Showing results for "Shoura Council"

Macron under pressure as French riots expose divided republic

  • As France’s millions of Muslims were preparing for the climax of the Islamic calendar last week, a French police officer shot and killed a 17-year-old boy of Algerian origin in the western Parisian suburb of Nanterre. Protests broke out immediately and they have since descended into nightly rio...
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Rising costs place question mark over future of desalination

  • For decades, the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council have been using desalination to support their water usage. Despite the efforts made by Gulf governments to diversify their water supplies, desalination plants remain the most critical process for meeting growing demand. As a result, the...
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France’s Constitutional Council approves key elements of pension reforms

  • It has been decades since France’s 17th-century Palais-Royal has been under such heavy guard. However, in circumstances unique to France’s very particular republic, the royal building has been surrounded by police and armored vehicles — for it hosts France’s Constitutional Council. France’s hi...
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France braces for more mayhem as Macron remains defiant

  • Keen to put last year’s electoral disappointment behind him, France’s President Emmanuel Macron chose pension reform as an important policy area where he could have an impact and, importantly, leave a legacy where his three predecessors had failed. However, what he believed might be a difficul...
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Race riots the latest evidence of Tunisia's malaise

  • With a cult of personality taking shape, parliament’s back broken and a neutered political opposition, Kais Saied’s Tunisia is a world away from the one that gave birth to the Jasmine Revolution in 2011. Home to what had once been the only successful transition of power to democracy following ...
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Strong institutions key to ending Iran’s influence in Iraq

  • Political stability has been a rare commodity in Iraq since the 2003 invasion. Though governments have come and gone, the lot of normal Iraqis has only worsened. Public services are in tatters, the economy is as broken as the country’s politics and the proliferation of militias has made securit...
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Trouble at home will hinder Iran’s export of its revolution

  • Despite the customary anti-Western rhetoric and character of Iran’s foreign policy, the chief calculation of its government since 1979 has been the export of its revolution. Specifically, this has meant the exportation of Velayat-e faqih — or guardianship of the jurist — in an effort to extend ...
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Is Assad out from the cold?

  • At the outset of the Arab Spring, President Bashar Assad’s Syria was part of a very clear regional setup. Despite its sister Baathist regime in Baghdad toppled and its hidden hand pried off of Lebanon, Syria relished its unchallenged mantle of Arab nationalism in a region where only Jordan and ...
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Concert diplomacy regains importance amid today’s global challenges

  • As the world struggled with the effects of the 1973 oil crisis, finance ministers from six of the world’s leading economies — France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the US — formalized their cooperation amid the instability they were experiencing. Disruptions to energy supplies had led to wi...
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Bread crisis threatens Saied’s constitutional ambitions

  • It was not meant to be this way for Tunisian President Kais Saied. Last July, he sacked the government and suspended parliament. He hoped his high-handedness would unclog a mixed parliamentary-presidential system often dogged by deadlock and nepotism. Tunisians, weary of the post-revolutionary...
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