Recent Posts

Egypt MP: UAE financing Ethiopia dam project

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 …

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Biden and Putin in G7 and a Half

[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, …

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China and Iran: Join Up the Dots

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 …

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Biden clears the air on ties with Russia and China

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, …

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Russia looks for way back into Yemen

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. …

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At his weakest moment, Erdogan to meet Biden

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 …

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ISIS Hisbah Police Reappears in Deir-ez-Zor

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 …

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