Ayman Nour's Office Raided

Via The Arabist, reports that Ayman Nour's office was raided during an anti-Gamal-succession meeting, and Nour's laptop and other devices seized. The anti-succession movement had been getting a fairly high profile; perhaps it was inevitable that State Security would step in.

He also caught an Al-Masry al-Yaum article I missed, in which Coptic Pope Shenouda again endorses Gamal Mubarak and dismisses the Coptic candidate. The Arabist expresses dismay at the Pope's remarks, but as I noted in earlier posts on Shenouda, Shenouda tried opposition politics under Sadat and spent several years in exile in the desert after Sadat deposed him in 1981, until Mubarak brought him back. He's been a Mubarak loyalist ever since, to the dismay of many Copts abroad and some at home.

Speaking of The Arabist, he posted a good dissenting comment to my recent post on Tunisia; it's worthy of your attention since it was posted nearly a week after the original post and only those who get the RSS feed of new comments will probably have seen it.