Supreme Media Council to discuss website ban today: The newly-founded Supreme Media Council will meet today to discuss the Ismail government’s decision last week to block access to 21 news websites for allegedly publishing fake news and hosting pro-terrorism content, Al Mal reports. The decision, which restricted access to news websites including Mada Masr, Huffington Post Arabic, Qatar’s Al Jazeera, as well as Al Borsa and Daily News Egypt, is “standard procedure” when sites pose a threat to national security, council member Nadia Mabrouk tells Al Mal.

Rumors have been circulating that the ban has been lifted, the newspaper says, but local news website Mada Masr, which is still accessible from overseas and locally through virtual private networks, put out an official statement through Facebook saying that it can’t confirm the news “as accessibility varies for users on the same service providers and is still completely blocked on others,” promising to update readers once it gets official word.

Al Borsa and Daily News Egypt are intermittently accessible from inside Egypt, while other sites including Al Jazeera and HuffPost are broadly inaccessible. Al Borsa’s backup domain — elborsanews.com — is steadily accessible.