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EU countries bought €1,5 bn worth of Russian fossil fuels in July, CREA reports. The bloc was Russia’s fourth-largest buyer after China, India and Turkey. It was still the largest buyer of Russian LNG and pipeline gas. France, Belgium, Spain and the Netherlands led LNG #RussianFossilFuels #EUBuyers #EnergyImports #EU #CN #IN #TR #FR #BE #ES #NL

The Romanian Ministry of Defense announced that a Spanish F-18 fighter jet shot down a drone that violated national airspace, marking the fourth such incident this year, with the drone being detected entering from Moldova, and its debris falling in an uninhabited area. (translated)

A Crown Instead of the Barracks: An Idea From Outside the Box Could Egypt’s exiled opposition use constitutional monarchy to dismantle the legitimacy of the 1952 coup? By Adham Hasanin Egyptian journalist and political writer, based in the Netherlands To understand what follows, a reader unfamiliar with Egypt needs one basic fact: since 1952, Egypt has never been governed by anyone who did not first wear a military uniform. Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat, Hosni Mubarak, and today Abdel Fattah el-Sisi four men, four eras, one common origin. All rose through the armed forces. All inherited a state built by a coup that year, when a group of officers calling themselves the "Free Officers" overthrew King Farouk I and, within a year, abolished the monarchy altogether and declared a republic. For seventy-three years, the underlying equation has not changed: the army rules, power passes from one officer to the next, and legitimacy is drawn from the barrel of a gun rather than the ballot box. Every conceivable form of opposition has been tried legal parties and banned ones, Islamist movements, liberal and leftist coalitions, the 2011 popular uprising, and the 2013 elections whose result was overturned by force within a year. All of them hit the same wall: a military institution that reproduces itself under different names, while the core of the system remains untouched. So what if the problem, all along, has not simply been who rules, but the constitutional framework that makes military rule possible in the first place? And what if the answer lies not in swapping one president for another, but in dismantling the underlying equation itself, through a framework Egyptian opposition movements have never seriously tried: a purely ceremonial constitutional monarchy, on the model of Belgium, the Netherlands, or Spain where the head of state becomes a symbol above the political fray, while the army is permanently expelled from politics and returned to its barracks. This is not a call to revive a particular family, nor nostalgia for a golden age that never quite existed. It is a proposal for a political and strategic tool that has not yet been used in the intellectual arsenal of Egypt’s opposition in exile a tool that deserves serious discussion, regardless of whether it is ever literally realised or simply serves to expand the boundaries of what is politically thinkable. I. Why 1952, Not 2013 or 2011, Is the Root The strategic error made by most Egyptian opposition movements from the Muslim Brotherhood to the April 6 Youth Movement to the various civil opposition parties has been treating each political crisis as an isolated case: Mubarak was corrupt and had to be toppled; Sisi staged a coup that must be condemned; the interim military council was a transitional phase to be endured. This piecemeal approach treats the symptoms while leaving the original illness untouched. That original illness is the very structure of legitimacy established by the coup of 23 July 1952. The Egyptian republican system, from Nasser to today, has never built its legitimacy on a genuine democratic social contract. Instead, it has rested on a fixed trinity: the rhetoric of "revolution against feudalism and colonialism," charismatic individual leadership, and military protection of the regime framed as the guarantor of stability. This trinity has repeated itself from Nasser to Sadat to Mubarak to Sisi, with only cosmetic variations. Each new president was never a break from the system he was its continuation. When the opposition says "let us return to the constitutional framework that preceded the coup," it is not criticising a particular policy. It is declaring that the legal foundation of everything that came after 1952 was illegitimate from the start. Here lies the rhetorical power of "returning to the pre-1952 order": it does not merely demand swapping one ruler for another. It withdraws historical legitimacy from the entire republican military system including today’s regime, which draws its own declared legitimacy from that same "1952 legacy." II. Why a "Ceremonial Crown," Not "the Return of a Ruling Family" Here is the most important distinction anyone advocating this idea seriously must grasp: the project does not rest on restoring any particular individual from the Muhammad Ali dynasty, nor on nostalgia for King Farouk or his ancestors. The real power of the idea lies in the constitutional form, not in the person who happens to sit on the throne. Three successful European democracies illustrate the model clearly. Belgium, where King Philippe is a purely constitutional symbol with no real executive power, while the state is run through an elected parliament and a complex coalition government reflecting the country’s linguistic and political diversity. The Netherlands, where King Willem-Alexander formally opens the parliamentary year and signs laws, but where actual decision-making rests with the prime minister and the elected parliament. And Spain, where the king represents symbolic continuity of the state above party politics, while the military and security services answer entirely to civilian authority a transition achieved after the death of the dictator Francisco Franco in 1975, when King Juan Carlos I voluntarily relinquished the extensive executive powers he had inherited and backed free elections, most dramatically in February 1981, when he personally ordered the armed forces to remain loyal to the constitution during an attempted military coup, causing it to collapse within hours. The common thread across these three models is not "the presence of an ancient royal family." It is the principle of separating symbol from power. The monarch in these countries does not rule; he represents. He issues no political decisions; he provides the continuity and symbolic stability that allows party political competition to revolve beneath him, without every transfer of power becoming an existential crisis of legitimacy. This is precisely what Egypt’s military republican system lacks: a neutral mechanism for guaranteeing state continuity that does not depend on the person of the ruler or his security apparatus. When Egypt’s military-republican president is absent, it is always the army that fills the vacuum, because it is the only institution built to be the "guarantor of stability." Under a ceremonial monarchical model, by contrast, it is the king not the army who represents that symbolic guarantee, genuinely opening the door to removing the military institution from the political equation altogether. III. Egypt’s Standing Under the Monarchy: An Honest Reckoning, Not Blind Nostalgia For a Western reader with little prior knowledge of Egypt’s monarchical period (1922–1952), it helps to know this: Egypt was nominally independent under its own king from 1922, but Britain retained enormous informal control over the country’s foreign policy, military bases, and the Suez Canal throughout the period a reality that shaped everything that follows. Any honest invocation of "Egypt’s standing under the monarchy" must avoid the trap of mythologised nostalgia that many advocates of this idea fall into. Egypt in that era was no lost paradise, and any honest article must say so plainly. The Egyptian pound, for instance, often invoked as a symbol of "national currency strength" in that period, was not strong because of independent Egyptian monetary policy. It was pegged to the British pound sterling as part of Egypt’s complete colonial financial dependency until 1947, with Egypt exercising no independent oversight of its own currency whatsoever. The pound’s strength, in other words, was not a sovereign Egyptian achievement it was a reflection of British imperial power ruling Egypt from behind the throne. But this does not mean Egypt lacked a genuine regional standing worth studying. Cairo, in the 1930s and 1940s, was the undisputed cultural capital of the entire Arab world: the Egyptian film industry produced more than half of all Arabic-language cinema; its theatre scene, led by figures like Youssef Wahbi and Naguib al-Rihani, and its music, with Umm Kulthum and Mohammed Abdel Wahab, set the standard across the region; Cairo University was the first modern university in the Arab world; and the Egyptian press was the reference point for Arab public opinion from the Atlantic to the Gulf. Cairo was, quite simply, to the Arab world what Paris was to Francophone Europe: an unrivalled centre of cultural and intellectual gravity. This standing was not necessarily a product of monarchy itself, so much as a product of a relative space of political and press pluralism that allowed Egyptian civil society to flourish, despite all the flaws of the political system and the interference of both palace and occupier. The lesson here is not "bring back the king and the standing will return." It is: when even a limited margin of civic freedom exists, Egypt flourishes culturally and intellectually almost by its own nature. And that margin is precisely what has been entirely absent across the past seven decades of unchallenged military rule. IV. What Reform Would Actually Require Not Repeating the Old Mistakes Any serious advocacy of this model must include, even briefly, a clear vision for avoiding the flaws of the old monarchical system itself otherwise the proposal collapses into simply replacing one form of authoritarianism with another wearing a different crown. First, the armed forces would need to be placed fully under a civilian ministry of defence, with its budget subject to transparent parliamentary oversight the exact opposite of its current status as a state-within-a-state, and equally opposed to its role under the monarchy, when it often served as an instrument of British influence. Second, a judiciary fully independent of both palace and government alike, unlike the old model, which saw direct royal interference in political life as when King Fuad I dismissed the elected government of Prime Minister Saad Zaghloul’s successor, Mustafa al-Nahhas, in 1928, in one of the clearest "constitutional coups" in modern Egyptian history. Third, a parliament that genuinely represents the people rather than landowners and the aristocracy, as was the case before 1952, when membership in the Senate was effectively conditional on the ability to pay land taxes meaning political representation was, by law, restricted to the wealthy. Fourth, genuine economic sovereignty, with a truly independent national currency rather than one pegged to a foreign power’s currency, unlike the historical dependency of the Egyptian pound on sterling. These four principles are enough to clarify that the project on offer is not a literal "return to the past," but a borrowing of the constitutional form (symbolic monarchy) combined with an explicit rejection of its old substance (colonial dependency, palace interference, parliamentary feudalism). V. The Role of Egyptian Movements in Exile: Between Goal and Instrument This raises the most practical question of all: how might Egypt’s opposition abroad actually adopt this idea, and in what capacity? The honest answer is that the power of this proposal does not necessarily lie in its literal fulfilment, but in its dual strategic function. On one hand, it can be advanced as a genuine political goal adopted by broad coalitions of Egyptian movements coalitions that might include Islamists, liberals, leftists, and traditional monarchists, united around a single shared premise: rejecting the legitimacy of the 1952 order and everything that followed from it, even if they later disagree over the precise final shape of the state. On the other hand and this matters more in practice the idea can be deployed as a rhetorical instrument of pressure to widen a Egyptian political debate currently trapped between two false choices: "continued military rule" or "no alternative, chaos awaits." When the opposition puts forward a clearly defined third model a European-style constitutional monarchy it breaks this false binary and opens new intellectual space in Egyptian public discourse, even if the project is never realised in its literal form. This kind of "leverage idea" is common in the history of political movements worldwide: it is not necessarily proposed to be fulfilled immediately in full, but to redraw the boundaries of the politically possible, and to force the existing regime to defend its legitimacy rather than simply assume it. Conclusion: An Invitation to Debate, Not a Ready-Made Prescription This article does not claim that restoring a monarchical form would magically resolve Egypt’s chronic crisis of legitimacy, nor does it ignore the immense difficulties facing any transformative project under a military institution as economically and securitywise entrenched as Egypt’s is today. But it raises a question that deserves serious debate among Egypt’s opposition in exile, rather than automatic dismissal simply for being unfamiliar: Has the Egyptian opposition exhausted every available tool for dismantling the legitimacy of 1952, or has it remained trapped in the same old binary swapping one ruler for another while the framework that makes military rule possible remains untouched? The idea is on the table now, not as a finished solution, but as an overdue invitation to think outside the box.

