Over the last ten years, Kuwait's power consumption has doubled. This rising need for electricity has been mainly driven by the fast population growth rate, the increasing need for desalinated water, accounting for 93% of water consumption, and the economic development of the country.

On Tuesday 10 April 2012, Osama bin Laden was finally replaced on the FBI’s most wanted list by a fugitive schoolteacher accused of possessing child pornography. As the United States’ perception of threat has shifted, so too has the broader national security discourse. The prominent al-Qaeda analyst Peter Bergen observed that the terrorist group which launched the 9/11 attacks is now more or less out of business. He argued, too, that it is time to declare al-Qaeda defeated and “move on to focus on the essential challenges now facing America”: fixing the country’s economy, containing a rising China, managing the rogue regime in North Korea, and continuing to delay Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.

First of all, shale oil is starting to take the same dimension as shale gas in the US. Already 51% of US production comes presently from unconventional gas (shale, tight gas and coal-bed methane), and outlooks predict that the US will produce more gas than Russia by 2020. Oil imports have already diminished from 60 to 45%. As domestic unconventional oil production tends to increase, - it is now around 15% - imports will probably decline even more.

As a number of provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act are entering into force, five years after the beginnings of the financial crisis, Professor Herman Schwartz explains how the U.S. banking community will continue to hurt the interests of the American economy and political system.

In the heat of the public discussion on the possibility of an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stressed that he has not yet decided whether to attack Iran. At the same time, partly in response to opponents of such an attack, he made it clear that the risk of harm to the home front at this point, when Iran still does not have nuclear weapons, is dwarfed by the risks involved in an attack on Israel after Iran has gone nuclear.

The futuristic green city of Masdar in the United Arab Emirates or the latest announcements of Saudi Arabia which might now well become the new Eldorado for solar energy companies have a clear marketing varnish. But if they are showcases of green ambitions, they nonetheless reflect the situation the Gulf States face today driven by the development of heavy industry and petrochemicals but first and foremost by the rapid population growth (around 2% for Saudi Arabia and 3% for Kuwait; Qatar and the Emirates have higher population growth rate due to immigrants).

A central piece of national security during two centuries and an essential link between the military and the people, the French reserve forces have considerably decreased over the last decades.

The dynamics of Muslim-Copt relations and how they are managed by the Church and the State are part and parcel of Egypt’s transition post-Mubarak because they underlie the discussions concerning Egypt’s future as a civil State. The treatment of Copts and other religious communities under a new government will be a key indicator of the maturity of Egypt’s democratic transition.