![Step back Amazon drones, Amazon rockets will deliver packages in 5 minutes or less [video]](https://www.greenprophet.com/wp-content/uploads/Amazon-Rockets.png "Step back Amazon drones, Amazon rockets will deliver packages in 5 minutes or less [video]")
Amazon’s drones are expected to deliver packages within 30 minutes, but they’ll also clog the skies, make a terrible noise, and encourage even more excessive consumerism. Zach King’s hilarious spoof video explores the issues with Amazon rockets that will “deliver packages in five minutes or less.”
Some good news out of the Middle East region for a change: It was announced at the Israel Business Forum that Israel has signed an historic water-sharing agreement with Jordan and the Palestinian Authority. But not all parties are happy with political manoeuvrings around the announcement.
The good news is that 800 tons of Syria’s chemical weapons are scheduled to be destroyed before the end of December. The bad news is, the byproducts of this chemical weapon destruction will be dumped into the Mediterranean Sea where they could damage fragile ecosystems.
![Palestinians make epic Volvo “Split” video to highlight Gaza energy crisis [video]](https://www.greenprophet.com/wp-content/uploads/gaza-split-van-damme-video-energy-768x438.jpg "Palestinians make epic Volvo “Split” video to highlight Gaza energy crisis [video]")
You’ve probably seen the Volvo video where a zen-looking Jean Claude van Damme does the splits. Now in a hilarious parody from the Gaza Strip, Tashwesh Productions does a low-scale production to highlight the Gaza energy crisis. Watch this video below and share it with all your friends!
Want to get close to Iraqi food traditions and culture? This cook book is for you. Lyrical memoirs of Nawal Nasrallah’s childhood in Iraq, and the place that food had in that culture, drift through the pages, pausing for sidebars that offer tidbits like four paragraphs on ancient wives in ancient kitchens.
Or samples from a tenth-century cookbook. Or amusing little line drawings, or a page on an abandoned Jewish delicacy made from cattail reed pollen.
After a scholarly introduction the recipes begin on Chapter One, Bread. It’s studded with proverbs, folk songs, photographs, drawings, and transcriptions of ancient documents relating to food. Can you resist a recipe for a bread called Lover’s Window? Its sweet, sesame-sprinkled bread whose dough is stretched out in the middle to make holes that you can peer through.
And that’s only the first chapter. The second, dealing with dairy products, includes a modern recipe for Geymer, a thick clotted cream, with a folk song comparing a lover’s white cheeks to it. In all, there are 20 chapters that cover vegetables, salads, snacks, sandwiches, side dishes, meat main dishes, stuffed foods (where the emphasis is on kubba), fish, poultry, grains and beans. savory pastries, every kind of sweet, and beverages. One chapter is dedicated to rice alone.
It’s easy to see that the author has tested and cooked every recipe herself. Tips and hints are attached to the recipes, that can only have come from her kitchen experience. The photographs aren’t gorgeous, but more than adequate to express appetizing foods like baked fish stuffed with za’atar and sumac. From simple peasant food like the combination of rice and lentils known as majadra, to a sumptuous, entire lamb stuffed with almonds, rice, raisins, peas and spices, this cookbook will keep the creative cook busy for at least a year, if one chooses to cook everything in it.
The great thing about all this delicious exotic cooking is that almost always, ingredients are easily found. Most are already in your pantry. Some ingredients may have to be especially shopped for, like tamarind concentrate or sumac, but if you enjoy browsing through Middle East markets, that’s just part of the fun.
At the end of the book are sections on menus (including pages on historical table manners and hygiene), an excellent glossary and recipe index, a bibliography, and separate indexes covering ancient, medieval, and Ottoman foods and ingredients, plus a name and subject index. This book is a treasure. It’s just a matter of parking it somewhere in your kitchen where you can flip it open and go on to cook the next mouthwatering recipe.
A Cookbook and History of the Iraqi Cuisine is the sub-title of this food encyclopedia.
Ms. Nasrallah was a professor of English and Comparative Literature at the universities of Baghdad and Mosul. Her English translation of the 10th-century Annals of the Caliph’s Kitchens and Delights From The Garden of Eden have won Gourmand World Cookbook Awards in 2007. We reviewed her book Dates here on Green Prophet.
Delights From The Garden of Eden: a cookbook and history of the Iraqi cuisine.
Equinox Publishing Ltd.
ISBN 978-1-84553-457-8.
574 pages.
You can order Ms. Nasrallah’s books online here.
Recipes from Nawal Nasrallah:
The environmentalists trying to protect the birds might not be happy, but as Turkey continues to be the address for investments for some of the world’s largest mega companies, General Electric takes the lead in wind.
I founded Green Prophet because I truly believe that the people of the prophets – the monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam can see eye to eye in the Middle East when we talk about shared environmental problems and solutions.
Me and my family stayed at the Fauzi Azar Inn in Nazareth last year. Normally tourists, even backpackers don’t put Nazareth top on the list for visits. Somewhere between hostel, hotel and your best friend’s secret the Fauzi Azar Inn is changing the way people see Nazareth and the Israeli peace process.
A new research paper proves it. 
Until the Fauzi Azar Inn opened in Nazareth in 2005, there were no real attractive options for staying in the predominantly Muslim city with a rich Christian background and legacy which continues to modern times.
The Old City and Arab market (read about Green Prophet’s visit here), once an attractive market and home for many became decrepit and unvisited by the early 2000s. Nazareth’s once glorious Old City, not unlike the cobblestone paths in the Old City of Jerusalem, Akko (Acre) and Jaffa, was dangerous and avoided at all cost.
This is what Souraida (pictured left), the granddaughter of Fauzi Azar told me when I stayed at the Fauzi Azar Inn with my parents and small family. She gives free talks about the inn on a regular basis. She talks about her family, and their dreams for peace. The 200 year old home belonged to her family and grandfather Fauzi Azar.
