Plastic is an alarming man-made catastrophe, and its abundant presence not only destroys the earth s environment and oceans but is also detrimental to humans. Halfway between Hawaii and California lies a mammoth garbage patch in which seven million tons of plastic waste have accumulated and spread.

The Conversation – There s no shortage of dire warnings about the dangers of artificial intelligence these days. Modern prophets, such as physicist Stephen Hawking and investor Elon Musk, foretell the imminent decline of humanity. With the advent of artificial general intelligence and self-designed intelligent programs, new and more intelligent AI will appear, rapidly creating ever smarter machines that will, eventually, surpass us.

Of all the fake and even comical titles that the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood group has used for itself, the designation of ousted president Mohamed Morsi as a “prophet” who was “assassinated” must be the most absurd. This designation was given by many Muslim Brotherhood activists, including the Yemeni Nobel Laureate Tawakol Kerman, who went so far as to use this designation to describe Morsi.

Around the world, hate is on the march. A menacing wave of intolerance and hate-based violence is targeting worshippers of many faiths across the globe. Sadly – and disturbingly – such vicious incidents are becoming all too familiar. In recent months, we have seen Jews murdered in synagogues, their gravestones defaced with swastikas; Muslims gunned down in mosques, their religious sites vandalized; Christians killed at prayer, their churches torched.

The Africa Cup of Nations kicked off in Egypt earlier this week. The circumstances under which the championship is being held are quite unusual, since it was originally destined for Cameroon. However, the latter country could not make the necessary preparations, which meant that the Confederation of African Football (CAF) asked for new bids to host the tournament, with Egypt and South Africa applying.

