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According to a friend, quoted by the Guardian, he was assaulted by security officials after being released. He then reportedly went to a police station to report the incident and was accused of telling lies and detained.

British diplomatic officials and the SIS passed on the message to Michaelson that she needed to meet Egypt’s visa issuance authority.Michaelson, who is also a German citizen, said she was advised by German diplomatic officials in Cairo that she should not attend the meeting under any circumstances. “They said, ‘We do not believe it’s safe for you to go to this meeting. You’re at high risk of arrest and you should get on a plane,’”

“The national security agency told British diplomats that there was a plane one evening and they ‘wanted me on it’,”

Michaelson’s departure leaves the north African country with no full-time British newspaper correspondents. Bel Trew, a correspondent for the Times, was threatened with a military trial and expelled from Egypt in March 2018.

A spokesperson for the Foreign Office said: “The UK supports media freedom around the world. We have urged Egypt to guarantee freedom of expression. UK ministers have raised this case with the Egyptian authorities.”

Egypt had 366 confirmed cases of the virus by Monday with 19 deaths, according to the country’s health ministry.

Press freedom in Egypt has severely deteriorated since the military took power in 2013 and the former commander-in-chief of the armed forces, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, became president the following year.

Domestic media has gradually come to be dominated by the state, which exercises widespread censorship. The office of the country’s last major independent news outlet, Mada Masr, was raided late last year. Access to its website from inside Egypt has been blocked.

When comparing the size of this negative association with other predictors of cognitive decline, watching television for >3.5 hours a day had a greater sized negative association (standardised beta = −0.034) than being in the lowest wealth quintile (as compared with the median quintile: standardised beta −0.027), while watching television for >7 hours a day had a greater sized association (standardized beta = −0.048) as being in the highest wealth quintile (compared with the median quintile: standardised beta = 0.043) or having no educational qualifications (standardized beta = −0.058).

associations between television viewing and verbal memory remained even when considering a range of variables relating to sedentary behaviours, suggesting that it is not just the sedentary nature of television watching that is responsible for its relationship with cognition.

Television involves fast-paced changes in images, sounds and action and, unlike other screen-based activities such as internet use and gaming, television is the most passive way of receiving such stimuli

television leads to a more alert but less focused brain

In addition to any potential cognitive stress created through the alert-passive interaction while watching television, the content of the programme itself can be stressful, such as through the depiction of graphic scenes, violence or the creation of suspense. Analyses of UK television from 2001–2013 (covering the country and much of the period of the data collection for the study reported here) have shown between 2.1 and 11.5 violent scenes per hour in UK soap operas, with 40% of these being categorised as moderate or strong violence22. It has even been proposed that the vividness of such experiences is greater than real-world experiences of events such as violence, conflict or disasters, as the drama is enhanced for entertainment purposes23. Chronic stress is known to lead to increased levels of glucocorticoids, which can have a direct effect on the hippocampus due to the presence of glucocorticoid receptors in that region of the brain. Consequently, stress has been shown to lead to atrophy of the hippocampus and impaired neurogenesis24, alongside impairments in cognition25.

excessive television could be linked with verbal memory through displacing other, cognitively beneficial activities such as playing board games, reading and engaging with cultural activities11,26. This theory implies that the relationship between television viewing and memory is not entirely down to television having negative effects per se, but rather television reducing the amount of time that people spend on more activities that could contribute to cognitive preservation

This study is not suggesting that watching television in older adulthood confers no benefits. Indeed, research with adults has suggested that TV dramas in comparison with TV documentaries can increase performance in tests of theory of mind, suggesting that television can enhance understanding of others27. Educational television can be an efficient way of learning when programmes are designed appropriately28. Television has also been shown to be a form of escapism from difficult life circumstances29. Further, research investing the effects of television viewing in the context of people’s daily lives has found that adults routinely report television as a means of relaxing30 (although this should be considered in relation to the potentially stress-inducing effects of television viewing discussed earlier). Nevertheless, this study suggests that watching substantial amounts of television is longitudinally associated with poorer verbal memory in older adults.

it remains unclear whether television viewing might affect other components of executive function

By curating and translating the work of contemporary Arab poets, writers, visual artists and journalists based around a specific theme, Arabpop aims to fill a gap in accessibility to Arab stories specifically catering to people who are interested in what goes on in the Arab world beyond the daily headlines.

