Horse bite victim faces 5 years in UAE jail for requesting unpaid wages
American Nichole Coffel is facing a possible jail term in Abu Dhabi because she asked for her unpaid wages and compensation for medical bills after her employer’s horse bit her. Instead of paying Nichole what she owed, celebrated UAE jockey, Anoud Sultan Al Suwaidi filed a complaint on June 9th against her with the police, alleging Nichole violated More...
Cat City – the first in a series of my personal experience in Cairo
It was 2014 and I was living on the 12th floor in a high rise building in Cairo on my own. The landlord was a doctor who was in charge of one of the big hospitals in the city; he had the pent house. My landlady More...
The Antichrist, by the numbers
There is an irony of biblical proportions in the high level of White Evangelical Christian support in America for Donald Trump, which hovers around 70% these days. This is much higher than among Black Protestants More...
Polls can be Appalling
The BBC has just released results of a BBC poll with the following take-away: “Arabs are increasingly saying they are no longer religious, according to the largest and most in-depth survey undertaken of the More...
Animal House in the 14th Century
One of the most entertaining Arabic compendia on animal life, taken in the loose sense of the term for things that breathe or are thought to breathe, is the Ḥayāt al-Ḥayawān (Life of Animals) of the Egyptian More...
Chewing on the “Khat” Issue
Before the recent conflict and humanitarian crisis in Yemen, the most likely story in the media about Yemen generally had to do with the stimulant qāt, usually glossed as “khat” in English. The plant in question More...
War and the Housing Crisis
After four years of bombing and military exchanges, Yemen remains a humanitarian disaster made by human hands and arms, not by nature. The number of direct deaths from the conflict continues to rise every day, More...
Open Bible, Closed Mind
The current U.S. Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, a former CIA director and congressman, gave a speech Thursday, January 10, at the American University of Cairo. He began by pointing out that he was an evangelical More...
I dvrc u
The surreal Saudi reform inaugurated by the Crown Prince MBS to give women more rights (at least some rights) has a new twist. In addition to being able to drive a car and to attend some football games (obviously More...
Peace Talks and War Talk
Sweden is the site for the current negotiations between the so-called legitimate government of Yemen, with Mansur al-Hadi as the ongoing interim president, and the Huthis, a movement also known as Ansar Allah, who More...