Egypt

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said that inheritance tax ‘shouldn’t be paid by people who’ve worked hard and saved and who bought a family house’ and that this would be addressed in the Conservative manifesto. Two opinion polls after the Budget, by Survation for the Mail on Sunday and by YouGov for the Sunday Times, had put Labour one percentage point ahead of the Conservatives. Nineteen Labour movement figures wrote to the Guardian warning the party not to hope to win the election on the basis of Tory unpopularity. The rate of inflation fell from 1.9 to 1.7 per cent, as measured by the Consumer Prices Index, or from 2.8 to 2.7 per cent as measured by the Retail Prices Index. The government said it would sell another 7.

 Gaza City Tattered green Hamas flags still flap above the streets in central Gaza and posters of its martyrs hang in public spaces. But these are tough times for the Hamas government, and not just due to the recent flare-up in tensions with Israel. In December last year, they cancelled rallies planned for the 26th anniversary of their founding, an occasion celebrated ever since they seized power here in 2007, and though usually secretive about their financial affairs, they revealed a 2014 budget of $589 million, with a gigantic 75 per cent deficit. So, what’s gone wrong for Hamas? Just a year ago, it seemed to be enjoying a honeymoon here.

Home Britain’s gross domestic product grew by 1.9 per cent last year, the most since 2007, according to the Office for National Statistics. The last quarter’s growth was 0.7 per cent, a little less than the 0.8 per cent of the previous quarter. In the fourth quarter of 2013, construction actually declined by 0.3 per cent, and economic output was still 1.3 per cent less than in the first quarter of 2008. Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, promised in a speech that Labour would restore the 50 per cent rate of tax on higher earnings.

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said that English local authorities would be allowed to receive all the business rates collected from shale gas schemes, not just the 50 per cent they’d expect. Total, a French company, said it would invest about £30 million in drilling two exploratory wells in Lincolnshire. To head off higher borrowing rates, the government announced that ‘in the event of Scottish independence from the United Kingdom, the continuing UK government would in all circumstances honour the contractual terms of the debt issued by the UK government’. The annual rate of inflation, as measured by the Consumer Prices Index, met the target set by the government for the first time since November 2009, when it fell to 2 per cent (from 2.

 Cairo Hook nose, blue chin, Arab headdress: the tomb robber resembled a villain from a Tintin comic. His friend was packing a big pistol and behind them it was sunset over the pyramids at Dahshur, south of Cairo. Looting’s been rife in Egypt since antiquity — but there has been an alarming acceleration since the 2011 revolution, and Hook Nose and Big Pistol are in up to their respective necks. I met them as they were about to set off for a night’s work: excavating holes in tombs right up to the foot of the famous Black Pyramid outside Cairo, built around 2,000 bc by a Pharaoh called Amenemhat III. Hook Nose was cock-a-hoop about his profession. ‘The police let me do whatever I want,’ he said.

It was towards dusk by the time we had given the tourist police the slip and started climbing the pyramid of Mycerinus at Giza. It was Sebastian Barry-Taylor and I and we wore white linen suits. The 4ft blocks were easy enough to scale because erosion of the limestone had in the 4,500 years since construction weathered cavities or broken off corners so that there were plenty of hand- and footholds. We climbed quickly, looking down at the fat policemen in the desert shaking their fists up at us — but we did not rush it. To slip or stumble would be very dangerous because I could see that once one started falling down that slope there was nothing to stop one from bouncing all the way down. We did not care. We feared nothing.

William Hague's interview on the Today programme this morning included the gloomy warning the the turmoil in Egypt is unlikely to end soon. He said that 'there may be years of turbulence in Egypt and other countries going through this profound debate about the nature of democracy and the role of religion in their society, but we have to do our best to promote democratic institutions, to promote political dialogue and to keep faith with the majority of Egyptians who just want a free and stable and prosperous country'. The turmoil means he has to choose his words carefully on the coup: it is difficult to condemn the actions of the current government, and equally difficult to condemn the actions of another group that may come to power as the churn continues.

You don’t have to be a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood’s clerical fashion to recoil at the draconian treatment of its members yesterday. Indeed, some reports now suggest that more than 500 people were killed with thousands more injured. By conspiring against it the army has inadvertently handed the Muslim Brotherhood a remarkable victory. Before he was forced from office, Mohammed Muris’s administration was failing in almost every respect. That is why ordinary Egyptians railed against it with the slogan ‘bread not beards.’ Even when those protests intensified there was value in letting Mursi’s administration run a little longer, if only to illuminate the full extent of its shortcomings.

This weekend’s closing of US embassies in the Muslim world and the British embassy in Yemen combined with the warning to Americans about overseas travel is another reminder that the Islamist terrorist threat has not gone away. But the relative calmness with which this news is being treated is a reminder that the politics of the situation is very different now than it was ten years ago. One of the things that has changed is that it is hard to find anyone who is optimistic about the Middle East anymore. The Iraq War was borne out of optimism, the neo-cons were convinced that the Middle East could be democratised. But that optimism has now gone.