MIDDLE EAST

On Saturday, a security official and state news agency “MENA ” said that  A powerful explosion in Cairo occurred in front of the Italian consulate and cultural center  in the downtown . The  loud blast was heard by residents of many districts in Cairo. The security official said that a car bomb caused the blast. And still there no immediate claim of responsibility …

On Thursday, the UNHCR released its latest report ” The UNHCR’s annual Global Trends Report: World at War”.  it said that worldwide displacement was at the highest level ever recorded. And the number of people who forced to displaced at 2014 rose to 59.5 million compared to 51.2 million a year earlier. It also showed that over half the world’s …

Attack on Gaza last year raises pressure on Ban Ki-moon to put Israeli army on same list as Islamic State and Taliban By Jonathan Cook Palestinian solidarity groups have taken to social media to step up the pressure on United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to include Israel for the first time on a “shame list” of serious violators of children’s …

Written by Felicia Campbell Photography & video by Celia Peterson- Aramco Magazine Inside every gilded lily of luxury in Dubai’s 21st-century garden of urban delights, from eye-candy skyscrapers to seven-stars this and that, there are, of course, people who work. Lots of them. They load and unload, carry, build, clean, repair and polish, and, no less than members of more …

Whereabouts Unknown for More Than 75 Held After Protests HRW (New York) – Iran’s intelligence and security forces have rounded up and detained scores of Ahwazi Arabs, including several children, in what appears to be an escalating crackdown in Iran’s Khuzestan province, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch said today. According to activists and family members, many arrests took place …

By Jonathan Cook Academia is far from the bastion of free thinking and free speech it would like to claim for itself, as a newly confected “row” involving the leading medical journal The Lancet confirms. Recently Southampton University in the UK caved in on hosting an important conference examining Israel and international law, following an intensive campaign of intimidation from Israeli apologists. Now some 400 medical …

Out of School, Doing Risky Work for Low Pay – HRW (Jerusalem) – Israeli settlement farms in the West Bank are using Palestinian child labor to grow, harvest, and pack agricultural produce, much of it for export, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. The farms pay the children low wages and subject them to dangerous working conditions …

By Jonathan Cook For many months now, the western media has presented the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in terms of a new and deepening rift. Israel is supposedly positioned on one side of the divide and the US and Europeans on the other, trying as best they can to defend Palestinian rights. In the past few days alone, European diplomats have leaked …

By Ramzy Baroud To suggest that the United States policies in Yemen was a ‘failure’ is an understatement. It implies that the US had at least attempted to succeed. But ‘succeed’ at what? The US drone war had no other objective aside from celebrating the elimination of whomever the US hit list designates as terrorist. But now that a civil …

By Ramzy Baroud Waiting on Israeli society to change from within is a colossal waste of time, during which the suffering of an entire nation – torn between an occupied home and a harsh diaspora – will not cease. But what are Palestinians and the supporters of a just peace in Palestine and Israel to do? Plenty. Those who counted …