A US TV journalist attacked in Cairo's Tahrir Square was stripped and beaten with fists and the poles of hand-held flags, US sources say. 
 
 Lara Logan, 39, a correspondent on the CBS News show 60 Minutes, was recovering in private with her husband, Joseph Burkett, their son and her stepdaughter. 
 
 Parts of her body were covered in red marks, a source said. They were originally thought to have been caused by bites, but on examination proved to have been made by aggressive pinching. 
 
 "Lara is getting better daily," said a friend. "The psychological trauma is as bad as, if not worse than, the physical injuries. She might talk about it at some time in the future, but not now." 
 
 CBS News said Logan had suffered a "brutal and sustained sexual assault". The network said a mob of about 200 men had been "whipped into a frenzy" as she filmed on the night Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak resigned. She spent five days in hospital in New York. 
 
 Tahrir Square was the hub of the revolution and until that night had been safer than most of Cairo. 
 
 After Mr Mubarak's resignation, the controls at the entrances disappeared and people who had never visited the square poured in, many of them aggressive and scornful of the political idealism of the protesters. 
 
 South African-born Logan, her crew and a security detail appear to have been surrounded near a tent city that had sprung up in the square. Logan became separated from her crew and security. One source said soldiers went in to rescue them, but Logan fell as they tried to escape. Sources in the US said the attack went on for up to 30 minutes. Her clothes were torn off and the crowd hit her and beat her with poles. Shouts of "Israeli" enraged the crowd even more. 
 
 Logan was finally rescued by about 20 soldiers and women in the square and taken to her hotel. 
 
 The ferocity faced by Logan was doubly surprising because Tahrir Square had been a haven for women, who are routinely harassed in Egypt - groped or subjected to obscene catcalls. In Tahrir Square, however, the scene of daily demonstrations until Mr Mubarak's resignation on February 11, women marvelled at the freedom they enjoyed from pests. 
 
 Despite her traumatic experience, friends expect Logan to return to the Middle East. 
 
 They said she may have started as a swimwear model but colleagues' cynicism about her glamorous looks faded as she proved herself in war zones. 
 
 Martin Frizell, a former colleague at GMTV, said: "There's a lot of chauvinism in TV news, particularly among war correspondents. But even though she happens to look like a model, she has bigger balls than most men." 
 
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 NEW YORK -- CBS News correspondent Lara Logan was recovering in a U.S. hospital Tuesday from a sexual attack and beating she suffered while reporting on the tumultuous events in Cairo.Logan was in the city's Tahrir Square on Friday after Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak stepped down when she, her team and their security "were surrounded by a dangerous element amidst the celebration," CBS said in a statement Tuesday.The network described a mob of more than 200 people "whipped into a frenzy."Separated from her crew in the crush of the violent pack, she suffered what CBS called "a brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating." She was saved by a group of women and an estimated 20 Egyptian soldiers, the network said. The Associated Press does not name victims of a sexual assault unless the victim agrees to it.She reconnected with the CBS team and returned to the U.S. on Saturday.The scene last Friday in Tahrir Square - ground zero of 18 days of protests that brought down Mubarak - was primarily one of celebration - people wept, jumped for joy, cheered and hugged one another. Some soldiers stationed at the square ran into the crowd, and the protesters lifted them onto their shoulders. Other troops stayed at their posts, watching in awe. There were fireworks, the sound of car horns and even some shots fired in the air.Sexual harassment of women is an all-too-common occurrence on the streets of Cairo. But many women noted a complete absence of it in the early days of protests in Tahrir Square, where demonstrators made a point of trying to create a microcosm of the society without many of Egypt's social ills.However, in the final days, and especially after the battles with pro-Mubarak gangs who attacked the protesters in Tahrir, women noticed sexual assault had returned to the square. On the day Mubarak fell, women reported being groped by the rowdy crowds. One witness saw a woman slap a man after he touched her. The man was then passed down a line of people who all slapped him and reprimanded him.The attack on Logan, CBS News' chief foreign affairs correspondent, was one of at least 140 others suffered by reporters covering the unrest in Egypt since Jan. 30, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. An Egyptian reporter died from gunshot wounds he received during the protests.A week before Friday's attack, Logan was detained by the Egyptian military for a day, along with a CBS producer and cameraman. They returned to the U.S. after their release, and Logan went back to Cairo shortly before Mubarak left.Logan joined CBS News in 2002. She regularly reports for the "CBS Evening News" as well as "60 Minutes," where she has been a correspondent since 2006. She has reported widely from Iraq and Afghanistan, and other global trouble spots.CBS said it had no further comment on Logan's assault.
– Police threatened an ABC News journalist covering the crisis in Egypt with decapitation in one of a mounting series of attacks on reporters. Two vehicles carrying producer Brian Hartman and three other ABC employees were carjacked to an isolated neighborhood yesterday where an angry mob surrounded them and a police officer warned: "So help me God, I am going to cut off your head," Hartman recalled. "One man was yelling, 'Cut their necks now, cut their necks now.' I thought were were absolutely doomed." The men were saved by an ABC Lebanese cameraman who embraced an elder in the crowd and told him: "He is your guest in this country. Egyptian people are better than this," said Hartman. In a tweet, he said there was a Mubarak banner over the scene, "but anger at perceived media bias was genuine." More than 100 journalists, including Anderson Cooper and Katie Couric, have been menaced, beaten, stabbed and held at gunpoint by supporters of Hosni Mubarak. The White House and State Department have condemned the "systematic targeting" of journalists as a "concerted campaign to intimidate."