Egypt’s Foreign Affairs Ministry dismissed on Tuesday article published by International media outlet Washington Post regarding the North Korean shipment stopped at Suez Canal last August.

The shipment that included huge number of rockets was noticed by United States (US) intelligence, when arrived to Suez Canal in August coming from North Korea in July 2016. The Egyptian authorities stopped and raided the shipment.

In response to the claims reported in the report published on Saturday that the shipment was coming to Egyptian officials, spokesperson of ministry Ahmed Abu Zaid, said in press statement to Agence France-Presse (AFP), that the report “included some aspects of the author’s imagination, along with some correct information”.

He also said that the report aimed at implying that, “Egypt is not committed to implement of resolutions of United Nation Security Council regarding North Korea”.

Russia is set to commence the supply operations of 50 Mikoyan MiG-29 fighters to Egypt as an implementation step to the bilateral agreement signed in 2014 between both countries; Vladimir Kojin, military affairs aide to Russian President Vladimir Putin stated.

According to Russian news agency TASS, Kojin said Egypt will receive the 50 MIG 29 fighters in batches; the batches are scheduled to arrive on an annual basis, adding that the delivery will continue for several years.

Human Rights Watch in a report released on Wednesday accused Egyptian security services of widespread torture of detainees in a probable "crime against humanity."

The New York-based rights group said security services in the North African country used torture as a "systematic practice" against suspected opponents of the government.

Rights groups have regularly accused Egyptian security services of practising torture, something the interior ministry has denied.

The government has acknowledged there have been "individual" cases of torture, and several policemen have been tried and sentenced for violent deaths in detention in recent years.

"Human Rights Watch believes the torture epidemic in Egypt likely constitutes a crime against humanity, due to its widespread and systematic practice across Egypt," the group said in the report.

It said it had interviewed 19 former detainees who detailed the methods of torture, which include electrocution.

In the short term, such a wall will starve Gaza, in the long term it helps place Israel in a strong position to invade and occupy Sinai once again, leaving Egypt increasingly defenceless.

President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi inaugurated on Saturday the largest military base of the Middle East in the coastal city of Alexandria. The president raised the Armed Forces flag on the new base in el Hammam city, west of Alexandria. The military base was named after late president Mohamed Naguib, who orchestrated 1952 revolution which ended the royal regime in Egypt.

Cairo and Amman discussed on Saturday possible measures that could be taken after the recent Israeli escalation against Palestinians at Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque, according to a statement by Egypt’s foreign ministry.

Egyptian foreign minister Sameh Shoukry received a phone call from his Jordanian counterpart Ayman Safadi on Saturday where they discussed the “dangerous violations against Palestinians by the Israeli occupation forces.”

'The Americans have findings that show our pilots were aware the ship was American,' a newly published document by the State Archives says.

Israel apologized and paid compensation to the victims’ families. Israeli and American commissions of inquiry found that the attack was a mistake. But naturally, as often happens in such events, to this day there are some who believe Israel attacked the ship with malicious intent.

A conspiracy? Healthy suspicion? Call it what you will. A new book published in May in the United States (its authors include several survivors of the attack) promises that “the truth is being told as never before and the real story revealed.” The 302 pages of “Remember the Liberty!: Almost Sunk by Treason on the High Seas” include quite a number of documents, testimonies, arguments and information that were gathered in the subsequent 50 years.

In a step towards resolving the current political crisis between Qatar and other Arab countries, Qatari Foreign Affairs Minister Mohamed Bin Abdel Rahman arrived on Monday in Kuwait to deliver his country’s response on recent reconciliation conditions put forth by the four Arab countries boycotting Qatar.

According to Al-Jazeera, the Qatari Foreign Affairs Minister is acting as mediator to end the recent diplomatic boycott imposed by Egypt, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

The boycott is due to charges against the Qatari government of sponsoring terrorism and being the main supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood and other opposition groups.

While previous Senate efforts to limit US arms sales to Saudi Arabia over human rights concerns narrowly failed, Senate Foreign Affairs Committee chair Bob Corker (R – TN) has now withheld all consent for US arms sales to not just Saudi Arabia, but to the other Gulf Arab states, citing the ongoing Qatar crisis.

Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Egypt have all imposed a blockade on Qatar over the past several weeks, and have issued a long list of demands for Qatar to comply with as a condition for lifting it. Sen. Corker warned that this is undermining the ISIS war.

