It takes a special man to carry off a skirt. In Iran, a growing group of Kurdish guys are rocking girly frocks to promote a serious message: being a woman is nothing to laugh at.
It began when a convicted domestic abuser was sentenced to parade around town dressed in traditional Kurdish women’s clothing.
A young Israeli man has renovated and transformed a disused public transport bus into a double story apartment that even boasts a penthouse guest room and basement. This is the second such bus conversion we’ve seen in Israel recently, a trend that kicks dust in the face of high rent prices.
Watch your step, kibbutzniks and spa-mavens! Diminishing water levels in the Dead Sea are causing changes to surrounding groundwater flows. Freshwater moves through the aquifer, dissolving subterranean salt deposits and creating underground voids, which cause surface collapse. Dramatic and unpredictable, sinkholes appear at the alarming rate of nearly one a day.
First observed around the Dead Sea in the 1980s, geologist Eli Raz estimates that today there are over 3,000 on the Israeli side alone. “Sinkholes are caused by human irresponsibility,” he told Slate Magazine, “For more than 30 years, I’ve been trying to warn everyone—especially government officials—that if we don’t do something about the situation in the Dead Sea, the sinkholes will swallow us up.”
The Dead Sea (which is technically a lake fed by the Jordan River) spans more than 60 miles. Its shorelines include Jordan, the West Bank, and Israel. Located 1,388 feet below sea level, it’s the lowest place on earth, and with no outlet for minerals deposited over millennia, its waters have become ten times saltier than the north Atlantic.
In the past half century, the populations of Jordan, Israel, and the Palestinian territories have ballooned from 5 million to over 20 million. Along with Syria and Lebanon, these thirsty nations pull water from the Jordan River and its tributaries, cutting flow to the Dead Sea to less than 26 billion gallons per year compared to 343 billion gallons a century back.
Next, factor in Dead Sea industries like the Israel Chemicals Company and the Jordanian Arab Potash Company. To support their mineral extraction processes, these companies extract enormous volumes of seawater, accounting for about 40% of the water level decrease.
As a result, the Dead Sea is shrinking over three feet a year and receding from the shore at an even greater clip. There are loads of videos to be found online showing the changes: the one below is short, vivid, and refreshingly void of conspiracy theories and New Age prophecy:
[youtube]http://youtu.be/3x2JlBctc7Y[/youtube]
Several nations have jurisdictions over the Sea, so remedies are fraught with international complexity. Ongoing debate undermines action. And doing nothing is the worst alternative of all.
Signs in Hebrew, English, and Arabic warn to beware of sinkholes. Raz laughs, “How can you be careful? No one knows where the next one will open up. It’s only a matter of time until we have to leave this entire area.”
To date, no one has yet died in an Israeli sinkhole, but there have been serious injuries. Sinkholes are a direct threat to agriculture and tourism, the main livelihoods of the kibbutzim and entire Dead Sea region. Jordan is also investing heavily in regional tourism, and the Palestinians plan to develop resorts in their future state.
The unique Dead Sea natural habitat is also at risk as the surrounding ecosystem includes spring-fed oases that support a rich range of plant and animal wildlife.
How can an environmental catastrophe be averted? One possibility is a World Bank plan to replenish the Dead Sea with water from the Red Sea. Environmentalists warn that the ecological effects of the long-touted Red-Dead project might drive the nail in the sea’s coffin.
Raz prefers to see the Dead Sea’s problems solved by rehabilitating the Jordan River and utilizing desalination to supply water to Israel’s densely populated Mediterranean coast. But something must be done, and done now.
“Water should not be a reason for conflict—there isn’t enough to argue about, certainly not in the Dead Sea basin. Water should be the reason for smart, regional cooperation.” says Raz, “There’s an expression from the army: ‘If we can’t hang onto each other, we’ll be hung next to each other.’ But no one seems to get it.”
Circling around the news is something that may violate human rights in the Middle East, pointing out just how bad it might be for gays living in these countries: some Arab states are looking to develop a “gay” test to bar gay travelers from entry.
It is illegal to be gay in 78 countries around the world, but in five countries –– three of which are in the Middle East (Iran, Saudi Arabia and Yemen) –– it is punishable by death.
There are no clear scientific guidelines on how Kuwait, the country to come up with the idea, will in fact use and meter out the test proposed for a number of interested countries.
But the intended test is for entry to Kuwait or any of the Gulf Cooperation Countries (GCC). The GCC includes of Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.
Yousouf Mindkar, director of public health at the Kuwaiti health ministry, said that the routine clinical screening of expatriates coming into the GCC will include tests to identify LGBT people who will then be banned from entering the country.
Mindkar says he has the technology to “detect” gays and prevent them from coming across the GCC borders. The plan will emerge in all its detail on November 11 when the Gulf Cooperation Countries committee convene.
