Training, fieldwork and collaboration in a new remote sensing method for heritage monitoring in Libya

Guest Editors’ Introduction

Chapter 6 - Faba bean

Curriculum design has received considerable critical attention in the Global North and much research has been published around the key principles of good curriculum design (Meyer & Land, 2003; Gibbs, 2010; Baume, 2009). However, much of the research has focused on the application of those principles to British higher education. To date, there has been little discussion around the appropriateness and relevance of applying the principles to countries in the Middle East and North Africa and in particular, the Egyptian higher education system. This paper reviews research about curriculum design and how this informed the development of the course design principles at Leeds Beckett University (LBU). It explores, as a case study, how these principles have been embedded within the Sport Marketing undergraduate (UG) degree course at LBU and then specifically focuses on the challenges of using five principles as a framework for curricular change at Assiut University in Egypt to enhance their specialist provision. LBU was invited to assist the Faculty of Physical Education at Assiut University to develop the first Sport Marketing degree programme as part of the International Inspirations sport legacy programme from London 2012, delivered by the British Council (British Council, 2014). The case study of this project reflects on the challenges of developing a curriculum within the confines of existing institutional regulations and national frameworks as well as the challenges of a cross-cultural shared understanding and cooperation. It will be of relevance to academics who are designing new programmes or who are considering how existing programmes can be adapted to meet the needs of other international institutions.

Introduction: Power and Knowledge in the Anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa Sherine Hafez and Susan Slyomovics Part I. Knowledge Production in Middle East and North Africa Anthropology 1. State of the State of the Art Studies: An Introduction to the Anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa Susan Slyomovics 2. Identity and Difference in the Middle East and North Africa: A Review Essay Seteney Shami and Nefissa Naguib 3. Anthropology's Middle Eastern Prehistory: An Archaeology of Knowledge Jon W. Anderson 4. The Pragmatics and Politics of Anthropological Collaboration on the North African Frontier Paul A. Silverstein 5. Post-Cold War Politics of Middle East Anthropology: Insights from a Transitional Generation Confronting the War on Terror Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar Part II. Subjectivities: Youth, Gender, Family and Tribe in the Middle East and North African Nation-State 6. Anthropology of the Future: Arab Youth and the State of the State Suad Joseph 7. The Memory Work of Anthropologists: Gendered Studies of Conflicts and the Heroic Life in Middle East and North Africa Sondra Hale 8. Rejecting Authenticity in the Desert Landscapes of the Modern Middle East: Development Processes in the Jiddat il-Harasiis, Oman Dawn Chatty 9. Notable Families and Capitalist Parasites in Egypt's Former Free Zone: Law, Trade, and Uncertainty Christine Hegel-Cantarella Part III: Anthropology of Religion and Secularism in the Middle East and North Africa 10. Will the Rational Religious Subject Please Stand Up? Muslim Subjects and the Analytics of Religion Sherine Hafez 11. Defining and Enforcing Islam in Secular Turkey Kim Shively 12. Sharia in Diaspora: Displacement, Exclusion and Anthropology of the Displaced Middle East Susanne Dahlgren 13. A Place to Belong: Colonial Pasts, Modern Discourses, and Contraceptive Practices in Morocco Cortney L. Hughes Part IV: Anthropology and New Media in the Virtual Middle East and North Africa 14. Our Master's Call: Mass Media and the People in Morocco's 1975 Green March Emilio Spadola 15. The Construction of Virtual Identities: On-line Tribalism in Saudi Arabia and Beyond Sebastian Maisel 16. Youth, Peace, and New Media in the Middle East Charlotte Karagueuzian and Pamela Chrabieh Badine References Contributors Index

