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Turkey boasts 40% of the world’s marble reserves and nine out of 10 quarries are found in Anatolia. They are a mainstay of the regional economy and the country’s $2bn-a-year natural stone export business. China is currently the biggest customer, but Turkish marble is also found in Disneyland, the White House, the Vatican, Burj Khalifa, the Bundestag and luxury hotels across the world

Ali, Aysin and their fellow campaigners launched a successful challenge that shut down two marble companies Bartu Mermer and Bahçeci. Bartu Mermer fought back with a defamation lawsuit against Ali. But he won again in March 2017. The judge not only acquitted him, but also cancelled the company’s operating license. Hailing the victory, Ali predicted it would be the first of many. “Before, citizens were scared to sue companies – now the decision will encourage all environmentalists,” he declared.

A suspect – Ali Ymaç – was quickly found and arrested. He confessed to carrying out the execution in return, he said, for a promise of 50,000 lire (£10,000) from a quarry owner who he knew only by the alias “Çirkin” (Ugly). Yumaç said he was paid 3,000 lire up front and promised the rest on completion. He was instructed to make the killing look like a robbery. That ought to have been where the Turkish justice system cranked into high gear to track down those behind the assassination. Instead, it was the starting point for months of delays, obfuscations and another death that has frightened and frustrated activists and raised wider questions about the country’s slide away from democratic rule of law.

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

A new analysis published Wednesday in the journal Nature shows that the Hittites endured three consecutive years of extreme drought right around the time that the empire fell. Such severe water shortages may have doomed the massive farms at the heart of the Hittite economy, leading to famine, economic turmoil and ultimately political upheaval, researchers say.

n accumulating field of research linking the fall of civilizations to abrupt shifts in Earth’s climate. In the ruins of ancient Egypt, Stone Age China, the Roman Empire, Indigenous American cities and countless other locations, experts have uncovered evidence of how floods, droughts and famines can alter the course of human history, pushing societies to die out or transform.

It underscores the peril of increasingly frequent and severe climate disasters. But it also points to strategies that might make communities more resilient: cultivating diverse economies, minimizing environmental impacts, developing cities in more sustainable ways.

a solar mega-project that is supposedly going to end Morocco's dependency on energy imports, provide electricity to more than a million Moroccans, and put the country on a “green path.”

The land, sold at a cheap one Moroccan dirham per square meter was clearly worth a lot more. As if things were not bad enough, the duped local population were surprised to find out that the money from the sale was not going to be handed to them, but that it would be deposited into the tribe's account at the Ministry of Interior. Additionally, the money would be used to finance development projects for the whole area. They discovered that their land sale was not a sale at all: it was simply a transfer of funds from one government agency to another.

What seems to unite all the reports and articles written about the solar plant is a deeply erroneous assumption that any move toward renewable energy is to be welcomed. And that any shift from fossil fuels, regardless of how it is carried out, will help us to avert climate chaos. One needs to say it clearly from the start: the climate crisis we are currently facing is not attributable to fossil fuels per se, but rather to their unsustainable and destructive use in order to fuel the capitalist machine. In other words, capitalism is the culprit, and if we are serious in our endeavors to tackle the climate crisis (only one facet of the multi-dimensional crisis of capitalism), we cannot elude questions of radically changing our ways of producing and distributing things, our consumption patterns and fundamental issues of equity and justice. It follows from this that a mere shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy, while remaining in the capitalist framework of commodifying and privatizing nature for the profits of the few, will not solve the problem. In fact, if we continue down this path we will only end up exacerbating, or creating another set of problems, around issues of ownership of land and natural resources.

The almost 11,000 square mile total project is to be designed and supervised by US, German, Japanese and possibly other western experts. It represents the largest single component of the Saudi Crown Prince's "Vision 2030", by which he intends his country to diversify its economy away from dependence upon oil. Egypt, in other words, is being harnessed to Prince Mohammad bin Salman's project to consolidate his personal political power, transform the Kingdom into a centre of high tech development in what heretofore has been a relatively peripheral region within the Middle East, and exert yet greater Saudi influence over both Jordan and Egypt.

The most immediate, tangible potential benefits are to lend support to the effort to convert the Suez Canal Zone into a globally important logistics hub, combined with opening up the Red Sea and Gulfs of Suez and Aqaba to a new surge of tourist development.

Suez Canal revenues and numbers of ships transiting have been essentially flat since the parallel channel was opened amidst great fanfare in February 2016 following a two-year, $8.4 billion upgrade

The system of plastic recycling in Tunisian cities is largely reliant on an informal workforce of waste pickers, known as barbechas, meaning someone who searches, digs or investigates

Many waste pickers live in poverty, selling the waste they find to middlemen recyclers who then sell it on for a marked-up price to the national waste collection system or, more often, a private recycling factory.

a proposed law to establish a "social and solidarity economy" which would support collectives and self-governed businesses that both make a profit and have a social objective

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

A group of Egyptian civil society organisations have been prevented from attending the Cop27 climate summit by a covert registration process that filtered out groups critical of the Egyptian government.

