Tahrir Square

CAIRO - The Obama administration ordered the evacuation of all but emergency U.S. government personnel, and all family members, from diplomatic missions in Tunisia and Sudan on Saturday and warned Americans not to travel to those countries. The action came as leaders across the Muslim world took stock of their relationship with the United States, a major provider of aid and investment, and struggled to balance it with the simmering anger of their populations. In Sudan, the State Department order came after the government in Khartoum rejected a U.S. request to send a Marine antiterrorism unit to protect the embassy there, which came under attack by protesters Friday.

Mitt Romney echoed the feeling of many Americans after last week's Mideast violence when he said: "Sometimes it seems that we're at the mercy of events instead of shaping events. " He's correct: American influence in the Arab world has waned dramatically in the last four years. The reason: Both Republican and Democratic leaders pushed for democracy in the Mideast without understanding what it would bring. Don't get me wrong. I think the United States had no choice but to endorse the Arab Spring uprisings, which reflected a flow of history that could not be halted.

This is hardly a week when we need to be reminded that judges, particularly Supreme Court justices, have a profound impact on politics. While the current court may seem extreme in its willingness to enter the political fray on immigration and health care, that is not new: High courts around the world have been wreaking havoc on their countries' political systems for a long time.   That judicial systems are an essential aspect of democracy is all too evident in Egypt today.

Intisar Sayed Mahmoud, a large woman in a head scarf and flowing orange robe, jumped up and bellowed from the front row of the balcony of an auditorium filled with 2,000 women from all over Egypt: "We want a Parliament that is 50 percent women!" The scene was a conference of Egypt's National Council for Women (NCW) in Cairo titled "She and the President. " It was held just before last month's presidential ballot to allow women to press their demands on the 13 (male) candidates.

CAIRO - When I interviewed young veterans of the January revolt in voter lines, and cafés, they all saw the vote as an extension of the revolution. They all rejected the so-called faloul candidates, with links to the past regime, meaning former Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq and ex-Foreign Minister Amr Moussa. Several said they would go back to the streets if Shafiq won. "We still have Tahrir," one young sales representative for the Cadbury food group told me. "If there will be injustice, we will go again.

CAIRO - On the first day of the first free presidential election in Egyptian history, 10 young men sat in a circle in a rundown cafe in the working-class quarter of Saida Zainab. They were supposed to be holding a sales meeting for a food products company, but instead they were arguing over which presidential candidate to vote for. Three had picked the candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood, three were opting for a moderate Islamist independent, and three backed a socialist who patterns himself on Gamal Abdel Nasser.

CAIRO — In Tahrir Square, the only reminders of last year's Arab Spring are a handful of tattered tents and the hawkers who sell leftover trinkets from the revolution. Many secular Egyptians who once demanded democracy now fear that they ousted a secular autocracy only to see it replaced with an Islamic one — ushered in by the ballot. Yet the liberals, leftists, and moderate Muslims who organized the revolt failed to do the one thing that would block an Islamist victory — unite around a single candidate for the presidency in the first round of elections on Wednesday and Thursday.

EL-ARISH, Egypt - Islamist militants driving vehicles mounted with machine guns opened fire on a police checkpoint in Egypt's Sinai peninsula Sunday, killing two policemen and injuring a third in a daring attack, security officials said. Militants have stepped up their activity in Sinai since last year's uprising, taking advantage of a security vacuum after many members of the hated police force disappeared from the streets. The lawlessness in the Sinai has been complicated by sour relations between the local Bedouin tribes and the security agencies, who were accused of mistreating them under the old regime of Hosni Mubarak.

NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE CAIRO - The six-month-old government of Tunisia cracked down with tear gas and batons Monday on thousands of protesters who filled a central artery of the capital in defiance of a new ban on demonstrations there. The confrontation, at the site of the protests that ousted former President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and kicked off the Arab Spring last year, was another manifestation of a role reversal now playing out across North Africa in the aftermath of the revolts in neighboring Egypt and Libya as well.

In April, the prize-winning New York Times correspondent Anthony Shadid was asked, on the NPR talk show On Point , why he kept taking terrible risks to cover conflicts in the Middle East. "I kind of wonder if it's irresponsible of you," a caller mused out loud. "Why would someone put themselves in such a situation?" Shadid, in his typically modest fashion, admitted this was "a perfectly legitimate question. " Then he replied slowly, "I felt that if I wasn't there, the story wouldn't be told.