No one could have imagined while celebrating New Year 2019 that Algeria would face a very grave political crisis that would cost President Abdelaziz Bouteflika a forced resignation three months later. The same situation had been witnessed in Egypt eight years earlier, when nobody had anticipated the forced departure of former president Hosni Mubarak from power.

There is a growing view that after seven years of multi-faceted wars, the Eastern Mediterranean is returning to stability. Four factors lend credibility to this view, but their impact will be merely in the short-term. What will really shape the future of the Eastern Mediterranean are two realities that are also major harbingers of conflict. Let s begin with the factors that imply upcoming stability.

George H. W. Bush visited Egypt when he was US Vice President for President Ronald Reagan when former President Mubarak set up a dinner for him at the Koubbeh Palace. My seat was beside a US national. I began to get acquainted with him, and he told me he was a federal judge practicing as the acting administrator of presidential oaths. He said that his job is to accompany the vice president wherever he goes so that if the US President is exposed to sudden danger that prevents him from exercising his responsibilities, the vice president will take the oath before the judge. His post eliminates the risk of constitutional vacuum or a break in the presidential post–even if for a few minutes–as it is the president who holds the nuclear codes and serves as the highest decision-maker in the country.

When the hall is crowded and attendance is high, you can t miss the way to advocate of Islam and peace Sheikh bin Bayyah. You ll find him wearing his chic white jalabiya and carrying his famous stick. You ll know him by these crowds of disciples and admirers surrounded. In Abu-Dhabi, the sheikh founded the Forum for Promoting Peace in Muslim Societies (FPPMS), which is a global foundation viewed with great international respect. The sheikh and the forum succeeded in imposing the peace discourse in Islam on several venues in the East and the West.

This weekend, over 1000 young people participated in a 2 KM run along the Luxor corniche, attended capacity building workshops and participated in an interactive theatre performance, as they rallied around population issues in Egypt. This came as part of UNFPA s Destination Egypt 2030 initiative, which is currently touring the governorates of Egypt in cooperation with the Ministry of Youth and Sports, and engaging youth to raise their awareness around different population issues such as female genital mutilation (FGM), early marriage and family planning.

The impossible is something that cannot be done logically and humanly, whether because the costs are inconceivable or because all options are out of the question or because they conflict with the laws of science and nature. But the impossible becomes a point of view when one appeals to another type of logic or calculation or when science comes up with opportunities and options that had not previously been available or when ambition and persistence make it possible to realise goals that had previously been unthinkable or that just to think them had been regarded as a stroke of madness.

Russell Bucklew is on death row in Missouri, and the United States Supreme Court just gave that state the go-ahead to kill him in one of the most torturous and cruel ways possible. Bucklew, who has a rare condition that leaves his body riddled with bleeding-prone tumors, will convulse, choke, and eventually suffocate on his own blood if he is executed by lethal injection, according to his lawyers. If this is true, his death will be slow. It will be brutal. It will be excruciatingly cruel. Jill Filipovic And according to Neil Gorsuch and the other right-wing members of the Supreme Court, it will be legal, even in the face of the Eighth Amendment, which says in full, "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted."

On May 1, 2003, aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, President George W. Bush stood before a banner declaring "Mission Accomplished." But he had declared victory prematurely and subsequently lost the political battle over the war in Iraq. From that day on, every time Americans troops suffered a setback, critics would remark something along the lines of, Is this really what victory really looks like? In the rush to solidify a political gain, the Bush administration violated the first rule of political communications -- under promise and over deliver. In fact, it violated the second rule, too -- be humble in all victories. Joe Lockhart Compare that moment with the day President Bill Clinton was acquitted on impeachment charges in the US Senate. Did he hold a victory rally, praise his supporters and criticize those who had opposed him? No, he took the opposite approach. He was somber, fully taking responsibility for his role in the painful national controversy that was ended that day.

It is one of the bloodiest series of suspected murders in Pakistan. Eight people were already believed to be dead before the start of 2019, and last week a ninth was reportedly killed, in what have become known as the Kohistan Honor Killings. Afzal Kohistani was the man who had exposed a cell phone video that showed four women and two men singing and dancing. All four of the women and one of the men, along with three others who were not in the video, were all ordered killed once the matter came before a tribal jirga or council, according to Dawn, an English-language newspaper in Pakistan. Rafia Zakaria Kohistani s death in early March underscores the need for new approaches in the fight against honor crimes. It also provokes the question of why laws like Criminal Law Amendment 2016, which was passed in Pakistan to reduce the incidence of honor crimes, have not been successful in doing so.

