In the country’s first free election in October 2011, millions of Tunisians cast votes for an assembly to draft a constitution and shape a new government. The moderate Islamist party Ennahda — whose name means the renaissance in Arabic — emerged as the winner in the elections, with a 41 percent plurality, according to officials. Ennahda tried to reassure secularists nervous about the prospect of Islamist rule by saying it would respect women’s rights and not try to impose a Muslim moral code on society.

In January 2013, Algeria was drawn into the conflict in Mali, its neighbor to the south, when militants seized dozens of hostages from an internationally managed gas field in Algeria, saying the act was in retaliation for a French military assault on the Islamist extremists who had taken control of northern Mali.

Although such calls are hardly universal and there is no threat of an imminent coup, the growing murmurs that military intervention may be the only solution to the collapse of public security can be heard across the country, especially in circles opposed to the Islamists who have dominated post- Mubarak elections. Others plead for reform to forestall such an outcome. Either way, the talk reflects the dire state of the security crisis, which threatens not only Egypt’s transition to democracy but also its hopes to stave off economic collapse. And here in Port Said, a focal point of the widening crisis since the police lost control more than a month ago, a form of local military takeover has already taken place.

As of the late 20th century the regime had sought to introduce women into the armed forces. In the 1978 Libya's new military academy began training women, training thousands since. In the early 1980s where the 'Nuns of the Revolution' were created as a specialist police force attached to revolutionary committees.

The next crown prince and king will clearly come from among the grandsons, rather than the sons, of the dynasty’s founder. The two new governors are potential candidates, as is Interior Minister Prince Muhammad bin Nayef, 52, who is in charge of the kingdom’s war on terror. He was in Washington this week for a series of meetings with US officials, including President Obama.

Critics have rejected these initiatives as half steps — they complain that the court, for example, is neutered because the king appoints its judges — and the monarchy has jailed dozens of activists on charges including incitement to change the Constitution and to overthrow the government, which can carry the death penalty. In October, the king dissolved Parliament and appointed Jordan’s fourth prime minister in a year.

In addition, power outages happen many times a day, complicating attempts at economic recovery and stalling efforts to resume normal daily life. Frustrated by the frequency of power outages, it is no surprise that the waiter I spoke to believes that Saleh’s men are behind these disruptions. Although it is not required under the power transfer agreement, Saleh’s departure to another country could restore some needed credibility to the political process in Yemen.

Syria has seen some changes recently. The Head of Syria’s main opposition coalition, Mouaz Alkhatib, says he is ready to talk with representatives of President Bashar al-Assad’s government and for the first time has not made the pre- condition that Assad has to go.

Once upon a time, America was the Saudi Arabia of whale oil, the fuel of its day. Whale oil was displaced by hydrocarbon production, which the United States also dominated. That started changing with enormous geopolitical consequences after easy, high quality oil was found in the Arabian Peninsula and other parts of the Middle East. The United States built alliances with autocratic regimes as part of a commitment to satisfy its needs and preserve the free flow of oil, which became the life-blood of the global economy. For oil-rich countries, this brought enormous fortunes, but it also brought something known as the "resource curse." With wealth concentrated in the hands of autocrats, corruption mushroomed, and other sectors of the economy withered. A trend away from the concentration of oil production in such an unstable, undemocratic part of the world bodes well. It bodes well for human rights, and it also bodes well, ironically, for the economies of oil-rich countries, which may at long last find an incentive to diversify into other industries. It certainly bodes well for the U.S. economy, which is already creating tens of thousands of jobs in industries related to the new boom.