First posted May 13, 2016 NB: Etel Adnan, writer, poet, artist and musician was born in 1925 and raised in Beirut, Lebanon. Her mother was a Greek from Smyrna, her father, a high ranking Ottoman officer born in Damascus. This prose poem is the final chapter of her book In the Heart of the Heart of Another… Read More Etel Adnan: To Be In A Time Of War
Patrick Wintour When the climate crisis meets a failed state, the outcome is the kind of disaster that Libya is witnessing in Derna. Any city would have struggled with the extraordinary level of precipitation that Storm Daniel visited upon Libya’s northern coast. In its earlier, milder form, the storm caused severe damage in Greece before it crossed the Mediterranean.… Read More Libya’s floods are result of climate crisis meeting a failed state
Tamir Pardo comments, slammed by ruling Likud party, carry weight because of high regard for intelligence agency in Israel Chris McGreal A former head of the Mossad intelligence agency has said Israel is imposing a form of apartheid on the Palestinians, joining a growing number of prominent Israelis to compare the occupation of the West Bank to… Read More Israel imposing apartheid on Palestinians, says former Mossad chief
Saudi border guards are accused of the mass killing of migrants along the Yemeni border in a new report by Human Rights Watch. By Paul Adams The report says hundreds of people, many of them Ethiopians who cross war-torn Yemen to reach Saudi Arabia, have been shot dead. Migrants have told the BBC they had… Read More Hundreds of migrants killed by Saudi border guards – report
The transfer of more than 1 million barrels of oil from an ageing tanker moored off the coast of war-torn Yemen has been completed, avoiding an environmental disaster, the UN has said. In a statement on Friday, Farhan Haq, the deputy spokesperson for UN secretary general António Guterres, said the operation had prevented a “monumental environmental and… Read More Yemen: UN removes 1m barrels of oil from tanker to avert environmental catastrophe
The deadly effects of ideological extremism in the Middle East for the past few decades have caused governments and journalists to focus on it. The Arabic word is al-taṭarruf. I was interested, however, to see the word put to a different purpose in a Sky News Arabia article , where it is used to refer to extremely high… Read More Climate Change: the New Mideast Extremism / Severe Consequences of new Oil, Gas and Coal Production
By Orla Guerin If suffering had an address, it might be al-Rasheed Street, in Taiz, a Yemeni city ringed by mountains and rebel Houthi fighters. On this narrow street of rough-hewn homes, the young can’t escape a grinding conflict the world tends to forget. Bader lost part of his right leg after being hit by… Read More Yemen: The children of a forgotten war
By Joe Hernandez; Daniel Estrin Israeli lawmakers on Monday approved controversial changes to the judiciary, part of a package of proposed actions that’s roiled the country in protests in recent months and sparked opposition from broad swaths of Israeli society. The vote in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, capped a monthslong campaign by Israel’s far-right government to… Read More Israeli lawmakers pass a key law to weaken the judiciary despite public outrage
Louise Pryke For over 3,000 years, cuneiform was the primary language of communication throughout the Ancient Near East (roughly corresponding to the Middle East today) and into parts of the Mediterranean. The dominance of the cuneiform writing style in antiquity has led scholars to refer to it as “the script of the first half of the known… Read More The recovery of cuneiform, the world’s oldest known writing
Juan Cole / TomDispatch In early April 2003, as American forces sought to wrap up their conquest of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, and take strongholds to its north, the Marine Corps formed “Task Force Tripoli.” It was commanded by General John F. Kelly (who would later serve as Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff).… Read More America’s War for Oil and the Great Mesopotamian Dustbowl
After the truth-shower 