The Egyptian Crucible

The Mediterranean Crucible

Cities are the crucible of civilization.

The crucible is for silver, and the furnace for gold but man is refined by his praise.

The crucible is for silver, and the furnace for gold but man is refined by his praise.

This increase in life expectancy is the remarkable product of culture the crucible that holds science and technology and wide scale changes in behavior that improve health and well being.

This is very, very important because this is the system, this is the crucible, out of which life on the planet came, and it's now time for us to understand it.

The US media and government focus their rhetoric on the possibility of Pakistan s nuclear arsenal falling into Taliban hands. The other obvious Western concern recently expressed by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is the threat of a crucible of terrorism in the border areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan endangering world security.

The Syrian opposition, a crucible of widely different groups and currents including Al Qaeda will most likely become even more radical following Morsi s ouster. For Hamas, strongly linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, the coup means losing Egypt s support, which also implies that Israel is one of the countries that stand to benefit the most from the coup.

Syria, which at first seemed to be just another instance of internal change, has spawned a civil war that has spread beyond the country s borders, affecting all of its neighbors. In historical terms, the Syrian crisis, not the Arab Spring, will most likely be regarded as the Middle East s seminal event in this decade and the crucible of the region s future.