Israel Flips: Ceuta and Melilla Are Spain’s Copy link

Algeria Gate: Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov raised yesterday (Monday) the possibility of expanding the “Mecca Joint Defense Agreement” to include other countries in the region, placing Algeria among the states whose accession or expression of interest in this framework could have a very positive impact given the regional position Algeria occupies.

The “Mecca Agreement” is a joint defense agreement signed on August 7th 2026 by Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan. It is based on the principle of cooperation and collective defense, while keeping the door open for the accession of other countries.

The Russian reference to Algeria comes at a time when Foreign Minister Ahmed Attaf, yesterday in Cairo, reaffirmed Algeria’s position calling for addressing the region’s crises in a national and comprehensive manner, away from external interventions.

In the same statement, Lavrov also referred to Egypt and Iran as countries that could enter this framework in the future given the large convergence of visions and viewpoints on numerous global issues.

Algeria Gate: What if the world map you’ve always known had, for generations, skewed your real perception of surface areas? That’s the question behind a centuries-old debate now back in the spotlight: the Mercator projection.

A navigational breakthrough… that distorts areas

Created in 1569 by Flemish geographer Gerardus Mercator, this projection was the first to map the entire spherical Earth onto a flat surface while preserving angles; ideal for maritime navigation in the Age of Discovery. Nearly 457 years later, it remains one of the most widely used maps, including on Google Maps.

The catch: while it keeps angles accurate, it heavily distorts distances and areas, stretching them more the farther you move from the equator toward the poles. High-latitude regions like Europe, North America and Russia look far larger than they are; equatorial regions such as Africa and South America look much smaller.

Africa, the biggest victim

On a Mercator map, Africa appears roughly the size of Greenland; yet it is actually 14–15 times larger. At 30.4 million km², Africa could hold the United States, China, India, Japan and most of Western Europe combined.

Russia looks almost as big as Africa on the same map, but is nearly half the size (17.1 vs 30.4 million km²). German geographer Arno Peters noted that by inflating Europe and North America, Mercator helped create a visual sense of supremacy for those regions.

And Algeria?

Africa’s and the Arab world’s largest country (about 2.38 million km²) is often visually reduced on Mercator maps. France’s top diplomat recently pointed out that Greenland appears nearly as vast as all of Africa, when it is actually about the same size as the Democratic Republic of Congo or Algeria. A continent-dominating country thus ends up looking like a sparsely populated polar ice sheet.

More than a geography debate

The issue has become political. The African Union has formally proposed gradually replacing Mercator with equal-area projections (such as Equal Earth or Gall-Peters) that show true surface proportions. The goal is to correct the long-standing under-representation of Africa relative to high-latitude countries.

France has already announced it is dropping Mercator for more accurate maps, noting that no map is fully neutral and that Mercator gives disproportionate visual weight to certain powers over Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia.

Changing the map doesn’t change the world, but it changes how we see it

A more accurate projection alters nothing about actual geography. It can, however, reshape how generations unconsciously perceive the weight and place of continents, especially Africa, the world’s second-largest, long minimised by more than four and a half centuries of inherited cartography.

Algeria Gate: Egyptian justice delivered a striking verdict on Saturday, September 5th 2026: the presenter, producer and businesswoman Sarah Khalifa, 39, was sentenced to death by hanging, along with eleven other defendants, for her involvement in a vast network of manufacturing and trafficking synthetic drugs.

A criminal organisation dismantled

According to the official daily Al-Ahram, the Cairo Criminal Court ruled that Sarah Khalifa and her accomplices had set up a criminal organisation responsible for importing from abroad substances intended for the manufacture of narcotics before marketing them. The defendants were also found guilty of the illegal possession of firearms and ammunition.

The investigation, opened last year, initially targeted 28 people, including the presenter’s brother. It led to the seizure of more than 750 kilograms of drugs and raw materials, as well as tools and machinery discovered in two apartments converted into clandestine laboratories.

In accordance with Egyptian procedure applicable to cases carrying the death penalty, the court had previously sought the advisory opinion of Egypt’s Grand Mufti. The sentence is not yet final, however: it may still be appealed.

Who is Sarah Khalifa?

Before her arrest in Giza in April 2025, Sarah Khalifa enjoyed a notoriety that extended well beyond Egypt’s borders. She began her career on the pan-Arab channel ART, then on the Iraqi television channel Al Sharqiya, before joining the private Egyptian channel Al-Mehwar, where she hosted Mission difficile, a programme devoted to security and crime affairs. She also had nearly two million followers on Instagram.

This drug-trafficking case is not the only one to have tarnished the presenter’s reputation. She was also sentenced to five years in prison in a separate case linked to the sequestration and assault of her private chauffeur.

The context of the death penalty in Egypt

Egypt maintains the death penalty for several serious offences, including premeditated murder, certain acts of terrorism, certain rapes and drug trafficking. According to the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms, a local non-governmental organisation, no fewer than 541 death sentences were handed down in the country in 2025 alone.