We can’t ignore the visit of Pope Francis without pausing and thinking about the implications of this visit, and what this visit could do for Egypt in general, and more specifically for the Christians around the world. We can’t deny that this visit will open many doors that were closed before. One of these doors, is “hope.” I consider hope the most important door for Egyptians and for everyone around the world. When I say hope, I mean the hope for living in peace, not clashing between civilizations as Samuel Huntington was trying to portray in his book by the same name, “Clash of Civilizations.”

Tomorrow President Sisi will be going to Saudi Arabia for an official visit, after along time of tension between the two countries, especially after the Egyptian situation that occured with the UN by supporting the Russian and French Revolution relating to the Syrian War. The question we need to answer here is as follows: Are there any benefits from the Saudi Arabia - Egypt relationship? It's difficult to say that the relationship between Egypt and Saudi Arabia has reached to a level we can call "strategic". Basically, Saudi Arabia wants to have Egypt as a support system in case any other country attacks. It is well-known that the Egyptian Army is the only army tha remains now among all the Arab countries.They are the only force that we can consider organized enough, and ready enough, to participate in any war that may occur in the region.

Although Easter is tomorrow, I want to express my condolences, not my congratulations to all the loved ones and friends of the martyrs of Tanta and Alexandria, after terrorists bombed the two churches on Palm Sunday, leaving more than 50 dead hundreds injured. Also, I believe that cancelling the Easter Celebration was the right decision from Pope Tawadros. I don’t think that celebrating Easter shows respect and sorrow for the people enduring this horrible attack.

After the horrible Palm Sunday terrorist attack, I've noticed many people attacking our beloved Pope Tawadros for supporting Sisi and sharing in the responsibility for what is happening to the Copts in Egypt. It Is irrational to attack Pope Tawadros especially in this time. We need to show our solidarity, not attacking our Pope becuase he has chosen to support the State not the Regime, regardless of who becomes president after this.

Lately, many accidents involving poison has been happening to Egyptian children after eating their school meal. However, the Egyptian Parliament has been dealing with this accident as if nothing happened. It appears the children are not important enough to question the Minister of Education, or at least investigate the incident. As an avid follower for all Parliament-related news, I believe this is incredibly horrible, and something that will stain Egyptian’s history as a terrible occurrence, and shame. This Parliament is composed of security personnel hand-picked, not by

As I have mentioned in the previous article that President Sisi should focus on four main topics which are as follows: The first important topic is the economic issue, which from my point, needs to take a lot of time and more effort to discuss than any of the other topics. As we can see now, Egypt is suffering from many economical problems especially after floating the Egyptian Pound which has led the Egyptian Pound to drop dramatically in the past few months, leading to huge inflation, which means simply, an incresase in the price of goods.

In just a few weeks Sisi will be flying half way across the world to meet the worlds most controversial leader, President Donald Trump. This guy has been the headline of all western tabloids for all the outrageous decrees, interviews, and troublemaking caused by the newly elected U.S. president. Trump has managed to upset literally the Mexicans, Canadians, Arabs, and most recently refused to shake hands with the ambassador to Russia during talks regarding all of the money owed to the U.S. In some weird turning of events, Egypt managed to not make the list of banned countries from entering the U.S. I would not be surprised at all if Sisi was seriously interrogated at airport security even though Trump himself invited him over for discussions.

I can’t understand why. But maybe I shouldn’t be asking “why” but asking “how.” How are they so happy? How do have this joy that fill a room? Is there some kind of secret that I don’t know about? I don’t know what the answer is. Maybe the key to joy is not in what happens to us, but how we happen to life. Does that make sense? Not so much, right? Think of this: the most impoverished people are the happiest people. Tragedy hits everyone equally, it does not discriminate. In one way or another, you will face disasters in your lifetime. So maybe since heartbreak is a known factor in the equation of happiness, we need to change a different variable, which is our attitude.

