tarek masoud, thank you very much for being with us.first of all, how surprising are these protests? >> these are pretty surprising protests, judy, at least to me. i mean, the egyptian system is pretty tough authoritarian system but it's also a very flexible one. and so for the last almost three four years, there have been small protests by different segments of the population, different labor unions, etc., but nothing of this kind of breadth and magnitude that cuts across different groups, different ideological trends and is just a really ready to confront violent apparatus of the state. it's just... we just haven't seen anything quite like this on the part of the egyptian people since about 1977. >> woodruff: so was it the protest in tunisia, the overthrow of the government there, that set this off? >> i think so. i think, you know, the protests in tunisia or ben ali's departure was maybe the match that set off this very large collection of combustible material. but the grievance that... in egypt now that we're seeing expressed in the