Suez

Egypt said on July 29 that the "new Suez Canal" was ready for navigation for all kinds of ships, as authorities geared up to launch the shipping route officially next month.

The first cargo ships passed through Egypt's New Suez Canal on July 25 in a test-run before it opens next month, state media reported, 11 months after the army began constructing the $8 billion canal alongside the existing 145-year-old Suez Canal. 

Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) said it carried out a missile strike on an Egyptian navy vessel off North Sinai on July 16, the first such incident in a two-year insurgency.

Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) militants launched a wide-scale coordinated assault on several military checkpoints in Egypt's North Sinai on July 1 in which 50 people were killed, security sources said, the largest attack yet in the insurgency-hit province. 

Egypt will inaugurate a "new Suez canal" shipping route in August aimed at speeding up traffic along the existing waterway and boosting revenues, officials said June 13.

Occupying the entrance floor of SALT Beyo?lu, a new installation, titled "Strait" by architect Neyran Turan, constructs a physical and imagined Bosphorus as the peculiar petrol pipeline it has become since the 1990s. 

Two Iranian destroyers, sent to the Gulf of Aden to protect commercial ships, have reached the entrance of Bab el-Mandab, a strategic strait between Yemen and Djibouti, Iran's navy said April 30.

Global oil prices have advanced as the Saudi Arabia-led coalition renewed airstrikes in Yemen, stoking new supply concerns about the crude-rich Middle East.

A stampede at a Cairo stadium earlier this month, much like a politically-loaded football brawl in the Suez Canal city of Port Said three years ago, is shining a spotlight on Egypt's unreformed, unabashedly violent, and politically powerful police and security forces amid confusion over what precisely happened and how many fans died.

An Egyptian military court will try deposed president Mohamed Morsi and 198 Islamist leaders and supporters over a deadly protest in 2013 following his overthrow, a prosecution source said Feb. 18
      
The defendants in the trial, which will start on February 23, also include Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Badie, the official MENA news agency reported.