• Polls reopen after record turnout on opening day
• US calls for UN action against Syria
• Libyan authorities still holding 7,000 prisoners
• Read the latest summary
الانتخابات المصرية, اليوم الثاني - تغطية حية
Here's a summary of today' events.
Egypt
• Voting is almost over in Egypt's first election since the fall of Mubarak. The Muslim Brotherhood Freedom and Justice party is expected to do well when preliminary results are announced tomorrow.
• There have been more allegations of voting violation today, including a complaint by a judge who said a member of Freedom and Justice Party offered him a bribe. The ministry of interior apologised for "mistakes" in the electoral process.Turnout in Suez was reported to be lower than the first day. The
• Egypt's military rulers are reportedly importing a shipment of 21 tonnes of teargas from the US, following eight days of street clashes in which countless gas cannisters were launched at civilians. Some employees at the Suez Customs office refused to allow an initial seven tonne shipment into the country and were detained and questioned by security officials as a result. Barack Obama is facing mounting grassroots pressure to stop exporting weaponry to the Egyptian regime.
Syria
• Turkey's foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu said the international community may decide to impose buffer zone in Syria if hundreds of thousands of people try to flee the violence there. But he expressed his hope that military intervention "will never be necessary". His comments come after the US renewed calls for international action to stop "atrocities" being committed by the regime.
• Activists claim 11 people were killed by the security forces. The Local Co-ordination Committee of Syria said two of those killed were girls.
Libya
• Libya's new leaders have acknowledged that some prisoners held by revolutionary forces have been abused, but say the mistreatment was not systematic. The comments from Interior Minister Fawzy Abdul-Ali come a day after the UN released a report that said 7,000 people were still being detained by the new authorities and some were reportedly being subjected to torture and ill treatment.
Morocco
• King Mohammed has appointed Abdelilah Benkirane as the new prime minister after his moderate Islamist PJD party won the most seats in a parliamentary election last week.
Bahrain
• A Bahrain court has postponed the trial of 61 athletes and sports officials accused of links to anti-government protests. Defence lawyer Mohsen al-Alawi says the hearing was rescheduled for 4 January because most of the defendants did not appear at Tuesday's proceedings. They include handball, basketball and volleyball players along with referees and administrators for several sports. The charges include illegal assembly and inciting hatred against Bahrain's Sunni monarchy. The defendants are among 150 Shia sportsmen detained as part of crackdowns on protests by Bahrain's Shia majority seeking a greater political voice.
Kuwait
• The speaker of the KuwaitI national assembly says there will be no new sessions for MPs until a new government is formed, after the prime minister and his Cabinet resigned on Monday in a growing row over corruption. Sheikh Nasser al-Mohammad al-Sabah had been under pressure over allegations that 15 MPs were paid bribes to support the government. The announcement by the speaker, Jassem al-Kharafi, puts a freeze on all debate inside the assembly parliament.
• The resignations came after the opposition staged the largest rally in Kuwait's history - organisers claimed the crowds reached 90,000 calling for the dissolution of the National Assembly and the release of 24 activists detained for storming the Assembly. Opposition MPs welcomed the resignation of the Cabinet but said a new prime minister should be appointed and there should be a transitional government to oversee the next elections.
One of the judges overseeing the Egyptian elections says he was offered a bribe by a member of the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party, al-Masry al-Youm reports.
The judge, Tharwat Ahmed Helmy, who is overseeing the polls at Helwan primary school, filed a report accusing a representative from the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party of offering him a bribe in order to manipulate the ballots.
Today's death toll in Syria has risen to 11 people, according to activists.
The Local Co-ordination Committee of Syria says those killed included two girls.
Yesterday a UN commission found that at least 256 children had been killed by government forces since the start of the uprising in March.
Morocco's King Mohammed has appointed Abdelilah Benkirane as the new prime minister after his moderate Islamist PJD party won the most seats in a parliamentary election last week, Reuters reports.