Let’s paint two pictures. The first, a family that has a roof over their heads, food in the fridge, money in the bank. The second, a family that is struggling to find food, who lives in poverty, not a piaster to their name. These are very basic pictures, because as you know, each family faces many obstacles in their lifetime. Going more in-depth, we could factor in family issues, self-fulfillment, serious illness, death, mental diseases, tragedy, and the list can keep on going because this life is filled with the absolute best and absolute worst situations anyone could encounter. One minute you could be happy beyond belief, the next minute you could be completely devastated, through no fault of your own, but simply by living.

Recently, Copts have been forced to leave their homes in Arish because of the threats they face. 6 Copts have been killed by the Islamic State in Sinai. This is not the first incident to happen against the Copts, and not the first time for them to be forced out of their homes and community. However, I want to point out that this displacement in Sinai is not only from terrorism. It's also as a result of authorities agreeing with the general public that forced displacement in Upper Egypt is appropriate. Forced displacement of the Copts is not just an isolated incident, it is something that happens often when Muslim people want to force their rules on others including the law and the legislation. This serious situation, as I mentioned and written many times earlier, will not be solved by security measures only, it needs more efforts than that. As long as our children keep getting the same education in schools and mosques, calling for Muslim kids to hate others because they are "infidels" we will continually be dealing with these types of incidents in Egypt all the time, and in alot of places. When you plant seeds in chilren to hate others becuase they are Christian, don't except to have angels when these children finally become adults. Unfortunately, Sisi is still running Egypt with the same old rules and same old approach. The president still hasn't recognized that Egypt is in need of a new and creative approach that not only comes through security measures. In conclusion, I want to call for the Pope and for all Christians to pay attention to their brothers and sisters who have become displaced lately, and to do their best to help, where possible, in this horrbile situation.

Lately, the US dollar had declined by 3 Egyptian Pounds, which lead everyone to believe that the government was right when it made the deceison of floating the Egyptian Pound against the US dollar. But we need to ask this question before becoming optimistic or pessimistic: is this decline real? Will this decline continue? And, what does it mean? From my opinion, the decline of the US dollar is not real and it will not last more than 3 to 4 months maximum, and the reason I say this is because nothing has changed in the Egyptian economy to improve the situation of the Egyptian Pound against the US Dollar. Let's take tourism for example. Egypt is still suffering from a lack of toursim and tourists who can bring and spend US dollars. By this way, Egypt can get more dollars than they need, consequentially, the Egyptian Pound will then gain more power to face the US dollar. In conclusion, I want to emphasize that I hope that this decline in the US dollar is real, however, I don't think this is real and I expect that in 3 to 4 months we will be talking again about the soar of the US dollar against the Egyptian pound. If we want the US dollar to have real decline against the Egyptian pound, we need to work hard to get more US Dollar through more exports or decrease our import and be self independent.

Every day in the morning we wake up very active and very hopeful. We start our day by taking breakfast, going to our work, chatting with our friends and back to home after long day of being exhausted, trying to relax and eat our supper together before time for sleeping come while watching TV. We are doing that every day, hoping and feeling that the future will be better and we believe that we will live longer to see our dreams coming true in front of our eyes. When we hear about accident here or there or when we know by chance that one we know have died, we try to feel sorry about him and say “God have Mercy on him “, God give patience to the family”, “we will all die”, also we might think little bit about repent and stop doing the bad things we were doing for a while.

After seven years of being absent from the African cup, the football team could be in the final against all the speculations that claimed that the Egyptian team will be out from the beginning of the championship. In fact, some of these speculations came from experts in football and previous coaches like “Hassan Shehata”, who was saying that Mr. Copper, is not qualified enough to train the Egyptian team, however, this coach reached the final until now.

After Trump decision of banning people from Seven Muslim country from entering the united statess, The media in the west sarted to talk about the Islamophobia started. Unfortunately, the western media and the eastern media talk about Islamophobia because of Trump decesion and no one talk about Chrsitian-phobia in the east. Muslims talk about human rights and freedom when it comes to their freedom and their rights but never talk about other people rights. I haven't heard any media in the east calling for demonstration against what happened to christian in Iraq, Lybia, Syria and even Egypt.

