CNN reports: Egypt’s general prosecutor on Friday ordered a police officer to submit to questioning regarding his suspected role in shooting protesters in the eyes during recent clashes in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.

“The Ministry of Interior is preoccupied by the latest events, but he will come in for questioning soon,” Adel Saeed, a spokesman for Egypt’s general prosecutor, said about the suspect, 1st Lt. Mahmoud Sobhi El Shinawi.

The evidence offered against El Shinawi includes videos recorded by protesters and posted on Facebook, Saeed said. At least five demonstrators have been shot in the eye, according to authorities.

They are among hundreds of casualties over the past week. Some 41 people have died — 33 of them in Cairo — while an additional 3,250 had been wounded as of Friday, Health Ministry spokesman Hisham Shiha has said.

Protesters have called El Shinawi, specifically, “The Eye Hunter” and have sprayed “wanted” stencils featuring his face, name and rank on the walls around Tahrir Square.

Al-Masry Al-Youm reports: Presidential hopeful Mohamed ElBaradei issued a statement Saturday night declaring his willingness to head a national salvation government if he was asked officially to do so and was given full powers. He added that he would give up his bid for presidency.

ElBaradei’s statement came after his nomination by revolutionary groups and Tahrir protesters to head a national salvation government to replace the military council in ruling the transitional period.

ElBaradei says in the statement that, if assigned officially to form the government, he will withdraw from the presidential race “to ensure confidence and total neutrality in his leadership of the transitional period.”

Names suggested to take part in the government include two other presidential candidates: Abdel Moneim Abouel Fotouh and Hamdeen Sabbahi.

ElBaradei met earlier today with youth groups who declared their refusal of newly appointed Prime Minister Kamal Ganzouri and reaffirmed that the only way out of the current crisis is the formation of a fully empowered national salvation government to manage the transitional period until the presidential elections.

Anthony Shadid reports: Some call it the silent majority. In Egypt these days, the preferred term is the Party of the Couch. And in that ill-defined constituency, sometimes more myth than reality, Egypt’s ruling military has staked its credibility as it seeks to fend off the greatest challenge yet from protesters seeking to force it from power.

Drawing on sentiments pronounced Friday in the grittier parts of Cairo, even just a few blocks from the protests in Tahrir Square, and in a defiantly nationalist rally near the Defense Ministry, the military is offering either a canny read of Egypt’s mood or yet another delusional estimation of its popularity, a mistake that has bedeviled so many autocrats. With a mix of bravado and disdain, it has hewed to a narrative first pronounced after it seized power from President Hosni Mubarak in February: It bears the mantle of Egypt’s revolution.

“Egypt is not Tahrir Square,” Maj. Gen. Mukhtar el-Mallah, a member of the 20-member military council ruling since February, said in a news conference this week. “If you take a walk on other streets in Egypt, you will find that everything is very normal.”

In much of Cairo, and elsewhere in Egypt, the military has found a receptive audience for that message in a country buckling under a stagnating economy and a lurking insecurity. Even as it promises to surrender power by June, it has deployed all the platitudes of authoritarian Arab governments: fear of foreign intervention, fear of chaos, and fear of the rabble. One doctor quipped Friday that the sole change since the revolution was an extra digit added this year to cellphone numbers.

“If the military goes, who will inherit power from them?” asked Mohammed Abdel-Aziz, 61, sitting before his watch store in Cairo’s Opera Square. Mr. Mubarak made the same bet, only to depart in disgrace in a helicopter 18 days after protests began in January. The lesson then was that a revolution is not a referendum, and the symbolism channeled by Tahrir Square represented a dynamic long dismissed by Arab rulers. The revolution was sometimes conflated with the square itself, so much so that Essam Sharaf, who resigned as prime minister this week, declared in a visit there in April that “I am here to draw my legitimacy from you.”

But back then, there was the military to force Mr. Mubarak’s departure. The question these days is, Who will force the military to relinquish its power?

Firas Al-Atraqchi writes: While Egyptian political parties attempt to gain an edge in the growing vacuum of governance since the resignation of the interim cabinet, it is the people of Tahrir Square who are outmanoeuvring them to win the hearts and minds of the rest of the country.

There are four stories to be told in Tahrir: tear gas suffocation and death; extreme police brutality; incredible acts of sacrifice, and the foundation of a new social contract.

