Étiqueté : years

One family, three ladies people, 70 years in exile 0

One family, three ladies people, 70 years in exile

Beirut, Lebanon – On a June morning in 1982, Leila Balqees joined her amputee father to watch the news on TV, as he did every day. For Leila, who was 17 and engaged at the time, that day had started out just like any other in Burj Barajneh, a cramped Palestinian refugee camp on the…

Nakba – 70 years of catastrophe 0

Nakba – 70 years of catastrophe

Nakba Day is when Palestinians commemorate the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian cities and towns by Zionist paramilitaries in 1948. Annual protests marking the Nakba, or « catastrophe », when the state of Israel was established on May 15, 1948, took place across the occupied territories on Tuesday. About 750,000 people were forcibly expelled from historical Palestine. Rallies,…

Lebanon holds general election for first time in 9 years 0

Lebanon holds general election for first time in 9 years

Polls have opened in Lebanon, kicking off the country’s first parliamentary elections in nearly a decade. Sunday’s vote sees 583 candidates compete for the 128 seats in parliament through 77 rival lists, spread across 15 districts. Under the terms of a new electoral law that introduced proportional representation, voters will be casting two votes; one…

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Where is Northern Eire, two decades later?

The new Northern Ireland is a surprising place. An hour’s drive north of Belfast, we find hundreds of tourists – from the US, China and elsewhere, taking selfies in an avenue of beech trees. This place is known as « the Dark Hedges », and the trees, with their twisting silvery branches, are indeed striking. But the…

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A Kashmiri poet loses 30 years of work in gun battle

Srinagar, Indian-administered Kashmir – From his neighbour’s house, Ghulam Muhammad Bhat watched his house turn to ashes. Three decades of Bhat’s poetic work was consumed by the flames during a two-day long gun battle between rebels and Indian armed forces at Balhama village of Indian-administered Kashmir. Bhatt, 52, a popular Kashmiri poet, is still in…

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Yemen’s skies of fear: Three years of struggle in Yemen

The war in Yemen has entered its fourth year. The campaign by the Saudi-led coalition against the Houthi rebels has seen more than 16,633 air raids launched across the country since March 26, 2015. The attacks have devastated Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the Middle East. « My parents and all three sisters were killed by an air strike…

First Iraqi-made film in 25 years in cinemas 0

First Iraqi-made film in 25 years in cinemas

Iraq’s cinema industry is making a comeback after years of conflict, with the first Iraqi-made film in a quarter of a century playing in theatres. Journey, which tells the story of an Iraqi woman struggling under conflict and sectarian violence, premiered in the capital, Baghdad, earlier this month. Mohammed al-Daraji, the film’s director and producer,…

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Syria war: Seven years on and not using a result in inspect

The Syrian civil war has entered its eighth year with more than 465,000 Syrians killed in the fighting and half of the country’s pre-war population displaced from their homes. On March 15, 2011, peaceful protests erupted in Syria following successful Arab Spring uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt that toppled authoritarian presidents. The peaceful protests descended…

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From Palestine to Fiji, untold flu tales a hundred years on

« I had a little bird, its name was Enza. I opened the window and in-flu-enza. » Almost like the creepy theme tune to a horror film, the rhyme above became a common refrain for young girls as they played and jumped rope in 1918 – when the Spanish flu began its deadly global rampage. The 1918 -…