A glimpse of Obama in a Cairo emptied of its people and its poor

Robert Fisk
"You cannot stay here," one of them muttered at me – I had planned to hide in a local tea-house until I discovered that all the tea-drinkers were cops – "and anyway, they're going through the other gate". Thanks mate. And sure enough, round the corner were a hundred more officers. There were police generals and police colonels and police captains and a vast horde of black uniformed security men (all standing to attention with their backs to the road). One of the generals had so much sparkling braid on his hat that I feared it might fall off because of the weight of gold."
The independent