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.

Throughout its history, the Nobel Prize in Literature was the most prestigious literary prize in the world. However, the last few years have witnessed a huge controversy following the awarding of the prize to the American singer and lyricist Bob Dylan in 2016. This is not the prize s only recent controversy, and now its credibility is at stake. This is due to news reports and investigations into accusations of sexual harassment by Jean-Claude Arnault, a well-known French photographer married to a member of the Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel Prize in Literature. A number of women, including other Academy members, have accused him of sexually harassing them. He and his wife also own a cultural venue that used to receive subsidies from the Swedish Academy.

Donald Trump s Iran decision is explained by two sets of factors: Trump s personality, stubbornness and ignorance; and his wish to please his base, some lobbyists, and Bolton-like hardliners. Trump s decision frightens me and I am not sure it is a correct one. However, I am dismayed: I did not find a single paper trying to defend it. Of course, I did not go to Fox News website. I surveyed my usual suspects.

The demand for higher education around the world is growing. By 2030, according to UNESCO, the number of enrolled students is expected to more than double to over 414 million. Serving that population and others requires extraordinary energy and imagination, strategic thinking, and innovation. The need for quality higher education is especially important in the Arab region as a whole, whose youth make up is the highest proportion of the youth population in the world. While the Arab world expects to widen its educated talent pool by 50% by 2030, according to the World Economic Forum, opportunities are out of reach for far too many of the region s 105 million young people.

With the minutes ticking down until the world learns whether President Trump will pull out of the Iran nuclear deal, it s worth asking the question: why did Trump decide to bring his announcement forward so dramatically? The announcement comes in the immediate aftermath of a flurry of European diplomacy. His decision may divide America from its European partners, France, Germany and the UK. And what happens next could further divide these nations, too.

In withdrawing the US from the Iran nuclear deal, President Donald Trump is taking a huge gamble. And aside from his desire to repudiate everything done by his predecessor, President Barack Obama, it s really hard to see why he is making this decision. Let s stipulate first that the Iran nuclear deal is working surprisingly well. That s according to the congressional testimony of Trump s own secretary of defense, James Mattis, who testified in October that the Iran deal was in American national security interests.

The Ethiopian government has been evasive with regards to Egypt s demands for negotiations over the building of the massive Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) on the Nile in Ethiopia. Since President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi came to power in 2014, he and his government have been treading carefully and diplomatically to repair the frictions caused by the former regime of Muslim Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi.

It is an almost neglected issue in all governmental discussions, especially among economic policymakers, despite its paramount importance. This we have clarified in several previous articles. It is well known that Egypt s economic problem can be solved to a large extent mainly via an increase of the investment rate in the range of 25 and 30 percent. What is achieved now doesn t exceed 15 percent. The reason for this can be referred to the decrease in domestic saving, which is one of the most important sources of financing investment. Even in the light of foreign capital flow, it is still the basic source of it.

French President Emmanuel Macron told the US media he had “a lot in common” with US President Donald Trump on his recent trip to Washington. He meant that both of them had been candidates from outside the “system” and that neither had a political past or record but had both scored an unexpected victory in the elections.

Add the name of White House chief of staff John Kelly to the astonishingly long list of close Trump aides who have reportedly disparaged the President s intellect, in his case referring to the leader of the free world as "an idiot." Kelly called the report "total B.S." But, like the dog that didn t bark, Kelly s statement reveals more by what it does not say. It does not say the President is bright. It does not say he is engaged. It does not say he digs into the impossibly difficult issues that come into the Oval Office each day. And Kelly s silence on those matters is telling.

Like a matador waving a red cape, someone is torturing President Donald Trump by leaking the questions that could be posed to him by special counsel Robert Mueller: How was the decision made to fire [national security adviser] Mr. Flynn on Feb. 13, 2017? What did you mean when you told Russian diplomats on May 10, 2017 that firing [FBI director] Mr. Comey had taken the pressure off? What did you know about communications between Roger Stone and his associates, Julian Assange and Wikileaks?

Cyber. It is the inescapable prefix defining our world today. From the privacy of individuals to relations between states, cyber dominates discussions and headlines – so much so that we risk being paralyzed by the magnitude of the problems we face. But we would do well to keep in mind that despite the many outstanding questions on the future of cybersecurity and governance, international cooperation is essential to tackle the ever-growing threats of cybercrime.

The Arabic root aqala (from which the word aql, or reason, is derived) appears 49 times in the Quran, and every time except once it appears in the form of a verb conjugated in the present tense, most of the time in the plural, as taaqiloun, yaaqiloun, and so on. The verb taaqiloun is repeated 24 times and yaaqiloun 22 times, whereas each of the verbs aqala, naaqil and yaaqil, being the first person singular and plural and the third person singular of the verb, appears only once.