Lebanon is the #1 participant in Earth Day
If you’re in Lebanon, picture this: all those days you were sitting in the dark, eagerly waiting for the clock to strike noon so you can plug your phone in, charge your laptop, watch some television, and turn the water heater on - you were participating in Earth Day!
With an average of three hours of power cuts in Beirut and up to twelve hours across different areas on a daily basis, we say to Mother Earth: "you’re welcome.”
Continue reading on Beirut.com
Languages of a stateless nation
Focused on the steaming plate of rice and liver in front of me, some five minutes went by before I noticed the religious silence that had descended onto the restaurant. The garson, cooks and customers, like millions of people all around the country, had turned all of their attention to the TV in the upper right corner of the room, listening to every word of Barzani’s speech – or rather to the instantaneous translation. Like their ethnically Turkish compatriots, the Kurds of Turkey had to listen carefully to the Turkish translation in order to follow the speech of the Kurdish leader.
I wondered why Kurdish people, watching a known Kurdish TV channel, would follow a speech by one of the most famous Kurdish leaders, who was speaking about the need to respect Kurdish culture, in Turkish?
Continue reading on Mashallah News
The hidden treasures of Gaza
A small room on a rooftop in the occupied Gaza Strip’s crowded Beach refugee camp resembles a miniature archaeological museum.
It is the workshop of Nafez Abed, 55, who studies archaeological artifacts in order to replicate them in exquisite detail.
Abed copies antiquities photographed in history books and ones he’s seen during visits to archaeological sites across Gaza, which many a civilization has passed through, as well as in other Arab countries and Europe.
Continue reading on Electronic Intifada