That’s been a concern from the beginning of the crisis, since the largest US military base in the Middle East is in Qatar, and much of the air war in Syria is based out of Qatar. So far,the Pentagon has insisted that hasn’t been impacted, but the longer the situation goes unresolved, the more likely it’s going to be a problem.

The Centurion was the main British battle tank for around two decades following the Second World War and Israel had already placed orders for it before Eshkol’s trip.

By July 1965, Britain supplied Israel with more than 180 such tanks. Another 150 were transported between that month and May 1967.

They were not the only weapons that Britain gave Israel. Just one week before Eshkol’s government made a surprise attack against Egypt on 5 June 1967, a ship brimming with machine guns, tank shells and armored vehicles sailed to present-day Israel from the English port of Felixstowe. It was among a series of secret weapons deliveries.

Fifty years ago, we were told – and this was the common belief then – that Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser had received information from the Soviet Union about a planned Israeli aggression on Syria. He reacted by closing the Strait of Tiran and alerting the Egyptian army. US President Lyndon B. Johnson had declared his full support for Israel, and we heard that King Hussein of Jordan had rushed to Cairo to sign a defense pact with the United Arab Republic (the union that had been formed between Syria and Egypt in February 1958, but by then only consisted of Egypt).

On June 8, 1967, an Israeli torpedo tore through the side of the unarmed American naval vessel USS Liberty, approximately a dozen miles off the Sinai coast. The ship, whose crew was under command of the National Security Agency, was intercepting communications at the height of the Six Day War when it came under direct Israeli aerial and naval assault.
Reverberations from the torpedo blast sent crewman Ernie Gallo flying across the radio research room where he was stationed. Gallo, a communications technician aboard the Liberty, found himself and his fellow shipmates in the midst of an attack that would leave 34 Americans dead and 171 wounded.

One the eve of the Six Day War, with the country surrounded by enemies and unsure of its future, Israel developed a “doomsday” plan to detonate an atomic bomb in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula as a warning to the Arabs, The New York Times reported Saturday.

The report was based on an interview conducted by leading Israeli nuclear scholar Avner Cohen with retired IDF brigadier general Itzhak Yaakov, who reportedly oversaw the plan.

“It’s the last secret of the 1967 war,” Cohen told the paper.

“Slavery in Egypt is actually one of the biblical archeologists’ biggest disappointments. It is almost common knowledge now amongst Egyptologists that the Pyramids, long thought to have been built by the crack of the whip, were actually built by paid labor“

An Egyptian court has determined the guilt of a man who was accused of raping a 20-month-old girl in March, and sentenced him to death in its final ruling. The case provoked widespread public outrage in Egypt.
The Egyptian criminal court of the Nile Delta province of Dakahlia delivered its initial judgment in early May but later referred it to the highest religious authority, the Grand Mufti, for approval, which is not binding but is a routine procedure for death sentences in Egypt. The final judgment was delivered on Thursday.

The man, 35, was accused of kidnapping a girl, just 20 months old, from her house in the Nile Delta village of Belqas and raping her. The man took the girl to a secluded location, raped her and fled the scene, leaving the toddler in a pool of her own blood, according to the investigators.

Finkelstein emphasizes that no genuine academic today, whatever their political orientation, endorses the Mainstream Narrative. He starts by identifying what he has called the “Two Biggest Lies.”

* The truth is that Nasser and the other Arab leaders had absolutely no intention of invading Israel in June 1967.

* And Israel’s existence was never in the slightest doubt, as both Israeli and American leaders knew that Israel could easily win any conflict, even against a coalition of Arab states.

Two Republican U.S. senators slammed Wednesday a law recently passed by Egypt’s president as “draconian” for imposing heavy restrictions and effectively banning the work of non-governmental organizations — the latest among measures cracking down on dissent in the country.

Republican Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham urged President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi to bring the law on NGOs in line with international standards and the Egyptian constitution.

Egypt has blocked the website of one of its most prominent financial newspapers, the paper's owner said on Sunday, expanding a media blackout initiated last week to curb what authorities called support for terrorism and fake news. Egypt blocked access to a number of news websites including Al-Jazeera and Huffington Post Arabic on Wednesday after similar actions by its Gulf allies Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Egyptian forces on Friday launched air strikes on six jihadist training camps in Libya in retaliation for an attack on Coptic Christians in Egypt earlier in the day in which at least 28 people were killed, many of them children.

In a televised address to Egypt's people, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said: "Before we spoke to you today, we launched a strike against one of the camps" where jihadists train.

