A Salvadoran father and daughter, who drowned while attempting to seek asylum in the US, are the latest victims of a policy that has cost lives and seriously affected the health of hundreds of people, most of them children.
Children have been (...)
The Trump administration recently decided to allow Cuban-American immigrants to sue the Cuban government for property confiscated from them after Fidel Castro took power in 1959. The administration is also limiting the amount of money that Cuban (...)
María Salguero knows how to leverage her background as a geophysical engineer on behalf of women. Since 2016, she has been tracking cases of femicide (also known as feminicide) all over Mexico. Femicide is the deliberate killing of a woman or girl (...)
The 2019 Memorial Lecture honouring Edward W. Said, "Out of Place: Refugees, Immigrants, and Storytelling" couldn't have come at a more appropriate moment. And the main speaker for that event, Viet Thanh Nguyen, was the right person for the job. (...)
I first learned of Gideon Levy many years ago, during a casual conversation with my friend Edy Kaufman, an Israeli human rights activist. He told me that he had asked Levy why was he such a serious critic of Israel's government and its policies with (...)
The influx of Syrian refugees into Lebanon which started in 2011 following the outbreak of the Syrian civil war has created a serious problem not only for Lebanon but for the refugees themselves. Lebanon currently has the largest number of refugees (...)
In many cultures and in older times obesity in children was a sign of good health. This is no longer the case according to a US National Institute of Health study, and because of its serious effects on their health, the global rise in childhood (...)
In these times of so much civil strife, internecine wars, and racial and political intolerance, it is good to remember an episode involving Turkey, Australia, and New Zealand. It shows the power of words to console the grieving, and to bring closure (...)
New York – On June 16, 2015, Donald Trump announced his candidacy to the presidency and set the tone of his priorities. The elimination of illegal immigration to the United States, mainly from refugees fleeing from poverty and violence in Mexico and (...)
I remember vividly the terrible day when our lives (our world) changed forever. I was listening to the radio in my apartment, a few blocks from Ground Zero, when the plane hit the first tower. I could hear the cries from the street below: “Oh, no, (...)
On 20 August 2018, María Isabel Chorobik de Mariani ("Chicha") died in La Plata, Buenos Aires Province. She was 94-years-old and for 42 years had been searching for her granddaughter Clara Anahí. On 24 November 1976, Clara Anahí had been abducted by (...)
A new and widespread corruption scandal implicating businesspersons with former Kirchner administration officials, may have unforeseen consequences for Argentina's future as a democracy. The recent conviction of former Vice President Amado Boudou to (...)
Unexpectedly, a casual incident brightened my life. It was one of the most interesting meetings I had during a recent trip to my native province, Tucumán, located in the north of Argentina. There I met Roberto Espeche, a local notary with a (...)
Growing up in Tucumán, a town in the north of Argentina, I had the opportunity to see a small example of peaceful coexistence and collaboration between Arabs and Jews. I was reminded of that experience after reading an article by Uri Avnery, one of (...)
Fifteen years after it started, the Iraq war has nearly destroyed the country, one of the most prosperous in the Middle East, and destabilised the whole region by intensifying internecine and religious conflicts and giving rise to new and violent (...)
Vickie Frémont, a French woman born in Cameroon, is a modern day heroine. For the past several years she has been conducting workshops around the world, using a hands-on approach for the transformation of rejects or trash into useful everyday (...)
New York, NY—Rarely was there so much expectation for the appearance of a book as is the case of Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House of the North American journalist Michael Wolff. And never before were so many copies sold so quickly.
Before (...)
New York, NY—In 1901, when Dr Alois Alzheimer started talking to his patient Mrs Auguste Deter, a 50-year-old patient, he immediately realised that there was something wrong with her. Her responses to his questions were not only repetitive and (...)
Idries Shah was a teacher in the Sufi tradition whose seminal work was The Sufis. He presented Sufism as a universal form of wisdom that predated Islam. In his writings, he frequently used teaching stories and humour to transmit this philosophy. His (...)
New York—Growing up in Argentina, I had an English teacher named Sarah, a kind and knowledgeable woman. Reading one of my papers, in which I called a character in the story "a despicable man," she admonished me: "you shouldn't use that word, César, (...)
New York –It is impossible to win a war that you cannot define. That seems to be the main lesson to be drawn from Afghanistan, where a so-called victory seems ever more unreachable. It is also the conclusion of several experts on the region, who (...)
The curtailing of electricity to Gaza conducted by the Palestinian Authority (PA) in Ramallah in connivance with Israeli authorities seriously hurts the people of that region. They have become the victims of the political fighting between the PA, (...)
The curtailing of electricity to Gaza conducted by the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah in connivance with Israeli authorities seriously hurts the people of that region. They have become the victims of the political fighting between the Palestinian (...)
Recently, as I picked up a book from my bookcase, I realised that one word in its title had the answer to a problem that had been bothering me for months. The book is "The Voice Imitator" by Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. And the word that solved (...)
The photograph is the image of desolation. In a room that seems to have been devastated by a hurricane, shattered windows and furniture, debris everywhere, and a few torn and winding curtains that remain as mute witnesses to the disaster, a man (...)