Category: Egypt

When the Suez Canal opened in 1869, it had taken hundreds of thousands of Egyptian workers 10 years to complete it. On Tuesday, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi said he was ready to build another one. At a lavish groundbreaking ceremony that included a military air show and the symbolic detonation of demolition explosives, Mr. Sisi’s government announced an ambitious plan to build a new waterway that would expand the capacity of the existing canal while creating jobs and revenue for the government. Mr. Sisi set an equally ambitious timeline for the project, which would involve the digging or dredging of approximately 45 miles of earth and wetlands, saying the new waterway would open next year. “We are racing time, because we are very late,” he said. There has been talk for years of expanding the development along the canal, a crucial passage for international shipping that links […]

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Egyptian troops killed seven suspected militants and arrested five as part of an ongoing offensive in the volatile Sinai Peninsula where the military has been trying to quell a spreading insurgency by Islamic militants, an army spokesman said. According to a statement posted on Brig. Gen. Mohammed Samir’s official Facebook page late Monday, the troops killed three militants in an exchange of fire while four others died when a group tried to attack a house of in the border town of Rafah. Five militants were arrested and five were wounded, the posting said but it was unclear if the five were the same people in both cases. Militant attacks in Sinai and elsewhere in Egypt have escalated since the military’s ouster last July of the country’s Islamist President Mohammed Morsi and its subsequent crackdown on his Muslim Brotherhood supporters. Militant attacks have also at times spread […]

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Cairo — The World Bank has agreed to give Egypt a $500 million loan to provide 1.5 million houses in 11 governorates with natural gas lines. "The Egypt Household Natural Gas Connection Project will support the Egyptian government’s programme to replace household consumption of Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG), which is mostly imported, with grid-connected natural gas," the website said in a statement on Thursday. About 52 percent of the neighbourhoods this project targets have poverty rates higher than the country’s national average, the statement said. "We are pleased to help improve the delivery of energy services to the people of Egypt," said Hartwig Schafer, World Bank Country Director for Egypt, Yemen, and Djibouti. "The project will provide financial support to finance the connection charges in disadvantaged areas so that poor households can also connect to the gas grid," said Husam Mohamed Beides, the project’s Task Team Leader. "We are […]

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When President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt said he intended to raise the price of flour, rice and other subsidized goods in 1977, he ignited days of riots that left more than 70 people dead and stood as a lasting warning to his successors about the perils of forcing impoverished Egyptians to make do with even less. So it was a surprise when, as one of his first major policy initiatives, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi sharply raised fuel prices two weeks ago, cutting deeply into energy subsidies, the most expensive single part of the government’s sprawling and expensive subsidy system. Even more surprising, perhaps, has been the absence of widespread civil unrest. The relative quiet appeared to signal an acknowledgment among many Egyptians that the fuel prices, which were among the lowest in the world, could not stay that way forever in an economy battered by years of […]

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Egypt’s Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS) has released a report saying that the recent increase in fuel prices will increase taxi fares by 3-10 percent. The Egyptian government recently increased fuel prices by up to 75 percent in an effort to decrease the budget deficit and reduce an economic burden that has increased in the past three years due to political turmoil. Cairo Governor Mostafa Saeed has promised that the raise would not affect public transport fares. Egypt has also increased electricity prices.

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Militants in Egypt ’s northern Sinai fired mortar rounds late Sunday at a military post in El Arish, the provincial capital, killing a soldier and seven civilians, including two children, in a nearby residential complex, security and hospital officials said. A senior security official said the attack hit the military post, killing the soldier. The military post is near a compound of residential buildings in the Salam district. The main security headquarters and the local government offices are in the same area. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media, said a supermarket, a pharmacy and a residential building were hit by the mortar fire. Samy Anwar, the head of the local hospital, said seven civilians were killed in the attack, including a 10-year-old girl and a 12-year-old boy. He said 24 others were […]

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