"The king appointed today Justice and Development's secretary general Benkirane as prime minister. He (Benkirane) should now seek to form a government in coalition with other parties," an official source told Reuters.
The US embassy in Cairo has been giving unhelpful replies to questions about US shipments of teargas to Egypt.
The Guardian's Jack Shenker, who tweets under the name @hackneylad, is one several people to have tweeted questions to the embassy about the issue following reports of a 21 tonne shipment of US made teargas to the Egyptian authorities.
The US embassy has not denied the reports but seems reluctant to answer questions about it.
Its Twitter account gave these response. Here's a sample of its replies.
@alixtrot @blakehounshell @hackneylad For questions on Egyptian government purchases, we refer you to the Egyptian Ministry of Interior
@hackneylad U.S. security assistance funds were not used for tear gas. That's a genuine fact.
@mehyo The U.S. is providing $100,000 of humanitarian assistance to victims of recent violence in #Egypt & has condemned the excessive force
Jack pointed out:
But the US govt grants export licenses for tear-gas to #Egypt, and are you not their representatives here? @USEmbassyCairo
He has yet to hear a reply.
Some 1,350 Egyptians living in Britain are among thousands of Egyptian living abroad to have cast their vote in the poll.
One hundred Egyptian embassies overseas have sent the results of their vote counts to the Foreign Ministry in diplomatic telegrams, said Amr Roshdy, the spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry.
The total number of expatriate Egyptians who voted in the first phase of elections is as follows, added Roshdy: 30,000 in Saudi Arabia, 26,000 in Kuwait, 12,000 in the UAE, 6000 in Qatar, 1,700 in Oman, 1,350 in Britain and 5,000 in Canada.
My colleague Laura Oliver has curated a Storify page on how day two of the elections are being covered on social media.
We had to remove embedded items earlier in the blog for infuriating technical reasons. Apologies.
Dozens of Iranian protesters have forced their way into the British embassy in Tehran, tearing down the union flag and throwing documents from windows, Saeed Kamali Dehghan reports.
The attack came two days after the Iranian parliament voted to expel the British ambassador, Dominick Chilcott, in retaliation for economic sanctions imposed by the west over the country's disputed nuclear programme.
The Guardian will soon be posting a separate live blog on the incident.
Here's a summary of the main developments so far today:
Egypt
• Voting is taking place on the second day of the Egyptian elections. There were long queues at polling stations on Monday when turnout was between 30% to 32%, according to the Muslim Brotherhood. Some judges monitoring the election process were held hostage in polling stations by voters angry at the slow pace of the ballots on the first day. There were also reports of parties contravening election law by campaigning in and around polling stations but Amnesty International said there were no human rights violations. The number of people voting on Tuesday seems to be growing after a slow start.
• Egypt's military rulers are reportedly importing a shipment of 21 tonnes of teargas from the US, following eight days of street clashes in which countless gas cannisters were launched at civilians. Some employees at the Suez Customs office refused to allow an initial seven tonne shipment into the country and were detained and questioned by security officials as a result. Barack Obama is facing mounting grassroots pressure to stop exporting weaponry to the Egyptian regime.
Syria
• Turkey's foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu said the international community may decide to impose buffer zone in Syria if hundreds of thousands of people try to flee the violence there. But he expressed his hope that military intervention "will never be necessary". His comments come after the US renewed calls for international action to stop "atrocities" being committed by the regime.
• The Local Co-ordination Committees, which report on protests in Syria, claim that four people have been killed so far today by the security forces. They say three people were killed in Rankous, in Damascus suburbs, and one person was killed in Homs.
Libya
• Libya's new leaders have acknowledged that some prisoners held by revolutionary forces have been abused, but say the mistreatment was not systematic. The comments from Interior Minister Fawzy Abdul-Ali come a day after the UN released a report that said 7,000 people were still being detained by the new authorities and some were reportedly being subjected to torture and ill treatment.
