News that Siri Apple engineers are probably listening to your intimate conversations and acts through Siri is alarming. In a way many of us take the “who cares” approach to privacy because if we all share it, what do we have to lose? For most of us average people our lives are boring compared to […]
Sderot’s dusty streets and woeful aspect come naturally after enduring years of rocket attacks from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. In this Western Negev town in Israel, all bus stops are small bomb shelters. A traffic roundabout represents the town center, with a pizzeria, a stationary store, and some tired-looking clothing shops around it. The young, […]
World Food Day, commemorated on October 16 is an annual event whose purpose is to find ways to alleviate hunger and malnutrition in various parts of the world. Green Prophet was there.
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.
Turkey’s Taksim square protest flared up last week when police took drastic measures to clear activists from Gezi Park- slated for destruction to make way for yet another shopping center. But that’s not the only unsustainable project the government is pursuing in the name of economic growth. We list 5 of the major ones.
Activists warn that a planned highway in Beirut will ruin what little is left of the city’s remaining green and historic spaces at the same time that tens of thousands of people are swarming streets throughout Turkey following a violent government crackdown on Gezi Park protestors.
Corruption is black, brown, grey, devoid of color. And in Egypt, it can be seen in streets piled high with trash and polluted canals, in maddening traffic resulting from outdated infrastructure, and chronic power outages. Corruption is everywhere, yet this silent killer of hopes and dreams is hard to pin down. Not anymore. A band […]
Build a Better Rubber, They will Come? The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will grant $100k to the inventor of the next generation condom. Condoms have been around for 400 years, with very little improvements over the last 50 years, according to Grand Challenges in Global Health, a research foundation established by the Bill and […]
An American environmental activist who shone a piercing light on environmental negligence in Egypt, Mindy Baha el Din died suddenly last week after suffering a brain stroke, leaving behind a husband, two daughters and a large community of grieving eco-warriors. Born and raised in the United States, Mindy first moved to Egypt in 1988 and married […]
Making Ecocide a crime and legally punitive could be one way of getting corporations to respect the environment Unlike humans, nature does not have a voice. It cannot voice its concerns for being mistreated, overused and abused and it cannot stop the harm it often undergoes; however, this may change soon. In April 2010, Polly […]
Armed with knitting needles, Israelis and Palestinians are knitting for peace! The TikkunTree Project is a community knittivist art project dedicated to advocacy of peace between Israelis and Palestinians. This ambitious community art project is growing a tree, an enormous knitted tree whose fiber leaves and fruits and branches will shelter doves made of yarn: […]
A few thousand New Yorkers stripping down to their Calvin Kleins in January ..but how’s that behavior fly in a Middle Eastern city with a penchant for modesty? Jerusalem hopped aboard the annual No Pants Subway Ride this month, making January 13th, more precisely, Israel’s first No Pants Light Rail Ride. In case you don’t […]
One man’s efforts to prevent ecological disaster and to save Turkey’s birds is permanent ink tats on his arms. It was the close of the day for us birdwatchers at the Hula Valley Bird Festival in Israel. Our guides dropped us off where we were to dine, and while we waited, we talked to the “birders” – passionate […]
Friendship through sunflower seeds is still going to happen between Israelis and Palestinians, says artist Noam Edry who has organized a big sunflower seed chew off, called Seeds of Bliss. Edry refuses to let politics get in the way of her monumental sunflower seed peace effort. Even when politics translate into siren alerts. From her […]
Solar panels at the pyramids. In the past two years since a popular uprising ousted former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, the question of sustainability, energy and overall environmental awareness has been as evident as a clean street in Cairo. Basically, it has been nonexistent. Actually, it had been nonexistent until recently. Over the past few months, Egyptians have […]
New opportunity opens for the hearing-disabled in Gaza. About 1 percent of Gaza’s 1.6 million people suffer from total or near-total deafness. Their education is limited to the 9th grade. They must contend with a popular notion that deafness equals mental disability. The new Atfaluna restaurant near Gaza port provides income for a 12 deaf […]
The Israeli government may not be taking them very seriously, but a small bucket of social activists who colonized Rothschild Avenue last summer with tents, pop-up massage parlors and peace-preaching posters have yet to give in to the country’s growing income disparity. Refusing to pay exorbitant prices for shoebox apartments amid the city’s concrete lanes […]
Polluting Paradise, the latest film by Turkish-German director Fatih Akin, documents the disgusting damage caused by a garbage dump near the Black Sea village of Çamburnu. Ten years ago, Turkish government authorities decided to transform an abandoned copper mine in northeastern Turkey into the biggest landfill in the eastern Black Sea region. Despite promises that the waste […]
More than 200 cyclists took over the streets of Beirut Sunday demanding a sustainable public transportation system for Lebanon. Haunted by the pollution poisoning their city’s car-clogged roads, more than 200 cyclists took over Beirut last week Sunday in an effort to demand a revival of its once-decent public transportation system. The seven kilometer (5 […]
Jordan has recently signed on with a Canadian company to plunge the Kingdom into a giant pit of oil shale hell. The Memorandum of Understanding signed with Global Oil Shale Holdings (GOSH) is the fourth mega oil shale deal the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources has penned in order to free itself from fossil fuel imports […]
Among those sweet baby scents have lurked not so sweet ingredients like formaldehyde, claim activists. If there is a signature scent associated with babyhood, Johnson & Johnson’s baby shampoo could win that prize. It’s a longstanding favorite with parents around the globe and has been for decades. Though the consumer products giant shut down their […]
Summer’s in its last laps: a new school year’s looming. Green up the school day with 10 easy tips Wherever you live around the world, it’s probably time to start the school year at the end of the summer. Here are some tips to pass on to parents with kids. They’re also good for high-school […]
He asks hundreds of thousands of people around the world to strip for his cause, but when naked activist photographer Spencer Tunick returns to Israel to help “save the Dead Sea” he’ll be floating clothed. The award-winning photographer from the US travels the world, and asks volunteers to strip as naked subjects in his art […]
A classic and common piece of Americana holds links to a misunderstood culture. I found a bag of small yarn balls. I’d left it long ago at a friend’s house in New Jersey: my Amman-bound suitcase was fatter than the airline allowed. That bag was big, but the skeins of wool no larger than my […]
350.org proves that Egypt has an enormous reservoir of young and engaged people. Scientists have determined that to keep the climate stable the average concentration of CO2 in the sky should be limited to 350 ppm, compared to the 400 ppm that was reached in 2012. And while the science of climate change is solid, […]
