Greetings!

I'm in the States for the Eid/Thanksgiving holidays, so there won't be any posts for the next few days. But here's some amusing reading if you have some free time over the long weekend. Thanks to a colleague, AVM, for the heads-up on the Egyptastic page.

I browsed the Egyptastic online store and I really want the mug that reads, "Zamalek: Like Egypt, With Fewer Egyptians," but I wasn't sure whether the whole site was a parody or whether you could really buy the T-shirt that says, "Zahi Hawass Announced My Discovery." The T-shirt is advertised as "a great ice breaker at conferences and symposia."

See you in a week.

As I write this, after midnight, Cairo sounds as if it's under siege.

Fireworks are exploding, police sirens are blaring, horns are honking, music is thumping and at least six processions of young men with drums have passed noisily in front of my building. Sporadic gunfire is keeping the whole block's residents in from their balconies.

Tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Egyptians are flooding the streets draped in the red, white and black of the national flag and generally whooping it up. They have reason to celebrate: the Egyptian national soccer team beat archrival Algeria tonight in a World Cup qualifier. The two teams will play again Wednesday in Sudan.

"This is what a revolution could look like," an Egyptian friend observed, wistfully, of the fervor in the streets.

But this was all about soccer, or "football" as it's known here and everywhere else besides the United states. There's an ugly history behind this particular match, which you can read in this ESPN story and this one from AFP. Riots broke out after an infamous Egypt-Algeria match in 1989.

Security forces swarmed the street and traffic was severely restricted in several places long before the match today. Vendors walked through traffic jams, selling Egyptian flags. I heard that some fans spent the night before in line at the stadium, to guarantee their seats for the main event.

I haven't heard whether things turned violent in the streets tonight (the latest AP story notes that it was fairly peaceful), but things were looking ominous before the game began. Egyptians threw rocks at the bus carrying the visiting Algerian team from the airport, injuring three players. The Egyptian press then further mocked the team by writing that the whole story was made up by the Algerians.

One of the best parts of the feverish lead-up to the big match today was a "peace concert" in Cairo jointly headlined by two of the most popular North African singers, Cheb Khaled and Mohammad Mounir.

Here's a YouTube clip from the concert:

CNN has an interesting online report about Egyptian women breaking a longstanding taboo and talking openly about divorce. The reporter says that the proliferation of TV programs, radio shows and blogs about marriage-related issues has helped to ease the stigma still associated with divorce throughout much of the Middle East.

CNN reports that nearly 40 percent of all marriages in Egypt end in divorce, according to 2008 figures from the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics. That means Egypt has the highest divorce rate in the Arab world.

Highlights from the report:

Once considered taboo to discuss in public, private relationships between men and women are now the hot topic of television talk shows, radio programs and blogs. Mahasen Saber, host of Divorce Radio, says that her program is helping to break the stigma.

"People are shocked at first, but after they read and listen to what we write and present, they like what we talk about...they are happy because I am talking about something they are dealing with" Saber told CNN.

Earlier this year she launched the radio show to complement her blog called "I Want A Divorce."

Sex enters the picture:

Dr. Heba Kotb is a leading sexologist in Cairo who appears regularly on TV. She has two PHD's, one in sexuality from the University of Florida, and she considers herself a conservative Muslim. Dr. Kotb attributes 80 percent of divorce in Egypt to sexual problems.

"In most cases couples simply don't know how to deal sexually with their partner," she told CNN. "I provide the information -- this is right, this is wrong, you should do this."

Egypt's divorce laws:

In Egypt marriage falls under family law, which is based on Shari'a, Islamic religious law, and which gives men and women unequal rights to a divorce.

"In Islamic Shari'a, a man can divorce his wife at any time, in any place, and for any or no reason by simply uttering the following words: "I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you," explained Gabriel Sawma an attorney specializing in Muslim divorce law and professor at Farleigh Dickinson University.

Women, on the other hand, can get a divorce only through court action, in a much more formal legal process.

In 2000, Egypt liberalized their laws, granting women the right to initiate a "no-fault" divorce (khula). Though this is considered a step forward, women are still required through khula to relinquish any claim to alimony or their dowry.

Egypt welcomed the sentence of life in prison -- the maximum penalty for murder under German law -- for the man convicted of stabbing to death a pregnant Egyptian woman who was testifying against him in court.

The death of Marwa al Sherbini in a German courtroom in July enraged and captivated Muslims, particularly Egyptians, many of whom blame Germany for fueling an anti-Muslim climate there. But the stiff sentence handed down Wednesday by a German judge earned praise from many Egyptians who described the ruling as just and impartial.

  "We are very satisfied with the verdict," Ramzy Ezzedin Ramzy, Egypt's ambassador to Berlin, told the Times of London. "The maximum sentence was demanded and the maximum sentence was awarded."

The case began last year on a Dresden playground when Sheribini asked Alexander Wiens, a Russian of ethnic German origin, to move from a swing so her 3-year-old son could use it. Wiens started to scream at Sherbini, who was wearing a headscarf, and accused her of being an Islamist and a terrorist. Sherbini pressed charges of slander against Wiens, who received a fine. He appealed and sought to bring the case before a judge.

Sherbini was three months pregnant when the case came to court. She was accompanied by her husband, a microbiologist, and their young son. Inside the courtroom, Wiens took a long knife from under his jacket and stabbed Sherbini 18 times, according to news accounts. Her husband was stabbed 16 times while trying to stop the attack.

Things got even worse when a security officer responding to the scene misread what was happening and shot the husband instead of Wiens. The husband was wounded, but survived. Sherbini's 3-year-old son witnessed the grisly episode. As news of the murder spread, Muslims held protests in Germany and elsewhere in Europe and the Middle East.

Al Arabiya interviewed Sherbini's relatives in Egypt, who told the channel they were satisfied with the life sentence for Wiens. However, they also demanded punishment for the security officer and the judge, saying the men shared in the responsibility for failing to protect Sherbini inside a court of law. Her father, Ali al Sherbini, told Arabiya: "My phone didn't stop ringing once the verdict was issued. People congratulated us and praised God for having mercy on her."

Sherbini's case became a rallying point for proponents of the veil, which is worn by the majority of Egyptian women but remains a controversial topic throughout the Islamic world. Because she was killed while defending her right to practice Islam, many clerics deemed her a "martyr." The Western press took to calling her the "veil martyr" in headlines.

Muslim governments seized on the incendiary case to make political points. Perhaps the most noteworthy was Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during a tense interview with Katie Couric. Couric was pressing Ahmadinejad on the highly publicized death of a young Iranian activist, and he fired back by producing a photo of Sherbini. He asked Couric if he knew who the woman in the photo was.

Couric didn't know, and Ahmadinejad used the moment as an illustration of the Western media's double standards. You can read the details of the interview here.

Last month was particularly deadly for young Asian and African women employed by Lebanese families as domestic help.

On Oct. 8, a Nepalese woman named Sunit Bholan committed suicide. A week later, a 23-year-old Ethiopian woman named Kassaye Etsegenet jumped to her death from the 7th floor of an apartment building in Beirut. Five days after that, the body of another Ethiopian, Zeditu Kebede Matente, 26, was found hanging from an olive tree.

Five other women died before the end of October, two more Ethiopians, another Nepalese maid, and two women from Madagascar, according to a report this week from the Beirut office of Human Rights Watch. That's a total of eight in one month.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) is calling on the Lebanese government to investigate the "disproportionately high death rate among this group of workers," according to a news release. An estimated 200,000 domestic workers, primarily from Sri Lanka, work in Lebanon. Last year, HRW published a study showing that migrant domestic workers were dying at a rate of more than one a week in Lebanon.

The rate of suicides and mysterious fatal falls apparently is worrying governments with high numbers of workers in Lebanon.

A diplomat for a country from which one of the dead women came told HRW: "These women are under pressure, with no means to go away. Their passports are seized and they are often locked away in their employer's house. It is like they are living in a cage. Human beings need to mingle with others; otherwise they lose their will to live."

Throughout the Middle East and North Africa, it's common for middle- and upper-class families to employ housemaids, gardeners, nannies and doormen. Their pay is low, but enough to support the domestic workers' families back home in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Eritrea and the Philippines.

