Posts from beehaw.org

Pairs well with a NIST PB&J

The global energy crisis caused by the war in Iran is equivalent to the combined force of the twin oil shocks of the 1970s and the fallout of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the head of the International Energy Agency has warned.

Elanor Boekholt-O’Sullivan is on a mission. The new housing minister of the Netherlands is charged with building 100,000 homes a year and breaking through a planning deadlock to combat one of Europe’s worst housing crises.

This month I will conclude my tenure as the commissioner-general of Unrwa – the United Nations agency that has provided essential, public-like services to Palestinian refugees across the Middle East for more than 75 years. As the world struggles to emerge from the quagmire of Gaza and the US-Israeli war against Iran threatens to engulf the entire region, I am profoundly concerned about the future of Palestinian refugees and the multilateral system at large.

Sohrab Faqiri spent Eid, the Muslim festival to mark the end of the fasting month of Ramadan, looking for the grave of his brother, killed in a massive Pakistan airstrike on Kabul this week.

Donald Trump has branded the UK and other Nato allies “cowards” but anger is growing among cabinet ministers that his war in Iran could jeopardise Britain’s fragile finances.

For the first time since 1967, al-Aqsa mosque – Jerusalem’s most sensitive holy site – was closed at the end of Ramadan on Friday, with tensions rising among Palestinians as Israeli authorities keep the complex shut, forcing worshippers to hold Eid prayers as close as they could to the sealed site.

It was over beers on an autumn evening in Zurich in 2024 that a group of journalists with an independent Swiss research collective began to discuss investigating Palantir, one of the world’s biggest tech companies.

My main NAS box was running OpenMediaVault until a failed upgrade left the OS totally borked. Now I’m back up and running on a fresh Debian install, and I’ve documented everything that I’m running currently to keep it all straight.

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In the playground of the rich, nobody wanted this war. For decades, Dubai built itself up as a sanctuary of unadulterated consumerism visited by tourists the world over.

A Swiss canton has suspended its pilot of electronic voting after failing to count 2,048 votes cast in national referendums held on March 8.

The Israeli state’s genocidal assault against the people of Gaza now appears to be the first installment in an ongoing series. The next episode is what the United States and Israel are doing to Lebanon and Iran. It’s not just the relentless bombings and missile launches with little regard for civilian life that’s so reminiscent of the war on Gaza. It’s not just the slaughtering of children followed by easily debunked denials. (The casual mendacity of both governments is jaw-dropping.) It’s not the assassinations of governmental and religious leaders. It’s the attempt to kill hope.

Overnight on March 7, Israel bombed fuel depots outside of Tehran, Iran’s capital city. Playwright and filmmaker Homayoun Ghanizadeh woke up the next day to black smoke and carnage. What follows is his account of a private citizen trying to maintain some normalcy in the face of a relentless bombing campaign.

If anyone knows the emotional turmoil the Iranian football players have experienced in the past 48 hours, as they leave their homeland behind for a new life in Australian, it’s Tooba Sarwari.

Thousands of pets are being abandoned in Dubai as their owners flee the Middle East because of the Iran war, animal charities have said.

On a steep hillside in western El Salvador, Oscar Leiva watches rainfall in December, a month that once marked the start of the dry season. During this harvest cycle, flowering came early and then stalled. A heatwave followed. What remains of the crop is uneven, lower in quality and more expensive to produce than the last.

In times of war, reality is often the first casualty—not only on the battlefield but in the narratives that travel across the global information system. As tensions surrounding Iran escalate, much of the international coverage has portrayed the country as teetering on the edge of internal panic and social breakdown. Yet recent reporting from foreign correspondents on the ground tells a far more complex story—one that challenges the dramatic narratives dominating headlines and raises uncomfortable questions about how wartime realities are framed for global audiences.

The widening US-Israeli war with Iran is already reshaping the political and military contours of the Middle East. Much of the focus has been on the risk of regional escalation and the implications for Gulf security. But the war’s impact may be just as immediate and consequential for Gaza, where 2 million people are already living under conditions that leave no room to absorb new pressures. The crisis is complicating an already volatile situation for a place with no functioning governance, no open borders, no powerful supporters, and a humanitarian infrastructure that was already failing before the strikes on Tehran.

As missiles and drones curtail energy production across the Persian Gulf, analysts warn that water, not oil, may be the resource most at risk in the energy-rich but arid region.

I was at work last Saturday when I heard the blast. Since that moment, the world has been turned on its head. The school called asking me to come and pick up my child. I rushed to the metro and headed north in a carriage filled with anxious people calling their loved ones to ensure their safety, melancholy etched on their faces, uncertainty metastasising from one to another as they checked the latest news on their mobiles.

The things we do for false Christianity.

If there is a readily accessible hydrocarbon to metabolize, life will evolve a way to metabolize it. Bacteria, fungi, and even some insects have already shown scientists they have figured out how to do this with certain types of plastic. Where does this lead?

Mojtaba Khamenei, the second son of the assassinated Ali Khamenei, is being heavily tipped to succeed his father as supreme leader of Iran, which would pitch a hardliner into the task of steering the Islamic republic through the most turbulent period in its 48-year history and offer a powerful signal that, for now, it has no intention of changing course.

Don’t be a harm increaser SMH

The outcome and duration of the war in the Middle East may be decided by a grim calculus based on the size of Iran’s drone and missile stocks v vital air defence munitions held by the US, Israel and Gulf states, analysts and officials say.