Group items tagged

Pollution, it seems, is one of the problems for which revolution has brought no answers.

“We can’t stay here. There’s too much smoke. We wake up at night feeling asphyxiated, our eyes and noses burning.”

Many in El Khadra suffer from severe respiratory ailments, and they have good reason to believe that their illnesses are directly related to the plant

With every flood or bout of extreme heat or cold, the jihadists would reappear, often supplementing their sales pitches with gifts. When a particularly vicious drought struck in 2010, the fifth in seven years, they doled out food baskets. When fierce winds eviscerated hundreds of eggplant fields near Kirkuk in the spring of 2012, they distributed cash. As farming communities limped from one debilitating crisis to another, the recruiters—all members of what soon became the Islamic State—began to see a return on their investment.

By the time the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) seized this swath of Iraq—along with most of the country’s west and north—in a brutal summer-long blitzkrieg in 2014, few locals were surprised to see dozens of former fertilizer market regulars among its ranks.

ISIS appears to have attracted much more support from water-deprived communities than from their better-resourced peers

Egyptian security forces detained seven people on Monday from the Warraq Island on the Nile river in the Giza Governorate, following protests against government plans to remove residents from their homes and make way for a set of development projects.

"We will not leave it to the thieves",

The Land Center for Human Rights, an Egyptian NGO group, said security forces had "arbitrarily arrested some residents because they were defending their homes and lands", and that displacement orders threaten the lives of thousands of people on the island.

A man that is deeply enmeshed in Egypt`s crony capitalist system, has revealed, through a series of online videos, what many Egyptians already felt and knew: Namely, the corruption of the military institution, and the regime’s deliberate economic and fiscal policy that is leading to the impoverishment of the mass of Egyptians, while enriching the military elites

His series of videos directly led to rare protests against President Abdel Fattah El Sissi, in-spite of the government’s draconian record of repression.

compared to 2015. Relative poverty rates rose from 27.8% to 32.5% in 2018, and the level of absolute poverty rose from 5.3% to 6.2% for the same period

the outbreak is linked to the presence of bacteria responsible for cholera in the waters of the Euphrates river, the river's water level has suffered a serious decline because of climate change and is, in many areas, transforming into swamp land.

“The lack of treated drinking water through water stations and the irrigation of vegetables from the Euphrates river were the main cause of cholera infecting my wife and child.”

"We do not have potable water because of the interruption of pipe water, which makes us buy water from tanks filled from surface wells, which are not subject to sanitary control at all,"

Adel Abdullah cultivates a subsistence living off of six acres of peppers, eggplants, cucumbers, tomatoes, wheat, corn, and pomegranates. He is one of millions of smallholder farmers working in the Delta. He walks barefoot in his farm as a show of reverence to the land. The soil is pale and thin, almost as sandy as the beach, and choked by mounting concentrations of salt, left behind by periodic coastal flooding and pushed into underground aquifers by the rising sea.“This is the first place to be affected by climate change,” Abdullah says. “The barriers help a bit with flooding, but the salty soil is still really killing us.”

he takes irrigation water from the nearby Kitchener Drain, one of the largest and most polluted canals in Egypt that aggregates wastewater from the farms, businesses, and households of an estimated 11 million people in the Delta. By the time water reaches Abdullah’s farm, it may have been reused half a dozen times since entering Egypt in the Nile, each time accumulating more salts and pollutants and losing beneficial nutrients.

Abdullah is forced to douse the farm in fertilizers, pesticides, and salt-suppressing chemicals, all of which further degrade the soil. Those inputs, on top of the rising costs of irrigation systems and machinery, eat up any potential income Abdullah might earn

"Nothing to invest. No businesses. No land. Nothing." His words make up the refrain to Tunisia's desperately undeveloped and long-neglected interior region, the birthplace of the Arab spring. What have the revolutionaries gotten out of their revolution?

During Ben Ali's 23-year rule, Tunisia focused 90 percent of its investment projects on the coastal regions, leaving the interior disproportionately underdeveloped. Unemployment in the region has increased to 18 percent, twice the rate on the coast, and while Tunisia's average national poverty rate is 18 percent, it ranges from 6 percent in Tunis to more than 30 percent in the center-west governorates.