While it’s merely a coincidence that Arabpop came out almost exactly 20 years after 9/11, Comito does refer to the extreme rise in anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiment that manifested itself since then, both in politics and society. “I say this at every presentation: a large part of the problem is the media, which in the last 20 years since the attack on the Twin Towers have unleashed a terrifying anti-Islam and anti-Arab country propaganda.”

Other highlights include an excerpt from the 2016 book Paolo by celebrated Egyptian writer Youssef Rakha, which is so thoughtfully translated that you wish everyone could read Arabic translated into Italian – the cadence, the poetry of the mundane, the flow of the story shows how perfectly the two languages sway together when approached with a passion for language and culture and attention for detail.

Tunisians have witnessed many Africans taking part in pro-Saied rallies in the past months.

Tunisia has always formally rejected calls to host migrants and refugees on a permanent basis

Migrants in these overpopulated, mostly working-class neighbourhoods “now have a sort of autonomous, independent communities. They have their own laws,” Zarzis-based activist Jihad A. told The New Arab, adding “migrants have strained ties with local communities. Clashes, sometimes violent, have often taken place in the past year."

“Unemployed, uneducated, and rebellious Tunisian youth have constituted a big challenge to the regime, since the Ben Ali era”, believes T.J., a blogger and civil society activist. “To get rid of these young people, mainly in the poor southern towns of the country, Saied’s authorities are shutting their eyes to the massive daily migration journeys from the south-eastern coasts of Zarzis, Jerba and Sfax to Italy”

more Tunisians sail to Europe from Tunisia than Africans

On August 1st, Italy’s Interior ministry revealed that the biggest numbers of irregular migrants who arrived in Italy from January to July 2022 are Tunisians, which is more than Bangladeshis, Sub-Saharan Africans, Iranians and others.

in Tataouine, there’s a flourishing network of migration for Tunisians to western Europe, via Turkey and Serbia.

individuals and families fly regularly to Istanbul. There, a Tunisian official sells them the official security document, which states that a person is ‘clean’, and not prosecuted in any legal cases in Tunisia. That document, which is never delivered in Tunisia because it is supposed to contain “classified” information, is strictly required by Serbia to allow Tunisians in

Medenine and Tataouine, two key regions for fuel smuggling and human trafficking, have remained without senior officials for months after President Saied sacked their old governors.

“Mayors can play a major role in monitoring irregular migration and in the hosting of migrants”, explains Boubaker Souid, Mayor of Tataouine. “But they are now left without any prerogative and who knows how Saied’s regime will get rid of them”.   

“It seems that one of the tactics of the Tunisian authorities is to empty the country of young people, who have always been the main source of contest and revolt”, says M.B., a civil society activist from Medenine.

On February 24, 2022, Kais Saied announced that he wanted to ban foreign funding for associations. For him, associations applying for or receiving foreign funding are “suspicious activities”. Consequently, the civil society ceased to play its role in monitoring and reporting migration issues and in delivering credible information and data about it.

in 2007 he founded Mosaic, which provides mentoring programs for young Muslims across the U.K. He also became patron of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, where he gave his most famous speech, “Islam and the West” in 1993

If there is much misunderstanding in the West about the nature of Islam, there is also much ignorance about the debt our own culture and civilization owed to the Islamic world

“Islam can teach us today a way of understanding and living in the world which Christianity itself is the poorer for having lost. At the heart of Islam is its preservation of an integral view of the Universe.”

he also argues that the West needs Islam in the here and now. There does not seem to be a parallel in any other Western political figure.

the world will also get used to a Western head of state who sees Islam in quite a different light than the waves of populism across Europe and North America