An Egyptian parliamentarian yesterday accused the UAE of financing Ethiopia’s controversial dam. During a parliament session held to discuss the new Sukuk (bonds) draft bill, Nasserist MP Diaa al-Din Dawoud demanded the “High Dam and the Suez Canal” be excluded from the law, so Sukuk would not be traded on …

[Putin] wants a return to the good or bad old days, when the USSR and the United States were regarded as arbiters of world affairs on an equal footing. Today, thanks to the Obama era, that vast region [Central Asia] is morphing into a race course between China and Russia, …

Sheikh Jarrah, the ostensible cause of the latest conflict in the Middle East, is not so complicated. It is a private rent dispute, caused by squatters and by Palestinian tenants who acquired protected tenancies (not ownership) during the period of Jordanian occupation 1948-1967 when Jordan illegally sequestrated the property rights …

The US President Joe Biden’s op-ed in Washington Post My trip to Europe is about America rallying the world’s democracies will draw wide attention in world capitals from Brussels to Beijing. He says right at the outset that this weeklong trip to Europe, the first overseas trip of his presidency, …

Rouhani’s expression of gratitude came a few weeks after his foreign minister was caught in a leaked audio, complaining about Russian attempts to put a spike in the wheel of the 2015 multilateral talks that culminated in the Iran nuclear deal. Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani said his country’s already “friendly …

The Biden administration continues to talk with Turkish officials about Ankara’s proposal to take over security at Kabul International Airport after US and NATO forces leave Afghanistan later this summer. The discussions come ahead of President Joe Biden’s planned first meeting since taking office with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan …

Here’s what you need to know about Ebrahim Raisi, the conservative cleric seen as the heavy favorite to replace outgoing President Hassan Rouhani. Ebrahim Raisi, the hard-line Iranian judiciary chief known for his role in the mass execution of thousands of prisoners in the late 1980s, is heavily favored to …

Moscow appears to be making some tentative steps for a deeper engagement in the Yemen war. The Russian Black Sea resort city of Sochi hosted talks May 26 between Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and his Yemeni counterpart, Ahmed Awad Bin Mubarak, who was in Russia on a work visit. …

The forthcoming Erdogan-Biden meeting on June 14 comes at a time when Erdogan is experiencing his weakest term in his very long reign. For a long period of time, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan looked mighty, especially from within Turkey. He was charismatic, a great orator, a shrewd tactician, imposing …

The Hisbah (ISIS’ religious police) has reappeared on the ground in Deir-ez-Zor, unleashing chaos in many villages and towns of the areas controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in northeastern Syria. The organization’s members affiliated with the “Hisbah Apparatus” demanded all residents of the eastern Deir-ez-Zor countryside not to …