It is with much interest that I am keeping track of the coverage your respectable newspaper and website are giving to the status of higher education and universities in Egypt. I also appreciate the keenness with which you are addressing the Egyptian university issue.

The so-called "Sinai Province" (aka Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis), which is linked to the "Islamic State" group, launched several raids in North Sinai that ended in battles killing 17 soldiers and more than 100 militants, according to the spokesperson of the Egyptian army. It should be said that other reports stated higher numbers of soldiers killed. This horrible incident came after the assassination of Hesham Barakat, Egypt's prosecutor-general, in Cairo. It also happened before the killing of nine members of the Muslim Brotherhood. It looks like a cycle of violence has started and it may have severe consequences on Egypt.

Sinai, a region so unfortunate in every imaginable aspect, on Wednesday witnessed simultaneous attacks on military sites and personnel. Islamic State-affiliated militant groups have claimed responsibility for the attacks, and the Egyptian army in response has launched a rigorous operation of retaliation to target members of terrorist groups in North Sinai.

White supremacists in the United States have never lost interest in pushing African Americans around. America is not, and never has been, socially cohesive. The Charleston massacre underscored the tragic reality that racism in America is rife. The series of murders of African Americans, and black male youth in particular, is testament to the bloodcurdling truth that whites in America are trigger happy. A well-honed sense of history is in the making in contemporary America.

Friday’s carnage on three continents, in which scores of people died in Tunisia, Kuwait, and France has appalled the global community and reinforced international condemnation of the Islamic State (IS), which has claimed responsibility for them.

Imagine the Prosecutor General of France in a motorcade near the Place de Montmartre. Now imagine a suicide car bomb intercepting that motorcade and killing him. Today Egypt doesn’t have to imagine.

Ideas are endless; the important thing is that they are followed by a political will to execute them, and perhaps the most important thing is that the decision-makers think about national projects targeting the poor, who are burdened by the weight of years of oppression, poverty, disease and ignoranc

If policy-makers are keen on research, they may wish to earmark some of their time for protecting and enabling researchers and for addressing the misguided suspicions of research that pervade the public imagination.

In the mid-1940s, Hafez Assad became one of the earliest non-Sunni Muslim leaders of Syria's general student union; in the 1950s, he became one of the country's first air fighters; in his late thirties, he became defence minister; in 1970, by the age of 40 he ascended to the presidency. He acquired power through a coup that ended a decade long political struggle between various socialist and nationalist forces, the most powerful of which was the Baath (Resurrection) ‎party. For most Syrians, this did not matter much; the country's experience with liberal democracy (in the early 1940s) was short and marked with economic upheavals and chaos. Most Syrians longed for stability.

After a long wait, the cabinet has finally completed a draft budget for the coming fiscal year and sent it to the president for approval or amendment. Under the proposed budget, state revenues will reach LE612 billion next year, an increase of 26 percent on the current year, and expenditures will rise 20 percent to LE885 billion.

“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.