To some, the scenes broadcast through Al Jazeera Mubasher Misr or local networks might at first appear apocalyptic, but I think that is a bit too morose an analysis.

There are those who have told me in recent days that the country is being destroyed bit by bit. I disagree. What I have seen emerge from Tahrir and beyond is evidence that the country is being slowly reconstructed. Bit by bit.

Something remarkable happened in the past days. Civic responsibility has become the norm, not the anomaly. During the regime of former President Hosni Mubarak, Egyptians slipped into a comfortable malaise as the rights and freedoms of the individual and their roles in developing the country were forcibly siphoned into a black hole.

The Egyptian regime, aided by its Soviet-style propaganda State media, convinced the average Egyptian that staying at home was the best option while the authorities took care of everything. From subsidizing food staples to idolizing the security forces as the benevolent protectors of the nation, the citizenry were rendered impotent.

But events in Tahrir Square, to some extent in January/February and more so in the past week, have forced the foundation of a new social contract along the lines of how nations were formed during the Greek city-state era.

Wendell Steavenson writes: It was Friday today, and Tahrir Square was packed. It was in a mix of every mood I have seen it in over the past ten months: politically focussed, “The people want to topple the Marshal!”; carnival-like, with face painters and food stalls; determined, with tents and supplies and field hospitals; organized, with volunteers checking bags and I.D.s at the entrances; thuggish, with plenty of knots of young kids from poor neighborhoods; and creative: a new sign had been erected for Mohamed Mahmoud Street, renaming it, “The Street of the Eyes of Freedom”—a reference to the many who had lost their eyesight from police birdshot.

The army has built a wall out of concrete blocks on Mohamed Mahmoud Street. Doctors in white coats stand on top, as a volunteer cease-fire line. In the streets and alleys leading up to the charred stretch where the tear gas and rocks rained over between protesters and police for five days, protesters now man barbed-wire barricades, stopping kids and passersby from coming too close and provoking the authorities. The police have withdrawn; the army has replaced them, and there is a truce. But the wall that separates the crowds on Tahrir from the Military Council is actually a gulf of generation, perception, and culture. The violence may have stopped for the moment, but the clarion call for a transfer to civilian rule has not.

The Military Council is laboring under the belief that they are protecting the state of Egypt. The protesters on Tahrir see that they are protecting only the regime. Yesterday, I went to see Hossan Baghat, who runs the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, an N.G.O. Baghat listed the litany of human-rights abuses, military trials, the harassment of bloggers and journalists, the interference of state and private media, the persecution of the human rights community (an investigation has been opened into the foreign funding of N.G.O.s in Egypt; he was expecting a legal summons imminently before the Square blew up again). We talked about the ongoing “bogus charges” leveled at those arrested over the past few days; the American Egyptian journalist Mona Eltahawy, held for twelve hours, her arm broken and badly groped; and worried about my friend Jehane Noujaim, a documentary filmmaker who has since been released.

He said he had recently seen the Clint Eastwood biopic about J. Edgar Hoover. “It’s almost identical!” He told me wryly. “Someone who thinks, ‘Only I am patriotic,’ that enemies within are undermining the country, and that citizens don’t have all the information that they have—now they may be against them, but one day they will be grateful. In their minds, they are protecting Egypt from outsiders.”

This mindset was illustrated in a press conference yesterday, when generals from the Military Council denied any responsibility for the recent violence or mismanagement of the transitional political process. “Egypt is not Tahrir Square,” Major General Mukhtar el-Mallah declared. “We will not relinquish power because of a slogan-chanting crowd.” Ignoring the hundreds of thousands on the square and appealing to the “silent majority” is the same mistake Mubarak made. Then they repeated the old shibboleth about third parties and foreign agendas agitating trouble to weaken Egypt, and announced a new Prime Minister, a seventy-eight-year-old former Prime Minister under Mubarak, a dinosaur with dyed black hair hauled out of retirement. The Square shrugged and rolled its eyes.

AFP reports: Once the preacher of a quiet mosque on the edge of Tahrir Square, Mazhar Shahin has become one of the most recognisable faces of the protests that ousted president Hosni Mubarak in February and which now call for the military to step down.

A roar of approval swept through the tens of thousands of demonstrators in Tahrir Square on Friday when Shahin called for the ruling generals to hand power to a government named by the protesters.