The death of ousted president Mohamed Morsi on 17 June from a heart attack during his on-going trial for espionage was met with a collective shrug in Egypt. Morsi died in the same month he and the Muslim Brotherhood faced mass protests that led to his removal from office. In June, six years ago, most of Egypt’s opposition figures — including former chief of the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Mohamed ElBaradei — came out against Morsi. In an interview with Al-Masry Al-Youm in mid-June 2013, ElBaradei pleaded with Morsi to leave office peacefully. “Morsi lost the confidence of most Egyptians, and I urge him to do like Hosni Mubarak and leave office peacefully,” said ElBaradei. “If Morsi refuses to leave, I hope the army will intervene to support the will of the people and force him from power. It is the duty of the army to support the people’s aspirations.” Responding to the calls of opposition figures, and of the Tamarod campaign which collected 30 million signatures in favour of ousting Morsi, millions took to the streets on 30 June 2013 — the sixth anniversary of which will be marked on Sunday — demanding Egypt be rid not just of Morsi but the Muslim Brotherhood. Anti-Brotherhood protests continued for four days, with demonstrators threatening to storm the presidential palace and evict Morsi by force. On 3 July 2013, representatives from opposition forces, including ElBaradei, delegates from religious institutions, the Salafist Nour Party, civil society organisations, and army’s then chief, minister of defence Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi, met to announce the removal of Morsi and the appointment of head of the Supreme Constitutional Court Adli Mansour as interim president. Morsi, like Mubarak in 2011, was placed under house arrest. Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood, forever obstinate and stubborn, refused to abandon power peacefully. They organised armed sit-ins in major squares in Cairo and Giza and threatened to use the terrorist Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis group in Sinai to spread violence across Egypt. Morsi was born in Al-Idwah, a village in the Nile delta government of Al-Sharqiya, on 20 August 1951. He graduated from Cairo University’s Faculty of Engineering (Department of Metallurgy) in 1975, after which he left for the United States to study material science at the University of Southern California. There is no reliable data on when he joined the Muslim Brotherhood. Tharwat Al-Kherbawi, a lawyer and historian who split from the Brotherhood over its dictatorial agenda, claimed in his book The Secret of the Temple, that Morsi joined the group while a student at Cairo University in the early 1970s. “At that time, late president Anwar Al-Sadat decided to release most of the Brotherhood’s officials and activists detained under president Gamal Abdel-Nasser since 1965. They moved quickly to spread in universities and mosques and recruit students,” wrote Al-Kherbawi. “Morsi was a voracious reader of Sayed Qotb, the leading Brotherhood ideologue who resurrected the ideology of Takfir and Hakimiya. The fact that Morsi was a hard-line Qotbist helped him rise quickly in the group, especially after the Qotbist wing took control of the Brotherhood in rigged internal elections in 2009.” In 1979 the 28-year-old Mohamed Morsi married Naglaa Mahmoud, a 17-year-old student. According to the Brotherhood-affiliated website Sebq, Mahmoud was a relative of Morsi. In an interview with Turkey’s Anatolia Agency in August 2014, Mahmoud said she met Hillary Clinton while she was living in the US with her husband. “We have a long friendship and it increased when my husband became the legitimate president of the country,” said Mahmoud. “The Muslim Sisterhood, the female off-shoot of the Brotherhood, had routine business dealings with the Clintons who always asked us for help on Middle East issues.” According to the World Bulletin, Morsi’s wife is also a friend with Saleha Abedin, the mother of Huma Abedin, a Muslim Students’ Association board member at George Washington University who started working for Hillary Clinton as an advisor in 1996. Until 2000, however, Morsi was little known. When parliamentary elections were held that year he was among 88 Muslim Brotherhood members who won seats. Subsequently the Brotherhood chose him as their parliamentary spokesman. “Morsi was a polite parliamentarian and at the time appeared to represent the voice of reason among the group’s MPs,” said Al-Kherbawi. “Yet his speeches and statements, on close examination, reveal him as a committed Qotbist.” Morsi lost his seat in 2005 when only 17 Brotherhood candidates were successful. The Brotherhood appointed him chief of its political bureau. When the Brotherhood’s Supreme Guidance Office elections were held in December and hardliners won against the reformist camp led by then deputy guide Mohamed Habib, he rose to greater prominence within the group. When protests erupted against Hosni Mubarak on 25 January 2011 Morsi was critical of the demonstrators. Abdel-Gelil Al-Sharnoubi, a journalist who was in charge of the Brotherhood’s official website, reported Morsi saying “the group can never join these boys who have decided to gather in Tahrir Square”. Morsi and other Brotherhood leaders were arrested on 28 January 2011, after security forces received intelligence that members of the group had met in Turkey with foreign agents, mainly from the CIA, where they were instructed to take part in what came to be known as “the Friday of Fury” on 29 January. According to later court hearings, extremists from Hamas in Gaza and Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis in Sinai used the chaos of 29 January to infiltrate Egypt’s borders and release Muslim Brotherhood prisoners. Morsi, in an interview with the Qatari Al-Jazeera TV channel aired on the evening of 29 January, claimed that citizens living near the Wadi Al-Natroun prison — on Cairo Alexandria desert road —demolished the prison buildings and set Brotherhood figures free. When Mubarak was ousted from office the Muslim Brotherhood became a major political force and Morsi its main negotiator. When the Freedom and Justice (FJ) party — the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood — was founded in June 2011, Morsi was named as its deputy head. Morsi said at the time that the party would not field candidates in every constituency “because the Brotherhood believes in political diversity”. Morsi, together with the Brotherhood’s supreme guide Mohamed Badie, also stressed that “the group does not intend to field a candidate in any presidential elections”. Despite the early reassurances, the FJ contested every seat, and ended with getting 235 seats. The party’s Islamist allies won 25 per cent of the remaining seats in the People’s Assembly. In the Shura Council elections, the FJ won 103 seats — 57.2 per cent of the total. Morsi did not stand in 2011’s parliamentary or Shura elections and after Mohamed Saad Al-Katatni was made speaker of parliament in January 2012, Morsi was appointed head of the FJ. But there were no plans for Morsi to stand as a presidential candidate. “Everything changed when John Kerry, the high-profile US senator who was at that time working as special representative for US president Barack Obama, visited Cairo in early December 2011,” says Al-Kherbawi. Kerry was the first among US congressmen who urged Mubarak to resign. In an article in The New York Times of 31 January, 2011 — six days after the uprising erupted, Kerry asked Mubarak to resign. “Kerry at that time — during the Obama and George W. Bush presidency, was one of several American officials arguing that the Muslim Brotherhood was a moderate group which America should support to achieve democracy and stability in the Middle East,” says Al-Kherbawi. In Morsi and the Seat Abdel-Moez Ibrahim, a member of the judiciary supervising the 2012 elections, wrote that “Kerry visited Cairo in December 2011 as an Obama envoy and held a closed-door meeting with leading Brotherhood officials at the group’s headquarters in Cairo’s Moqattam district.” “Kerry urged the Brotherhood to contest the presidential elections and promised the Obama administration would support them. Kerry’s only condition was that if the Brotherhood won the presidency it must respect Egypt’s foreign agreements, particularly the peace treaty with Israel,” Ibrahim wrote. In March 2012 the Brotherhood announced that it would field a presidential candidate. Its first choice was Khairat Al-Shater, the Brotherhood’s bank-roller. “Al-Shater was disqualified from running on a legal technicality. The group, now overwhelmed by ambition for power, decided to push Morsi as Al-Shater’s “spare tyre”, the Brotherhood’s accidental candidate. In the second round, in May 2012, Morsi was able to defeat former army general and prime minister Ahmed Shafik, winning 13.2 million votes to Shafik’s 12.3 million. Some sources said the Brotherhood spent as much as LE600 million to help Morsi succeed. Former US president Barack Obama was the first foreign leader to congratulate Morsi,” Ibrahim said. During his one-year rule Morsi moved quickly to implement the Muslim Brotherhood’s agenda. “Although he promised to be a president for all Egyptians, his promises proved false,” said Ibrahim. Between July and November 2012 he issued a series of constitutional declarations that allowed him to legislate by decree without any judicial oversight or review. At the same time, a constituent assembly dominated by the Brotherhood and Islamist forces drafted what came to be known as the Kandahar constitution which placed Egypt on the road to becoming a theocratic, jihadist state. Having alienated judges, the intelligentsia, secular political forces and Copts, Morsi clashed with the army. In August 2012 he dismissed defence minister Hussein Tantawi and chief of staff Sami Anan. He also refused to attend the funeral of 16 soldiers killed by Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis. The confrontation between the Muslim Brotherhood and civilian forces escalated. In December 2012 Brotherhood militias moved to disperse protesters who had gathered before Al-Ittihadiya palace, killing three. Mohamed Hassanein Heikal warned in a TV interview at the time that Egypt was moving towards a civil war. The Tamarod group was formed to gather signatures for a petition demanding Morsi’s removal. Political forces demanded Morsi dismiss prime minister Hisham Qandil and prosecutor-general Talaat Ibrahim and form a new constituent assembly to write a new constitution. At that time, minister of defence Al-Sisi called for a national dialogue. But Morsi, under orders from the Muslim Brotherhood leaders who were now Egypt’s de-facto rulers, refused. Al-Ahram political analyst Hassan Abu Taleb believes that in the 12 months in which Morsi was in power “people saw what Muslim Brotherhood rule and a theocratic state look like”. “Political Islam — as shown by the Morsi experience — was incompetent, polarising and stubborn. Morsi managed to alienate almost every sector of society outside the Brotherhood,” Abu Taleb said. *A version of this article appears in print in the 27 June, 2019 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly under the headline: The road to 30 June

