Egypt

31 Mar 2021; MEMO: Egypt's President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi has warned that it will not allow any other country to undermine its water supply and if it does, there will be severe regional consequences.

"I'm not threatening anyone here, our dialogue is always reasonable and rational," Al-Sisi said on Tuesday at a press conference in Ismailia to mark the freeing of the Ever Given container ship.

CAIRO (Reuters) - Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said on Tuesday that the grounding of a huge container ship in the Suez Canal had reaffirmed the importance of the waterway.

“We didn’t hope for something like this, but fate was doing its work. It showed and reaffirmed the reality and importance” of the canal, Sisi said as he greeted staff on a visit to the Suez Canal Authority in Ismailia.

30 Mar 2021; MEMO: The death toll from a collapsed building in Gesr Suez in Egypt has reached 25 amid ongoing rescue operations, with 75 injured.

A six-month-old baby was found alive amidst the rubble though the baby's mother, father, and sister were found dead whilst his elder brother was still missing.

The Cairo apartment building, made up of a basement, ground floor, and nine further floors, collapsed on Saturday morning around 3 am.

SUEZ, Egypt (AP) — Salvage teams on Monday finally freed the colossal container ship stuck for nearly a week in the Suez Canal, ending a crisis that had clogged one of the world’s most vital waterways and halted billions of dollars a day in maritime commerce.

A flotilla of tugboats, helped by the tides, wrenched the bulbous bow of the skyscraper-sized Ever Given from the canal’s sandy bank, where it had been firmly lodged since March 23.

CAIRO, Mar 29 (NNN-MENA) – Ethiopia’s unilateral actions over the filling and operation of the controversial Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), will have “massive negative repercussions,” Egypt’s Minister of Irrigation and Water Resources, Mohamed Abdel-Ati, warned yesterday.

Abdel-Ati made the remarks, during his meeting with the U.S. Special Envoy for Sudan, Donald Booth, and Marina Vraila, head of political, press and information section of the European Union (EU) delegation to Cairo, Egypt’s Ministry of Irrigation and Water Resources said.

(AP) --- Delays in freeing a mammoth container ship stuck in Egypt’s Suez Canal have highlighted still more pressure points in global trade, a year after supply chains were disrupted by the pandemic.

Tugboats and salvage crews took advantage of high tides early Monday to partially refloat the Ever Given, which carries cargo between Asia and Europe. Shoei Kisen, the Panama-flagged ship’s Japanese owner, said the bow had moved slightly but was still touching the seafloor, and it was unclear how long it would take to fully reopen the canal.

SUEZ, Egypt (AP) — Engineers on Monday “partially refloated” the colossal container ship that continues to block traffic through the Suez Canal, authorities said, without providing further details about when the vessel would be set free.

Satellite data from MarineTraffic.com showed that the ship’s bulbous bow, once lodged deep in the canal’s eastern bank, had been partly wrested from the shore — although it remained stuck at the canal’s edge. The ship’s stern had swung around and was now in the the middle of the waterway, the tracking data showed.

CAIRO, Mar 28 (NNN-XINHUA) – Five persons were killed and 24 others injured yesterday, in a building collapse in Egypt’s capital Cairo, according to a statement by the Cairo Governorate.

The accident took place at dawn yesterday, when a 10-story building collapsed, in the al-Salam neighbourhood, east of Cairo, according to the statement.

Civil protection forces and rescue teams are still searching for people under the debris of the collapsed building.

27 Mar 2021; MEMO: Data analysis company Kepler Analytics announced on Friday that seven vessels transporting liquefied natural gas (LNG) had diverted their course away from the Suez Canal due to the blockage caused by a giant container ship since Tuesday. The crisis has entered its fourth day with no apparent solution in sight.

CAIRO, March 27 (Xinhua) -- Egypt's Deputy Foreign Minister for African Affairs Hamdi Sanad Loza held talks on Saturday with U.S. special envoy for Sudan Donald Booth on efforts to resume negotiations over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) built on the Nile River, the Egyptian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

Loza stressed the necessity for reaching "an agreement on filling and operating the GERD at the earliest possible opportunity before Ethiopia begins carrying out the second phase of filling (the dam)," according to the statement.