A Roundup from the Holiday Weekend

Today was the Martin Luther King holiday in the US and I've been busy with family things, but I thought I'd offer a few quick links you might wish to check out:

• Amira al-Tahawy, one of the bloggers arrested in Nag Hammadi and held in Qena, managed to conceal her cellphone and get a few pictures from captivity: the blog's in Arabic but everybody can figure out the pictures.
  

• Anwar Sadat's first wife, Iqbal, has died at age 93. She was the mother of his three eldest daughters, but he divorced her and married his second wife Jihan, who became familiar to the world as Egypt's outspoken First Lady and as Sadat's activist widow.

• The disqualification of 500 Iraqi politicians for alleged ties with the Ba‘ath has further clouded the prospects for the upcoming elections. I'll post more eventually but in the meantime you can follow coverage of the issue by Norwegian blogger Reidar Vissar, who has published a detailed series of analyses; or see shorter posts such as those by Marc Lynch, and also Juan Cole.

More from me later or tomorrow.