India
Jerusalem - On Jerusalem's busy Salah Eddin Street, where cafes, grocery stores, money exchange centres and jewellery shops proliferate the landscape, a prominent board at number 22 announces itself as the Educational Bookshop. Shortly ahead, across the road, is another bookstore and cafe, also titled the Educational Bookshop.
FREELANCE WORK
Nabi Saleh, occupied West Bank - Palestinian Janna Jihad Ayyad, who turned 10 this month, counts herself among the youngest journalists in the world. A resident of the village of Nabi Saleh in the occupied West Bank, Janna, along with many other local children, regularly participates in demonstrations against the Israeli occupation.
Justice B. Kemal Pasha, a sitting judge of the Kerala high court, was recently in the spotlight for comments made at a seminar in Kozhikode organised by the Punarjani Charitable Trust, a women lawyers collective, and Nisa, a progressive Muslim women's forum.
The attack on Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) has been framed largely in terms of nationalism. Yet, if one dissects the debate, it becomes clear that the attack is not just on the rights of individuals to arrive at their own understandings of their relationships to the nation and state.
On 15 December 2015, representatives of the 164 member states of the World Trade Organisation gathered in Nairobi for a ministerial conference-a biennial gathering, and the group's highest decision-making forum.
In 1989, Safdar Hashmi - the Indian actor, playwright and theatre activist - was shot dead while performing a street play in Jhandapur village in Uttar Pradesh. More than two decades later, in 2011, the Palestinian-Israeli actor Juliano Mer-Khamis was struck by a hail of bullets outside The Freedom Theatre in West Bank's Jenin refugee camp.
A "historic political milestone" is how President Reuven Rivlin of Israel described Pranab Mukherjee's just concluded visit, the first by an Indian President to Israel and Palestine. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is expected to visit Israel in 2016. India and Israel have never been closer, and the cooperation between them never quite as visible.
The Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the international community promise to 'leave no one behind' but by omitting any mention of caste, they have cast aside the dalits New York: The United Nations recently announced the launch of its formal development paradigm, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) encompassing 17 goals and 169 targets.
New Delhi, India - An overwhelming majority of Muslim women in India want reforms in religious laws involving matters of divorce, alimony, polygamy and custody of children, according to a survey conducted by a rights group.
Muzzafarnagar: Rehana Adeeb's phone won't stop ringing. After answering a few calls, she switches off her mobile. "The calls will continue. We won't be able to talk properly," she explains. We are in a nondescript building in Muzaffarnagar district, Western Uttar Pradesh.
New Delhi, India - Once a champion of the Palestinian cause, India should now use its deepening diplomatic relations with Israel to press for an independent Palestinian state, critics say. Zikrur Rahman - a former Indian representative to Palestine - was one of 10 delegates at a Solidarity with Palestine convention last weekend, which was held to mark the first anniversary of Israel's attack on Gaza.
A tall and lean fisherwoman with a strong face stares at the evening sun fading into the still waters running through Kultali, an island in the Sunderbans forest; Anima Mandal is angry. She hasn't eaten since morning.
'The Great Game' Indians had already started going to Afghanistan before Mujtaba Ali's arrival in 1927. Afroz says: "The first Indians who arrived in Afghanistan were Sikhs and Hindus, possibly with Ahmad Shah Abdali, and controlled business and banking.
The auditorium was filled to capacity. On the stage, performers from the Israel-based Maria Kong Dancers Company executed graceful moves with their lithe, endlessly supple bodies. Brawny men with ear receivers stood guard on the side-lines as the city's elite and well educated broke into loud applause.
Urvashi Sarkar is a freelance journalist and works with the South Solidarity Initiative. She tweets @storyandworse. Barring a parting cautionary remark on religious intolerance, US President Obama's three day visit to India was marked by a heady celebration of India-US political and economic ties. And in the ensuing din on issues such as the nuclear...
Dressed in a bright yellow sari with a bunch of pretty white bangles on her wrists, Bimala Bhatt squats in a square area, baking rotis over a smoking chulha. After kneading the dough into round moulds, she lightly tosses each circular disc on to a pan.
Rural India gets a new voice Veteran reporter P. Sainath launches a new platform to portray rural India in all its complexity. URVASHI SARKAR explains how the stories will also form an archive.
The Census of India 2011 shows that 833 million of the country's 1.21 billion people live in rural India. It is this vast cross-section of the population and their lives - largely ignored by the media - that forms the subject of People's Archive of Rural India (PARI).
Guest post by URVASHI SARKAR Some sections of Indian civil society have reacted to Israel's most recent brutalities in Gaza with outrage, and rightly so. In its pounding of Gaza which lasted over a month, Israel destroyed essential services and infrastructure, razed houses to debris and wiped out entire families.
They train to operate agro machinery and run farms with the discipline of a military It is an important day at the Agricultural Research Station of Kerala Agricultural University, Thrissur. A group of instructors are seated classroom-style, listening closely to station head Dr U Jaikumaran's instructions for a 'passing out parade'.
Guest Post by URVASHI SARKAR Until June 20th 2014, if you visited the Wikipedia entry on Bhanwari Devi - a women's rights Dalit activist who was raped for taking on child marriage in an upper caste community in her Rajasthan village- you would have been in for a nasty surprise.
The elections for India's 16th Lok Sabha, which resulted in an overwhelming mandate in favour of the rightwing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), were largely dominated by a clutch of domestic concerns including the state of the economy, unemployment and rampant corruption. As usual, matters of international import were largely ignored, or placed on the backburner.
Palestine's dead olive trees show Israel's cruel design - "...In the beginning, we caught the settlers stealing olives from our trees. Then they started breaking off the branches, but they grew back and we also planted new trees to replace those damaged.
Don't mention the word cancer," cautions Liaqat Sheikh as he leads the way to a small tent in Joula camp where his wife Bina is bedridden. It is pitch dark inside. There is electricity only at night. Bina lies tucked under blankets, and struggles to sit up, her face gaunt.
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