Following the recently evolving downturn in the Greek economy, there is an opportunity to build a new Hellenic scientific institution for neglected infections of poverty located at the geographic center of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. While today populations who live in poverty in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia suffer from the largest public health impact from the world's neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) [1], [2], it is astonishing to some that many of these same diseases also disproportionately strike the impoverished populations living in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. In Europe, a 2011 analysis found surprisingly high rates of NTDs among the more than 150 million Europeans who live below the poverty level [3]. Especially in the Balkans and elsewhere in southeastern Europe, as well as in Turkey, several former Soviet-bloc countries, and among the Roma, today there are high rates of parasitic infections such as echinococcosis, toxocariasis, toxoplasmosis, and trichinellosis, as well as a number of important bacterial infections such as brucellosis and congenital syphilis (Table 1). Many of these NTDs are zoonoses transmitted from animals and linked to breakdowns in veterinary public health, especially in Eastern Europe [3]. Fallout from the war in the Balkans and the collapse of communism among the former Soviet republics represent key socioeconomic determinants of these infections [3]. Table 1 Major NTDs of Europe and the Middle East and North Africa. Similarly, in the Middle East and North Africa, high rates of some of these same parasitic infections are endemic, in addition to fascioliasis, leishmaniasis, and schistosomiasis [4]. Important viral infections have also emerged, including dengue and Rift Valley fevers [4]. Many of these NTDs are also zoonoses transmitted from livestock and other domestic animals and are on the rise as a result of breakdowns in veterinary health and unrestricted trafficking of animals across unsupervised borders [4]. Most of these infections are concentrated among the more than 60 million people who live in the Middle East and North Africa on less than US$2 per day [4]. In terms of the largest number of cases of these conditions, destabilized countries such as Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen suffer the most from NTDs [4]. The NTDs are forgotten diseases that disproportionately afflict the forgotten poor. Indeed, these neglected infections can even trap the poor in a cycle of poverty because of their ability to stunt child growth and intellectual development, affect pregnancy outcome, and reduce productivity [1]. While the world's attention appropriately turns to completing the Millennium Development Goals by lifting the poorest people in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia out of poverty, we must not leave behind the poorest and forgotten people of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. A key step to addressing these neglected infections of poverty would include establishing a new center for research in order to conduct fundamental and translational research on the major NTDs affecting areas of poverty in southeastern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa; ideally, these activities might also include product development activities for a new generation of neglected disease drugs, diagnostics, and vaccines. In some cases, new products for veterinary use must be developed as new tools to halt zoonotic transmission. Greece represents an intriguing location for such a center of excellence (Figure 1). This nation is centrally located between Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa and therefore is in a position to undertake unique studies on the ecology, transmission, and epidemiology of the NTDs across the region. A recent example is the changing of ecology of brucellosis and other zoonoses with increasing transmission in the Balkan Peninsula [5], as well as the re-emergence of vivax malaria in Greece [6]–[8]. Greece has also become one of Europe's major gateways for immigrants arriving from Africa and the Middle East [9], [10]. Equally relevant is the devastating recent downturn in the Greek economy, including a stifling level of unemployment that is reaching 50% among young people together with dramatic cutbacks in government services and new austerity measures [11]. There are real concerns about the future of Greece's ability to maintain its previously robust scientific research infrastructure. Indeed, there have already been severe cuts to science budgets and salaries at leading Greek scientific institutions, with the anticipation of additional cuts and consolidations likely [12]. Figure 1 Map of Greece, At the same time, there is every reason to anticipate an emergence or re-emergence of NTDs in Greece just as we have seen in other areas of economic collapse and post-conflict in Europe and the Middle East. European Union or private support of a Hellenic center of excellence for NTDs could help to fend off declines in Greek biomedical science and prevent a potential brain drain to northern Europe, Australia, and elsewhere, while simultaneously providing urgently needed research and development for a nation that for centuries has bridged the cultures of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Such an NTD center could be established by expanding infrastructures in existing centers such as the Hellenic Pasteur Institute, which is conducting important research on leishmaniasis and other NTDs [13]; the Foundation of Research and Technology-Hellas (FORTH) [14]; or the Hellenic Center for Disease Control and Prevention (HCDCP) [15], among others. It is important to point out that such a program should occur within the context of overall increases in financial support for Greek scientific institutions, and possibly even European Union funding. A Hellenic center for NTDs is not a panacea, but it would be a welcome and potentially transformative institution that would address a pressing neglected disease problem linked to poverty and destabilization in the region. It could also provide urgently needed research and possibly new antipoverty drugs, diagnostics, and vaccines benefiting impoverished people and their animals everywhere. Such a center could promote global, neglected disease research much as other pan-European institutes in Germany (EMBO - European Molecular Biology Organization), Switzerland (CERN – European Center for Nuclear Research), and Italy (ICTP – The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics) have promoted outstanding studies in molecular biology, physics, and other key scientific areas. A Greek center for NTDs would go a long way to fostering urgently needed research and reducing poverty and disease.

