After an Egyptian judge on Saturday dismissed charges against former President Hosni Mubarak over the killing of protesters during the 2011 revolution, more than 1,000 people demonstrated near Tahrir Square where the uprising first took place. See also: Egypt court drops murder charges against Mubarak, protests erupt near Tahrir Square.

Total $5.4 bn pledged but Ban warns against making 'conferences such as this a ritual' CAIRO: Delegates from 50 nations and several multinational organisations met at a plush hotel on the outskirts of Cairo on Sunday, to discuss the reconstruction of Gaza after this summer’s Israeli bombardment of the strip.

Since June 2013, news from the Egyptian court system has grown increasingly fantastic. Scores of activists have been arrested for mathematically impossible crimes. Egyptian citizens with no political affiliation have been imprisoned for rioting and political protests they did not attend. Random civilians have been arrested as Muslim Brotherhood conspirators.

The Egyptian city of St. Katherine lies at the end of a dusty road that snakes through jagged, rust-colored mountains, weather-beaten palm tree oases, and military checkpoints manned by bored teenagers. The road ends and the town appears, fitting snuggly into the trough of a bare desert mountain range.

Reach the higher peaks of South Sinai and the mountains spread forth like undulating heartbeats. From up here, you can see from north to south, from desert to sea. The geography is fluid. Borders overlap and intertwine, all defined and interpreted through the visions of developers, the Egyptian military, and Bedouin tribes.

Reporter Max Siegelbaum and photojournalist Ahmed Deeb follow 12-year-old Mohammed Alhwani, a Palestinian boy in Gaza, as he helps build the tunnels that smugglers have been transporting illicit materials and cargo through for over three decades. In 2006, after Hamas’s landslide victory in the Palestinian elections, the Israelis instituted a strict blockade on Gaza.

Mahienour el-Massry, the Egyptian human rights lawyer, responsible for organising the protest and media campaign that popularised the circumstances surrounding the Egyptian blogger’s Khaled Said’s death at the hands of two police officers, was sentenced last month to two years in prison for violating Egypt’s notorious protest law while protesting at his killers’ retrial.

The son of a farmer to a political agitator and election underdog, Hamdeen Sabbahi is Egypt's everyman to his supporters. Hamdeen Sabbahi greets supporters during a campaign event in May (Anadolu Agency) Hamdeen Sabbahi’s campaign for presidential elections that will start in Egypt on Monday began just four weeks before the vote.

Read rest in the April 2014 edition of Esquire Middle East

In the chaotic months following the ouster of autocrat Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s myriad political parties began to court each other in an attempt to consolidate power. As protests continued under Supreme Council of the Armed Forces rule, it became clear that for the first time in its roughly 80-year lifespan, the Muslim Brotherhood was destined to become a ruling force within Egyptian politics.

On Monday, the Egyptian Court for Urgent Matters banned the April 6 youth movement, a protest group founded in 2008 in support of a general strike in the industrial city of Mahalla. The ruling, similar to the banning of the Muslim Brotherhood on 23 September 2013, will allow the government to confiscate April 6 property and freezes the movement’s assets. The problem, Ramy Sayed, mobilization coordinator for April 6 says, “We don’t have any place, any apartment or offices, we don’t have funding, so how can they close us?”

On 16 January, Omar Osama, a Cairo University student, was killed on the university's campus during a protest. Roughly six hours later, Mohamed Abdel Khalek Mohamed left his home in Giza and boarded Cairo’s metro. Final exams were approaching and he needed to retrieve study materials from his department. In the subway station near the university, Mohamed was stopped by a police officer, arrested, and charged with participating in the killing of Osama.

On a dark road in Cairo’s working class Shubra district, horse-drawn wagons crash down the avenue, narrowly missing cars, motorcycles, microbuses, and spectators. Young men sit on the sidelines on wooden carts and plastic chairs, passing small wagers back and forth as the riders pass. Relentless Mahraganat electronica music belts out of speakers, as foul language flies and the jockeys beat their horses to push them forward.

Should you decide to grow a metre-long moustache, your daily routine will become a tad more complicated. Every morning you will spend at least thirty minutes coaxing the slender strands of hair on your face into two hardened spikes.

Last Sunday, two high school students from a small town in the northern Egyptian governate of Gharbiya were accosted by a mob in the neighbouring town of Mahallat Ziyad. Mahmoud Essoudi and his pal Abderrahman were accused of stealing two propane gas tanks, as well as kidnapping a young local woman who had recently gone missing.

Yesterday, Egypt saw the culmination of the Tamarod Campaign, a massive petition calling for the impeachment of President Mohamed Morsi. In the year since Morsi was elected, the economy has plummeted, state security has largely retreated from the country's streets, electricity cuts have increased, inflation has risen and gas has become scarce. Now the country is in the grips of a confusing push and pull between supporters of Morsi's government and the Muslim Brotherhood, those who had ties with the previous Mubarak regime and the left-leaning, loosely grouped anti-Morsi camp.