It’s Revolution 3.0 in Egypt now – things are hot, and extremely uncertain! Dead and wounded are falling everywhere, much of the Sinai is in open revolt against the new (temporary?) military regime, and in general no one has much of a certain idea about what is to happen next.

At least there has been some slight technical progress, reported by the Italian Huffington Post.

“Twitter returns to Tahrir Piazza” – sorry, “Square.” But it’s a truism that social media has long been a key driving force behind the Arab Spring generally, certainly behind the revolution in Egypt whose first notable accomplishment was the toppling of the long-entrenched Mubarak regime back in February of 2011.

The problem for outside observers, of course, has been language. These folks prefer to address each other in Arabic, including via social networks. Those who are non-conversant have been limited to whatever the main social network protagonists have been willing to post in English, which too often has been merely by way of after-thought.

The point of this piece is that that has now changed. Oh, they’ll still write mostly in Arabic, but most tweets (at least) will now have an English translation provided by Microsoft’s Bing Translator. According to the HuffPoIT reporter Francesco Bisozzi, this initiative has been provided by Twitter itself, in effect using accounts affiliated with the Egyptian Revolution as a trial for this technology. OK, it’s Bing and not Google Translate – clearly, monetary and power-play considerations played a role in the choice here – and often you get the sort of funny-sounding text that such machine-translation is still known for, but it’s clearly a big step forward nonetheless.

So check out some of these Twitter-feeds that Bisozzi mentions. Warning: some are from the “bad guys” (e.g. ex-President Mohammed Morsi’s cabinet – boo!). Just be sure to click “Expand” and you’ll get Bing’s translation.

There’s Wael Ghonim, whom many considered as the catalyst of the Egyptian Revolution with his “We Are All Khaled Saeed” Facebook page: @Ghonim

Prof. Pakinam El Sharkawy, Assistant to the [former] Egyptian President for political affairs (a lady, but this gal still didn’t do such a good job, eh?): @Dr_pakinam

Ahmed Shafik, former fighter pilot, former Egyptian Prime Minister (under Mubarak), and Mohamed Morsi’s head-to-head opponent in the second round of the presidential elections in June last year: @AhmedShafikEG

And finally the star of our show, Nobel Prize winner and former International Atomic Energy Agency head Dr. Mohammed El Baradei: @ElBaradei

It’s true, Dr. El Baradei hasn’t tweeted much lately – not since 28 June, at this writing – but he’s a busy man these days. Plus, he might be headed for something even bigger:

Bonus benefit from this HuffPoIT piece: It appears that “to tweet” in Italian is twittare! Io twitto, tu twitti, eccetera . . .

This news deserves more coverage in the US than Google News tells me it is getting; hopefully the fault is merely in the timing, namely around the 4th of July holiday. In any event, as the Dutch Volkskrant reports (in an article credited to Reuters and the AP), the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) now has a new chairman to succeed Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, who has occupied that post since 1997 (and who together with his organization won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2005). The new man is Yukiya Amano, currently Japan’s resident representative at the IAEA and who boasts a long record of service in the Japanese diplomatic corps, who last Tuesday (30 June) needed six rounds of voting among national IAEA representatives to finally (barely) gain the necessary two-thirds vote for selection to the post.

This has to be an important development, in the first place because of the vital importance these days of the IAEA, which is more-or-less the UN’s atomic power/atomic weapons supervisory agency. (It is formally an autonomous organization, but reports to both the UN General Assembly and the Security Council.) Just think of all the countries where possession/non-possession of nuclear weapons is currently an issue: North Korea, Israel, Syria – and then, of course, Iran. It’s also important because of the very troublesome relationship the US has had in the recent past with the IAEA, particularly under the George W. Bush administration (e.g. over whether the 2003 invasion of Iraq was really necessary), which actively campaigned against the re-election to the post in 2005 of Dr. ElBaradei.

Again, these days the main atomic trouble-spot is Iran (if only because, in North Korea’s case, the cat is already long out of the bag). So what is Amano’s view on the alleged Iranian ambitions for nuclear weapons? “I see no sort of indication of that in official IAEA documents” – that is, put him on the skeptics’ side (when even Dr. ElBaradei, in a recent interview with the BBC that the Volkskrant article cites, maintains that his “intuition” tells him that that is what the Iranians ultimately are pursuing). Amano’s attitude here will certainly go down rather poorly among most ranges of American public opinion but, again, it is the official attitude of the IAEA itself, i.e. of the impartial experts who are supposed to know (and whose expertise was blatantly ignored in the Bush Administration’s rush to war in 2003). For what it’s worth, it is also the long-held view of leading Middle East expert Juan Cole, who has also covered past American attempts to fool the IAEA into detecting an Iranian weapons threat by supplying it with forged evidence.