List of Tables - List of Figures - Preface - Prospects for Middle Eastern and North African Economies: An Overview N.Shafik - THE CHANGING INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT - The World Economy and Its Implications for the Middle East and North Africa, 1995-2010 E.M.Riordan, U.Dadush, J.Jalali, S.Streifel, M.Brahmbhatt & K.Takagaki - The Arab Economy, the Uruguay Round Predicament, and the European Union Wildcard I.Diwan, C-P.Yang & Z.Wang - The World Trade Organization, the European Union, and the Arab World: Trade Policy Priorities and Pitfalls B.Hoekman - ECONOMIC GROWTH, THE STATE, AND THE PRIVATE SECTOR - From Boom to Bust-and Back? The Crisis of Growth in the Middle East and North Africa J.Page - The State and Economic Transition in the Middle East and North Africa J.Waterbury - Supporting Private Sector Development in the Middle East and North Africa R.E.Anderson & A.Martinez - SECTORAL ISSUES: HUMAN RESOURCES, POVERTY, AND THE ENVIRONMENT - A Human Capital Strategy for Competing in World Markets F.L.Golladay, S.E.Berryman, J.Avins & L.Wolff - Poverty in the Middle East and North Africa W.van Eeghen - Environmentally Sustainable Development in the Middle East and North Africa H.Mohtadi - Environmental and Natural Resource Management in the Middle East and North Africa B.Larsen

Contents of the report are as follows: Long-term economic development: challenges and prospects for the Arab countries by Mustapha K. Nabli. Reform complementarities and economic growth in the Middle East and North Africa by Mustapha Kamel Nabli, and Marie-Ange Veganzones-Varoudakis. After Argentina: was MENA right to be cautious? By Mustapha K. Nabli. Restarting Arab economic reform by Mustapha K. Nabli. Democracy for better governance and higher economic growth in the MENA region? By Mustapha K. Nabli, and Carlos Silva-Jauregui. The political economy of industrial policy in the Middle East and North Africa by Mustapha K. Nabli, Jennifer Keller, Claudia Nassif, and Carlos Silva-Jauregui. The macroeconomics of labor market outcomes in MENA by Jennifer Keller, and Mustapha K. Nabli. Challenges and opportunities for the 21st century by Mustapha Nabli. Labor market reforms, growth, and unemployment in labor-exporting countries in the Middle East and North Africa by Pierre-Richard Agenor, Mustapha K. Nabli, Tarik Yousef, and Henning Tarp Jensen. Economic reforms and people mobility for a more effective EU-MED partnership by Ishac Diwan, Mustapha Nabli, Adama Coulibaly, and Sara Johansson de Silva. Cruise control, shock absorbers, and traffic lights by Mustapha K. Nabli. Trade, foreign direct investment, and development in the Middle East and North Africa by Farrukh Iqbal, and Mustapha Kamel Nabli. Making trade work for jobs by Dipak Dasgupta, Mustapha Kamel Nabli, Christopher Pissarides, and Aristomene Varoudakis. Exchange rate management within the Middle East and North Africa region by Mustapha Nabli, Jennifer Keller, and Marie-Ange Veganzones. How does exchange rate policy affect manufactured exports in MENA countries? By Mustapha Kamel Nabli, and Marie-Ange Veganzones-Varoudakis. Public infrastructure and private investment in the Middle East and North Africa by Pierre-Richard Agenor, Mustapha K. Nabli, and Tarik M. Yousef. Governance, institutions, and private investment by Ahmet Faruk Aysan, Mustapha Kamel Nabli, and Marie-Ange Veganzones-Varoudakis.

