I have now posted my Middle East Week in Review news bulletin. News briefs for the week deal with issues in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Iran and Chechnya.

Lots of election news this week, although some of it is “election” news. Democracy watchers may want to focus on the news on Qatar, for they are now announcing elections to parliament for the first time, pursuant to their 2003 constitution. The democracy news was less appealing from Palestine, where convicted terrorist Marwan Barghouti won a landslide victory in an internal Fatah primary; from Egypt, where the price of a vote seems to be going up, where the Mubarak regime’s thugs graduated from knives to machetes in their efforts to “get down the vote,” where the democratic opposition was virtually wiped out while the Muslim Brotherhood flourished; and from Chechnya, which underwent a Potemkin village-like election in which an outright majority of the registered “Chechnyan” voters were reported to be Russian soldiers.