Surely, Vladimir Putin let out a smile when he heard it. The Russian president has many reasons to rejoice these days, all courtesy of President Donald Trump, whose latest stunning statement was a call for America s allies to bring back Russia to the world s most prestigious club, the G7, a group of seven wealthy democracies. The call is mindboggling for many reasons, not least of which is, well, the elephant in the room. There is no credible justification for democratic powers to invite Putin to their meeting and there are countless reasons not to do it. And yet Trump -- under the shadow of a special counsel investigation over the nature of his presidential campaign s relationship with Russia -- took Putin s side in a dispute with America s allies.

Last May the Oxford University World Literature Society held a seminar devoted to the poetry of the Lebanese poet Jawdat Haydar (1905-2006) as a “Call for Tolerance and Cohesion”. The interest of Oxford University in Haydar s poetry follows on seminars held in no less distinguished institutions, such as the Library of Congress in Washington and the Library of Alexandria, where Ahmed Abdel Moaty Hegazi and Hassan Teleb, among other luminous speakers, discussed the universality of Haydar s poetry and his poetic vision.

Changes to the education system are the first step to reforming the human mind in the new Egypt and the new Middle East. This is simply to sum up the answer to the question of who the new citizen is and how he can be created. In the past, ideas in books were sometimes simply memorised, but today things are changing, and discoveries and inventions have been non-stop. The language itself has changed to keep up with the recent technologies and not just in space science.

Egypt was in turmoil for several years after the 25 January 2011 Revolution, moving rudderless and with uncertainty about the ability of institutions, individuals, political parties, groups, media and press to lead society to safety and stability. Even though, state institutions and agencies closely monitored the situation and took action to maintain an even keel in the face of the storm that toppled other countries in the region. They addressed every development based on the higher interests of the state of Egypt.

On the surface, Harry and Meghan s royal wedding had all the glitz and glamour you would associate with such an occasion. But now accusations of racism-tinged media coverage have taken some of the shine off the gloss.It was a wedding fit for a (new) duchess: In one of the biggest TV events of the year, an estimated two billion people tuned in to watch Meghan Markle marry Prince Harry on Saturday in a joyous, if somewhat unusual, celebration. And media across the world were scrambling to examine every angle of the Meghan and Harry story. Read more: Royal Wedding: The world flocks to Windsor for Prince Harry and Meghan s big day Unsurprisingly, not everyone got it right. German public broadcaster ZDF came under fire for what was deemed racist remarks during its wall-to-wall coverage of the wedding; the journalists mused over the texture and styling regime of Meghan and her mom s black hair and repeatedly referred to the bride and her guests as exotic. Viewers and Twitter users were not amused. ZDF said in a statement that it takes those concerns seriously.

The government borrows money to meet its short- or long-term needs when there is a budget deficit. This is called debt. So, debt is a bill paid by coming generations in cases of obtaining loans for the purpose of narrowing a budget deficit without aiming to finance development projects. Or it may be a bill paid by the current generation in cases of obtaining loans to spend on projects with future returns for the benefit of upcoming generations. There are two economic theories regarding loans; the first calls for reducing debts as they burden future generations with their interest rates. Meanwhile, another theory assumes that higher debt is better than taxation. Which is correct? Let us see what can be found through history. Egypt has had foreign debt since the reign of Muhammad Ali Pasha, who depended on external financing (loans) to achieve economic development. The foreign debt kept mounting until Egypt became unable to repay its debts in the 19th century, resulting in Britain s intervention in the economy first, then occupation later.

Bobby Kennedy s death 50 years ago this week was more than a tragic political assassination. His presidential campaign s message of defiant hope resonated with a broad swath of politically marginalized Americans, anticipated the rise of Barack Obama s multiracial coalition, and placed racial justice at the center of American democracy in an unprecedented and transformational way. Peniel Joseph Robert F. Kennedy s groundbreaking campaign for president ended in the early hours of June 5, 1968. Shot shortly after winning the California Democratic primary, he died the next day. Historians often identify Kennedy s assassination, coming two months after Dr. Martin Luther King s horrific death, as a capstone to a year marked by angry demonstrations, political violence, and a degree of polarization that foreshadowed the stark divisions of our own time.

Every week, I offer a glimpse of the kind of intelligence assessments that are likely to come across the desk of the President of the United States. Modeled on the President s Daily Briefing, or PDB, which the director of national intelligence prepares for the President almost daily, my Presidential Weekly Briefing focuses on the topics and issues the President needs to know to make informed decisions.

I admit I believe in conspiracies and conspiracy theories, but I am not afflicted with political or compulsive phobias, simply because we live in a tragic reality in the Arab and Middle East region full of slogans and positions that are not related to what is happening on the ground or behind the scenes regarding relations and interests, linking powers that appear to be enemies but are discreetly allies and friends on the level of institutions and agencies. This is contrary to what is being fed to public opinion and citizens.