A Generation That Forgot the Shape of the Square On memory left to die alone By Adham Hasanin Egyptian journalist and political writer, based in the Netherlands In a house near mine, there is a boy of thirteen. Born in 2013 just a few months younger than the July coup itself, younger than the new republic under whose shadow we now live. I asked him once, with no preamble, no test, out of nothing more than passing curiosity: do you know what January was? He answered simply, without hesitation, without any sense that he was missing something: "An old revolution, against Mubarak, right?" Not entirely wrong. But it is everything he knows. The name Tahrir Square means nothing specific to him. The sound of the crowd chanting has no echo in his mind. He does not know that his own family whom he sees every day saying "thank God for stability," who warn him against "chaos" whenever a political headline crosses the screen once, at a moment two years before he was born, went down into the street, betting their entire lives on the possibility that something might change. This article is not about politics. It is about memory, and about who decides what gets told and what is left to die in silence. I. Who Erases the Picture? The first question that comes to mind is the easiest and most deceptive one: who erases this memory? And where do we begin holding them accountable? But the truth is too complex to reduce to a single actor. No one actually erases memory, in the literal sense of the act. There is no ministry called the "Ministry of Forgetting," no presidential decree ordering January struck from the collective consciousness. What happens is simpler than that, and more dangerous at once: the subject is simply never told. School says nothing. The textbook leaps from one period to another without pausing on January for more than two faded lines, composed with deliberate neutrality, devoid of any detail that might make the event feel alive to its young reader. Television no longer has any reason to return to it; the programmes that once hosted witnesses and activists stopped years ago, replaced by an official discourse that mentions January only in passing, as an unfortunate prelude to the "stability" that supposedly followed. And the home the most dangerous link of all has become afraid of the subject. Speech now carries a price, and many families, whether consciously or by sheer survival instinct, have decided that silence is safer than the story. The father who marched fears passing on to his son a curiosity that might one day lead him into trouble the family cannot afford. The mother who lost a friend in the events prefers not to reopen the wound before a child who does not yet grasp the weight of loss. And so, generation after generation, the circle of those who know shrinks, and the circle of those who do not even ask because they do not know there is anything worth asking widens. No one decided to erase the memory through an explicit decision. The memory was simply left to die alone, with no one tending it. And it is precisely this decentralised absence of responsibility that makes this kind of erasure more dangerous than any direct official ban: there is no single decision to challenge, no single body to hold accountable. Responsibility is distributed across thousands of small decisions made by thousands of individuals, each within their own context, each seeming reasonable when viewed in isolation. II. Why This Is More Dangerous Than Direct Repression An objection might be raised: is direct repression arrest, imprisonment, publishing bans not far more lethal than mere gradual forgetting? The answer is complex, and deserves calm unpacking. Direct repression can be seen. It can be documented, and the victim can know they are a victim, can tell their story, and their pain can become a testimony added to the collective memory, even if it never reaches justice. The political prisoner knows he is a political prisoner. The journalist banned from writing knows he is banned, and can tell the world he is banned. Direct repression, for all its cruelty, leaves a trace that can be followed. But a generation that has forgotten something happened at all does not even have a starting point from which to ask. This thirteen-year-old boy will never ask "why were we repressed?" because he does not know there is anything deserving that question in the first place. He feels no absence, because he does not know there is anything absent. He simply lives in a version of reality stripped of an entire chapter of his country’s history, and never for a moment suspects that this void is a void at all. Here lies the essence of the danger: direct repression creates victims who know they are victims. Erasure of memory, when it succeeds, creates a generation that does not even know it has been deprived of anything. And deprivation that is not felt cannot be resisted, because resistance always begins with an awareness of loss. The regime that came after 2013 does not need to convince