It was a cold winter day when I arrived at Dulles International Airport in Washington DC on 4 January 1979 to begin my first diplomatic posting in the Egyptian embassy. Three months earlier, Egypt and Israel had signed the Camp David Accords, on 17 September 1978 in DC as a prelude to starting a diplomatic process to reach a comprehensive, total and just peace among the Arab countries, the Palestinians and Israel. It was to be based on UN Security Council Resolution 242, adopted unanimously by the council on 22 November 1967.

ISIS has suffered a momentous blow with the defeat of its last physical stronghold, according to an announcement Saturday by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces. At the height of its power four years ago, ISIS controlled an area in Iraq and Syria that was the size of Portugal and lorded over almost 8 million people -- a population larger than that of Bulgaria. ISIS also ran a quasi-state that taxed and extorted its millions of subjects, enabling it to field a terrorist army with a large war chest. While ISIS once attracted an estimated 40,000 people around the world to join its so-called caliphate, that number has since plummeted, as it seems no one wants to join the losing team.

Egyptian Political Islamists led by the Muslim Brotherhood often argue that Germany has a leading religious political party, the German Christian Democratic Union (CDU), founded in 1945, and that Egypt could therefore follow suit and establish a similar religious party. They have been making this claim for decades in order to try to legitimise their status and present themselves as a non-violent pro-democracy movement happy to abide by Western democratic values.

When there was an outage of Facebook a few days ago, billions of people around the world came to a complete standstill. People in different parts of the planet were shocked, terrified and left in darkness, wondering about their lives without Facebook. A few days later, the same billions around the world were devastated to realise that terrorists had live-streamed a massacre they had committed at a mosque in New Zealand.

Europe and Africa are close neighbours. Both continents share the same geography, the same security context, and complementary challenges when it comes to migration. Over the last few years, the European perspective on the extent of our Southern Neighbourhood has evolved in the right direction: we are now well aware that our vicinity goes far beyond Northern Africa, encompassing instead the Sahel region and even Central Africa.

The crime in New Zealand that left 50 innocent martyrs in a house of God marks a turning point in the current of violence and terrorism that has hit the world during the past decades. The causes of this terror have certainly become more complex than its religious dimension. Regardless, in both the West and the East, some still reduce terror to its Islamic referent and assume that the solution lies in the renewal of religious thought. Certainly, the terrorist who committed this heinous crime had complicated motives mostly traceable to cultural, ethnic and political bases. Religion might be the last reason that one considers. In any case, history has taught us that economic, political, and colonial projects often masquerade as religious causes.

part from the most controversial amendments proposed to the current constitution, which some of its articles have not been implemented yet, the issue of an electoral quota has been raised in this regard. The first suggestion is to amend Article 102 to provide women with a quarter of the seats in the House of Representatives, instead of the provision in the current constitution stipulating equitable representation of women. The second suggested amendment in this regard is to amend articles 243 and 244 to stipulate appropriate representation for the following six categories: workers / farmers / youth / Christians / people with disabilities / Egyptian expats. This is instead of the stipulation in the current constitution that they should only be properly represented in the present House of Representatives. In general, many see the suggested amendment to include the seven quotas as a temptation for them to agree to the constitutional amendments, whether in parliament or during the constitutional referendum. In any case, the quota proposal raises several things:

There have been calls for the Fifth Arab-African Summit, to be held in Saudi Arabia in 2019, to intensify coordination, enhance cooperation and give new impetus to Arab-African relations. A number of factors are seen as catalysts for the success of the Arab-African Summit and the development of Arab-African cooperation, including Egypt s presidency of the African Union (AU) and its promising agenda that puts boosting Arab-African ties at the top of its priorities and Saudi Arabia s hosting of the next summit meeting.

Whoever said that if you want to destroy a society, oppress its women was a very wise person. The status of women and their participation in society are among the UN s most important criteria for ranking a country s development or underdevelopment. In the 1970s, the UN formed an Expert Group on Establishing Women s Development Institutions, of which to my surprise I was elected chair. The group was tasked with studying the status of women and their roles in peace and development.

Democracy is an invention of humanity just as the telephone is. The basic difference between the two inventions is that democracy has not developed for hundreds of years, whereas the telephone has evolved in form and function several times since its recent invention. The world today is witnessing increasing demands to develop the invention of democracy (among many other human inventions). Ancient Greece – the city of Athens specifically – owns the intellectual property rights for the invention of democracy. It was there that democracy was first exercised directly when all citizens were invited to meet in the large city plaza in order to deal with various matters and make decisions.

The Algerian Revolution, or the War of Independence in the 1950s and the early 1960s, was a great inspiration for Arab revolutionaries and nationalists, including the Egyptian generation I belong to. It was a golden era of fighting for independence, freedom and national dignity. For this, the Algerian people set an example in sacrifice rarely seen in modern Arab history.