In the last few months, president Sisi took many measurements that showed without a doubt, that he failed in managing many internal issues. I remember when the 25th of January revolution sparked, one of its demands was "the bread" and now Egyptians can hardly make a living. Sisi's policies made most Egyptians more poor and more desprate. Sisi failed in providing fair priced medicine to Egyptians, now prices are more than most can afford. Sisi failed in keeping the Egyptian Pound strong and float the Egyptian Pound which led the Egyptian pound to lose 120% percent of its value.

Nowadays it seems like everyone is getting to the list of “terrorists” or “conspirers” or “a general threat” The most recent is Abu Trekka. Whether the convictions are true or not, is not my point. If it is true, wow, that’s terrible. If not true, well, it’s equally is terrible from the Government. More and more we are hearing messages from the Government condemning people for doing these “unacceptable” acts against the country. I don’t mean to say it’s not serious if Abu Trekka was actually funding the Muslim Brotherhood or not. If he was actually doing that, then shame on him, and what a disgrace!

I want to start off by wishing all of you a very Merry Christmas. I hope everyone can be with family and friends, and really take time to relax and be thankful among those most important to you. When I think about the birth of our Lord, I can’t help but wonder how far, us, as Christians, have wandered from the example Jesus set for us. The most glorious Being, the King of Kings, our Saviour, was born in a manger. How many times do we hear this same story, and yet it continues to shock me. The One who is our Leader, in all ways, was born in a tiny bed lying on hay. Which, by the way is what cows eat for food, thrown onto the ground left for animals to step on.

I want to congratulate all our readers with the new year. Wishing to be better than the previous year which was full of bad news everywhere in the world. I know that many people may be negative and say that we say the same thing every year. Also might say that every time we wish the next year to be better but it never become better. I want to tell those who think in this way that asl ong as you still have chance to live for the next year, its very good and amazing news. Look around yourself especially with what is happening around the world now days, you should be thankful that you still have chance to improve your life and make it better.

I have recently watched an interview of Dr. Abd El-Moneem Saeed on CBC Tv. He was trying to analyst Egyptian diplomacy, especially since after Egypt voted for the Russian and French resolution at the UN at the same time. Saeed tried to understand and interpret the confusion of Egyptian diplomacy by claiming that Egypt is lacking a strategy to deal with international issues. With my respect to Dr. Saeed, I completely differ with what he was trying to say, as I don’t think that the confusion in Egyptian diplomacy is because of a lacking strategy. I totally believe that you can’t have an independent diplomacy without being independent in your decisions.

Egyptians have been asking the same question for a long time now. This question is: why can't the lower class feel or see any improvements despite the economic reform that all governments have been proclaiming to adopt to improve poverty and the middle class. I can assure you, that Egyptians will never feel any imporvement either short term or long term if economic reforms are not adopted, and fair tax systems not imposed. It is widely known that the exact same taxes are collected from rich people, as they are collected from the poor and middle classes. However, this should not be the same percentage, because it is only making the poor more poor, and the middle class move towards being poor as well. Having said that, we can see that the Egyptian tax system is now based on an unfair tax system. We can see that the most heavily taxed people are the government employees and the public sector employees as well. At the same time, we can see that the richest people pay the same percentage as the poor people. Furthermore, they try to create their own ways to escape and report unreal facts about their profits so they can pay less taxes. In conclusion, I want to advise that the only way the government will see a real change in Egyptian life, they will have to adopt a different approach to the their tax system.

The terrorism attack that happened recently against the Church of St. Peter, located inside the Coptic Cathedral shows us, that without a doubt, the Copts have a history, and are a living history, of sacrifice. Martyrdom is something the Coptic people have gotten used to since the time Islam invaded Egypt. Before that, it was the Roman Empire who considered Christians as rebels. This terrorism attack not only shows the teachings of hatred in schools and mosques, and how it leads to disasters such as these tragedies, but also shows that unless Egypt takes serious steps to eliminate these insulting teachings towards other religions we will continue down this road. This attack aslso shows how the police is so careless about protecting the rights and freedoms any Egyptian Christian should be able to practice.