An Israeli Jew named Maoz Inon had an idea –– to turn the old crumbling property once belonging to her grandfather into a stunning hostel, one that was affordable for backpackers and mid-range travellers.
After some convincing the idea came into being and against all odds, including pressures from her family and friends. The Fauzi Azar Inn is now a beacon that points the way as to how sustainable tourism, between partners however unlikely, can change a neighborhood and create peace.
New research on the Inn shows how one small idea can transform the peace process in a big way.
In the study, researchers from Israel and Sweden argue they argue that bottom up tourism, like the approach being offered at the Fauzi Azar Inn is a good model for uniting people with shared cultural interests.
A shop in the Old Market today: Fahoum Coffee, for the best coffee in Israel:
The study is being presented by Prof. Daniel Laven, Department of Tourism Studies and Geography, Mid Sweden University, Sweden and Alon Gelbman from the Department of Tourism and Hospitality Management, Kinneret College on the Sea of Galilee, Israel.
“One hostel drove a change in a city recovering from conflicts,” the paper explains. The paper will be presented next week at an academic conference in Tiberias.
Courtyard of Fauzi Azar Inn at night, in winter
As for staying at the Fauzi Azar Inn: even in winter the facilities provide ample heating to keep you cozy at night. The beds aren’t fancy and there is even a dorm option for the budget traveller but the company and food is magnificent. We also highly recommend the free market tour, usually occurring every day, and eating at the local restaurants made into stars thanks to the Inn.
Nazareth plays a starring role around this time of the year, at Christmas, when there are religious events and festivities put on by the local Christians and Catholics. Nazareth was the boyhood home of Jesus, according to the New Testament.
It is the largest Arab city in Israel, with 80,000 people. And its heritage is unmatched by few. Archeological excavations show the city is very important for Christians.
Up top in the morning:
Before the hostel turned things around ongoing conflict, crises and lack of planning killed the Old City.
Nazareth’s heritage sites remained in neglect. Seeing its potential, in 2005 the Israeli Jew Inon decided to turn one property around and since it has transformed the city in many ways.
Lonely Planet lists it as a highlights of the Galilee region.
I love the constantly cooking cookies in the stove, the tea on the burner and the feeling that I’d come to meet some old friends during my stay at the Fauzi Azar Inn. I also got to learn the narrative of some Israeli Arabs who are often misunderstood as waves of gentrification flow over Israel’s ancient cities.
Want to support the peace process in the Middle East? Get out of your comfort zone this holiday season and escape commercialism and visit Nazareth, the ancestral home to the Christian religion. It will probably go down in history books for the place that started Middle East peace. Just maybe. Backpacker Becki is doing it, why not you?
Following a United Nations bill that Israel had proposed last week to allow a smoother flow of agricultural technologies into the developing world, Israel is now launching the what it is calling the Facebook or Wikipedia of agricultural technologies.
You’ve probably seen the video of Amazon’s Prime Air delivering a customer’s goods within 30 minutes. If not, catch it below.
Just as the news broke last week I was taking my kid to a park in Jaffa, Israel and saw a local guy test running what appeared to be a drone that looked just like the above.
He quickly put it away when 20 toddlers started running towards him. In my social networks we started asking around asking if there is an Israeli link to the Amazon Prime drone. A number of Israeli military companies are developing drones (like Bynet) but there was no link to Amazon, said a rep there.
We know that drones typically have a bad rap because they are being developed for military purposes. But beyond that bad rap, drones could have life saving and green implications too.
Made electric or to run on a solar charge, drones can help you “pick up” small items that would otherwise need a trip out to collect. They could help monitor large tracts of real estate so that illegal bird poachers, dolphin raiders, and seal killers can get their day in court.
We know that the latest Amazon Prime Air drone is being hyped up for Christmas, a holiday not widely celebrated in the Middle East. But those experimental “octocopter” drones being made by Amazon could be commercial in as little as four years says Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos.
“I know this looks like science fiction, it’s not,” says Bezos in an interview with Charlie Rose on 60 Minutes.
A: It looks like science fiction, but it’s real. From a technology point of view, we’ll be ready to enter commercial operations as soon as the necessary regulations are in place. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is actively working on rules for unmanned aerial vehicles.
A: Yes. One day, Prime Air vehicles will be as normal as seeing mail trucks on the road today.
A: We hope the FAA’s rules will be in place as early as sometime in 2015. We will be ready at that time.
A: The FAA is actively working on rules and an approach for unmanned aerial vehicles that will prioritize public safety. Safety will be our top priority, and our vehicles will be built with multiple redundancies and designed to commercial aviation standards.
Able to carry up to five pounds and deliver within a ten mile radius of an Amazon outlet, these kinds of delivery trucks could be as normal as mail carriers. If you still have those in your neighborhood.
![Hyperloop, Elon Musk dreams of a fifth mode of transportation [video]](https://www.greenprophet.com/wp-content/uploads/hyperloop-transportation-technologies-development-stealth-01.jpg "Hyperloop, Elon Musk dreams of a fifth mode of transportation [video]")
Elon Musk is known as the founder of SpaceX, a pioneer in the commercialization of space travel and Tesla, a company named after a brilliantly mad high-voltage inventor of the nineteenth century and known for its electric cars. So what happens when this visionary sets his eyes on America’s decaying public transportation infrastructure?
Birds have a terrible time in the Middle East and North Africa. We’ve seen men posing with a bonnet full of dead ones, one million migrating songbirds killed for a pickled dish, and other horror stories.
EnviroMission’s unique solar energy generation technology is picking up steam and the Middle East will be one of the first regions to give the technology a fair chance to succeed.
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