Egypt

A number of British passengers are believed to be amongst those being held hostage on a hijacked EgyptAir plane which has landed in Cyprus. The jet – which took off from Alexandra in Egypt and had been due to fly to Cairo – had 81 passengers on board. Most of those, including 51 Egyptians have been let go, according to the airline which said only the crew and four foreign national passengers remained on the plane which is currently sitting on the tarmac at Larnaca International Airport. Details are still sketchy on exactly what the motives for the hijacking are but there are reports suggesting that the hijacker is attempting

The Swedish and German authorities say they have never encountered anything like it: groups of men encircling then molesting women in large public gatherings. It happened in Cologne and Stockholm, but is it really unprecedented? Ivar Arpi argues in the new Spectator that it may well be connected to a phenomenon called ‘taharrush gamea’, a form of group harassment previously seen in Egypt. So what is taharrush gamea, and should Western police be worried? Here’s what we know. ‘Taharrush’ means sexual harassment – it’s a relatively modern word, which political scholar As’ad Abukhalil says dates back to at least the 1950s. ‘Gamea’ just means ‘collective’. Taharrush gamea came to attention in Egypt in 2005, when

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/jeremyhunt-scatastrophicmistake/media.mp3″ title=”Douglas Murray discusses what Isis might do next” startat=1814] Listen [/audioplayer]When the creation of a new caliphate was announced last year, who but the small band of his followers took seriously its leader’s prediction of imminent regional and eventual global dominance? It straddled the northern parts of Syria and Iraq, two countries already torn apart by civil war and sectarian hatreds. So the self-declared caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, appeared to be just another thug and opportunist ruling over a blighted no-man’s land, little known and still less revered in the wider Islamic world. He was surrounded by a rag-tag army of jihadis, whose imperial hubris seemed to reflect

‘I want a woman to be President,’ declared one of the ambulance drivers interviewed by Sherief Elkatsha for his film Cairo Drive. I don’t think he was joking. He was fed up with the struggle to do his job in the chaos of the Egyptian capital’s streets clogged by 14 million vehicles. Elkatsha’s feature documentary took five years to make and takes us from 2009 through the Tahrir Square uprising up to the most recent elections purely through looking at the traffic, the lifeblood of the city. He set out to give us voices, not tell a political story, and this lies behind many of the films shown in last

It now seems fairly likely that an explosion brought down the Russian passenger airline over Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula over the weekend. One Metrojet official has already suggested that the ‘only explainable cause is physical impact on the aircraft’ and they have ruled out technical failure or human error. If the ongoing investigation proves that to be the case, it will obviously have an immediate and catastrophic impact on Egypt’s already decimated tourism industry. A jihadist would have been able to infiltrate one of the country’s supposedly most secure airports to plant a sizeable explosive device on a specific airline. PR disasters do not come much worse than that – and just one

Tunisia is preposterously touted as the one success story of the nightmarish revolutions, counter-revolutions, civil wars, jihadist invasions and Islamist terrorist atrocities in the name of an Arab Spring we are still told represents a thirst for Western-style freedom and plurality. The decision to award this year’s Nobel Peace Prize to the country’s National Dialogue Quartet, for apparently helping the country’s transition to democracy, dangerously perpetuates this myth. The Nobel Committee says that the National Dialogue Quartet was… …instrumental in enabling Tunisia, in the space of a few years, to establish a constitutional system of government guaranteeing fundamental rights for the entire population, irrespective of gender, political conviction or religious belief.

If reports that Pearson will soon sell their stake in the Economist magazine are to be believed, Mr S hopes that the publication’s latest ‘cover’ won’t dent the brand’s value. Steerpike understands that the usually independent-minded magazine has received a number of complaints from readers after they ran a cover on Egypt’s Suez Canal project with the title ‘Egypt’s gift to the world’: Cover of The Economist refers to the new #Suez Canal project as "#Egypt's gift to the World" pic.twitter.com/VCQIWtUV29 — Alwasat Libya (@alwasatengnews) August 6, 2015 This left some readers puzzled as to why the magazine had taken such an overwhelmingly positive stance on the government development, which has made the news