While many families treat their hired help as in any employer-worker relationship, with time off for home visits and set working hours, abuses have become so frequent that human rights groups are calling for greater legal protection and more government enforcement of existing labor laws.

Without reforms, many domestic workers will remain vulnerable and trapped, modern-day slaves.

Despite the rantings of some militant clerics, Beyonce's highly anticipated concert on Egypt's Red Sea coast -- her first in North Africa -- went without a hitch this weekend. The only time she ran into trouble, apparently, was on Sunday during a private tour of the pyramids in Giza.

There, Beyonce faced an equally formidable diva: Zahi Hawass, Egypt's antiquities chief who's known across the globe from his splashy documentaries for National Geographic, Discovery Channel and the History Channel on the lives of the pharaohs. It's hard to overstate how colorful a character Hawass is; the latest issue of The New Yorker has a profile of Hawass that portrays him as the self-important, wildly unreliable juggernaut behind Egyptomania, even as his contributions to Egyptology are disputed.

This is the man Beyonce reportedly left waiting for two hours, arriving late for a scheduled tour of the pyramids complex at Giza with Hawass as her personal escort (Hawass was also President Obama's escort during his visit to the pyramids this year).

Al Arabiya reported that Hawass gave Beyonce a tongue lashing, quoting him as telling the singer, "You're lucky I was writing an article and it took this long to finish it. Otherwise, I wouldn't have waited for you." And, according to Arabiya, Hawass chided one of Beyonce's aides for stopping a photographer from his Supreme Council of Antiquities from taking pictures.

"I give the orders here, not Beyonce," Hawass was quoted as saying.

That's a lesson some aspiring Egyptologists are learning. A reality show is in the works for the History Channel, featuring Zahi Hawass and young American acolytes "chasing mummies," according to some audition tapes for the potential show. Rumor has it that filming is going on in Egypt now, with scenes such as Hawass interrupting a young fan's speech by ordering the woman to get him some tea.

I don't know who's on the show, but YouTube has the audition tapes of several would-be contestants. They talk about their fascination with Egypt and the thrill of possibly working with Hawass.

Here are three of my favorites: an earnest Howard University student who is fluent in heiroglyphics, a British guy who works as a "costumed interpreter" at a history theme park, and this effusive actress who intones ancient chants while praying to Isis.

Photo credit: Photo of Beyonce and Zahi Hawass in Egypt is from Reuters.

The practice of extraordinary rendition didn't end under the Obama administration, though the controversial tactic that began in the George W. Bush era has been largely overshadowed by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Extraordinary rendition -- in which the U.S. seizes suspected militants and transfers them to allied countries for interrogation; critics call it "the outsourcing of torture" -- is still going on. President Obama chose to close secret overseas prisons, but decided to keep the practice of extraordinary rendition, pledging better monitoring to prevent torture. Human rights leaders were quoted as saying there would be little more than "diplomatic assurances" to prevent abuse in countries known to torture prisoners.

The current administration is still dealing with fallout from the Bush administration's excesses in the so-called War on Terror. On Wednesday, an Italian court convicted 23 American CIA agents, including the former Milan station chief, in the kidnapping of an Egyptian terror suspect in Italy. The prisoner was then transferred to Egypt, where he spent more than three years in solitary confinement with frequent abuse, according to human rights groups and interviews with the man's lawyer and family.

Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, known as Abu Omar, was seized while walking to noon prayers at a mosque in Milan. Here's more from the AP's latest story about the case and the convictions (in absentia, which basically means none of the American agents can enter Europe while the verdict stands).

In May 2006, my news assistant Miret and I reported on Abu Omar's case, interviewing his attorney in Cairo and his relatives by phone from Alexandria. Here's our report on what happened to Abu Omar after he was snatched from an Italian street.

President Obama is betting that this won't happen again under stricter monitoring, but at least one case already casts doubt on notions of an improved renditions program. The Huffington Post published this account of a Lebanese construction manager with a third-grade education who reportedly was the first target of an Obama administration rendition. He's alleging torture, according to federal court papers filed in suburban Washington.