Bahrain
• A Bahrain court has postponed the trial of 61 athletes and sports officials accused of links to anti-government protests. Defence lawyer Mohsen al-Alawi says the hearing was rescheduled for 4 January because most of the defendants did not appear at Tuesday's proceedings. They include handball, basketball and volleyball players along with referees and administrators for several sports. The charges include illegal assembly and inciting hatred against Bahrain's Sunni monarchy. The defendants are among 150 Shia sportsmen detained as part of crackdowns on protests by Bahrain's Shia majority seeking a greater political voice.
Kuwait
• The speaker of the KuwaitI national assembly says there will be no new sessions for MPs until a new government is formed, after the prime minister and his Cabinet resigned on Monday in a growing row over corruption. Sheikh Nasser al-Mohammad al-Sabah had been under pressure over allegations that 15 MPs were paid bribes to support the government. The announcement by the speaker, Jassem al-Kharafi, puts a freeze on all debate inside the assembly parliament.
• The resignations came after the opposition staged the largest rally in Kuwait's history - organisers claimed the crowds reached 90,000 – calling for the dissolution of the National Assembly and the release of 24 activists detained for storming the Assembly. Opposition MPs welcomed the resignation of the Cabinet but said a new prime minister should be appointed and there should be a transitional government to oversee the next elections.
The Muslim Brotherhood has published a breakdown of voter turnout on Monday "according to preliminary estimates".
It puts the overall participation rate at 30% to 32%. The breakdowns by governorate are as follows:
Alexandria 30%
Assiut 30%
Cairo 25%
Damietta 40%
Fayoum 35%
Kafr El-Sheikh 40%
Port-Said 45%
Luxur 30%
Port-Said 45%
The Red Sea 25%.
On the Arabist blog, Issandr El Amrani writes of the elections that the "broadly positive coverage in the media will serve as a corrective to last week's negative mood about Egypt in the markets":
That is a silver lining that is much needed a few days after S&P downgraded Egypt's debt and as alarm rises about the state of the reserves (about halved since January, leaving less than four months of imports), policy paralysis notably over the IMF/WB loan, terrible policymaking (borrowing locally at 11-13.5% since last June's rejection of the first IMF/WB package, which was at around 3%) and expectation of a coming devaluation of the Egyptian pound (which would help exports and tourism but contribute to inflation, the one thing brought under control in recent months.)
He says the biggest problem for ordinary Egyptians is making ends meet, citing a Gallup poll from October, showing that people are struggling to do so.
As further evidence of the dire economic situation he highlights a Bloomberg report that there was an 80% drop-off in tourist bookings in response to the recent demonstrations.
Al-Masry al-Youm reports that the Egyptian pound has fallen to its lowest level in almost seven years this morning but while the Arabist talks of an impending devaluation, al-Masry al-Youm says that the depreciation in the value of the currency comes despite the central bank having spent almost US$2 billion of its foreign reserves in October, partly to support the currency. The falling pound will increase the cost of imports as well as Egypt's foreign debts.
There has been some good news for the economy today, however. Egyptian investors have reacted positively to the elections with the country's stock exchange up 5.2% to 3,977 points, having been closed on Monday, Reuters reports.
Mohamed Radwan, the head of equities at Pharos Securities, said:
Investors were quite pessimistic that the election might be postponed or cancelled. There will definitely be some violations but the overall mood is focusing on the fact that this election was secure with a strong turnout.
The Muslim Brotherhood has been publishing on its Twitter feed what it claims are preliminary results of votes cast by Egyptians overseas, where polls have closed. It claims the details have come from Egyptian embassies overseas but the Egyptian government has denied releasing such information, according to Ahram Online , and says the results will be published alongside those from within Egypt so as not to prejudice the voting.
The Brotherhood says its Freedom and Justice party, has won the majority of votes in Yemen and Oman but that the Free Egyptians party, a liberal party that is part of the Egyptian bloc, has won the most votes in the Republic of Ireland.
