The previous postings, April 29, 2013, included as the top story the report from “Egypt Independent”: “Final Issue: In Egypt, environmental journalists are endangered species”.

“Egypt Independent” has been an outstanding source of environmental news. As the story in the previous posting relates, the newspaper made an editorial decision that environmental issues were under-reported and critical to understanding Egypt’s current state and future prospects.

Compare the environmental reporting in “Egypt Independent” to “Al Ahram” (or for that matter almost any other news media in the Middle East). The systematic lack of attention to changing environmental conditions is simply a misleading of the public by keeping a critical issue at the margins of public discourse. The closure of “Egypt Independent” means that an important voice that understood the seriousness of the environmental challenge has been suppressed.

In tribute to the paper’s agenda of raising public awareness of regional environmental challenges, today’s postings are a representative sample of recent reports from the environment section of “Egypt Independent”.