This paper presents an empirical application and analysis of the social contract in countries in the Middle East and North Africa. The paper suggests a simple operational model that synthesizes a social contract's three main characteristics: participation, protection, and provision, between a government and its citizens. This empirical "3-P" framework allows investigating the role that government provision and protection may have on citizen participation, which is particularly pertinent given the political and economic development of countries in the Middle East and North Africa. The paper compares the evaluation of the health of the social contract in countries in the Middle East and North Africa region to that of countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The empirical evidence shows that the social benefits provided to citizens through improved delivery of basic services have come at the cost of impaired political participation. This feature of the social contract in the Middle East and North Africa may be considered one of the root causes of the social turmoil some countries have been struggling with in recent decades. Digital transformation is a potentially powerful channel through which the relationship between government and citizens can improve, and the paper finds that it has a three-year lagged positive effect on the quality of the social contract in the Middle East and North Africa and the effect is inversely U-shaped. This suggests that structural and institutional improvements are needed in countries in the Middle East and North Africa for the quality of their social contract to reach levels comparable to those of countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

This chapter outlines some of the findings and conclusions of a project that aimed to capture and disseminate good practice in the area of equality, diversity and inclusion (diversity) within the British Council and to influence others through a study of the stories that local and international staff tell. The approach was one of co-production of the research by the British Council’s Diversity Unit, the academic research team and the British Council’s Education and Society commissioning team. It used the research method chosen in the previous section to better understand the nature of actual practice within two British Council regions. The two objectives informed the fieldwork undertaken in the regions of Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The findings illustrate the difficulties of central delivery of policy implementation within diverse geographical locations and the value of storytelling as a way to reveal actual diversity practice.