Meanwhile, the Associated Press areports long lines forming on Tuesday at polling centres around the capital Cairo and other cities , despite those Twitter reports suggesting lower turnout today.
Omar Robert Hamilton update. After explaining why he has changed his mind about boycotting the poll (see the previous post), Omar Robert Hamilton has now voted.
No queues at all at at Zamalek station. Was done in 5 minutes.
He is not the only one reporting lower turnout today.
Journalist and activist Sarah Carr tweets:
Been walking around Abdeen and now in Sayeda Zeinab 0 queues v. Few voters coming in & out of polling stations.
NBC Ayman Mohayeldin tweets:
Any busy polling stations today with long queues? Have been to a few but very low numbers. #egyelections
Some Egyptian activists are changing their tune on participation in the election, Jack Shenker reports.
Many demonstrators in Tahrir Square vowed to boycott these elections: some out of the belief that they simply couldn't be held amid the current security crisis, but most because they felt that any parliament that emerges from them will have little real power in the face of an ongoing military dictatorship, that the real struggle for the revolution lies elsewhere, and to participate would effectively help legitimise Scaf's rule.
Interestingly some - but by no means all - are now changing their minds. Among them is film-maker and activist Omar Robert Hamilton, who has written up an interesting blog post explaining his decision.
"No one is expecting voting to achieve the aims of the revolution," claims Hamilton. "I don't think anyone even wants to vote. The elections are a sham. But they are one of the battles that are being forced on us so I think we should engage."
He goes on to list three main reasons for casting a ballot. Firstly that the elections have been designed as a weapon against the revolution; the Muslim Brotherhood and Scaf are trying to stitch up parliament between them, he argues, and if the poll offers even a 0.0001% chance of disrupting that plan then it's worth participating. Secondly that voting doesn't necessarily mean endorsing Scaf or their 'transition' timetable. And finally that the elections and the struggle in Tahrir are not mutually exclusive, and that the boycott call could serve to alienate Egyptians beyond the square.
That last point is a really interesting one, and something that was borne out for me when I visited Duweiqa, a very poor district to the east of Cairo, yesterday afternoon. It wasn't that the voters there were anti-Tahrir or even pro-Scaf; in fact many of them shared the same critique of military rule that is often articulated at anti-junta protests. But they did feel that Tahrir was something distant and detached from their own struggle for dignity and a basic standard of living in one of the most impoverished areas of the country, and that those calling for a boycott didn't understand how much the chance to vote and thus have some say over their lives - however flawed the process was - meant to them. From the perspective of the revolutionaries, anything that can help build bridges between Tahrir and neighbourhoods like Duweiqa can only be a good thing.
As Hamilton argues: "The revolution will rise or fall on how widespread it is. Tahrir was most effective when it was the physical representation of a national will; when the country was shut down because of it and the wave of union actions behind it. It can be that again, but we have to make sure it keeps feeling like everyone's home."
The CBC's Derek Stoffel has tracked down a polling station that used to be reserved for Mubarak.
It is now open to all he says, but armed guards he photographed at the gates don't make it look particularly welcoming.
There are reports that Egypt's military rulers are importing another sizeable shipment of teargas from the US, writes Jack Shenker.
As Egyptians flock to the polls for the second consecutive day, there's been another reminder of the volatile backdrop to these elections - and specifically the state-sponsored violence meted out against anti-junta demonstrators which dominated headlines last week,
According to the state-owned al-Aharm, the Egyptian Ministry of Interior is in the process of importing a further 21 tonnes of tear-gas from the US, following eight days of almost uninterrupted street clashes between revolutionaries and security forces in which countless gas canisters - the majority of them American-made - were launched at civilians, causing serious injuries including seizures, convulsions and coughing blood.
