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The US Military is a Staggeringly Well-Funded Blowback Machine

America’s never-ending twenty-first-century conflicts were triggered by the decision of George W. Bush and his top officials to instantly define their response to attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center by a tiny group of jihadis as a “war”; then to proclaim it nothing short of a “Global War on Terror”; and finally to invade and occupy first Afghanistan and then Iraq, with dreams of dominating the Greater Middle East — and ultimately the planet — as no other imperial power had ever done.

A Palestinian man hangs a Palestinian flag atop the ruins of a mosque during a snow storm in West Bank village of Mufagara, south of Hebron, in 2016. Credit: Mussa Qawasma/Reuters

My Home is Beit Daras, Palestine: Our Lingering Nakba

When Google Earth was initially released in 2001, I immediately rushed to locate a village that no longer exists on a map, which now delineates a whole different reality. Although I was born and raised in a Gaza refugee camp, and then moved to and lived in the United States, finding a village that was erased from the map decades earlier was not, at least for me, an irrational act. The village of Beit Daras was the single most important piece of earth that truly mattered to me.

Cows graze through garbage at the Deonar landfill site in Mumbai, India. Credit: Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg

UN Releases Alarming Report on Global Soil Pollution

Soil pollution is posing a serious threat to our environment, to our sources of food and ultimately to our health. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations warns that there is still a lack of awareness about the scale and severity of this threat. Global production of municipal solid waste was around 1.3 billion tons per year in 2012 and it is expected to rise to 2.2 billion tons annually by 2025.

Palestine's iconic olive trees are key to the local economy. The olives from the 11 million trees across these lands support 100,000 families. LEILA MOLANA-ALLEN/AL JAZEERA

Spirit of the Orchard: A Palestinian Story

Spanning decades and encompassing war, mass exodus, epic migrations and the search for individual and collective identity, The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story tells the story of modern Palestine through the memories of those who have lived it. Ordinary Palestinians have rarely narrated their own history. In this groundbreaking book, acclaimed author Ramzy Baroud draws on dozens of interviews to produce vivid, intimate and beautifully written accounts of Palestinian lives - in villages, refugee camps, prisons and cities, in the lands of their ancestors and in exile.