"Egypt will not hesitate in striking terror camps anywhere, either inside (the country) or outside it," Sisi added. According to state TV, a total of six targets were hit.

The Egyptian leader did not specify where in Libya his forces struck, but military sources cited by the Reuters news agency said the strikes were carried out near Derna, where Cairo believes militants responsible for Friday’s deadly attack were trained.

Gunmen attacked a group of Coptic Christians travelling to a monastery in central Egypt on Friday, killing 28 people and wounding 24, with many children among the victims, Health Ministry officials said.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, which came on the eve of the holy month of Ramadan. It followed a series of church bombings claimed by Islamic State in a campaign of violence against the Copts.

Islamic State supporters reposted videos from earlier this year urging violence against the Copts in Egypt.

Eyewitnesses said masked men opened fire after stopping the Christians, who were in a bus and other vehicles. Local TV channels showed a bus apparently raked by gunfire and smeared with blood.

Clothes and shoes could be seen lying in and around the bus, while the bodies of some of the victims lay in the sand nearby, covered with black sheets.

Egypt’s Coptic Christians once again find themselves under attack from radical Islamists.

Today, at least 26 were killed and over 26 were injured when terrorists shot at Christians on a pilgrimage to the Anba Samuel Monastery near the city of Minya.

Between 8 and 10 heavily armed terrorists surrounded the bus in trucks before opening fire and slaughtering the unarmed Christian martyrs.

Officials in Poland say a Polish tourist who died in an Egyptian resort last month may have been a victim of human trafficking and organised crime.

The Polish tourist, named in media reports as Magdalena Zuk, travelled alone to the Red Sea resort of Marsa Alam at the end of April.

Days later, she plunged to her death from a hospital window.

Egyptian security sources and medical staff say the 27-year-old woman took her own life.

There has been speculation the woman was the victim of a sexual assault by hotel staff, but Egyptian security sources have denied that she was drugged and raped.

Zuk was reportedly transported to a private hospital after “suffering a state of agitation while being at the airport” only hours before her return flight to Poland, police explained. They claimed that Zuk took off her clothes and shoes at the airport in an agitated state. She was then prevented from traveling and was transported to a private hospital following which she threw herself off the window without letting the guards notice.

Remember the Mistrals, those helicopter-ships that France refused to hand over to Russia, thus unilaterally breaking its contract because of the war that Kiev launched against the people of Donbass?

Now Egypt is negotiating with Russia to equip them. French diplomacy is truly up to every challenge!

Krugman believes — or at least wants his Democratic followers to believe — that supporting and praising savage despotism in Egypt is a new development that only happens in “Trump’s America.” The Washington Post’s neoconservative columnist Jackson Diehl this morning encouraged Post readers to believe in the same fairy tale, complaining in his column about the “ugly scene” of a “love-in” between Trump and “the most repressive dictator in Egypt’s modern history.”

President Donald Trump will seek to rebuild the US relationship with Egypt at a Monday meeting with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi focused on security issues and military aid, a senior White House official said on Friday.

An intact tomb dating back to the Twelfth Dynasty, which ruled Egypt nearly four millennia ago, has been discovered.

The identity of the deceased is Shemai, son of Satehotep and Khema. The tomb was discovered by researchers with the University of Jaen in Spain, and is located at a site called Qubbet el-Hawa, a dune on the bank of the Nile which houses the tombs of numerous Ancient Egyptian officials.

The inside of the tomb contained funerary goods such as pottery, cedar coffins, and, of course, what is believed to be the mummified corpse of Shemai. Serrano said that the mummy is adorned with a "beautiful" funerary mask and is presently under study.

Islamic State's branch in the Sinai Peninsula posted a video on Tuesday depicting the beheading of two men the militant Islamist group said it had found guilty of practicing witchcraft and sorcery.

The video, posted on a Telegram channel often used by IS, showed the group forming a religious police unit known as the Hasbah in northern Sinai, where it has waged an insurgency for years. The rugged, thinly populated peninsula borders Israel, Gaza and the Suez Canal.

No comment was immediately available from Egypt's military or Interior Ministry.

Israel on Monday urged citizens vacationing in Egypt's Sinai peninsula to leave immediately, saying the threat of attacks inspired by Islamic State and other jihadi groups was high.

In a press briefing at the Pentagon today, African Command leader Gen. Thomas Waldhauser announced that the US intends to keep ground troops in Libya for the foreseeable future to support “friendly forces,” and to “degrade” the ISIS forces that remain in the country.

