The foreign press is piling onto human rights stories with a focus on the arrest of health workers and journalists during the pandemic: Associated Press | Washington Post | Daily Mail | London Evening Standard.

A 24-year-old US citizen arrested last year for protesting in Tahrir Square has been released from prison and yesterday returned to the US. CNN, the Associated Press and ABC News have the story.

The Wall Street Journal has a piece on Egypt’s recent appeal to the UN to end the standoff over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. “Going to the Security Council is almost a nuclear option from the Egyptian perspective,” the paper quotes Riccardo Fabiani, director of the North Africa Project at International Crisis Group. “It’s part of this policy of maximum pressure and diplomatic isolation that Egypt has been pursuing vis-a-vis Ethiopia.”

Also in the pages of the foreign press:

• Authoritarianism, weak alliances and utopian visions of a religious based society are to blame for the Ikhwan’s downfall in Egypt, according to San Diego political science professor Ahmet T. Kuru’s most recent research published in the Conversation.
• Stolen artifacts: A US man has been accused of attempting to smuggle hundreds of ancient Egyptian artifacts through JFK Airport in New York, the New York Post reports.