The massive order came to light when some employees at the Suez Canal customs office refused to allow an initial seven tonne shipment into the country and were detained and questioned by security officials as a result. Documents obtained by those employees and leaked to the press suggest two further deliveries are due later this week, even as grassroots pressure mounts on President Obama to stop exporting weaponry to the Egyptian regime.
The story leaves a lot of unanswered questions - for example 21 tonnes sounds like a lot, but how much of that is packaging and casing, and how much is actual teargas? There are also some who doubt that sensitive security shipments for the Ministry of Interior would ever be processed through the normal customs channels, as appears to have happened in this instance. But whatever the truth behind the claims, it has set the social media world alight and focused Egyptian minds once again on the underlying division between the military council and some parts of the street, at a time when polling stations and ballot boxes have largely been getting all the attention.
Diplomatic pressure against Syria is mounting up, following a renewed call by the US for UN action against the Assad regime.
Turkey's foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu said the international community may decide to impose buffer zone in Syria if hundreds of thousands of people try to flee the violence there.
The Turkish daily Hurriyet Daily News quoted him saying:
If the oppression continues, Turkey is ready for any scenario. We hope that a military intervention will never be necessary. The Syrian regime has to find a way of making peace with its own people.
The Swiss president has expressed backing for a French idea of setting up humanitarian corridors in Syria, according to Switzerland's English language news site, the Local.
It quoted Micheline Calmy-Rey as saying
The humanitarian situation is deteriorating. We will examine the idea of humanitarian corridors. If the project materialises, if it has positive effects, it will be a good thing.
Germany's ambassador to the UN Peter Wittig endorsed an Arab League decision to impose sanctions against Syria. According to AP he said:
The decision of the Arab League was a really remarkable if not historic decision It was a reaction to the brutal crackdown — and the message of course is clear. If (President Bashar) Assad doesn't heed the call, then there will be biting sanctions.
I think the council cannot stand idly by regarding what the regional organization has said so strongly: the council should take up that decision and endorse and reinforce it.
The Russian news agency RIA Novosti quoted Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov claiming that opposition groups were being armed by foreign governments just as they had been in Libya.
Groups, including those formed from citizens who penetrated to Syria from other states, have been actively supplied with arms. That is why proposals to introduce a ban on any arms supplies to Syria are quite unfair.
We know how the arms embargo was applied in Libya. The opposition was receiving arms, with such countries as France and Qatar publicly stating that they have supplied those arms.
Different day, same problems ... Egypt's interior ministry announced that 22 polling stations have not yet opened in Cairo and Fayoum, Ahram Online reports.
Polling taking place at the rate of one vote every five minutes, according to the One World Foundation, al-Masry al-Youm reports.
Jack Shenker said there had been estimates that polling would need to take place at the rate of one vote per minute if everyone was going to get a chance to vote.
One World Foundation,
The Muslim Brotherhood and its political wing the Freedom and Justice Party appears buoyed by the high turnout. In a statement it said:
The long queues revealed the voters intent in making history and shaping Egypt's future reaping yet another fruit of the January 25 Revolution.
Last week's protests exposed divisions in the Brotherhood on its attitudes to activists and the military government. The New York Times reported that it was "torn between preserving its credibility with protesters and securing the political advantages of cooperating with the ruling military council."
But analysts now expect them to do very well in the elections.
Steven Cook, chief Egypt watcher for the US thinktank the Council on Foreign Relations, said the poll showed the strength of the Brotherhood's organisation.
The Muslim Brotherhood is, indeed, the most well-organized, resourced, and politically savvy political movement in Egypt. The Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party is going to reap the rewards of these factors.
This will worry Washington, he said:
From an American policy perspective, the outcome may not be as inspiring as the process. Word on the street is that the Muslim Brotherhood, which until last week had vowed that it would only seek 30-35 percent of the seats in the People's Assembly, may be going for broke and seeking to accumulate as many seats in the parliament as possible.
Needless to say, a bigger than expected return for the Muslim Brotherhood in a parliament that has the legitimacy of being popularly elected is going to put pressure on the US-Egypt relationship because the Brothers simply do not share Washington's view of the region and least of all its interests. Indeed, there is likely to be a fair amount of hand-wringing around the Beltway should the Brothers do well. This is not surprising given the tenor of the commentary regarding the Brotherhood in Washington over the last nine months, but the fact remains that nothing the United States can do about it. If Washington is going to be good to its word in supporting change in Egypt, policymakers are going to have to live with an influential Muslim Brotherhood.
Some judges monitoring the election process were held hostage in polling stations by voters angry at the slow pace of the ballots, Ahram Online reports.
Head of the judges club Ahmed El-Zend advises judges to "avoid discussions with angry voters ... in order not to escalate the situation", it said.
Despite this and other widely documented problems at the polls, Amnesty's election observer Said al-Haddadi said there were no human rights violations on the opening day of voting, al-Jazeera reported.
Meanwhile, long polling queues have already been building up this morning.
This picture was posted to Twitter by Ramy Raoof before the polls opened.
Welcome to Middle East Live. It's day two of Egypt's extended opening round of elections. Here's a run down of what happened on Monday:
Egypt
• On the opening day of the election Egyptians came out to vote in record numbers, defying widespread predictions of violence and chaos. Polls were kept open two hours past their scheduled closing time to allow long queues of people at polling stations throughout Cairo to cast their ballots. Preliminary results are expected later this week. Two further rounds of voting will be held in other areas of Egypt, the last on 3 January, before a 498-member lower house of parliament is elected.
• First time voter Marwa Gamil summed up the mood of many Egyptian who went to the polls:
People in Tahrir Square told us to boycott these elections because the new parliament will be controlled by the military council. I think they might be right. But that doesn't change the fact that, for the first time, I'm about to tick a box and someone far away is going to count it and in that way I'm going to make a difference. Every time I hear the new parliament mentioned on television I'm going to smile and think to myself, 'I helped choose that parliament'. And that makes me so full of hope for the future.
• "Many well-known bloggers spent the day working as self-appointed election monitors," the New York Times reports on online efforts to crowd source election violations.
• So far so good, despite the problems, is the verdict of the Arabist podcast. Blogger Issandr El Amrani says Egypt has a come a long way since last year's disastrous elections under Mubarak when there was widespread vote buying and police collusion. "So far what we have seen, despite being an election that was tremendously badly prepared, is going OK," he said.
Syria
• The United States has renewed calls for international action to stop "atrocities" being committed by the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Speaking to reporters, Susan Rice, US ambassador to the UN said:
It's past time for the Security Council to take much more decisive action with respect to Syria ... It is becoming increasingly clear ... that the Assad regime has participated in outrageous and, now, well-documented atrocities ... We think it's time to revisit the question of what might be possible here in New York ... We will be talking to partners in the Council and outside the Council as to what appropriate next steps may be.
• Syrian security forces have committed "crimes against humanity" since widespread anti-government protests began in March, according to a damning UN report. It said that least 256 children had been killed by government forces.
Bahrain
• Medical staff accused of trying to overthrow the government after treating protesters, had hoped charges against them might be dropped but now face new accusations. Last week a report by the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry found allegations that the medics "assisted the demonstrators by supplying them with weapons" to be unfounded. But at their retrial prosecutors produced guns, swords, knives and chains and claimed this was proof against the doctors, nurses, and paramedics.
Libya
• The new authorities are still detaining 7,000 people, and some reportedly have been subjected to torture and ill treatment, according to a new UN report. The report says that many of the inmates have no access to due process in the absence of a functioning police and judiciary.
Kuwait
• Kuwait's prime minister and his cabinet have resigned following a growing row with his parliamentary opponents about alleged corruption, the BBC reports. Sheikh Nasser al-Mohammad al-Sabah had been under pressure over allegations that 15 MPs were paid bribes to support the government.
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