Exclusive: Freed After Hunger Strike, Egyptian Journalist in U.S. to Cam...

http://democracynow.org - In a global television and radio exclusive, we are joined by Abdullah Elshamy, the Al Jazeera journalist who was released from an Egyptian prison after he sustained a five-month hunger strike. Elshamy was freed from prison in June after being held for 10 months without charges. During his imprisonment, he lost over a third of his body weight. He is in New York City to lobby for the release of his fellow Al Jazeera reporters still imprisoned in Egypt. As he walked across the street on Wednesday to the United Nations where Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi delivered a speech, Sisi supporters threw hot coffee on him. Sisi is set to meet with President Obama and reportedly request more U.S. assistance — including military hardware. Human Rights Watch is calling on Obama to use the meeting to publicly criticize Egypt’s continued crackdown on human rights, including the widespread jailing of political opponents and journalists, mass death sentences, and lack of accountability for the killing of more than 1,000 protesters by security forces in July and August 2013.