A year ago, on June 1, President Donald Trump staged a bells-and-whistles Rose Garden event to announce his intent to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement. In doing so, he paid little attention to many of his top advisers, the vast majority of major American companies, or his counterparts around the world. Looking back now, it is clear that this heedless act has damaged the global effort to contain climate change, and, together with two other fateful decisions, undermined US diplomacy more broadly.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo s speech this week on next steps in US policy toward Iran read more like a call to war than a carefully crafted foreign policy stance. So much so that the obvious next question is what it might cost if the Trump administration seeks to provoke regime change in Iran. That s tough to answer, since it depends entirely on how the Trump administration chooses to go about it, if it indeed chooses to go down that disastrous road. Pompeo s threat to bring Iran to its knees with punishing economic sanctions clearly won t get the job done, especially since the Trump administration has just alienated its most important potential partners by withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal. Good luck getting France, or the United Kingdom, or Germany, much less Russia or China, to join in a campaign of maximum economic pressure on Tehran after the Trump administration has walked away from a painstakingly negotiated multilateral deal that was working to achieve its only stated objective -- stopping Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.

Withdrawing from the nuclear deal with Iran was on US President Donald Trump s election agenda, as he had expressed his discontent at its contents since its signing in 2015. It was thus only a matter of time before he found the right moment to announce his decision to unilaterally withdraw from the deal made by his predecessor Barack Obama.

One day in the fall of 2010, Father Anthony Messeh, then a priest at the St. Mark Coptic Orthodox Church in Fairfax, Virginia, sat down with a list of names. There were 30 individuals—all American converts with no Egyptian heritage—who had been baptized at the church since his arrival in 2001. Of the group, only eight were still active members. “That just broke my heart,” Messeh told me one afternoon last summer. “If one or two people had left, then maybe I could say it was something wrong with them. But if 22 out of 30 had left, that meant it s something wrong with me.”

Before attempting to answer this question, it is worth to note that this question stems from outside the Church, influenced by the feminist movements, which arose in the west. This does not mean that the Orthodox Church should not be concerned about it. On the contrary, it is deeply rooted in Church life now, as some call it, The controversy of our time . Neither is the question a new one. The Church was confronted with it during its first three centuries, while at the time many Gnostic sects were ordaining women to priesthood and even the pagan cults surrounding the young church had a lot of practices of woman priestess. However, the Church stood its ground, opposing both practices not for cultural, but for theological reasons.

This week, 47 years ago, a group of Irish feminists boarded what became known as the Contraceptive Train -- a train to and from Belfast so they could buy condoms, take them back to Dublin and goad the police to arrest them. The protest against the illegality of contraceptives was a landmark moment in Irish society, a perspective that could not be unseen and a point of view that shifted public discourse.

Early Sunday afternoon President Donald Trump elevated Twitter to a virtual Cabinet position in his administration. He used it, rather than the attorney general, to order a possible criminal investigation of a counterintelligence operation conducted by the Department of Justice and the FBI. "I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes - and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration."

On 8 May, in fulfilment of his electoral campaign pledge, US President Donald Trump announced that the US would withdraw from the nuclear deal signed between Iran and the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany). He then signed a presidential order restoring the highest degree of sanctions against Tehran and cautioned countries that Washington would sanction them too if they helped Tehran in its efforts to obtain a nuclear weapon.

Has the government has radically cut Ministry of Culture allocations in the budgetary bill that is now under review in the House of Representatives? An MP told me that the allocation for the Family Library project has been slashed entirely. Is this true? Is this acceptable? I fear for the future if the House of Representatives approves the budget as it stands, because this would be an implicit declaration that the government has given up fighting terrorism, despite the enormous price that Egypt has paid in fighting terrorist crimes, a toll that was paid in the form of innocent lives lost, the disruption of revenues from tourism and the sources of people s livelihoods, and the lack of security and sense of safety.

I expect the “deal of the century” to be another watermark of the fizzled attempts at fascism made by the administration of US President Donald Trump. It will be a poorly worded, grammatically incorrect and morally obscene reiteration and entrenchment of the status quo, not just over the objections and to the exclusion of the Palestinians, but over the objections of the world community as a whole.

Prince Harry is very much his mother s son. As he grew from boy to man, the nation fell in love with his cheeky, fun-loving personality and his natural warmth and kindness. Over time, Harry s love life became a matter of national obsession. He was always seen with a beautiful -- normally blonde -- society girl with a cut-glass accent and from a family steeped in wealth and status. The burning question on every royal watcher s lips was: "Who would snare Britain s most eligible bachelor?" The answer took everyone by surprise. Thomas Markle is being vilified for one reason: he s American Harry didn t end up with the sort of person everyone thought he would -- a wife born and bred in the upper echelons of British society. Instead, he fell head over heels with someone who has already done more to shake up the royal family since his mother, Princess Diana, did in the 1980s.

If the lives of thousands of Syrians have no value to those watching indifferently, the whole world will be in danger when these precedents become familiar acts, made acceptable by silence and failure to punish the criminals. Silence in the face of what the Syrian, Iranian, and Russian regimes are doing in Syria will make all the region s cities open to “murder by gas” as a result of the broadening of wars and the cold global responses. The mass murder of civilians started four years ago and is still ongoing. The first time we heard of it in the Syrian war was on 19 March 2013 in the suburbs of Aleppo. This was followed by another chemical attack on 29 April in Saraqeb, and then another on Ghouta in Greater Damascus on 21 August. Three days later, the Damascus suburb of Jobar was sprayed, and Ashrafiyat Sahnaya—another suburb—was attacked by chemicals on 25 August.