Iran Feature: A Middle Class on Edge (Worth)

>One measure of the profound anxiety now coursing through Iranian society can be seen on Manouchehri Street, a winding lane at the heart of this city where furtive crowds of men gather every day like drug dealers to buy and sell American dollars.

The government has raised the official exchange rate and sent police into the streets to stop the black marketeers, but with confidence in Iran’s own currency, the rial, collapsing by the day, the trade goes on.

“Am I afraid of the police? Sure, but I need the money,” said Hamid, a heavyset construction engineer who was standing by a muddy patch of greenery amid a crowd of other illicit currency traders here. “Food prices are going up, and my salary is not enough.” Glancing nervously around him, he added that he had converted almost all of his assets into dollars. Like many Iranians, he had also stockpiled months’ worth of rice and other staples.

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Iran Feature: How Tehran's "Islamic Awakening" Lost Its Arab Spring (Worth)

It was meant to be a crowning moment in which Iran put its own Islamic stamp on the Arab Spring. More than a thousand young activists were flown here earlier this week (at government expense) for a conference on “the Islamic Awakening,” Tehran’s effort to re-brand the popular Arab uprisings of the past year.

As delegates flooded into a vast auditorium next to a space needle in western Tehran, a screen showed images of the Iranian revolution in 1979, morphing seamlessly into footage of young Arab protesters in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya and Yemen.

But there was a catch. No one was invited from Syria, whose autocratic president, Bashar al-Assad, is a crucial Iranian ally.

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Yemen 1st-Hand: "They Want to Turn the Revolution into a Tribal War" (Worth)

Freedom Square, Taiz, YemenThe events in Taiz took on a tragic dimension that went beyond the numbers of dead and wounded. Taiz is Yemen’s least tribal city, home to the highest number of educated people, professionals and traders. The city was “the heart of the revolution,” in one popular refrain, and its protesters were less politicized and more rigorously nonviolent than elsewhere in Yemen. The attack on May 29, with its deliberate cruelty and excess, confirmed what many Yemenis feared: that Saleh sees the democratic uprising as a greater threat to his power than Al Qaeda. The burning of the Taiz square, after all, coincided with the collapse of all government authority in large areas of south Yemen, where heavily armed jihadist groups have captured two towns and several villages. In the northwestern province of Saada, too, a militia movement now reigns supreme; they recently elected Yemen’s biggest arms dealer as their new governor. All this has implications that go well beyond Yemen’s remote mountains and deserts — the chaos in the north, for instance, threatens to set off a proxy conflict between the region’s two great nemeses, Saudi Arabia and Iran — and the Yemeni military has done little to oppose any of it.

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Egypt Feature: "The Struggle is Far from Over" (Worth)

Tahrir Square, Cairo, 27 May 2011Three months after the revolution, Egypt is in the agony of self-discovery. As other Arab revolutions founder or lapse into civil wars, Egypt has achieved far more than its young rebels ever hoped for. First, they forced out Mubarak in only 18 days. Then, with renewed protests in Tahrir Square and elsewhere, they rid themselves of his loyalists, including Ahmed Shafiq, the prime minister.

Nominally, Egypt is being ruled by a panel of military generals, who have governed in an uneasy dialogue with the revolution’s self-appointed leaders, making concession after concession to popular demands. But protesters continue to call for deeper reforms, and workers are striking throughout the country, demanding better pay and the removal of Mubarak-era bosses. Meanwhile, many Egyptians seem eager to carry the revolutionary energy of Tahrir Square into everyday life. “I was part of the regime — I used to take bribes,” intones a man in a new public-service TV ad campaign. “But Egypt is changing, and I am changing.” Sitting in traffic, I saw bumper stickers proclaiming: “As of today, I won’t run traffic lights,” and “I will change.” Posters have appeared on walls across Cairo urging Egyptians to stop littering, stop cheating, stop putting up with police abuse and sectarian slurs.

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