The Egyptian Court of Cassation announced on Saturday the decision to remove from the country’s terrorism list the name of the Egyptian football legend Mohamed Aboutrika, as well as another 1,500 more people for their alleged links with the Muslim Brotherhood.

In a statement, the court pointed out that in addition to being removed from this blacklist, the travel ban and the seizure of his funds are also lifted.

“The Court of Cassation heard our arguments today and decided to cancel the judgment of the Criminal Court and return the case for consideration before another court,” said Egyptian lawyer Khaled Ali in his official account of X.

The Criminal Court of Cairo designated Aboutrika in 2017 as a “terrorist” for allegedly financing the Muslim Brotherhood, a group illegalized in Egypt and considered a terrorist since 2013.

A year later, the Prosecutor’s Office requested that his name be included in the country’s “terrorism” list for five years, and last year the Public Prosecutor’s Office decided to renew it for five more years.

This extension is the one that has been rejected today by the Court of Cassation, so this case becomes the competence of another court.

The former Egyptian soccer player publicly supported Mohamed Morsi for the presidency of Egypt, which he won in 2012 in the country’s first democratic elections, although a year later the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood was overthreapped by current President Abdefaltah al Sisi, in a military coup.

International on 102 occasions and double champion of Africa (2006 and 2008), this offensive midfielder, who lives in Qatar and works as a commentator for the Bein Sports channel, was compared for his style of play with the Frenchman Zinedine Zidane and elected Best Player of Africa in club competitions, in 2008.

Days after dozens of police officers arrested more than 100 of their colleagues in two days of protests against the war in Gaza, Linda decided to return to the campus of the University of Texas (Austin) to ask for the resignation of the president of the institution.

The third-year biochemistry student, who asked to hide her name to protect her identity, assured EFE that she does not feel discouraged, quite the contrary. “There is nothing they can do to me that compares to what young people are going through in Gaza.”

The response of the main public university in Texas to the pro-Palestinian demonstrations has been one of the toughest in the country. Without any threat of negotiation with the student leaders, the institution forcibly dissolved a camp set up by university students in a park on campus.

The images of the eviction, where the agents took the students by the arms and legs, threw pepper spray at them and even arrested a photojournalist, became a reflection of the repression against the student movement that has spread throughout the country.

The governor of the state, Republican political media Greg Abbott, has already made it clear which side he is on. “The University and the State will use all the tools at their disposal to quickly put an end to all illegal protests on campus,” he wrote on his Twitter account.

On campus, however, this message has not deterred student activists, who have more protests planned for this last month of classes.

“The repression (…) what it has done is increase the number of people who are willing to fight what is right,” stressed Linda, who has been part of the pro-Palestine student organization Palestine Solidarity Committee, suspended last week by the institution in response to the demonstrations.

A hundred young people, professors and supporters of the anti-war cause once again took the university’s south park shouting slogans such as “Free Palestine” and “We will not stop, we will not rest.”

Aman Odeh, a doctor and associate professor at the University of Texas, approached the esplanade holding his phone up. On the other side of the screen, a group of about six children watched the protest.

“They are part of a family in Gaza that welcomed me,” said the pediatric specialist. “I spent two weeks there as part of a mission and they wanted to see what’s going on here, they feel supported.”

Odeh went up on the stage and, with the phone in his ear, repeated the words of Mohammed, 15 years old, on the other side of the world: “I want to tell you how proud I am; his voice sends a powerful message.”

In addition to expressing a feeling of rejection of war, university students also seek with the protests a series of defined objectives. Force your alma mater to break financial ties with companies that sell weapons to Israel.

Higher education centers in the U.S. are financed with public money, tuition and donations. With the latter, institutions invest in a series of assets, from bonds to shares in private companies, to obtain more capital

Specifically, the students are asking the University of Texas (UT) to stop investing in companies that manufacture weapons and military equipment such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dymanics and Boeing.

Roger Reeves, a professor of literature in UT who has been involved in the pro-Palestinian movement, told EFE that the presidency of the university has decided to “listen” to the members of the faculty, but has not committed to negotiating.

“They say they listen, but at the same time they are inviting the police to occupy the university campus,” the academic stressed.

The anti-corruption commissioner of the Government of Guatemala, Santiago Palomo, assures that the first months in office have been “a roller coaster” after having found a State “in critical conditions” in the face of the indications that between 2 billion and 3 billion dollars were embezzled during the presidency of Alejandro Giammattei (2020-2024).

Palomo, a 29-year-old lawyer graduated from Harvard University (USA), said during an interview with EFE that his first months in the position, appointed by the president, Bernardo Arévalo de León, have been “intense” and comparable to “a roller coaster.”

“We are trying to navigate in an Executive body that we receive in critical conditions. We identify a pattern when chatting with the new ministers and secretaries: they describe it as a dead rat in each drawer that is opened. This is how the conditions in which the Government was assumed are defined,” Palomo explains.

According to experts cited by local and international media, the Government of Giammattei could have embezzled up to 3 billion dollars between 2020 and 2024.

Precisely the Corruption Perception Index of 2023 placed Guatemala in 2023 among the five countries with the most embezzlement of state funds. Only behind Haiti, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Honduras.

Commissioner Palomo says that the corruption found operated under the same pattern. “Relevant financial disbursements from 70% to 90%” for the construction of “public works that are being thrown away, such as schools and roads, whose progress does not exceed 30% or 40%.”

According to the official, “this is how these corruption structures worked in the State, right now they are still trying to operate,” the official remarked.

The Government of Arévalo de León denounced Amelia Flores, former Minister of Health of Giammattei, before the courts of justice on April 4, for anomalies in the purchase of 16 million doses of the Russian Sputnik vaccine, in 2021 for a total amount of 615 million quetzals (79 million dollars).

According to various sources, many of the vaccines never reached the Central American country and others expired before their application.

“The case of vaccines shows that they were willing to pursue their own interests to the detriment of the most sacred thing, which was the health of the population, in the midst of a pandemic. It is a case that reflects how unscrupulous the degree of corruption of the previous Administration became,” says Palomo.

Last week Palomo, along with the Minister of Communications, Jazmín de la Vega, denounced two former officials for a possible fraud in the assignment of contracts to a company for the construction of 14 schools for an amount between 45 and 60 million quetzals (between five and seven million dollars approximately).

The anti-corruption tsar explains that it is up to the Executive Body to detect and prevent cases of corruption from occurring in its Administration. But that is the Public Ministry (Attorney’s Office) that “is responsible for investigating and prosecuting.”

“The Prosecutor’s Office does not have a real commitment to investigate serious cases of corruption,” it is not an ally in the fight against corruption,” which becomes a real challenge, Palomo recognizes, although, he said, the Administration of Arévalo does not intend to stop denouncing the anomalies that are found in the various ministries.

In 2023, the Prosecutor’s Office, led by Consuelo Porras Argueta, tried to stop the electoral victory of Arévalo de León in the general elections through various criminal cases and dozens of governments around the world sanctioned his action, including that of the United States and members of the European Union.

Arévalo de León surprisingly prevailed over the traditional politics of Guatemala thanks to his offer to heal the corruption of the State that has caused a significant democratic deterioration in the last 30 years.

Palomo concludes that assuming the anti-corruption arm of this Government for the next four years is “a great responsibility.” An “opportunity to improve the dignity of the public service.”