“Were there Jews living in Egypt?” asked my son while I was watching the TV series “The Jewish Quarter”.

The judge made his final call today, confirming the death sentence of former Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi, a crucial step in cementing the counter-revolution and the unravelling of the uprising that had brought him to power. Morsi, who is now already serving a 20-year jail term for ordering the arrest and torture of demonstrators in 2013, was convicted of breaking out of prison during the 2011 revolution against the Mubarak regime. He has never denied that he broke out of prison, but why it merits the death penalty is hard to comprehend, particularly because he was being held in that prison without charges in the first place. The Grand Mufti of Egypt still has to confirm any death sentences.

A recent report urged the US president to change US strategy in the Middle East in order to stay abreast with rapid and dramatic changes in the region.

Last week, the media spotlighted two stories that at first glance seem unrelated. First, the preparations for the international celebration to mark the completion of the new Suez Canal and second, the surprise visit by the prime minister to the Heart Institute and the subsequent exposé of the poor condition of public hospitals and health services in the country.

I live in a northern state in the US called Minnesota, which is also considered the “ice box” of the US for its long, brutal winters, where even the lakes and rivers freeze over. The state is a lot smaller than Egypt, with a population of just 5 million people. According to the last census, the population breakdown is 92% white, 3% black, and almost 3% Asian, with the rest so-called “other” ethnicities.

Youth unemployment is a serious policy challenge in Egypt. Unemployment affects the young and the educated. According to recently announced statistics from Egypt’s Central Agency for Public Mobilisation And Statistics (CAPMAS), the unemployment rate among youth has reached 26 per cent.

In the past four years, Arabs have been living an endless Sisyphean ordeal, an unexpected nightmare after rising for what they called “the Arab Spring”. A very similar scenario was cloned in most of the Arab Spring countries. Alas, a hopeful revolution turned into belligerence, then into strife followed by a war, as if a new regional order was endorsed to guarantee instability and chaos in the region. This new regional order has marked new regional features and novel actors. The most significant feature is the rise of non-state actors, which in return bolstered their presence and influence across the region, disregarding borders and ignoring the strategic equations that ruled the region for decades.

Youth unemployment is a serious policy challenge in Egypt. Unemployment affects the young and the educated. According to recently announced statistics from Egypt’s Central Agency for Public Mobilisation And Statistics (CAPMAS), the unemployment rate among youth has reached 26 per cent. The largest educated group among the unemployed is university graduates. "Educated unemployment," as often described in the literature, is a historical challenge in modern Egypt with documentation of the phenomenon dating back to the time of the British tutelage. However, unemployment is not the only problem in relation to the labour market in Egypt. Unemployment figures actually fail to provide an adequate understanding of the situation of youth in the labour market. Informal employment (understood as lack of access to work contracts or social insurance) is a key challenge that receives less policy attention than it should, despite its gravity. Informal employment has a serious impact on the quality of jobs in Egypt among working youth. Recent survey data shows that informal employment is the norm, even among educated working youth. Among wage workers with secondary education and above, only 42 per cent have access to work contracts. This figure is drastically depressed to six per cent among those with less than a secondary education. More than 60 per cent of young workers are employed in small and micro enterprises, most of them operating within the informal economy. Access to other work benefits, primarily contributory social insurance schemes, is contingent on their access to a work contract, according to current regulations. These figures explain why only one quarter of employed youth express satisfaction about their jobs in survey results. Different data sources show that the only group that enjoys such benefits are employed in the public sector and the civil service. This can explain the continued preference for this sector of employment among youth. In fact, the difference in job quality parameters between the predominantly informal private sector and the public sector induces many young people to queue for jobs in the latter. Interviews show that these young men and women would choose unemployment over a job with compromised benefits, or a “bad” job as described in the World Bank literature. The decent work deficit, as dubbed by the International Labour Organisation, is therefore a key challenge. Meanwhile, there are two key issues that remain central to our understanding of the situation of youth in Egypt’s labour market. First, the face of unemployment in Egypt is that of young women. In absolute numbers, the number of unemployed young women is more than double that of unemployed young men (1.3 million young women as opposed to 0.6 million young men, according to data of the School to Work Transition Survey of 2013). The unemployment rate among female youth is more than five times that among male youth according to the same source. In fact, if women in the working age population in Egypt (15-65) had the same unemployment rate of men, the national unemployment rate would drop to less than 10 per cent, according to data published in 2015 by CAPMAS. Second, there are very few entrepreneurs among youth in Egypt. Despite the increasing emphasis on entrepreneurship as a solution to youth unemployment, self-employed youth constitute less than seven per cent of working youth. These entrepreneurs are primarily reliant on family for funding, showing the limitation of institutional financial support mechanisms. Young entrepreneurs list lack of finance and market competition as their key problems. Youth unemployment can be understood as a symptom of compromised job quality within the informal economy. It becomes a choice for many to be unemployed rather than be in a bad job. It is, therefore, vital to address job quality issues as the gateway to address youth unemployment. Incentivising regulations addressing access to contributory social insurance schemes for workers within the informal economy remains a key policy approach. Similarly, support to small and micro-enterprises, a main employer in Egypt, is bound to improve job quality within this large sector. The writer is assistant professor at the School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the American University in Cairo (AUC). Her research focuses on issues of youth, gender, employment and poverty.