Bread riots in December 1983 in the same cities launched the most serious challenge to the Tunisian regime. If things don't improve, as seems grimly likely, rebellion may return.

Over the past 40 years, the regime’s entrenched corruption, cronyism, and mismanagement of environmental and natural resources have brought Iran to the edge of disaster. In 2013, the former head of Iran’s environmental protection agency reported that 85 percent of the country’s groundwater was gone, while the population had doubled in the last 40 years. According to Issa Kalantari, a former agriculture minister and current head of the environmental protection agency, millions of Iranians will be forced to migrate to more developed countries, especially in Europe, if the water crisis is not resolved in 20 to 30 years.

the story of Iran’s water crisis began before the revolution when Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi nationalized Iran’s water resources. For more than 3,000 years, Iranians avoided overexploiting aquifers by relying on indigenous pieces of infrastructure called qanats—slightly inclining underground canals for transferring water within arid and semiarid lands without exposing water to the sun. But the shah introduced to Iran the use of deep well-drilling technology and powerful motor pumps that began depleting the country’s aquifers.

the Islamic Republic began to build hundreds of dams, most completely unnecessary, and new networks of water transfer pipelines and channels. The revolutionary government’s hope was that these measures would allow it to collect and supply enough water for agricultural and industrial projects. The dam building also benefited construction companies connected to the regime, especially those affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. But the new dams blocked major rivers from reaching many parts of the country and prevented the replenishment of aquifers. As a result, farmers started drilling deeper wells to reach the natural water tables that were gradually sinking.

Egypt's parliament has passed a law allowing the government to restrict the cultivation of crops that require a large amount of water, amid fears that a massive Ethiopian dam being built upstream could cut into the country's share of the Nile. The law passed late Sunday would allow the government to ban the cultivation of rice, bananas and other crops in some areas, with violators facing prison time and a fine of up to $3,000. Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi would need to approve the law.

El-Sissi says the country is building desalinization plants on the Red Sea to reduce its dependence on the river as Ethiopia nears completion of the dam.

The occupation of Tahrir Square, which continued from that night until Egypt’s long-ruling president, Hosni Mubarak, stepped down on February. 11, 2011, was an exercise, too, in overcoming decades of public policy and urban planning that had sought to render urban open spaces inaccessible or even dangerous to would-be protestors.

A decade after the 2011 revolution, Egypt’s sprawling capital city looks a lot different. Tahrir Square has been adorned with Pharaonic monuments and staffed with police. Domineering concrete barriers and towering metal gates topped with spikes and painted in national colors now line the surrounding streets. Rabaa Al Adawiya Square, where hundreds of protesters were killed in August 2013, has been made inaccessible. A large monument meant to express “the unity of the army, the police, and the people,” according to Brig. Tarek Mohamed Sayed, was erected in the square in September 2013, and an overpass — one of the dozens built in the city in recent years — now crosses over it. Under Al Sisi, the Egyptian government has been transferring the nation’s capital out of Cairo altogether, building lavish palaces and administrative compounds in a far-off, sparsely populated New Administrative Capital in the desert.

Construction projects have also resulted in the destruction of hundreds of thousands of square meters of green space — 390,000 square meters (429,000 square yards) alone, in the affluent neighborhood of Heliopolis in eastern Cairo, according to the Heliopolis Heritage Initiative, where hundreds of century-old trees have been uprooted to widen arterial avenues like Abou Bakr Al Seddik and Al Nozha, which cut through the heart of the neighborhood. There is no place in today’s Egypt for broad-leaved trees that hinder surveillance nor shaded spaces that foster assembly.

Iraq as the fifth-most-vulnerable country to climate change. Temperatures have increased by 1.8 degrees Celsius (3.2 degrees Fahrenheit) in three decades, according to Berkeley Earth, well above the global average, and in the summers, the mercury now regularly hits 50 Celsius (122 Fahrenheit)

burning crops and desiccating marshes

As upstream dams in Turkey and Iran weaken the flows of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, a salty tide is creeping north from the Persian Gulf, poisoning the land