Media in Middle East & North Africa

Consumer finance is on the rise against a backdrop of price hikes in Egypt, where many households are struggling to make ends meet. Consumer finance rose by roughly 7% to 7.32 billion pounds ($374 million) in the second quarter (Q2) of 2022, against 6.84 billion pounds in 2022 Q1, according to data from the state-run Financial Regulatory Authority (FRA).

Egyptian breadwinners are buying clothes, school books, stationery and groceries on credit. Consumer finance companies are prospering with more and more customers due to high inflation rates that have made it rather hard for many households to buy in cash.

although the law has laid out clear-cut regulations to protect consumers and traders, several unauthorized companies and some individuals offer consumer credit, taking advantage of this highly prospering business.

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,"

A leading Iranian cleric has urged authorities “to listen to the people”, as protests ignited by a young woman’s death in morality police custody show no sign of letting up.

“The leaders must listen to the demands of the people, resolve their problems and show sensitivity to their rights,” said Grand Ayatollah Hossein Nouri Hamedani in a statement posted on his website Sunday.

The powerful 97-year-old cleric has long been aligned with the country’s ultra-conservative establishment and strongly backed supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on several occasions — notably during the 2009 protests against the reelection of former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The Biden administration is pressing Tunisia’s leaders to reverse steps weakening the country’s democracy, exposing friction with a nation once seen as the most promising of those who experienced Arab Spring revolutions.

talks between Saied and Barbara Leaf, the State Department’s top official for the Middle East. During a visit to Tunis last month, Leaf conveyed worries about a new constitutional framework “that weakens Tunisia’s democracy and how crucial going forward an inclusive and transparent reform process is to restore confidence of the Tunisian people,”

In July, Saied’s government reacted angrily to a statement by Secretary of State Antony Blinken raising questions about a constitutional referendum vote marked by low voter turnout.

Al Manthari has paid the price for America’s shoot-first-ask-no-questions-later system of remote warfare. The irreparable damage to his body left Al Manthari unable to walk or work, robbing him of dignity and causing his daughters — ages 8 and 14 at the time of the strike — to drop out of school to help care for him. The psychological impact of the strike has been profound, leaving Al Manthari traumatized and in need of treatment. And the financial impact has been ruinous.

While the U.S. has millions of dollars in funds earmarked for civilian victims of U.S. attacks, the military ignored pleas on Al Manthari’s behalf, leaving the 56-year-old to rely on a GoFundMe campaign earlier this year to save his life

Since at least World War I, the U.S. military has been paying compensation for harm to civilians. During the Vietnam War, solatia payments, as they are called, were a means for the military to make reparations for civilian injuries or deaths without having to admit guilt. In 1968, for example, the going rate for adult lives was $33. Children merited half that.

Palestinian schools in occupied East Jerusalem are observing a general strike in protest at attempts by Israel’s Jerusalem municipality to censor and edit Palestinian textbooks, as well as introduce an Israeli curriculum in classrooms.

“What is worrying the parents is that they are being cornered between distorted Palestinian curriculums and Israeli curriculums,”

“There is an Israelisation of Palestinian education going on,”

Levels of trust in news on social media, search engines, and messaging apps is consistently lower than audience trust in information in the news media more generally.

Many of the same people who lack trust in news encountered via digital media companies – who tend to be older, less educated, and less politically interested – also express less trust in the news regardless of whether found on platforms or through more traditional offline modes.

Many of the most common reasons people say they use platforms have little to do with news.

“We’re not kidding ourselves that the registry will overnight result in sort of a massive governance regime on fossil fuels,” she said. “But it sheds a light on where fossil fuel production is happening to investors and other actors to hold their governments to account.”

After decades of war, occupation and factional feuding, the Lebanese began suffering through compounding crises in 2019: fiscal, monetary, financial and economic. Since then, though they weren’t exactly living in paradise before, people in Lebanon have been “sinking” through one of the 10 (perhaps even three) worst collapses in the world since the 1800s.

At least 80 percent of Lebanese are poor. About 90 percent of the Syrians and Palestinians living in Lebanon, regardless of whether they are registered and how the Lebanese state and international organizations classify them, need (additional) assistance to cope with these crises. So, too, do hundreds of thousands of migrants from Asia and Africa who have also suffered while living in Lebanon.

Time and again, people have taken matters into their own hands because — much like people who have played by the rules, however warped in principle and skewed in practice — they have no good options. They have done so peacefully, such as when they protested in Beirut and across the country for months in late 2019 and early 2020. They have done so violently, such as when they’ve rioted, blocked roads, burned tires, or attacked business owners — from prominent bankers holed up in pilfered palaces, to gas station owners in north Lebanon, to shopkeepers in Beirut and the Bekaa Valley. They have done so spontaneously, or at least without political direction, while struggling day after day — like when a woman rammed her sports-utility vehicle into a pharmacy. They have done so as instruments of factional bosses, each adept at initiating, escalating, managing, or diffusing conflict as they deem necessary or useful — like when gunmen clashed in Khaldeh, a town south of Beirut, in August 2020 and August 2021, or fought in Beirut skirmishes in October 2021.

A battered plaque in a rundown hospital and a crackly, black-and-white newsreel are all that remain of Queen Elizabeth II's 1954 visit to Aden, the war-torn Yemeni city whose troubles are a reminder of Britain's complicated legacy in the Middle East.

mildew, emaciated children and the stench of urine, as the under-equipped facility grapples with an impossible workload in the face of a long-running conflict.

British colonialism is inextricably linked with the Middle East partly because of the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement, when Britain and France carved up much of the region between them amid the collapse of Ottoman rule during World War I. Many Arab leaders remain close to British royalty, however. After the queen's death this month at 96, sombre tributes were offered by monarchies that thrived under British protection.