“The revolution is the one that thinks, the revolution is the one that decides, it is the one that judges,” said the cleric in his Friday prayer sermon.

“Our revolution was a body without a head. Today, the revolution will have a head,” he said of a proposed civilian government that includes opposition luminaries such as former UN nuclear watchdog chief Mohamad ElBaradei.

With his cropped beard and white turban wrapped around a red fez, Shahin looks like the traditional government-appointed mosque preacher who, for years under Mubarak’s rule extolled the regime’s virtues.

But the sheikh has become a thorn in the side of the country’s rulers — first Mubarak, and now the ruling generals — with his vigorous denunciations of their abuses and calls for protesters to hold firm to their demands.

“Few of the revolution’s demands have been met,” he told the protesters on Friday. “The people insist on completing their revolution. Either we live in dignity, or we die here in Tahrir.”

Press TV reports: In Cairo, up to a million people gathered on Friday in and around Liberation Square, the focal point of a popular revolution which toppled the four-decade regime of former dictator Hosni Mubarak in February.

The protesters called for an end to the rule of the Supreme Council of Armed Forces which took over after Mubarak’s ouster, and voiced their opposition to SCAF’s nomination of Mubarak-era official Kamal el-Ganzouri as prime minister.

The calls were soon joined by Egyptians army officers, who supported popular demands for a civilian government and opposed the junta choice to head the transitional government.

“The Supreme Council of Armed Forces does not reflect the whole Egyptian army,” said Egyptian Army Captain Ahmed Shouman. “We must be in cohesion with the Egyptian people once again. This is the best way. We must resort to the essence of the revolution,” he stressed.

Shouman expressed regret about the crackdown on anti-junta protesters over the past days and described it as a sign of the despair of the remnants of the Mubarak regime, who want to stay in power.

The captain recalled that the people’s demand since the start of the uprising in Egypt has been the establishment of a civilian government. He then called for the formation of a “real parliament” representing the Egyptian people and their demands.

The Guardian reports: Thumping his shoe against a poster of a television host, Ahmed Magdi called on the gathering crowd below to denounce Egypt’s enemies and back what he said was the only group that could hold the country together.

Beneath the overpass he was using as a pulpit, thousands of protesters were streaming into a roundabout in west central Cairo, to support the fragile state’s military rulers.

The flag- and banner-waving protesters, who by late afternoon was around 20,000-strong, were a varied lot. Some openly yearned for the Mubarak days. Others were standard-bearers of the 25 January revolution that overthrew the veteran leader. Another group championed Egypt’s – eventual – democratic transition; yet others thought that the military leadership should remain indefinitely.

Their common denominator was that none of them thought the Scaf (Supreme Command of the Armed Forces) should be run out of town. All instead appeared to believe the country’s combustible streets would rapidly ignite if the junta ceded power to a revived uprising that they variously described as “reckless”, “stupid” or “naive”.

But as crowds grew throughout a mild, hazy afternoon, those on the pro-regime rally seemed to know they were losing the numbers game. Though well-attended, their rally was dwarfed by renewed scenes of people power at Tahrir Square, where it all began 11 months ago.

The retort was simple. “They say they have one million, well we have 85 million,” said Mona el-Gemayel, from a nearby neighbourhood in the suburb of Abbasiya. “These people are not taking to the streets because the uncertainty scares them. People need someone to guide their steps in such times.”

Gemayel’s words had echoes of the last words uttered by former Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman when he announced that Hosni Mubarak was stepping down. Ever since, Suleiman has stayed clear of the limelight. However, now Scaf supporters hold photos of the Mubarak man in a plaintive plea for stability.

Many openly said the best way forward for Egypt was to return to a bygone era. All the senior members of Scaf were well represented on posters and in chants. And few in the boisterous crowd would countenance the idea that security forces were killing or maiming unarmed civilians in Tahrir Square.

Shashank Joshi writes: This week, Egypt exploded for one simple reason: its army crossed the line. The Egyptian military, buoyed by its apparent role as saviour of the revolution, judged that it could manipulate the country’s democratic transition to keep its privileges intact. It was wrong.

