Leading up to the 2020 vote, Americans had mixed feelings about election integrity, with about 6 in 10 saying they did not trust the outcome to be fair. Rebuilding trust now looks like a high civic priority. Next in our series, “Democracy Under Strain.”

Despite the insurgent Taliban’s atrocities and their grim past rule, why do they still exert a real gravitational pull? A window into Afghanistan’s Wardak province, and the story of one jihadi.

A year of pandemic hardships has affected all ages, and in Colombia, citizens have come together in protest. Their frustrations could signal what’s to come across the region, as countries juggle a desperate need for austerity with citizens’ exhaustion.

NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson’s memoir offers a glimpse into how she found success amid the racism and sexism of her era. The Monitor spoke with one of her daughters, Joylette Goble Hylick, about her late mother’s outlook – and how she finally got to space.

How can having a childlike view of the world help the environment? Danish eco-artist Thomas Dambo combines a flair for recycling with a fairy-tale imagination to bring people worldwide closer to nature.

In the Middle East, where trusted mediators are hard to find, Egypt has received high praise for negotiating a truce Thursday between Israel and Hamas, ending 11 days of war that took the lives of hundreds of civilians.

Germany said Cairo was a “very, very important quantity” in the cease-fire. France said it was “absolutely key.” The United Nations commended Egypt, while President Joe Biden, who had been giving a cold shoulder to Egypt’s authoritarian ruler, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, finally called him Thursday. One U.S. official described Egypt as “the main game in town.”

Unlike neutral brokers such as those from the U.N., Egypt’s mediation between Israelis and Palestinians is driven largely by its own need for calm. It borders both Gaza and Israel and cannot afford spillover effects from the frequent wars between them. Egypt also needs good ties with Israel to continue massive financial aid from the U.S., and it wants to contain Gaza’s rulers, Hamas, who are allies of the Muslim Brotherhood, a political Islamic movement banned in Egypt.

Despite this self-interest, Egypt has over time developed better mediation skills, perhaps accounting for a shorter war between Israel and Hamas this time than the last one in 2014, which lasted seven weeks. Cairo has begun to mediate in other regional conflicts. Its envoys recently helped calm Libya’s conflict and have sought a role in Syria’s ongoing war. And it remains a mediator between the two main Palestinian factions: Fatah in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza.

As the world’s oldest country, Egypt has tried to make peace between Israel, which was created in 1948, and Palestine, a country that does not exist as a normal state. But it has been unable to bridge the ideological divide between them.

For all its faults in suppressing dissent at home, the Sisi regime in Cairo is one of the few governments in the region playing peacemaker. Oman and Iraq often play a similar role. Leaders in all three have adopted the mediator’s touch – listen first and then find common ground. Sometimes that results only in a truce, perhaps a temporary one, as with Israel and Hamas. But calm can be a good start for peace.