One of the features of the Queen’s Speech to Parliament on 27 May, by which the UK's new Conservative government laid out its policies, was a counter-extremism bill which will be presented very soon to Parliament. However, some are questioning the need for more laws to fight extremists since there are already many such laws, including the 2000 and 2006 Terrorism Acts.

At a passing glance, President Barack Obama’s meetings with the leaders of the Arab Gulf states have borne fruit in terms of furthering mutual respect and as a building block to closer cooperation. But when one digs beneath the flimflam and the verbal pledges – with the exception of a joint missile defence system and a promise that deliveries of US weapons would be fast-tracked – the recent Camp David Summit delivered few tangible benefits.

I was recently in the Upper Egyptian governorate of Aswan to meet with local government, partner non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and people working together to fight against Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), a widely-spread practice in Egypt that predates both Christianity and Islam.

A year into his rule, one of the most challenging files on the president's in-tray was militancy, which in Egypt has taken the Sinai Peninsula as its base. President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi stepped into office 11 months after former Islamist president Mohamed Mursi was removed from power. Throughout the first year of Sisi's tenure, much has happened in relation to militancy and the Sinai Peninsula and many have been caught in the crossfire.

I was recently in the Upper Egyptian governorate of Aswan to meet with local government, partner non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and people working together to fight against Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), a widely-spread practice in Egypt that predates both Christianity and Islam.

Yet again news comes of Coptic families expelled from their villages, this time in Beni Soueif and Minya, part of the terms of customary reconciliation agreements reached in meetings of local residents, clerics, and state representatives.

Speaking of tyrants Nael Shama said: “A typical consequence of such a distorted mind set is the equation between personal criticism and disloyalty.” Though that particular article was penned in the summer of 2008, two and half years before the [25 January] revolution, it is such a penetrating deconstruction that will draw readers of the new book Egypt before Tahrir by Dr Nael Shama, political commentator and St Andrews PHD holder.

I wrote this article shortly after the president’s televised address, at the end of the day on which ‘Good Morning Egypt’ had announced the justice minister’s resignation because of his unfortunate statements about the opportunities available to the sons of sanitation workers.

I wrote this article shortly after the president’s televised address, at the end of the day on which ‘Good Morning Egypt’ had announced the justice minister’s resignation because of his unfortunate statements about the opportunities available to the sons of sanitation workers.

The latest conflict over the capital gains tax on stock exchange transactions is not a battle between justice and injustice or big business and the people. It is symptomatic of a much deeper problem in the economic discourse: the gap between the desire for justice and a fuzzy apprehension of the tools needed to realise it.

Since January 2011 the Egyptian media has been subject to accelerated and troubled shifts. The space here would not be enough to fully outline the situation of the media during the years of the revolution. However, we can summarise the six main shifts as follows.

We used to work together in the same company during the 25 January Revolution, a genius upper-middle class young man in his mid-twenties and I was his manager. We would run into each other in Tahrir Square chanting the same slogans of “bread, freedom and social justice”, and carrying the same banners demanding change.

Egypt has been struggling for democracy for some time now. Despite how some observers of Egyptian politics and society mark January 25th 2011 as a beginning of tangible efforts to implement a democratic regime-- after removing an authoritarian one-- the truth is that a series of events and efforts were taking place during the last decade of Mubarak’s rule.