We killed you, the last of the prophets…” With these words, activist and Nobel Laureate Tawakkol Karman lamented the death of former Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi. She may have not realised that this poem was written by poet Nizar Qabbani to lament former president Gamal Abdel-Nasser, who was known as one of the worst enemies of the Muslim Brotherhood. A moment of raw emotion is one of many positions which deserve a closer look, to understand the full impact of the death of Morsi. Various responses have surfaced in the wake of his death last week during a court session, responses which were influenced by the political position of each individual.

This café was legendary in every sense of the word. Perhaps it was the most famous café in history. In 1913 – just one year before World War I – Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler were sitting in this café in Vienna. In Café Central – according to the BBC – a number of twentieth-century makers were sitting sipping coffee. At the same time, Sigmund Freud and Leon Trotsky as well as Josef Tito were also sitting in the aforementioned café. Freud, at the time, was a famous psychoanalyst, Tito was a car engineer trying to make his way in life, while Hitler was a young man who was 24, living in students hostels and looking for work.

On 13 June, two tankers sailing through the Gulf of Oman came under attack, similar to a previous attack on four tankers in the same area a couple of weeks ago. The first attack was ascribed by senior US officials to Iran without conclusive evidence to this effect save that the attack must have been carried out by “a state actor”. As far as the two attacks of last Thursday are concerned, US President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo left no doubt that Iran was the state actor responsible for carrying out the two.

Attacks against Norwegian and Japanese oil tankers in the Gulf last week may mark a new chapter in the regional and international crisis that began with Washington s unilateral withdrawal from the nuclear agreement with Iran and the re-imposition of its boycott and economic sanctions against Tehran. Judging by Iranian reactions to the new reality, we could summarise its strategy as follows. Firstly, if the confrontation between Iran and the United States forces a halt to Iranian oil exports then Iran will make sure that other parties cannot export their oil either.

