The end of a year and beginning of another is always a good chance to assess performance of the economy by analysing different indicators, taking into consideration the performance of different sectors, government policies, and the role of the private sector.

Up until recently, the distance between the East and the West was too long and terrain challenging to measure accurately. Seas and oceans stood in in the way and took months to cross. Modern transportation helped make the geographic distance easier to cover. However, the cultural differences between East and West have been a much more demanding task. Modern electronic technology, cell phones, the Internet and social media such as Facebook and Twitter attempt to bridge the cultural divide. To date, these tools have complicated matters rather than helped. They have accentuated our deep societal differences. Separation has widened and the rejection of cultural distinctions has persisted.

If Barack Obama is right, there is no Islamic terror wave today, just a few “incidents.” Likewise, progressive politicians in Germany, Britain, Sweden and other parts of Europe say much the same thing: no need to worry -- only isolated incidents. The European progressives have been saying for years that reports of Muslim immigrants carrying out sexual assaults on non-Muslims, committing hate crimes against Jews, planning terror assaults on newspapers, cartoonists and authors are the products of “Islamophobia” -- an unreasoning fear of Muslims.

A 10-day New Year holiday break has just come to an end in Russia as Egyptian Parliament starts work for the first time in three years. The two powerful strategic partners have been weakened by major internal problems. Some challenges are common such as corruption, sluggish political systems, and deep economic crisis. They are, however, caused mostly by different factors.

The new year begins, mass killings continue, and the U.S. government has yet to declare what is happening in Iraq and Syria “genocide.”

This new year Egypt faces several difficulties, economic, political, security, and regional. There’s no need to rehearse the well-known facts here. It's not important to assuage our conscience, deflect blame, or prove the soundness of our predictions for a bleak future. We must instead find a way forward.

Several studies have shown that there is a relationship between education and health. A strong positive correlation between a woman’s level of education and her general health has been observed. It has been found that better education, particularly among mothers, is widely associated with better children’s health. In addition, education for women is closely associated with later age of marriage and a smaller family size.

It looks like President Obama will not be sitting quietly during his final year in office. He began 2016 with a detailed plan to use executive power to place tighter restrictions on guns sales, which he defended against critics in a town hall on CNN.

On 16 September 2006, Al-Ahram published an article I wrote entitled "The Economic and Regional Considerations and the Necessity of Egypt's Entrance into the Nuclear Club." This article preceded the transformation of this issue by the defunct National Democratic Party (NDP) and its chairman into a political propaganda issue that was not accompanied with any practical measures. Today, after nine years of publishing the article, my standpoint remains as it was. The entrance of any country into the nuclear club means that the scientific elite of this country will be ushered into a new level of scientific and technological development. The effects of this development may spread in different sectors of the economy, provided that flexible mechanisms to transfer scientific achievements to the production field are available.

Like a broken clock, Donald Trump is occasionally right. Who knew it would be about the subject of gender politics? Trump looks and sounds like a cave man in a business suit. But he's helped illustrate a Democratic double-standard on sexism. This latest row started when Trump said Hillary Clinton had been "schlonged" by Barack Obama in 2008 -- schlong is a Yiddish word meaning penis. Clinton replied using a French word, saying that Trump had a "penchant for sexism." Trump then charged the Clintons with sexism in a back and forth that culminated with his assertion to CNN's Chris Cuomo that Bill is "one of the great woman abusers."

Ask anyone for their abiding memory of 2015 and they will most likely recall a negative one. Some will recall the horrifying stories of death and destruction caused by conflicts around the world, most notably in Syria where over 250,000 people have lost their lives and almost 11 million people have been displaced. Others will recall a sense of grief, fear and anger after violent extremists attacked, tortured, kidnapped, and executed innocent civilians around the world. Others still might recall a simple but disturbing fact they heard in passing – that 2015 was the hottest year on record or that over 15,000 children continue to die annually, mostly from preventable diseases.

What did the rulers of Egypt want after the land became theirs and they owned everything? Their grip has returned and their influence is bigger than it ever was before January 2011. What do they want now after they posed themselves as the necessary choice? They succeeded and took the reins again. The state now decides according to their desires. Why do they insist on imposing the pre-2010 circumstances? We now have an opposition-less parliament like before. Do they want to repeat the scenario of 2010 with some amendments?

While David Cameron, the British prime minister, ordered a probe into the ideology and activities of the Muslim Brotherhood inside the UK and its links with organisations in the UK and abroad, the outcome was as expected: a shy attempt from the British government to meet the concerns of close allies with regards to the Brotherhood group. The report was commissioned in April 2014 and was completed by July 2014. However, it only became public in December 2015.

From the outside, away from reading the numbers and the details, the results of the parliamentary elections that were conducted lately seem very positive.

In 2008, our nation broke through a barrier, electing an African-American to be president of the United States. In 2016, another barrier may very well be broken. All polls indicate that a woman or a Latino has a very good chance of being elected to be our 45th president. But there is another barrier -- an important one in the eyes of the world -- that is almost certain not to be smashed. Barring an unprecedented political upheaval, the next president of the United States will be a Christian, just like virtually all of his (or her) predecessors. The only exceptions may have been Thomas Jefferson, who abandoned orthodox Christianity, and Abraham Lincoln, who often spoke of God and frequently quoted the Bible, but who never joined a church.

The Muslim Brotherhood remains caught at the centre of the problems that dominate Egyptian politics. Regime hardliners believe that all the ills of Egypt could somehow be traced to an elaborate conspiracy by the Muslim Brotherhood to destabilise the country.

Many young Egyptians dream of a better life. The trouble is that most want to achieve it by leaving Egypt; this was not always the case. In 2011, many youths living comfortably abroad decided to dream of a better Egypt, not just by wishing it but by risking their lives and careers and coming back to contribute to a revolution they thought could bring about these dreams. Numerous Egyptians rediscovered their roots by taking to the streets in thousands, to offer a glimpse of an Egypt with integrity, with a dream of reclaiming a country that is rightfully theirs.

On Wednesday, December 16, the Cabinet approved several amendments to Law 62/1975 on illicit gains,stating the fight against corruption to be the reason behind such amendments. But in my opinion this is the wrong approach to combating corruption and is unlikely to yield any results.

This week has seen an event that reveals the nature of what is politically going on in Egypt. It pertains to the State Support Coalition, whose name was changed to the Egypt Support Coalition. Endless meetings and discussions were held on satellite channels between those who are in favor of the coalition and those warning against it. And the peak of this melodramatic scene was the ostentatious claim that the coalition has reached a majority of 400 deputies that will control parliament, as was planned by certain state institutions.

The Muslim Brotherhood has always kept its internal problems secret from the media and even from its own grassroots. But since 2005, blogs on the internet served as an outlet for the young members of the group to express themselves and criticize the thoughts and political positions of the group, as many of them withdrew from the group and adopted their own liberal or leftist ideas. The group's leaders managed to get rid of those who criticized them at that time, stressing that the internal affairs should not be divulged to the media, even by leading figures like Al-Erian or Abul Fottouh.

A few weeks ago, I wrote on my Facebook page about the discomfort I felt at the appearance of someone calling himself an “economic expert”, giving his opinions on the constitutionality of the parliament, the political parties in Egypt, and the new French Mistrals delivered to Egypt’s navy. Professor Abdel-Latif Mahmoud, the former head of the Advanced Materials Research at the Canadian Ministry of National Defence, commented below my post stating: