Egypt

Authored by Steve H. Hanke of the Johns Hopkins University. Follow him on Twitter @Steve_Hanke.

Early last Thursday, EgyptAir 804 disappeared over the Mediterranean, becoming the second civilian airliner in less than seven months to go down while flying either to or from Egypt. Both this incident and Metrojet 9268’s disaster of last October were terrorist acts. Tourism to Egypt, a major earner of foreign exchange, has already been flat for years and will suffer even further from these airline disasters.

Following two days of searching, Egyptian crews have located the data recorders for EgyptAir Flight 804 close to an area where human remains and debris from the crashed flight have been found, CBS News reports citing government sources.

Six months after an Airbis A321 operated by Russia's Metrojet exploded shortly after takeoff from Egypt's Sinai peninsula en route to St. Petersburg, killing all 224 people on board in what was an ISIS-inspired terrorist attack, overnight there has been another aircraft-related tragedy when an EgyptAir flight carrying 66 passengers and crew on a flight from Paris to Cairo disappeared from radar over the Mediterranean shortly before landing, at 2:30am local time. Officials said they believed the jet has come down in the Mediterranean sea.

Since the end of the Cold War, we’re had a lot of very instructive experience in the Middle East. Back in 2010, I compiled the real-time analyses I had made of our policies and their results in a book titled America’s Misadventures in the Middle East. The book holds up well as an explanation for the origins and evolution of most of our difficulties in the region. Unfortunately, both the situation in the Middle East and our position there have continued to deteriorate.

In the Orthodox Church, we are preparing to commemorate the life of St. Mary of Egypt. Last night in our parish, we did as Orthodox parishes always do during matins of the Fourth Thursday of Lent: read aloud during evening services her biography, as written down by St. Sophronius, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, who lived from 560 to 638. St. Mary of Egypt died in the year 522. When Sophronius heard her story, passed down in oral tradition by the monks in the nearby monastery, he was so impressed that he wrote it down to preserve it. The story is told in Orthodox churches on the