Histories of gender in the modern Middle East and North Africa have flourished in the last three decades, fueled in part by JMEWS. Yet much of this work is circumscribed by the nation-state, which remains the primary framing for discussions of women’s activism and gender-based reform. Existing scholarship includes glimpses of women collaborating across national, regional, cultural, and linguistic boundaries but rarely foregrounds these transnational connections or emphasizes how formative transnational spaces and conversations were in shaping gender norms. This roundtable brings together the work of gender historians whose research collectively ranges from Morocco to Afghanistan, and traces a variety of connections across the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. Its five short essays highlight modes of movement, organizing, and exchange across borders, focusing on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We demonstrate the many ways in which women in the Middle East and North Africa collaborated with one another and with women in other world regions in the name of national independence, women’s rights, and economic justice, often shaping gender norms in the process. But should all modes of cross-border collaboration be described as “transnational”?One area of debate that the roundtable addresses is whether “transnationalism” is the best analytic mode for studying women’s activism across local and international borders. While thinking entirely beyond the national has its own historiographical value (Ludden 2003), transnationalism as a methodological approach begins with the nation, then demands that scholars think above and below it in ways that have the potential to challenge its solidity and salience as a category of analysis. Pursuing a transnational approach, we acknowledge the nation as a salient political unit while refusing to be confined within it, whether in linguistic, spatial, or ideological terms. Another key concept running through these essays is “transnational feminism,” which foregrounds feminist cross-border collaborations in the name of disrupting systems of power (Mohanty 2013). During the colonial era, many feminists in the Middle East and North Africa engaged in transnational organizing in opposition to colonialism. More recently, transnational feminist organizing in the Middle East and North Africa has been anticapitalist, prodemocracy, and has often sought to end US military occupation in the region.This roundtable also touches on questions of what counts as “transnational” activism and the scales on which it operates. Our essays reveal how micro and macro transnational feminist organizing contributed to reshaping gender norms in the wider Middle East. Marya Hannun’s work reconstructs a web of feminist organizing that connected Afghan women with women from Cairo to Bombay. Nova Robinson’s piece reveals how Syrian women collaborated with US and Swiss feminists to try to secure representation from the “East” on the League of Nations’ Committee of Experts on the Legal Status of Women. Anny Gaul’s research demonstrates that multiple generations of Moroccan women activists engaged with ideas and movements circulating through the Middle East and beyond as they advocated for liberation. Focusing on these models of exchange and activism encourages new spatial frameworks for understanding women’s organizing. Lucia Carminati’s essay addresses such frameworks by asking how the inherent transnational nature of certain spaces, like the Suez Canal, impacts gendered subjectivities and histories in unique ways. Finally, Gülşah Torunoğlu’s essay addresses the promises and limitations of transnationalism as a method of analysis, and discusses “relational comparison” as an alternative analytic lens through which to scrutinize the interconnected feminist networks in the Middle East prior to the 1920s.In addition to highlighting the circuits and exchanges of people and ideas, this collection of essays in conversation with one another demonstrates how a transnational approach can push gender history in the Middle East and North Africa in exciting new directions. Questions that animate this roundtable include: In what ways did feminisms in the Middle East and North Africa transcend the nation and even the region during the interwar period, a time when the nation-state emerged as the default vehicle through which patriarchy was wielded and contested? What were the geographic limits of these connections? How does the fact that women of a certain class around the world had more in common with one another than they did with those who shared their national frames shape our writing of women’s history? How do these divisions endure in the present debates around global feminist movements? Our essays do not definitively answer these questions. However, we suggest that a denationalized analysis of feminism can give us a clearer picture of women’s movements and subjectivities in the early twentieth century, within and beyond national contexts. We hope that our collective exploration about the potential benefits and challenges of transnational analysis sparks further debate and inquiry.

Reports that emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) experienced a decline in informality over two decades before the COVID-19 pandemic. Output informality declined most in East Asia and Pacific and South Asia, while employment informality fell most in the Middle East and North Africa, South Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Yet the incidence of informality remains high in all regions. In South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, pervasive informality has associated with low human capital and large agricultural sectors. In Europe and Central Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Middle East and North Africa, heavy regulatory and tax burdens and weak institutions have proven important factors. In addition, legacies of the transition from central planning to market economies and disruptions related to conflict remain important. In East Asia and Pacific, employment informality associates with lagging social protection in cities following large-scale rural-to-urban migration. A balanced policy mix tailored to economy-specific circumstances can help mitigate the adverse effects of informality.

