A picture’s worth a thousand words - we all know that - and when the picture is a map, it can serve as a powerful tool for making complex concepts easily comprehensible. And what concept is more complicated than the Middle East? Modern maps become dynamic when you mix in digital technology. Click to see timelapsed border changes ; or watch ethnic groups migrate across continents. Put down that dusty encyclopedia and step away from Google Earth - these amazing maps can switch on instant understanding of socio-political subtext, in ...
Last year’s Academy Award-winning film 12 Years a Slave powerfully depicts the horrors of human bondage, but we don’t need to dial back 100 years to unveil the sights and sounds of forced servitude - just turn on the news (or better yet, look around the neighborhood)! Weeks after 276 schoolgirls were kidnapped in Nigeria , the militant Islamist group Boko Haram claimed responsibility in a video in which leader Abubakar Shekau announced his plan to sell them. Yes, sell them! Making the girls the latest inductees to the modern-day ...
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you will have seen the alarming headlines about Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) , the deadly infection caused by the MERS-CoV coronavirus that’s raging through the region . The number of cases reported in April blew past the last two years' total number of incidents - with a shocking death rate tracking at 36%! What the heck is happening here? The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control said its global count of MERS cases in April hit 217, compared with 207 reported ...
He may have won the title of Hollywood’s perpetual bachelor but Clooney has clearly been biding his time for the right woman - and by jove is it Amal Alamuddin , Beirut-born and London-raised barrister and international human rights bad-ass! Oxford educated, internationally renowned for her skills as a lawyer and representing some of the biggest names in politics today, Amal is a true inspiration but she remains something of an enigma - the Lebanese-Brit-extraordinaire - in the global media as it grapples with the idea of Clooney being made ...
There’s a conga-line of celebrities parading through Syrian refugee camps - an incongruous mash-up of glamour with grit that has us debating the end results. Do celebrities trivialize good causes? Worse yet - do they jeopardize them? Or should we lighten up and see this as a brilliant way to keep critical causes in the public awareness ? The Syrian civil war may be the biggest humanitarian crisis of our time, with an estimated 9 million Syrians displaced from their homes since 2011. It’s logical that refugee settlements in Turkey ...