Exploring Egypt's Wadi El-Hitan and Fossils and Climate Change Museum: In video

I know. I promise you that this would be the finale of the posts series I dedicated to the visit I paid to Egypt’s Wadi El-Hitan or the Valley of the Whales in 2017.

Believe me, this obsession is worth it, the place is amazing and having this place in Egypt makes me so proud.

Now here are a couple of video clips I took at the UNESCO World Heritage Site in the heart of the Fayoum desert which is 150 km away from Cairo. Warning: Extremely shaky, fast and short video. Turn on the captions, it got English captions and I am working on the Arabic captions as well.

I apologize for the bad filming; I was still a newbie. 

If you like it, please like, share and subscribe because I still record videos of places I visit. “You probably know that already if you are a regular here.”

Featured in the video are Wadi El-Rayan’s man-made waterfalls and the man-made magic lake.

And Independent leftist Khaled El-Balshy becomes the head of Egypt’s Journalists Syndicate

It was an unusual and surprising turn of events when an independent opposition journalist, Khaled El-Balshy, was elected as the head of Egypt's Journalists Syndicate in free elections.

Khaled El-Balshy at the syndicate on Friday "Abdullah Ewies" 

This unexpected outcome made history, as El-Balshy won against his main rival Khaled Meiri, the editor-in-chief of the state-owned daily Al-Akhbar.

Typically, the head of the syndicate comes from a state-owned press institution, but in this case, the Egyptian journalists made history by electing an independent journalist as their leader.

Thursday Rants and Rave: #EP13 “Mrs Karima and surviving the death row”

This is what I ranted in Arabic about in tonight’s episode of “Thursday Rants and Rave” which I am posting on Frida.

I spoke about the case of Mrs Karima El-Sayed who was acquitted of her husband’s murder while waiting on death row.

Two weeks ago, the Court of Cassation in Egypt acquitted Mrs Karima El-Sayed of her husband’s murder in December 2017 cancelling the death sentence issued by the Mansoura Criminal court to her in September 2019.

It is the first verdict of its kind to be issued in similar cases of spousal murders since 1986 according to Mrs Karima El-Sayed’s lawyer Wahdan El-Baz.

Karima with her daughters after her release and return to her family

The story of Karima started when her husband Mohamed Abdou El-Sheribiny was found dead in some field near the railways rail in their Nile Delta village on 5 December 2017.

IWD2023 : Let’s have high hopes like Amal Ismail and Zubaida Abdel Aal

Happy International Women's Day 2023.

It comes in a very hard economic time in Egypt with a lot of pressure and challenges facing women for real in society but instead, I will focus on two positive news that made headlines in Egypt in the past week.

Zubaida and Amal 

First of all, we got the news of Mrs Zubaida Abdel Aal of Mounfia governorate who took her literacy exam a couple of weeks ago at the age of 87 years old.

The photo and news of Haja Zubaida made it to Angelina Jolie’s Instagram stories and the internet in the Arab world went mad to see an old Egyptian peasant granny making it to Angelina Jolie’s Instagram.

Restoring back daylight saving time in Egypt: 1000 years of “apply” and “not apply”

On Wednesday, Egypt’s government announced that it was going to apply or rather to re-apply the daylight saving time again in Egypt after cancelling it in July 2016.

The daylight-saving time will be applied to start from the last Friday in April to the end of the last Thursday in October of the Gregorian year.

The aim of re-applying the system already applied in almost 40% of the countries in the world during summer is to rationalize energy and fuel which to exported to Europe. Already the plan was declared last August.

Lights of Alexandria Stanley Bridge in May 2016

It will be one hot summer indeed.

Now all I think about now is how daylight-saving time was one of the most cancelled and uncancelled decisions in the history of the Egyptian Republic.

Historically, Egypt knew the daylight-saving time in 1957 “The Nasser era” when it was introduced as a power-saving measure before it was cancelled in 1975 “Sadat era”.

Thursday Rants and Rave : #EP12 “The Rise and Cancelling of Saad Lamajarred”

This is what I ranted in Arabic about in tonight’s episode of “Thursday Rants and Rave” which I am posting two days later: The rise and fall of Moroccan singer Saad Lamajarred.

Honestly, I was not planning to speak and write about Lamajarred this week. I was planning to write about how the family of Malcom-X is suing the FBI, CIA and New York Police Department for his assassination 58 years ago.

The move of the Shabazz ladies comes after three men including a deceased one who were originally convicted for the famous African American rights activist were fully exonerated by New York’s attorney general after finding out that the prosecutors in their case withheld evidence.

For me, a person who lives in the Middle East, the case of Malcolm X, his life and assassination as well as the quest for justice following covers many issues concerning minorities' rights, cults, revisions, civil rights movements, security and the justice system. Malcom-X was only 39 years old when he was killed in New York and from beyond his grave, he still hunts down US authorities.

But 37-year-old Saad Lamajarred suddenly appeared with his trial this week in Paris to reopen another door of issues to be discussed.

Saad Lamajarred is convicted 

Moroccan singer Saad Lamajarred was sentenced by a Paris Criminal Court to six years in prison for raping a young French lady in a case that goes back to October 2016.

Quickly for those who are unfamiliar, 1985-Saad Lamajarred is considered Morocco’s most famous Arab pop singer in our current times after his music videos broke YouTube’s viewership records in 2013.

The eldest son of famous actors in Morocco, Lamajarred began an A-List Celebrity in the Arab world when his song “LM3ALLEM” got one billion views. Unprecedented achievement for Moroccan singer, Saad Lamajarred was awarded a Knight Order Honor by King Mohamed IV on Youth Day in 2015.

Lamajarred has been by far the Moroccan regime’s poster boy positioned as the hottest and most Moroccan successful export in the Arab world. But it was for a short time before the world would see the dark of the moon.

In October 2016, Saad Lamajarred made international headlines for all the wrong reasons.

He was arrested at Paris Marriott Champs Elysees Hotel on charges of rape and assault of a 20-year-old French woman while intoxicated "Cocaine plus alcohol" on 26 October 2016 in Paris. He was detained pending an investigation into the charges in France. The Lamajarred saga started from there and it has it all: sex, drugs, society, and politics ..etc

Save Cairo Houseboats : And the Kitkat’s houseboats replaced by nightclubs boats

Do you remember what happened to the famous Cairo Houseboats last summer!?

When Egypt’s Ministry of irrigation sent an eviction notice to 32 houseboat owners mostly in Imbaba’s KitKat area e allegedly for encroachment despite being there for decades and paying their bills like model citizens!?

During then the only thing those owners were able to do for real was to make noise through a social media campaign called “Save_Cairo_houseboat” led by Egyptian renowned author Dr Ahdaf Soueif focusing on the old residents of the houseboats above them Mrs Ikhlas Helmy.

Following the media campaign and acting upon presidential directives as usual Mrs Helmy was given a rented apartment with a Nile view in some building in Zamalek island owned by Misr Insurance properties. 

Ironically, the old lady spoke about how she left a similar house decades ago to live in a blue houseboat that would be a trade mark for the KitKat houseboats.