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Africa 2018 Forum discussed developing continent’s infrastructure, creating new job opportunities.

 Sharm El-Sheikh, Dec. 10.– President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi said Egypt will continue to exert efforts in order to ensure a brighter future for Africa, stressing that the Africa 2018 Forum was a great opportunity to prove Egypt’s desire to protect African interests. The president issued a number of decisions which aim to achieve economic integration in Africa, including the establishment of new funds and measures to facilitate African investment in Egypt.

During his closing speech at the third African Forum on Sunday in Sharm El-Sheikh, Al-Sisi pointed out that the forum allowed for the exchange of viewpoints and ideas about optimum ways to develop Africa, especially its infrastructure as well as creating new job opportunities.

The hundreds of published pages from the Special Counsel’s office and the House intelligence committee read like a Le Carré novel.  

Washington DC, Dec.8.– The Mueller investigation has been running for 81 weeks and counting. For much of that time it has offered those yet to get over the 2016 election a chance to fantasise about an alternative ending to the Trump presidency, one in which the good guys get the bad guys and justice is served. The market for this is so strong that there is even a podcast dedicated to investigation speculation, called “Mueller, she wrote”. Lawfare, a wonky legal blog, has become so popular that it has a merchandise section selling Lawfare-branded babygrows.

Yet the investigation is widely misunderstood. Many Americans seem to be waiting for a final report from Robert Mueller’s team, at which point something will happen. Both those assumptions are wrong. The report, when it eventually comes, will probably not be made public. And the judgment on what that report means for the president will be political, rather than legal. It will rest on the views of Republicans in Congress. And many of them would rather not think about it.

Interviews with Republican congressmen, staffers and strategists in the wake of the most recent guilty plea from Michael Cohen, the president’s former lawyer and fixer, suggest few have paid it much attention. “I don’t think our members of Congress give a shit about Don Junior, the president’s family, people around the president,” says one. Another likens the party’s situation to the fable of the frog: the water is hotter, but colleagues have adjusted to it. Some quietly calculate that their political futures depend on publicly supporting a president whom they deplore.

Yet the widespread indifference in one party does not mean the special counsel’s investigation is inconsequential. Its seven guilty pleas or convictions are real enough. What has already been revealed, in the hundreds of pages of documents published by the special counsel’s office and the report by the House intelligence committee, is startling. These documents contain a cast of characters that seem drawn from a novel by Eric Ambler or John le Carré ...

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A majority of 87 votes in favor did not reach the 2/3 required to condemn Hamas terrorism. A vote previously called to require a 2/3 majority was narrowly backed by 75 to 72, with 26 abstentions.

For the first time in the history of the United Nations, a record number of countries supported a General Assembly resolution condemning Hamas — but the world body still failed to pass the resolution.

United Nations, NY, Dec.6.– The resolution won a majority of 87 to 57, with 33 abstentions, but did not reach the required two-thirds backing.

Russia attacks and seizes three Ukrainian ships; seeks to landlock eastern Ukraine.

“We need to fucking fuck them up, fuck…it seems like the president is controlling all this shit,” a Russian commander tells the captain whose ship rammed a Ukrainian military tug-boat in the Kerch Strait while another used live ammunition against a Ukrainian warship (see video).

It looked more like piracy than self-defence. The Russian coastguards, part of the FSB, or security service, seized the Ukrainian ships and captured 23 sailors, wounding six of them. They took them to Crimea, a chunk of Ukraine that Russia grabbed four years ago. In 2014 Russia acted deniably, sending “little green men” in unmarked fatigues to Crimea. This time its forces acted openly, under the Russian flag.

The crisis did not emerge from out of the blue. It is the culmination of six months of growing Russian pressure on Ukraine. Having in 2004 annexed Crimea, Russia is now restricting access from Ukraine’s eastern ports to the Black Sea, and thence to the Mediterranean and the world.