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today’s largest volumes of global seaborne crude oil – around 30% – along with a significant volume of LNG, passes through its Straits of Hormuz, making it the most important maritime oil chokepoint which connects the Gulf states with key global markets in the East and the West

The International Energy Agency (IEA) sees that the world can reach net-zero emissions by 2060, wherein 75% of reduction comes from energy efficiency and renewable energy, with another 14% from carbon capture and storage, 6% from nuclear and 5% from fuel switching. In this context, the fossil fuels’ share of the global energy mix falls from 82% in 2014 to 35% in 2060 under the 2°C scenario, or to 26% in the below 2°C scenario.

Renewable technologies and batteries require certain minerals for their production, such as cobalt, lithium, nickel and rare earth elements. Despite the fact that renewable endowments for wind, solar, geothermal and biomass are scattered geographically, controlling the production of these new commodities will have major geopolitical consequences as they are based only in a selected number of countries such as Chile, Bolivia, Mongolia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

a solar mega-project that is supposedly going to end Morocco's dependency on energy imports, provide electricity to more than a million Moroccans, and put the country on a “green path.”

The land, sold at a cheap one Moroccan dirham per square meter was clearly worth a lot more. As if things were not bad enough, the duped local population were surprised to find out that the money from the sale was not going to be handed to them, but that it would be deposited into the tribe's account at the Ministry of Interior. Additionally, the money would be used to finance development projects for the whole area. They discovered that their land sale was not a sale at all: it was simply a transfer of funds from one government agency to another.

What seems to unite all the reports and articles written about the solar plant is a deeply erroneous assumption that any move toward renewable energy is to be welcomed. And that any shift from fossil fuels, regardless of how it is carried out, will help us to avert climate chaos. One needs to say it clearly from the start: the climate crisis we are currently facing is not attributable to fossil fuels per se, but rather to their unsustainable and destructive use in order to fuel the capitalist machine. In other words, capitalism is the culprit, and if we are serious in our endeavors to tackle the climate crisis (only one facet of the multi-dimensional crisis of capitalism), we cannot elude questions of radically changing our ways of producing and distributing things, our consumption patterns and fundamental issues of equity and justice. It follows from this that a mere shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy, while remaining in the capitalist framework of commodifying and privatizing nature for the profits of the few, will not solve the problem. In fact, if we continue down this path we will only end up exacerbating, or creating another set of problems, around issues of ownership of land and natural resources.

In recent months, as a slew of anti-democratic and racist legislative initiatives were advanced by Labor's government allies and as even the façade of a functioning peace process was removed (and Labor's justification for being in the coalition was to ‘save the peace process'), many Labor ministers felt uncomfortable in the government and attacked its policies. The end was near.  Several MKs were pushing to bring forward party leadership elections to unseat Barak and to pull Labor out of the government.

The name of the new faction, "Independence," is being treated with deep irony, it is anything but that. It is as much a creation of Netanyahu's as it is Barak's, and is dependent on the former's good will. The only part of today's drama that surprised no one was that Ehud Barak himself would betray the Labor Party in order to save his own political skin.

Many consider Barak to have single-handedly snuffed out the remains of Israel's peace camp when Barak himself declared there was no Palestinian partner after the failure of the Camp David negotiations in 2000. The "No Partner" meme has become a defining motif of the Israeli discourse ever since.  Barak presided over the total loss of support for Labor amongst the Palestinian Arab population in Israel, and once Kadima was formed, mostly as a Likud breakaway, and later when serving in the Kadima-led Olmert government, Barak chose to relocate Labor from its natural place - to the left of Kadima - to a more hawkish centrist position to Kadima's right.

With every flood or bout of extreme heat or cold, the jihadists would reappear, often supplementing their sales pitches with gifts. When a particularly vicious drought struck in 2010, the fifth in seven years, they doled out food baskets. When fierce winds eviscerated hundreds of eggplant fields near Kirkuk in the spring of 2012, they distributed cash. As farming communities limped from one debilitating crisis to another, the recruiters—all members of what soon became the Islamic State—began to see a return on their investment.

By the time the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) seized this swath of Iraq—along with most of the country’s west and north—in a brutal summer-long blitzkrieg in 2014, few locals were surprised to see dozens of former fertilizer market regulars among its ranks.

ISIS appears to have attracted much more support from water-deprived communities than from their better-resourced peers

The occupation of Tahrir Square, which continued from that night until Egypt’s long-ruling president, Hosni Mubarak, stepped down on February. 11, 2011, was an exercise, too, in overcoming decades of public policy and urban planning that had sought to render urban open spaces inaccessible or even dangerous to would-be protestors.

A decade after the 2011 revolution, Egypt’s sprawling capital city looks a lot different. Tahrir Square has been adorned with Pharaonic monuments and staffed with police. Domineering concrete barriers and towering metal gates topped with spikes and painted in national colors now line the surrounding streets. Rabaa Al Adawiya Square, where hundreds of protesters were killed in August 2013, has been made inaccessible. A large monument meant to express “the unity of the army, the police, and the people,” according to Brig. Tarek Mohamed Sayed, was erected in the square in September 2013, and an overpass — one of the dozens built in the city in recent years — now crosses over it. Under Al Sisi, the Egyptian government has been transferring the nation’s capital out of Cairo altogether, building lavish palaces and administrative compounds in a far-off, sparsely populated New Administrative Capital in the desert.

Construction projects have also resulted in the destruction of hundreds of thousands of square meters of green space — 390,000 square meters (429,000 square yards) alone, in the affluent neighborhood of Heliopolis in eastern Cairo, according to the Heliopolis Heritage Initiative, where hundreds of century-old trees have been uprooted to widen arterial avenues like Abou Bakr Al Seddik and Al Nozha, which cut through the heart of the neighborhood. There is no place in today’s Egypt for broad-leaved trees that hinder surveillance nor shaded spaces that foster assembly.