the new generation that January was a mistake. That would be an arduous, costly task, requiring sustained propaganda and continuous effort to persuade each individual one by one. It is far easier, and strategically far more efficient, simply to ensure they never know it was anything at all. The void requires no defence; it requires only silence, and silence is free and always available. III. The Four Mechanisms of Erasure Four complementary mechanisms can be identified working together to produce this collective void not as an organised conspiracy, but as a system of incentives that pushes each party, consciously or not, to contribute to the same process. The first mechanism: formal education. The curriculum, as currently designed, treats January as a passing footnote rather than a founding event deserving detail and analysis. The student memorises two dates the start of the revolution and its presumed end without understanding why people took to the streets, what they were demanding, or how they felt in that pivotal moment. The second mechanism: broadcast media. The channels that once hosted live discussions on January, featuring varied perspectives, have gradually disappeared, or transformed their discourse entirely. Today’s televised image either ignores the anniversary altogether, or invokes it only to frame it as a prelude to chaos that must be avoided. The third mechanism: the silence of homes. This is the most dangerous of all, precisely because it is the most human and understandable. Parents who lived through the experience protect it with silence, not out of aversion to the story, but out of fear of its price. This silence, however legitimate its motives, achieves exactly the same effect as official censorship: it blocks the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next. The fourth mechanism: the absence of alternative spaces. Even those among the new generation who wish to know cannot easily find places to look. Archives are scattered, trustworthy websites are blocked or require effort to reach, and personal testimonies are dispersed across corners of the internet that an ordinary student at an ordinary school will never stumble upon. These four mechanisms require no central coordination to work together. Each naturally serves the others, and all converge on a single result: a growing void in the consciousness of every new generation. IV. Memory as an Act of Resistance If erasure operates without a centre, then resisting it must also be decentralised. No one waits for a government decision to restore January to the curriculum, nor for a television programme to revive the testimonies. Resistance here is necessarily individual, happening in small details, in passing conversations, in the simple decision to tell rather than to stay silent. This is exactly what I try to do, without any claim to heroism, without any grand mission. I try, whenever I can, to tell the thirteen-year-old boy and others like him details that are never written in official reports or in schoolbooks: what the voices in the square sounded like, how someone felt the first time they realised change was possible, what that moment of hope was like before everything changed. The goal is not to bring back the past; the past cannot be brought back. The goal is that this boy, when he grows older and asks again and he will ask, because the questions always return at some point finds someone to tell him the full story, not two faded lines in a schoolbook. That he knows the stability he is told is the fruit of "wisdom" has a prior history, that this history carried other possibilities, and that real people bet their lives on those possibilities. V. Why This Matters Now Talking about the memory of a generation not yet aware might seem an intellectual luxury next to more urgent matters: arrests, a collapsing economy, regional wars. But the truth is that this issue is the foundation on which every other issue is built. A people who do not know they once rose up will not understand why they should ever think of rising again. A generation raised to believe "stability" is the only natural state possible will never ask itself what drove its own parents, shortly before it was born, to risk everything for an alternative that was never guaranteed. Memory is not a luxury; it is the reference point by which every generation measures its present, and through which it determines what is possible and what is not. And whoever understands this understands why erasing memory, not direct repression alone, is among the most important tools of any regime seeking to guarantee its permanence: because a people who have forgotten they were once free will not even know they are missing freedom. Memory, like the word, needs someone to tell it in order to survive. And when the tellers stop, memory does not die suddenly; it withers slowly, generation after generation, until the day comes when a boy asks an innocent question, and finds no one to answer him but two faded lines in a schoolbook.