“Health centres conduct the routine medical check to assess the health of the expatriates when they come into the GCC countries,” he told local daily Al Rai. “However, we will take stricter measures that will help us detect gays who will be then barred from entering Kuwait or any of the GCC member states.”
We can presume that this proposed “gaydar” test is meant to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS and other communicable diseases from entering those conservative states and countries? Some gay “scenes” may also be associated with illicit activities that detract marry-able people from getting married and having kids. But straight people can act just as naughty!
We have received a personal email recently from an Indian national denied entry into the UAE for suspected TB scars. This lawyer accused the UAE of gross human rights violations.
While it is important for countries to try and keep communicable diseases in check (think about the MERS virus), diseases that “gays” get actually affect all humans.
Any ideas on what kind of factors would be included in the gay test? Will it be a lie detector, some hair-brained blood test or a the way a guy or girl talks or walks?
I suggest these same countries start working on testing air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, human rights standards at home, marine effluents and general poisons going into the environment.
Gays, at least the ones I know, are usually progressive thinkers in these areas: they are often the first to fight for the unjust when it comes to human and animal rights. They are among the world’s best artists and lead the way in veganism.
Meanwhile, gay travellers can find a very warm welcome in Tel Aviv, Israel, and while it is frowned upon in Turkey, gay travellers reportedly do not have problems there. I met a gay male traveller when I was staying in the Kasbah du Toubkal in Morocco though he was single at the time. But he seemed pretty at ease with being in Morocco.It seems to be hard, by these accounts, to be gay in Cairo. Dubai seems pretty friendly by far out of all Middle Eastern Arabian cities.
Oh, and if we have enough problems on our hands wondering if the FIFA 2020 World Cup should be in Qatar’s winter or summer, people from the LGBT in the UK are proposing an outright boycott.
I think some input and dialogue from locals who live in the GCC is worth considering before big boycotts are discussed.
My mom told me about a time when she travelled to Florida when it was illegal for blacks to be on certain buses and beaches there, and that was only about 40 years ago. Why am I saying this? The Gulf countries may need a little time catching up to what the western world thinks about sexuality and how one should choose to celebrate their personal choices.
Instead of a boycott, how about some (green) travel to the GCC countries to support the gay men and women there? Come November, see if you can pass the test.
A group of friends from Tel Aviv got so tired of lugging enormous locks to foil would-be bicycle thieves that they got together to design what may be the world’s only fashionable solution: the Foldylock.
The smirky little ram gracing billboards across Amman, Jordan is the face of Tkiyet Um Ali, an organization launched in 2006 by Jordan’s Princess Haya Al-Hussein in memory of her mother, the late Queen Alia, who conceived this project to (literally) cater to the needy.
Can’t find a couch to surf? Too broke for Air BNB? No need to cancel your travel plans, just lace up a pair of Walking-Shelter sneakers and hit the road.
It’s something we can’t avoid as human beings: we begin as naked embryos that go through stages of gestation. We emerge naked, until clothed.
Multiple sclerosis is an inflammatory disease in which the immune system attacks the nervous system. The result can be a wide range of debilitating motor, physical, and mental problems. But smoking a spliff might decrease this inflammation, scientists from Israel find.
Public health officials in the Gulf states are playing down fears about an outbreak of the deadly MERS coronavirus among pilgrims travelling to the Hajj in Saudi Arabia this month, though doctors are advising the elderly, people with existing health conditions, pregnant women and young children to stay away.
When Israeli soldiers killed her son Bassem in 2009, Sabiha Abu Rahman faced the impossible task of being alive without him. She has since turned her grief into balm with a beautiful garden full of repurposed tear gas grenades.
Digital developments are lessening reliance on traditional architecture. The internet enables us to dine in “restaurants” and sleep in “hotels” that are actually ordinary people’s homes. Our retail therapy is increasingly conducted online in virtual stores. And now a nutty little website is muscling out conventional places of worship.
If someone offered you camel bourguignon or a camel-burger on a gold-leaf bun, would you think they were kidding? We offered you an affordable recipe for camel burgers in this post. Now The Daily Star reports that in the Abu Dhabi Emirates Palace Hotel, the humble camel has been elevated into the new ulra-gourmet meat.
British photographer Mishka Henner has produced some disturbing aerial images of cattle feedlots in Texas, composed of hundreds of high-resolution satellite images stitched together into large format prints. This could be the final push to put me off meat.
Artist Pedro Reyes is waging a war on weapons, transforming guns into musical instruments and constructing a fully mechanized orchestra. In collaboration with Cocolab, a media studio in Mexico City, and in concert with an electronic music producer and other musicians, he built eight fully functional new “instruments”.
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