As soon as news broke of the sudden death of ousted president Mohamed Morsi during a court hearing on 17 June, Brotherhood officials and activists in Europe, Turkey and some Gulf countries, as well as human rights organisations opposed to the Egyptian government, lashed out at Cairo for causing his death. The statements were many and diverse, but the common thread was that Morsi died as a result of the Egyptian authorities’ neglect of his medical condition during his years in jail. Some even demanded an international investigation into the causes of his death. Morsi had already been found guilty in two of the cases against him and sentenced to life. The Brotherhood and its supporters now want to capitalise on the opportunity to internationalise the cause of his death. Experts agree that the group’s latest actions conform to its long-standing habit of “manufacturing victimhood”. It is a habit that began following the assassination of the group’s founder Hassan Al-Banna in circumstances that still remain a mystery. According to one narrative, the Brotherhood’s “Special Apparatus”, as its paramilitary wing was called, was involved in the assassination following a quarrel between Al-Banna and Abdel-Rahman Al-Sanadi, commander of the paramilitary wing, over the latter’s role in the assassination of judge Ahmed Al-Khazindar. Mokhtar Nouh, a lawyer and former Muslim Brotherhood member, points out that there was nothing suspicious about Morsi’s death. He collapsed in full view of the courtroom after he had been on his feet addressing the court as a co-defendant in the case pertaining to espionage charges involving the Palestinian Hamas organisation. The prosecutor-general’s office immediately took all the measures necessary to put paid to any doubts and issued a detailed report. A member of the Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights (EOHR), speaking on condition of anonymity, said that, contrary to rumours put about by the Brotherhood, Morsi had no problem accessing medical treatment and was in fact given special attention. The EOHR member added that it was in no one’s interest to neglect Morsi’s health. Nouh stresses the Brotherhood had consistently refused to appeal to the government or to President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi for an amnesty on grounds of ill health because the organisation refuses to recognise the post-30 June 2013 political order. Lawyer Amr Abdel-Salam offered testimony to the medical attention accorded to Morsi. Citing General Ihab Abul-Kheir, the former assistant to the interior minister who oversaw Morsi’s medical treatment, Abdel-Salam said, “Morsi received comprehensive health and medical care during his detention at the hands of leading practitioners in all medical disciplines. Contrary to rumours, he was never deprived of medication. In fact, two officers were assigned to oversee his medical needs in order to preserve his health.” The Brotherhood’s victimhood discourse builds on four components. One is the politicised statements of condolences by foreign officials, especially the heads-of-state of countries hostile to Egypt such as Qatar and Turkey. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was quick to charge his rhetoric with terms as the “martyr Morsi” and the “martyred president”. The second involves commentaries by human rights organisations, most echoing the Brotherhood’s narrative that Morsi died as a result of medical neglect for which the Egyptian government is responsible. One of the organisations involved is the Committee for Justice, a Geneva-based operation run by the Muslim Brotherhood. Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International (AI) tow the same line and have echoed calls for an international investigation into the causes of Morsi’s death and the conditions prevalent in Egyptian prisons. Egypt’s State Information Service (SIS) responded to tweets by Sarah Whitson, executive director of HRW’s Middle East and North Africa Division, by saying her feeble claims confirm HRW’s intent to continue to circulate falsehoods. “It is amazing that Whitson posted her first tweet less than half an hour after the announcement of Morsi’s death. In that tweet she concluded that he had died as a result of medical negligence without offering a shred of evidence to back her claim,” said SIS. It added that the only authoritative information was to be found in the report released by the Egyptian prosecutor-general’s office which contained initial findings into the cause of death and added that it would supply further details after an autopsy had been conducted. The report, which refuted Whitson’s claims, confirms “that her conclusions are nothing less than a tendentious attempt to precede events for political motives and that HRW has stooped to yet another level of baseness by exploiting the death of an Egyptian citizen to espouse political positions and criminal allegations without proof. Such behaviour has nothing to do with rights advocacy,” insisted SIS. The third component of the victimhood discourse is the propaganda campaign launched through social media platforms using hashtags such as “martyred president”. The fourth is mobilisation through funeral rites. Funerals have long served as chapter headings in the Brotherhood’s narrative of victimhood. In this case, the group sees funeral and commemorative activities for Morsi as a means to re-establish its presence in the street and demonstrate that the organisation is still alive in Egypt. Some analysts predict that the “Special Apparatus”, currently headed by Mahmoud Ezzat, will plot to avenge Morsi. They say such a scenario is consistent with Ezzat’s ideas expressed, for example, in his first communiqué to followers as acting supreme guide and in his book The Jurisprudence of Popular Resistance to the Coup. The book, circulated among the group’s rank and file, condemns the Egyptian government, its security establishment and, indeed, Egyptian society, as heretic, and calls for armed resistance. It has served as the group’s ideological rationale for acts such as the assassination attempt against the Egyptian prosecutor-general Hisham Barakat and the murder of police and army officers. Ezzat’s book, which he signed using the moniker Papa Mahmoud, has become an ideological frame of reference for Brotherhood militant activity today, much as works by Sayed Qotb, such as Signposts on the Road, set the compass for Islamist violence in the 1960s. Investigations have also revealed that the Brotherhood has circulated among its members in prison documents that furnish a theological rationale for condemning the Egyptian government as heretic. One of these is a study by Abdel-Rahman Al-Barr, known as the Brotherhood mufti, which cites Sheikh Mohamed Al-Ghazali’s commentary on the assassination of the Egyptian intellectual Farag Foda by Al-Gamaa Al-Islamiya. In Al-Ghazali’s opinion it was not Foda’s execution that was wrong but the fact that it was carried out by an agency other than the ruler (ie, the government). Al-Barr argued that since the ruler was unlawful and would not issue a judgement against himself, it was legitimate to fight him. Maher Farghali, a specialist in Islamist groups, argues that Morsi’s death serves the interests of the hardliners in the group who will try to use it to promote antagonism towards the Egyptian government and as a means to mend rifts in the organisation in favour of the hardliners and their appeal for vengeance. Farghali adds that the Brotherhood, when acting out its victimhood discourse, generally turns to violence rather than taking a step back for introspection. *A version of this article appears in print in the 20 June, 2019 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly under the headline: Playing victim

North Africa has been an arena for rivalry between the Islamic State group (IS) and its affiliates and Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and its affiliates for many years. In the period prior to its military defeats in Syria and Iraq, IS influence in North Africa increased considerably and many factions of Al-Qaeda affiliated groups in North Africa shifted their allegiances to it.