The primary aim of this dissertation is to provide a critical analysis of the scholarly literature on the long historical, social and cultural processes that characterized Jewish-Arab coexistence in the Muslim Arab societies of the Middle East and North Africa. For this purpose I survey:
\nA. a large body of primary sources that have for the most part not been available in Hungarian. These include: parts of medieval Muslim, Christian and Jewish travelers’ itineraries and diaries, British and French diplomatic correspondence, documents from the British and US Intelligence Services and the Alliance Israélite Universelle archives, WZO correspondence and my interviews with Syrian and Iraqi Jews living in Israel.
\nB. a substantial amount of analytical and exploratory literature that provides theories and hypotheses formulated by highly qualified and experienced scholars in a number of fields. These scholars include Heinrich Graetz, Ignaz Goldziher, Raphael Patai, H.Z. Hirschberg, Y. Ben-Zvi, S.D. Goiten, S.W. Baron, Bernard Lewis, Norman A. Stillman, and W.P. Zenner.
\nOn the basis of my survey I then examine the veracity of several rather wide-spread assertions popular in western liberal scholarly circles, such as:
\na. In the Muslim Arab world, Jews on the whole fared better than they did in Christian societies.
\nb. The breakdown of a presumably peaceful Jewish-Arab coexistence was caused by the appearance of the great powers and/ or European Zionists in the Middle East and North Africa
\nGiven the multi-faceted scholarship on the coexistence of the two communities, a multi- disciplinary approach is best suited for this project. In particular, I will be utilizing methods deriving from disciplines such as theology, social and cultural history, cultural anthropology, ethnography, and social psychology.
\nThe dissertation is structured into three main parts.
\nIn the first part, I provide an overview of Jewish-Arab relations during the period starting from the emergence of Islam and ending with the appearance of the great western powers in the Middle East and North Africa. I examine closely the socio-psychological and theological roots of anti-Jewish sentiment in Islam, I provide an overview of the life and possibilities of the Jewish communities in the Omayyad and Abbasid caliphates, and explore life under the relatively more tolerant shiite Fatimid rulers. After analyzing the situation of the Jews in Andalusia, I discuss the overly idealized image of the “Arab–Jewish Golden Age” commonly found in scholarship, including in the influential work of Heinrich Graetz. By contrast, I explore the political, social and theological reasons underlying the harsh persecution of the Jews in North Africa under foreign monarchs, and portray the life of the Jews in the Ottoman Empire from a socio-economic and a cultural-anthropological perspective.
\nThe second part of the dissertation deals with the new challenges of modernization introduced by the European colonialists, which restructured the Middle Eastern and North African societies, leading to economic and social competition between the Muslim majority and the despised minority groups. This situation created a fertile soil for the European-born political anti-Semitism, which, together with the extant social tensions, resulted in the emergence of blood libels, which were without precendent in Arab lands, and accusations of blasphemy at the end of the 19th century. The spread of the Jewish conspiracy theory after the publication of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Arabic [Cairo, 1925], the adoption of fascist and Nazi ideologies by the Arab nationalist movements (Baath, Muslim Brotherhood, Phalanges Libanaises, etc.), and the anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist political activities of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, al-Husseini, all led to the cumulative insecurity of the Jews in Arab lands and eventually to the pogroms during the Second World War.
\nIn the third part of this study, I examine the responses that Jews in Arab lands made to the challenges of modernization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These responses took several distinct forms:
\na. A European type of assimilation, whose main supporter was the French Jewish world organization, the Paris-based Alliance Israélite Universelle, which contributed to the transformation and reformation of Jewish education in the ME and NA. This assimilation resulted in the appearance of a highly westernized new generation that distanced itself from the surrounding Arab culture.
\nb. Participation in the Arab national revival, which was the most common response among the Jewish upper class in Egypt. I provide a brief overview of Jewish involvement in Egyptian government, politics, the Arab media and literature.
\nc. Political Zionism, whose promoters were the European Zionist Jewish immigrants, and Jewish refugees, who fled from Palestine to other countries in the Middle East and North Africa. In contrast to the European Jewish religious circle, the Sephardi community leaders embraced the Zionist idea enthusiastically, as did a large number of Oriental Jews. In my analysis I also touch on the contradictory attitude of the WZO toward the Zionist activities of the Middle Eastern and North African communities.
\nIn the post-war era, the Zionist response became the most relevant one after the Holocaust and prior to the birth of the modern state of Israel, especially given also the flare up in anti-Jewish sentiment in the Middle East and North Africa, and the cold reception that French and British societies gave to westernized Jews from the former colonies.
\nArab-Jewish coexistence can be described as the peaceful cohabitation of a master and a servant, i.e. Jews in Arab lands lived relatively peacefully, preserving their religious and communal autonomy by accepting the status of the belittled and often humiliated minority, of the dhimmi and – with some, often disastrous exceptions -, anxiously avoided any interference in Muslim Arab affairs.
\nThe new challenges of the modern era, especially the impact of Western culture on the Middle East and North Africa, have resulted in a twist of this microcosmos. The ensuing cold peace between the two coexisting communities came to an end with the different attitudes and responses to the possibilities of the emerging globalized world.

