All posts by nedhamson

Activist, writer, researcher, addicted to sharing information and facts.

Children at war: the faces of Syria’s lost generation |The National

The war in Syria has changed so much. The loss of innocence, the phrase so often used to lament the effect of war on the young, has affected the whole country. What was, just two years ago, one of the safest countries in the Middle East is now a war zone. No part of Syria is untouched by violence. As these photographs from Dimitar Dilkoff show, children have been dragged to the front line and the experience of war has escaped few.

It is in these photographs that we see the truth of the Syrian conflict. These are not the terrorists and foreigners of Bashar Al Assad’s fiction. These are the boys and girls of the country, the future men and women of Syria, now begging, fighting, hiding, and surviving, merely for demanding the right to live in freedom.

These are the children of Syria’s war. Boys and girls who cannot go to school, cannot play in the streets safely, cannot live a normal life. These are children who are now breadwinners, whose fathers are dead or vanished, who hear their mothers mourn in the dark hours of the night, children who can no longer remember the voices of their dead friends. It is they who must line up, small elbows jostling, in the filth of refugee camps, edging forward in never-ending lines to bring food and water back to their families, or dodge the snipers and the sadists of Assad’s armies to buy bread from the few bakeries the regime has not bombed.

What makes these images so heart-breaking is how old these children look. In their faces is written the pain of the last two years of the revolution, the terrifying reality of children becoming adults, brutalised into maturity, seeing things no adults should see and feeling things no child should know.

These are the faces of a lost generation. The faces of the millions who have fled Syria or fled their homes for safe haven within their former country, boys and girls whose entire childhoods have been swept away by, as the war poet Wilfred Owen wrote, the monstrous anger of the guns.

* Faisal Al Yafai, opinion writer for The National

via Children at war: the faces of Syria’s lost generation |The National.

Mosques and Politics in Egypt

Nervana

Nothing reflects the essence of Islam better than the pilgrimage to Mecca. It sums up the faith in a nutshell; humility, reflection, and most importantly, equality. In the haj, women stand side by side with men; the rich stand alongside the poor; brown people alongside white. All are equal in the journey toward redemption. All pilgrims have to perform the same rituals and endure the same suffering. Arguments, bickering, hatred, resentment, and revenge are qualities Muslims must abandon to avoid spoiling their pilgrimage.

 Sadly, outside the pilgrimage season, divisions, conflicts, and even wars between Muslims have been a recurring theme since the early days of Islam. The death of Caliph Osman , and then later the conflict between Caliph Ali and Muawyia were crucial events that planted the seeds of division among Muslims.

 It is pointless to reopen the narratives of past tragedies; however, it is paramount to acknowledge the…

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Americas MexicoBlog: Mexico’s Streets of Fire

As flames engulfed the policeman’s legs and arms, his comrades stood by watching, stunned. A steady barrage of rocks bounced off the wall of plastic shields flanking him.

By nighttime on October 2nd in Mexico City, 111 policemen, protesters and journalists had been injured and 102 people arrested during the annual march to commemorate a student massacre in 1968.

Street protests have long been a staple of Mexican politics and culture, a powerful outlet for millions of people who feel alienated from the political class. But over the last year, they have become more frequent, volatile and violent, analysts say, a response to major domestic policy shifts and growing alienation among the young and unemployed. The makeup of the protesters is also shifting, with men who refer to themselves as anarchists unleashing their fury during some marches.

via Americas MexicoBlog: Mexico’s Streets of Fire.

ICRC, prison officials aim to quell plague outbreaks in Madagascar | Vaccine News Daily

In an effort to curb outbreaks of the plague among Madagascar’s prison system, the International Committee of the Red Cross recently teamed with government officials to rid the country’s prisons of rodents.

Efforts have been focused on Antanimora Prison in Antanavarivo, Madagascar, which houses approximately 3,000 prisoners. There has been an average of 500 annual cases of the plague reported in the country during the last four years.

via ICRC, prison officials aim to quell plague outbreaks in Madagascar | Vaccine News Daily.

Sad that this is still a divider issue… ASIA/LEBANON – Houses for Muslims built on the lands belonging to Christians. Sectarian balance at risk – Fides News Agency

An urgent reminder to curb the misuse of land belonging to Christians in order to build housing for the Muslims was launched on Monday, October 14 from Talal al- Doueihy, leader of the Movement \”Lebanese Land, our Land\”. The appeal – refer Lebanese sources contacted by Fides Agency – was addressed to state institutions and all political and Christian religious leaders during a conference convened in Beirut in particular to denounce the recent case of Al- Qaa, a Christian village near Baalbek in the area where large tracts of land have been bought by Muslims – Shiites and Sunnis – as agricultural land, only to be allocated to the building of housing estates to be sold to Lebanese and Syrian refugees belonging to their own religious community.

via ASIA/LEBANON – Houses for Muslims built on the lands belonging to Christians. Sectarian balance at risk – Fides News Agency.

Obama Foodorama: The White House In Shutdown: First Lady Michelle Obama’s Kitchen Garden Is Wrecked

The first government shutdown in seventeen years has had a dramatic impact on First Lady Michelle Obama\’s world-famous Kitchen Garden on the South Lawn, currently bursting with more than thirty kinds of vegetables, including Presidential pumpkins awaiting harvest just in time for Halloween.  (Above, Mrs. Obama in the garden in happier days)

In the eleven days since the shutdown began on Oct. 1, the pounds and pounds of ripe organic bounty have gone to waste.  The vegetables filling the 1,500 square-foot plot are now rotting away on the vines and in the boxed beds, thanks to the mandate for \”minimal maintenance\” placed on the skeletal crew of National Park Service gardeners who remain on duty at 1600 Penn.

The gardeners are not allowed to harvest the crops, a White House source told Obama Foodorama.  Weeds are springing up everywhere, and the vegetables that have already fallen off the vines are now mouldering on the ground.

via Obama Foodorama: The White House In Shutdown: First Lady Michelle Obama’s Kitchen Garden Is Wrecked.