It has become apparent that the United States will fight the rise of China over the next decade using economic warfare and sanctions, and as a result the resourceful Chinese have been taking steps to fight back in this war by allying themselves with US rival Russia. The latest visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping to Russia in May and his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin represents a major step forward in the two countries relations.

Recent attacks on shipping, including oil tankers in the Persian Gulf, and missile attacks by Iran-backed Houthi rebels directed at targets inside Saudi Arabia are ratcheting up tensions in the Middle East. At the same time, Iran is promising to restart elements of its nuclear program. Add to this the deployment last month of a significant US military force to the region to counter Iran and you get a combustible mix that could be the spark for a wider regional war arising out of the rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia -- unless steps are taken to lower the tension.

Elections make for strange bedfellows in Iraq s self-ruled Kurdish region, and when they are over power struggles among the victors begin. This has been the case since the breakaway northern Iraqi enclave held its first ballot in 1994. On 10 June, Nechirvan Barzani, prime minister of the Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), was sworn in as the region s newly elected president, succeeding his uncle Masoud Barzani who quit after the failure of an independence referendum in 2017.

Ramadan is the time of year when charitable organisations bombard Egyptians with television and other advertisements promoting various charitable causes and asking for their contributions. Building upon the increased piety and desire to do good that is associated with the holy month of Ramadan, charitable organisations tend to concentrate their fund-raising efforts during this month, hoping to extract the maximum resources to finance their activities for the remainder of the year.

t has been known for a long time that physical activity–including dancing and exercise–can have several positive effects on people s bodies and minds, leading to better cardiovascular health, fewer migraine headaches, and a sharper brain. The Einstein Aging Study carried out in the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, found that dancing helps prevent both Alzheimer s disease and vascular dementia, which is the next most common form of dementia after Alzheimer s disease. Joseph Verghese, the lead researcher of the Einstein Aging Study said, “Dance is not purely physical in many ways, it also requires a lot of mental effort.” Among the people who participated in the Einstein Aging Study, those who danced frequently –three or four times a week–showed 76% less incidence of dementia than those who danced only once a week or did not dance at all.

The Trump administration recently decided to allow Cuban-American immigrants to sue the Cuban government for property confiscated from them after Fidel Castro took power in 1959. The administration is also limiting the amount of money that Cuban Americans can send to their relatives on the island, as well as the frequency of transactions. These are erroneous decisions which will only increase the suffering of Cuban people, and unnecessarily increase the antagonism between Cuba and the US government. “The only way to get property claimants what they deserve is through diplomatic negotiations, which President Trump just threw off the table,” wrote in a statement James Williams, president of Engage Cuba, a Washington-based advocacy group which is working to lift the embargo on Cuba. At the same time, limiting remittances to the island will only increase the suffering of Cubans who largely depend on the financial aid from their relatives in the US.

Egypt s economic reform programme, launched in 2016, was a much-needed and brave endeavour, developed by a home-grown economic team, approved by political leadership, and endorsed by internationally acclaimed institutions such as the IMF. The programme aimed at a significant turnaround in Egypt s main economic key performance indicators, with the ultimate objective of elevating the quality of life based on solid and permanent foundations.

Egypt will host the 2019 African Cup of Nations (AFCON) in a few days, making this the fifth time Egypt will have the honour of acting as host of the tournament, having organised it in 1959, 1974, 1986, and 2006. This will also make Egypt the country to have organised the tournament the most times. This year will witness the participation of 24 teams for the first time in the history of the AFCON, which began in 1957. Several key points about this important event should be considered.

In the past forty years, Europe has gone through a turning point at the end of every decade. The first came at the end of the 1970s when Greece, Spain, and Portugal embraced democracy. This evolved the European project from mechanisms of economic integration to maintain peace in the continent, towards the beginning of the slow “ever closer” union. This coming together of the south with the north and the west breathed life in the European Union as an ideal of enlightened, democratic, rules-based liberalism.