Heritage Without Borders (HWB) is a UK charity that works internationally to build capacity in museum skills. We aim to develop the capacity of heritage industry professionals in regions where specific skills such as object conservation, interpretation and community engagement are in short supply. We are a volunteer organisation, so the UK professionals with whom we work give their time for free. We also cover the costs of our international participants who cannot afford to pay.The present article will describe two projects we have worked on since 2012 in partnership with the British Council and University College London. The aim of both projects was to build capacity through international exchanges between museum professionals. The first project focused on the Middle East and North Africa, and the second project on South East Europe. Overall, we have found that our model of international knowledge exchange changes lives and builds skills in two directions insofar as international colleagues learn best practices from museum professionals in the UK, while UK professionals improve communication skills through collaboration in an international context. This article provides a critique of the model we have developed through case studies and a discussion.

Extreme dust events (EDEs) have become intensified in recent years, causing serious environmental issues. Current EDE-related research mainly focused on case studies, leading to a limited understanding of long-term EDE frequency and intensity. Moreover, aerosol reanalysis products are increasingly used in dust-related studies, while their performance on EDEs remains unclear. Accordingly, based on MODIS satellite observations and MERRA-2 aerosol reanalysis, this study analyzes the frequency, intensity, and driving factors of spring EDEs during 2000–23. Due to the regional disparities in assimilation data, the applicability of MERRA-2 has significant regional differences, with favorable performance in the Middle East (ME) and North Africa (NA), while underperforming in the Taklamakan Desert. The EDE frequency increases and then decreases in ME and NA, with higher EDE intensity in NA. Spring EDEs in NA and ME are both driven by the East Atlantic/West Russia teleconnection which can cause anomalous high pressure over the Mediterranean Sea and anomalous low pressure over the Eurasian continent, rather than by the North Atlantic Oscillation. The propagation of the corresponding Rossby wave results in EDEs occurring successively in NA and ME. Furthermore, it should be noted that DOD during EDEs is an independent mode, rather than an extreme feature of spring-averaged DOD. Our study highlights regional differences in the applicability of MERRA-2 and the independence of EDEs as well as indicates that the driving effect of the East Atlantic/West Russia teleconnection on EDEs should be given attention in the prediction of EDEs in NA and ME.

BackgroundThe Middle East and North Africa, is one of few regions where the number of new human immunodeficiency virus infections is increasing. The present study aimed to estimate the attributable burden of unsafe sex and drug use in Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome in the Middle East and North Africa countries.MethodsWe used the Global Burden of Disease data 2017 to estimate the attributable mortality and disability-adjusted life-years to unsafe sex and drug use in Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome in the Middle East and North Africa countries (21 countries) from 1990 to 2017 by region, sex and age. The percent change was calculated at three time points by country and sex.ResultsThe rate of Disability-adjusted life years/100,000 attributed to drug use for Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome increased 1.10 (95% CI: 0.75–1.71) to 13.39 (95% CI: 9.98–18.17) in women of Middle East and North Africa countries from 1990 to 2017, and there is an increasing trend in Disability-adjusted life years attributable to drug use for Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome in men. The rate of Disability-adjusted life years/100,000 attributed to unsafe sex for Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome increased in women of Middle East and North Africa countries, 5.15 (95% CI: 3.34–8.07) to 53.44 (95% CI: 38.79–75.89); and 10.06 (95% CI: 6.61–16.18) to 46.16 (95% CI: 31.30–72.66) in men. Age-standardized mortality rate attributed to drug use and unsafe sex for Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome increased from 1990 to 2017 in both sex in Middle East and North Africa countries.ConclusionThe rate of Disability-adjusted life years /100,000 and age-standardized mortality rate attributed to unsafe sex and drug use increased in Middle East and North Africa from 1990 to 2017. While most of such countries have traditional cultures with religious believes, such increase need to be addressed in more depth by all policy makers.