Many of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood leaders and activists have either been sentenced to death or life imprisonment in a series of mass trials.

Field Marshal Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Egyptian Defense Minister and Commander-in-Chief Egyptian Armed Forces, retires from the military, announcing on March 26, 2014, he will stand as a candidate in the 2014 presidential election.

The North Korean people consider themselves in many respects the purest Chinese culture.

The relation of the Koran language, a member of the Korean-Japanese language group generally included in the Altaic language family, is distinct from the Chinese languages, which today form the majority of the Sino-Tibetan language family.

(It has not been convincingly demonstrated that the non-Chinese Tibeto-Burman branches languages constitute a monophyletic group.)

Language aside, Korea continues as the Hermit Kingdom, the core defender of East Asian values and traditions embodied on the world stage by the Han Chinese and the various peoples also incorporated into modern China.

North Korea’s population is homogenous throughout its history to a degree unusual in Asia or Europe; they are more so today than any other of the world’s developed cultures.

The region specific to North Korea is accustomed to militarized dynastic rule with a xenophobic discourse.

Present-day North Korea is arguably the most racist of the world’s developed societies.

Cuba is a museum, not of communism, but of a wholesale transition from capitalism to communism, confined to a large and fertile island.

The Egyptian poll, held between May 26 and 28, 2014, had resulted in a landslide victory for el-Sisi.

Sisi is sworn into office as President of Egypt on June 8, 2014.

The Muslim Brotherhood and some liberal and secular activist groups boycott the vote.

Even though the interim authorities had extended voting to a third day, the forty-six percent turnout was lower than the fifty-two percent turnout in the 2012 election.

Israel launches Operation Protective Edge against Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip starting with numerous missile strikes,  followed by a ground offensive a week later, amid growing tensions between Israel and Hamas following the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers in June and the revenge killing of a Palestinian teenager in July.

By August 26, twenty-one hundred Palestinians and seventy-one Israelis have been killed in seven weeks of fighting.

Egypt enters into a diplomatic crisis with Italy following the murder of researcher Giulio Regeni when, in April 2016, Prime Minister Matteo Renzi recalls the Italian ambassador from Cairo because of lack of co-operation from the Egyptian Government in the investigation.

The ambassador will be sent back to Egypt in 2017 by the new Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni.

The United States announces its decision to withdraw from UNESCO on October 12, 2017, and is immediately followed by Israel.

A mosque attack in al-Rawda, a village in the markaz of Bir al-Abed, in the North Sinai Governorate of Egypt, kills three hundred and eleven worshipers and leaves one hundred and twenty-two wounded on November 24, 2017.

Many of the victims worked at a nearby salt factory and were at the mosque for Friday prayers.

Al-Rawda Mosque, which is located on Sinai's main coastal highway connecting the city of Port Said to Gaza, belongs to the local Jarir clan, of the Sawarka tribe, who follow the Jaririya (Gaririya) Sufi order—an offshoot of the movement of Abu Ahmed al-Ghazawi,of the broader Darqawa order.

The mosque is on the road between El Arish and Bir al-Abed.

The mosque has a smaller zawiyah, a Sufi lodge, attached.

According to local media, attackers in four off-road vehicles planted three bombs; the attackers used the burning wrecks of cars to block off escape routes.

After their detonation, they launch rocket propelled grenades and open fire on worshipers during the crowded Friday prayer at al-Rawda near Bir al-Abed.

When ambulances arrive=d to transport the wounded to hospitals, the attackers open fire on them as well, having selected ambush points from which to target them.

Local residents quickly respond, bringing the wounded to hospitals in their own cars and trucks, and even taking up weapons to fight back.

No group claims responsibility for the attack, although there are reports that the attack appears to be the work of Islamic State's Wilayat Sinai branch.

Islamist militants have been active in the Sinai since July 2013, killing at least one thousand Egyptian security forces personnel.

According to The New York Times, in January 2017 an interview of an insurgent commander in Sinai appeared in issue five of the Islamic State magazine Rumiyah, where the commander condemned Sufi practices and identified the district where the attack occurred as one of three areas where Sufis live in Sinai that Islamic State intended to "eradicate."

The community had been repeatedly threatened to refrain from Sufi practices.

Jund al-Islam, an al-Qaeda-linked jihadist group in Sinai who were formerly affiliated with ISIL, declare their innocence and condemn the attack on the al-Rawda mosque.

On November 25, the Egyptian public prosecutor's office, citing interviews with survivors, will say the attackers brandished the Islamic State flag.

The UN warns on March 10, 2017, that the world is facing the largest humanitarian crisis since the Second World War, with up to twenty million people at risk of starvation and famine in Yemen, Somalia, South Sudan and Nigeria.