Waldhauser did not specify how many US troops are in Libya now, or how many will stay, but did estimate that there were less than 200 ISIS fighters left in Libya. The US had announced the end of the anti-ISIS campaign in Libya back in December, but never fully withdrew from the country.

The US forces were in Libya trying to help the “unity” government defeat ISIS in the city of Sirte. US officials repeatedly claimed the city was totally surrounded, and that no ISIS fighters would get away, though when the fighting finally ended, a substantial number of ISIS fighters did in fact get away.

Hosni Mubarak, the former Egyptian autocrat toppled during the 2011 Arab Spring, left a military hospital Friday where he spent much of the last six years in detention.

The release of the 88-year old who ruled Egypt for three decades would have been unthinkable several years ago, but revolutionary fervor gave way to exhaustion and even nostalgia in the uprising's chaotic aftermath.

Mubarak had been cleared for release earlier this month after a top court finally acquitted him of involvement in protester deaths during the 2011 revolt that ousted him.

"Yes," his lawyer Farid al-Deeb told AFP when asked if Mubarak had left the hospital Friday.

He added the Mubarak had gone home to a villa in Cairo's Heliopolis district.

After six years, Egypt’s Mubarak is free but Arab Spring protestors are still in jail

Russia appears to have deployed special forces to an airbase in western Egypt near the border with Libya in recent days, U.S., Egyptian and diplomatic sources say, a move that would add to U.S. concerns about Moscow’s deepening role in Libya.

The U.S. and diplomatic officials said any such Russian deployment might be part of a bid to support Libyan military commander Khalifa Haftar, who suffered a setback with an attack on March 3 by the Benghazi Defence Brigades (BDB) on oil ports controlled by his forces.

The U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the United States has observed what appeared to be Russian special operations forces and drones at Sidi Barrani, about 60 miles (100 km) from the Egypt-Libya border.

An IDF spokesperson confirmed that at least four missiles were fired in the direction of Israel’s southernmost city Eilat, from the direction of the Egyptian border. Three of the missiles were successfully intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system, while the fourth landed in an open area.

An Egyptian court has frozen the assets of two more NGOs and their founders yesterday in a string of moves that has received criticism from the United Nations.

The court ordered the freezing of the assets of Nazra for Feminist Studies and its founder Mozn Hassan, as well as on Mohamed Zarea and his Arab Penal Reform Organisation.

The court is allegedly investigating the NGOs on suspicion of receiving illegal foreign funding.

The Paris prosecutor’s office opened a manslaughter investigation in June, but said it was not looking into terrorism as a possible cause of the crash at this point. Their investigations have focused on a mechanical fault, while Egyptian investigators have followed a hypothesis of an attack.

A longtime and vocal supporter of Israel, former US presidential candidate Graham told the Post that as chairman of the Senate’s Foreign Operations Subcommittee, he will work to cut US aid to the PA for continuing to pay stipends to imprisoned Palestinian terrorists and to Egypt for its recent legislative crackdown on NGOs.

In recent days, a number of Arab media sources started speaking about Egypt’s growing involvement in the Syrian war. In particular, with a special reference to the Lebanese agency As-Safir, a number of Arab media reported that Egypt is allegedly sending troops toprovide assistance to Damascus. Moreover, we are being told now that Egyptian pilots are already flying sorties in the Syrian Hama. In particular, it has been stated that Egyptian jets and cargo planes have been deployed the province of Hama, and while fighters are bombing ISIS, Egyptian transport planes are helping the Syrian army to rapidly redeploy its cargo and personnel.

"Our priority is to support national armies, for example in Libya to exert control over Libya territory and deal with extremist elements. The same with Syria and Iraq." Sisi said.

A group of officers from the Egyptian Army traveled to the Syrian port-city of Tartous on Tuesday to train with Russia's military advisors near the Islamic State's front-lines.

Sixty years ago Britain and France colluded with Israel in invading Egypt to reclaim the Suez Canal, nationalized by Egypt. The adventure finished Britain and France as global powers and cleared the way for a new player - the United States. But the rules of the game remain the same.

It's become an oft-repeated mantra by politicians in the West that they have built a rules-based international order that is under attack and needs protecting. One of the biggest building blocks was put into this western "rules-based" international order exactly 60 years ago by Britain and France, with a little bit of help from US and Israel. So what are those "rules" now applied to Syria and those who support her?