“You don’t let a government tell the UN who is and who isn’t an NGO, certainly not the Egyptian government,” said Ahmad Abdallah, of the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms (ECRF), one of five leading organisations unable to register to attend the conference due to the screening.

“the UN is colluding with the Egyptian government to whitewash this regime”

The inquiry at hand focuses on larger narratives that have managed to discourage uprisings from happening in the first place. It focuses on aspects of the country's spatiality that are usually accorded little attention - large, pervasive, and enveloping initiatives that are seen to improve the old and bring about the new - aspects which are often overlooked either because they are thought of in positive terms, even by local Moroccans, or because they are so gargantuan in scale, literally spanning the entire country in some instances, that academic analysis often finds it difficult to relate them to more localized and isolated events. It is the ambition here to at least shed some light on these larger, perhaps banal, aspects of Morocco’s physical environment, where, upon examination, the state's spatial tactics are found to be most evident and most effective

The inquiry at hand focuses on larger narratives that have managed to discourage uprisings from happening in the first place. It focuses on aspects of the country's spatiality that are usually accorded little attention - large, pervasive, and enveloping initiatives that are seen to improve the old and bring about the new - aspects which are often overlooked either because they are thought of in positive terms, even by local Moroccans, or because they are so gargantuan in scale, literally spanning the entire country in some instances, that academic analysis often finds it difficult to relate them to more localized and isolated events. It is the ambition here to at least shed some light on these larger, perhaps banal, aspects of Morocco’s physical environment, where, upon examination, the state's spatial tactics are found to be most evident and most effective

This perceived link is capitalized upon by the Moroccan monarchy; it employs, in sync with the country’s landscape of indigenous architecture, an elaborate system of state rituals and ceremonies, traditional fashion choices, titles and honors, among other strategies, all in order to preserve a constructed image in which the monarchy is not only inseparable from the nation’s Islamic heritage, but also from the very historical foundations of Morocco

former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, who ruled Egypt as an autocrat for three decades, appeared as a witness against imprisoned former Egyptian president, Mohammed Morsi, who was Egypt’s first freely elected leader. Besides being former Egyptian presidents, they had something else in common: their religious supporters both considered revolting against them to be a forbidden form of "khuruj ‘ala al-hakim" – "withdrawing from the ruler." This wasn’t just an idle sentiment; it was expressed by Ali Gomaa’, the-then Mufti of Egypt whose words I heard when in Cairo during the revolutionary uprising of 2011. “Khuruj ‘ala al-shar’iyya haram, haram, haram” – ‘exiting’ from [political] legitimacy is religiously forbidden, forbidden, forbidden.”

Supporters of Arab autocratic regimes of Mubarak and others that faced the Arab uprisings were not the only ones to use this tool

it is undeniable that the world has changed a great deal since the concept had widespread currency among Muslims and was applied to pre-modern modes of government. Whether Muslim religious establishments have collectively realised this or not, the modern autocratic ‘president’ holds far more power—if only due to technology alone—than the medieval sultan. And far more destructive than that is that civil society in today’s world is far weaker—especially in the modern Arab world—than it was in pre-modern Muslim societies

In Qatar, the country with the highest per capita carbon emissions in the world and the biggest producer of liquid gas, the outdoors is already being air conditioned.

The Gulf States are still highly reliant on oil and gas exports, which remain more than 70% of total goods exports in Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Oman, and on oil revenues, which exceed 70% of total government revenues in Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain. In Vision 2030, published in 2016, the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, promised to turn the country into a diversified industrial power house. The reality is very different. The World Bank shows Saudi Arabia is still 75% dependent on oil exports for its budget.

The Middle East is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world. By the end of the century, if the more dire predictions prove true, Mecca may not be habitable, making the summer Haj a pilgrimage of peril, even catastrophe

18 Oct 2011 11:27

A total informal way of life pervades that includes schooling, healthcare, food supply and social services. People here are friendly and welcoming and they know what needs to be done to better their community, but there are no channels for them to officially take part in civil society and government. Although this area is part of the capital and is reached by metro, it is at the periphery of the regime’s concerns. In Mounib, nothing has improved since Hosni Mubarak passed his presidential powers to the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF)

Egypt’s government is designed for a dictatorship: It is extremely centralised and tightly controlled by national policy, and local councils are void of power. Although Cairo’s three governorates have separate budgets and various departments, they largely depend on the country’s ministries, led by presidentially appointed ministers, to care for essential elements of the urban environment: housing, schooling, transport, parks, healthcare, etc.

