview in Cairo that the words that investigators believe had been uttered by the relief pilot, Gameel el-Batouty, was a Muslim prayer "said in a time of crisis when a person is facing a difficult situation."

CAIRO, Egypt -- The massive video screen towering over a busy Cairo intersection plays an endless loop of President Hosni Mubarak's greatest triumphs: surveying reclaimed desert farmland, inaugurating Cairo's subway system, presiding over the repatriation of the final piece of Israeli-captured Sinai Peninsula land.At the end, the message flashes: "Yes to Mubarak!"Across the street, a man waiting for the bus rolls his eyes and mutters, "And what if we said `No'? Who would we even say no to?"

CAIRO, Egypt -- The names suggest kiddie parks or country clubs -- Dreamland, Royal Hills, Gardenia Park. Out in the desert wastelands surrounding Cairo, a new world is springing up -- one that, for better or worse, could determine the future of Egypt's teeming, overpopulated capital.Long fed up with the pollution, noise, traffic and general hassle of Cairo life, upper-class Egyptians have started looking outward -- to the dozens of elite, gated communities being built outside the city.Construction is nonstop -- and so is the debate about whether these new communities will save Cairo or finish it off.Egypt has always been a place of rigid class divisions, but until now rich and poor had lived side by side in relative harmony.

CAIRO, Egypt -- Traveling high above the Earth, the first men to circle the globe nonstop in a balloon say they reached a higher achievement, an appreciation for the planet and for peace."

"Cairo: The City Victorious," by Max Rodenbeck. Knopf. 288 pages. $27.50.You have taken a wrong turn and are in hell. It is every degree as hot as you feared. And is painfully bright, everything bleached dead white -- another fear fulfulled -- and tortuously loud because demons in Fiats constantly honk their horns while a hundred buses roar, while you try to breath air that seems mostly grit. Tahrir Square, in central Cairo, is the busiest, most energizing hell I know.In the Arab world, haughty Damascus sinks to the level of provincial capital when compared to Cairo.

CAIRO -- It's known as "the national dream." And that might not be much of an exaggeration. Beneath Egypt's crowded and claustrophobic capital city lies what many feel is the last, best hope to make Cairo livable again.In a city rapidly collapsing under the weight of its own population, government officials and city planners have turned their hopes underground -- to the only subway system in Africa or the Middle East."It's an idea that has been long overdue. They should have started it in the '60s," says Sayed Ettouney, a Cairo University professor of architecture and urban planning.

CAIRO, Egypt -- At the butcher shop of the sons of the sheik, the impoverished women of Imbaba line up for camel meat.Verses from the Koran blare from a tape recorder as Ahmed Hawari sharpens his knives. Camel is the only meat he sells. His customers, the poorest of Cairo's poor, can afford no other. This is a dusty warren of mud and brick tenements, 1 million people in two square miles, a shantytown that lacked water, electricity and crudely paved roads until a couple of years ago.Imbaba's astonishing poverty and resentment is not what tourists see when they come to Egypt.

CAIRO, Egypt -- A state security court convicted an Israeli Arab of espionage yesterday and sentenced him to 15 years of hard labor, deepening the rift in relations between Israel and Egypt.Azam Azam, a technician at a garment factory that was one of the few Israeli-Egyptian joint ventures in Egypt, had been accused in a plot to recruit an Egyptian textile worker as an economic spy for Israel. His fate is now in the hands of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who under Egypt's emergency laws has the power to set aside the verdict against Azam, the first Israeli ever to be convicted of spying against Egypt.