from the BBC feed

2006: President Mubarak appears to have adopted a two-pronged approach to save his government and ward off his departure, BBC Arab affairs analyst Magdi Abdelhadi reports from Cairo. On the one hand, he has got rid of figures who have become, in the eyes of many Egyptians, hated symbols of his long rule, including his younger son Gamal. On the other, he has tightened his grip on the country, with the much-disliked plain-clothes police reappearing on the streets to round up pro-democracy activists, and state media stirring up nationalist sentiment and portraying the protest movement as a foreign plot.