Our fourth @JungNaiv interview from our trip to Israel & Palestine: Yisrael Medad, Jewish settler in the illegaly occupied Westbank talks to me about the future of his settlement, peace with Palestinians, International law and voting for Netanyahu https://t.co/CwlxdSqq7W https://t.co/8BidOeZN4V #Israel #Palestine #WestBank #IL #PS

Ένα drone με εκρηκτική γόμωση καταρρίφθηκε κοντά στο προξενείο των ΗΠΑ στην Αρμπίλ του ιρακινού Κουρδιστάν, marking the fourth incident of such attacks within a week amidst ongoing hostilities linked to Iran and local armed groups following the outbreak of war in the Middle East. #Ιράκ #drone #ΗΠΑ

Ukraine’s drone campaign has reportedly forced Russia to suspend all shipping in the Azov Sea and through the Volga-Don canal, bottling up one fourth of Russia’s grain exports. The strait of Kerch has become Moscow’s strait of Hormuz, of sorts. The latest video from Ukraine’s https://t.co/dgQyNt2H1a #Ukraine #Russia #DroneWar #UA #RU

Die Mutter des Bräutigams, Donna Kelce, enthüllte bei der Macy's Fourth-of-July-Feier, dass die Hochzeit ihres Sohnes Travis Kelce mit Superstar Taylor Swift im Madison Square Garden „magisch“ war, nachdem die Veranstaltung aufgrund strenger Geheimhaltungsmaßnahmen und mit einer Schar von 1.000 Gästen, darunter zahlreiche Prominente, stattgefunden hatte. #TaylorSwift #TravisKelce #Hochzeit

🎆 Happy 4th of July! 🇺🇸 Celebrating 250 years of freedom, unity, and the spirit of America! Let’s honor the brave souls who fought for our independence and embrace the diverse tapestry that makes our nation great. Here’s to liberty, justice, and the pursuit of happiness for all! https://t.co/0A3SWTmtNn #IndependenceDay #FourthOfJuly #Freedom #US

🎆 Happy 4th of July! 🇺🇸 Celebrating 250 years of freedom, unity, and the spirit of America! Let’s honor the brave souls who fought for our independence and embrace the diverse tapestry that makes our nation great. Here’s to liberty, justice, and the pursuit of happiness for all! https://t.co/V3WXrEUFOm #FourthOfJuly #IndependenceDay #USA #US

🇺🇸 🎆 Happy 250th Birthday, USA! Happy 4th of July to all our American friends! May God bless you! The fight for freedom, sovereignty and independence never ends. #FourthOfJuly #USA250 #IndependenceDay #US