Dubai, one of the seven principalities that make up the small, oil-rich United Arab Emirates, is a growing destination for students from the Middle East, India, and China, making it a logical host for the Going Global conference, said the British Council, the British government's cultural and educational arm and the event's organizer. But recently the Emirates have been better known as the site of an academic controversy.

countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council, of which the U.A.E. is a member, are at the "cutting edge" of efforts to internationalize higher education, and that holding the conference in Dubai "contributes to the sterling efforts being made in countries like the U.A.E. and Qatar to open their societies to international debates."

The United Arab Emirates is home to 37 international branch campuses, which serve its large expatriate population. The government of Abu Dhabi, part of the U.A.E., is also financing lavish new campuses for New York University and the Sorbonne.

At a recent news conference, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights noted that, two years after January 25, many abuses of state power continue. Censorship is among these abuses

censorship, instability, and fear of censorship create a difficult environment for longer-form artistic developments

in a recent interview with Mai Elwakil and Andeel at the Egypt Independent, pioneering political cartoonist Amro Selim remained steadfast: We need to constantly push the boundaries whether they are set by society, the political regime or even a newspaper’s editors. If people equate your critique of a bearded political Islamist figure with atheism, then you must do it more, all the time, on purpose. This is ground that we are gaining. It is a battle with possible lawsuits and threats. But we must continue. We went through a lot to be able to draw the president every day. We won ground under Mubarak’s rule. At the beginning of Al-Dostour, I told them that we must shatter the god-like image of the ruler who we cannot draw. We started drawing him from the back, and bit-by-bit we turned him around, until making a cartoon of him became the norm. Then we drew his sons, Gamal and Alaa. We were very happy when these cartoons were published. Before that, if Mubarak were ever represented, it would be with Egypt holding him like her beloved son. We have come a long way in a society that asked us to “respect” the ruler. Now, they want us to go back.

Egypt has begun devaluing its currency to help revive the economy and meet the conditions of an expected IMF loan and the depreciation has further to go, a business leader in the ruling Muslim Brotherhood said

"We have started already some increase in taxation, and there is the devaluation of the pound and we raised some prices of petrol and gas," Malek said in an interview."Normal people in the street now understand that there is a price that we will have to pay for the IMF agreement."Asked whether he expected a further depreciation of the Egyptian currency to help exports and tourism, he said: "I'm not of course a technical (expert) but people expect a little bit of devaluation in the future."

Malek, who was imprisoned under Mubarak with top Muslim Brotherhood leader Khairat el-Shater, his friend and business partner, said he was actively trying to persuade wealthy Egyptians to return and invest in the country.Asked if he was personally involved in trying to persuade billionaires who have left Egypt and had their assets frozen or been convicted of economic crimes to come home, he said "Yes. I am inviting everyone to come to Egypt. It is very important to prioritize legislation and court cases should be solved first... before these people come back."

According to reports of the activist Facebook group Le patrimoine archéologique syrien en danger, all six UNESCO World Heritage sites in Syria have been damaged, major museum collections at Homs and Hama have been looted, and dozens of ancient tells have been obliterated by shelling. In Iraq, recent media stories recount ISIS fighters’ use of antiquities to raise revenues. So-called blood antiquities function as cash-cows, fetching high prices from unscrupulous collectors and netting a handsome cut for ISIS. As devastating as this news is, Syria and Iraq are simply additional chapters in the long-running story wherein conflict is characterised by a two-fold assault on humanity: human bodies themselves as well as the objects and sites that people create and infuse with cultural meaning.

So-called blood antiquities function as cash-cows, fetching high prices from unscrupulous collectors and netting a handsome cut for ISIS.

The destruction of human communities is incomplete without cultural violence. This was the conclusion of lawyer and human rights advocate Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-born jurist who coined the term “genocide” and fought successfully for its recognition by international legal bodies as a crime. In Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944), he argued: By ‘genocide’ we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group…[It signifies] a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. (Lemkin 1944: 80) Among the “essential foundations” of the life of human societies, Lemkin argued, were cultural sites, objects, and practices. The Holocaust galvanised his human rights work, but it was the tragic case of Turkish Armenians during the beginning decades of the twentieth century that served as the basis for Lemkin’s theory of genocide.

In February, OPEC called for an oil production “freeze” to raise crude prices in conjunction with Russia. But this effort collapsed at a meeting in Doha, Qatar, in April when Iran refused to join any freeze in order to regain the pre-2012 production levels of close to 4 mbpd it enjoyed before U.S. and European Union nuclear sanctions were imposed, following the removal of certain sanctions after the 2015 nuclear deal. A similar proposal failed at the OPEC meeting in June, again following Iran’s refusal, despite outreach by the Qataris.

OPEC again called for a form of output cut on Sept. 28 at an extraordinary meeting in Algiers. Markets bit on the news, with Brent prices rising sharply by about 15 percent in the following week, from $46 to $52 per barrel.

Can action by the cartel sustain higher crude prices over the long term? Probably not. Like a desert mirage, the image of an OPEC resurrection vanishes when approached.