Over the last ten months, Egypt’s ruling body, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), has re-imposed martial law, assaulted journalists, imprisoned people without charge and with impunity, and sharply curtailed rights of assembly and freedom of expression. Then, early this month, the government went one step too far: it released a set of “supra-constitutional principles” that would have imposed tight limits on the scope of Egypt’s new constitution.

Those principles accorded the military the status of “protector of constitutional legitimacy”, which was – quite reasonably – interpreted as a “right to launch coups”. SCAF was to be given the exclusive right to scrutinize its own budget, the right to manage “all the affairs of the armed forces” without accountability to elected legislators, and a veto over any laws relating to the army.

In short, SCAF, led by the increasingly mistrusted Field Marshal Tantawi, wants to create a political model resembling the Turkey of the 1980s or Pakistan of today – an eviscerated democracy with no control over its national security policy, weighed down by a bloated and self-serving military-industrial apparatus.

Mona Eltahawy, Egyptian-American journalist and columnist.

The Guardian reports: The US-based Egyptian journalist Mona Eltahawy has been released according to her personal twitter account after 12 hours in detention at the hands of Cairo security forces. An earlier tweet from the account @monaeltahawy said that she was sexually and physically assaulted while being held inside the interior ministry in Cairo, in the early hours of Thursday morning.

A US embassy representative in Cairo told the Guardian that the reports of her detention were “very concerning” and that “US embassy consulate officers are engaging Egyptian authorities”.

At 10:30am on Thursday, the former Reuters Middle East correspondent who has been lauded for her recent coverage of the Egyptian uprising, began tweeting that she had spent 12 hours in detention under the authority of interior ministry and military intelligence officials and that she had suffered a serious sexual assault by up to half a dozen members of the Egyptian security forces. She also said that she had been kept blindfolded for hours and also posted a picture of her severely bruised hand.

She also thanked supporters after #freemona began trending around the world on twitter.

In a series of tweets on Wednesday night, Eltahaway who is a columnist for various papers including the Toronto Star, the Jerusalem Report and Denmark’s Politiken, and has also written for the Guardian, described scenes in and around Tahrir Square including news that a relative of hers had been killed. She ended the message by damning the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (Scaf) who have control over Egypt‘s transition.

At approximately 11pm GMT she wrote “Pitch black, only flashing ambulance lights and air thick with gas Mohamed Mahmoud #Tahrir”. At around the same time she then described the violence occurring around the gates of the American University in Cairo of which she is an alumnus.

“Across street from AUC gate I used to enter every day Mohamed Mansour. Can’t believe it. A cacophony sirens, horns, flashing ambulance lights” In a penultimate tweet she appeared to write “Beaten arrested in interior ministry”.

In one of her latest tweets after her release, Eltahawy says X-rays show her left arm and right hand are broken.

The New York Times reports: Egyptian generals offered an unusual apology on Thursday for the killings of protesters in Tahrir Square, the iconic landmark of the country’s revolution, but rejected the demonstrators’ demands for an immediate end to military rule.

As violence around the square eased after five days of intense clashes, the military also insisted that parliamentary elections, scheduled for next Monday, would proceed as planned.

“We will not delay elections. This is the final word,” Gen. Mamdouh Shaheen, a member of the ruling military council told a news conference.

Maj. Gen. Mukhtar el-Mallah, another council member, told the news conference that the military would not relinquish power because to do so would be “a betrayal of the trust placed in our hands by the people.” Egyptians must focus on the elections, he said, not on street protests.

“We will not relinquish power because of a slogan-chanting crowd,” he said, according to The Associated Press, “Being in power is not a blessing. It is a curse. It’s a very heavy responsibility.”

On what had been the front line of the confrontation near the square, army troops in black helmets and visors replaced the police — reviled by many protesters — and a crane lowered cement barricades behind a line of coiled barbed wire to separate the protesters from the Interior Ministry building, near the library of the American University in Cairo.

“The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces presents its regrets and deep apologies for the deaths of martyrs from among Egypt’s loyal sons during the recent events in Tahrir Square,” two generals said in a statement on a Facebook page. “The council also offers its condolences to the families of the martyrs across Egypt.”

The message struck an apparently conciliatory tone as the ruling military commanders seek to defuse the crisis in time for the elections. But thousands of people remained in Tahrir Square, many demanding the ouster of Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, the de facto leader and a longtime colleague of the deposed former president, Hosni Mubarak.