Noticeable Changes

Ahmad's first day of school was in 1991 during the first Palestinian intifada. Then six years old and living in the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun, Ahmad was a good student who enjoyed school. He worked hard and was always the first in his year. However, he was to have a different attitude towards education as frequent Israeli violence made completin […]

Tareq Abu Daya, owner of a popular souvenir shop in the heart of Gaza City, has recently offered his customers a new kuffiyeh, or traditional checkered scarf, on which the name of Judge Richard Goldstone is inscribed. "When the famous UN report of Judge Richard Goldstone was first made public, I thought of something that would be in honor of such a sign […]

Mohammed Ahmed Issa Yassen, 20, lives in the occupied West Bank village of Bilin, where he works in his family's car garage business as a mechanic. He is also a student at the al-Quds Open University, but since he has joined the Israeli intelligence's "wanted" list from the village, studying has been difficult. The Electronic Intifada con […]

My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness bills itself as "A Poet's Life in the Palestinian Century." To better understand Adina Hoffman's biography of the Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali, however, consider it: "A Palestinian Century in a Poet's Life." But this syntactical slip doesn't discredit Hoffman's wor […]

On Wednesday, 11 November, more than 200 persons packed into La Sala Rossa, a slightly operatic Montreal venue, as part of the ongoing concert series "Artists Against Apartheid," which is held in solidarity with the call from Palestinian civil society for boycott, divestment and sanctions from Israeli apartheid and is organized by Tadamon!, a Montr […]

Directed by Alberto Arce and Mohammed Rjuailah, To Shoot an Elephant is a documentary film that offers an eyewitness account from the Gaza Strip during Israel's assault last winter. During the attacks, when the Israeli military banned foreign journalists from entering the Strip, Arce managed to stay inside Gaza and filmed how medical teams and hospitals […]

Since the end of August, construction equipment in the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr al-Bared, near the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli, has stood unused after the Lebanese State Council granted a two month moratorium for the reconstruction of the camp. Nahr al-Bared, home to approximately 30,000 refugees, was destroyed during a three-month-long battle […]

BEIRUT (IRIN) - The politics of the Israeli-occupied Shebaa Farms, a rugged sliver of mountainside wedged between Lebanon, Israel and Syria, have long overshadowed what some Lebanese environmentalists call "the real issue" of the disputed area: its water resources. Now activists are calling for hydro-diplomacy to take precedence over political mane […]

Nostalgia, insists architect and academic Rami Daher, is a legitimate feeling. While most individuals' instinctive thoughts of the glories of Levantine architecture might run to ancient mosques, castles and palaces, Daher's yearning is towards an era in living memory, and on a more everyday scale. Sarah Irving reports for Electronic Lebanon. […]

“It’s a great pleasure to introduce to you our latest project: Israelis for Palestine. This has been in the works since the beginning of October and we’re happy to finally be launching it, despite the fact that it’s still very much in its early stages,” writes Bahraini Esra'a on Mideast Youth.

In Gaza, the members of the Qattan Foundation Reading Club were recently introduced to the Kindle, and photos have been posted on the club's blog [Ar].

During Israel's attacks on Gaza in January 2009, bloggers and Twitter users took the place of the media, which had been banned from entering, reporting on each event well before mainstream publications. Today, a user raises the alarm saying Israel has just bombed Rafah and Khan Younis.

Shanghai human rights activist Feng Zhenhu has been living and waiting in the hall of Japan's Narita airport since November 4 when he was barred from entering his own country by the Shanghai immigration the eighth times. Feng is an economist and a human rights activist. After the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989, he openly criticized [...]

Sylwia Presley reviews the reactions of Polish bloggers to a recent proposal by a Polish Catholic group to include the symbol of the cross in the national coat of arms.

Barbados Underground suggests that the doctor who examined the minor brutalised by Guyana police “was complicit in the torture…the concealment of a crime against humanity and…he possibly committed obstruction of justice.”

Winter is yet to arrive in much of Europe, but one of its geopolitical attributes is already back in the spotlight: fears of disruptions of Russian gas deliveries are growing more intense, due to the recurring dispute between Russia and Ukraine. Politics aside, though, in some of Russia's regions winter has been there since early fall. In Yakutia, for e […]

Can ICT truly preserve and protect distinct identities and culture? The cultural debate surrounding deployment of ICT in the field of indigenous/ knowledge and culture simply refuses to die down.

In eastern Paraguay, 217 members of the Ava Guaraní indigenous community came down with health symptoms, believed to be caused by intentional aerial spraying with pesticide, after refusal to vacate their ancestral lands.