Full Coverage: Middle East

28.05.2004 United Nations Development Programme has organised a two-day workshop on national e-strategies in Beirut, Lebanon. Delegates from the Arab region are attending this high-level meeting.

28.05.2004 Israel has drawn up a secret plan for a giant desalination plant to supply drinking water to the Palestinian territory on the West Bank, the New Scientist reports. Israel hopes the project will diminish pressure for it to grant any future Palestinian state greater access to the region's scarce supplies of fresh water.

27.05.2004 According to a UN report issued this week, virtually all 27 million Iraqis depend on food rations and 55 percent of the population live below the poverty line.

27.05.2004 JERUSALEM, May 27 (IPS) - The Israeli attack on Rafah in the Gaza Strip did not come in a political and military vacuum. The Israeli army's 'operation rainbow' is now only 'paused' and all indications point to the struggle that has continued between Israel and the Palestinians along the Egyptian border for more than three years now will resume shortly.

26.05.2004 Lakhdar Brahimi is “no favorite of the White House” because he opposed the decision to invade Iraq, condemned the siege on Fallujah and publicly denounced Israel’s actions in the Middle East. But as the man widely praised by diplomats, warlords and U.S. military commanders for stabilizing post-conflict Afghanistan, “the Bush administration sees no viable alternative to Brahimi as a peacemaker in Iraq.”

26.05.2004 Academicians from Arab countries gathered in a meeting recently pointed out the lack of electronic databases, especially in Arabic languages. They made a strong case for making information on research accessible through such databases.

26.05.2004 Some Iraqi men abused at the now-infamous Abu Ghraib prison and other Coalition-run detention centres fear exploitation by politically-motivated lawyers. They are highly sought after as clients by lawyers across the Arab world who wish to have their cases tried at international courts.

25.05.2004 Ahead of the anticipated release of the U.S Greater Middle East Initiative at the G-8 Summit in June, Arab leaders have adopted a five-page blueprint for political and democratic reforms in the region.

25.05.2004 President Bush’s speech on Monday was unequivocal about the June 30 hand over in Iraq. But analysts question the speech’s non-specificity on the withdrawal of coalition troops, the fate of the militias after the handover, most importantly, who constitutes the new government.

24.05.2004 President Bush apologized to King Abdullah of Jordan, not the Iraqi people, for the abuses at Abu Ghraib prisons. Defense analyst Charles Knight says this is a familiar pattern in U.S. diplomacy, using "foreign stooges" to do the unpleasant jobs.

24.05.2004 The peace and progress on the surface in Somer, one of the Baghdad neighborhoods most comfortable with US occupation and home to one of Iraq's most successful local councils, conceal big problems for the grass-roots institutions that US officials had hoped would be the building blocks for an unprecedented democratic culture inside Iraq.

24.05.2004 More than seven million of the world’s nearly 12 million refugees have been confined to camps, special settlements, or other conditions in which their basic human rights have been denied for ten years or more, according to the 2004 ‘World Refugee Survey’ released by the U.S. Committee for Refugees (USCR).

22.05.2004

21.05.2004 In three separate incidents, one television technician was killed and two journalists were detained on Thursday in the Iraqi cities of Kerbala, Najaf and Baghdad.

21.05.2004 Military operations in the Gaza Strip this week contravene the Fourth Geneva Convention which mandates protection for civilian populations in time of war or military occupation.

21.05.2004 UNICEF has said it is deeply concerned about the impact on children of the ongoing military operation in the Gaza Strip, particularly a missile strike on 19 May that claimed the lives of at least 10 Palestinians, many of them children.

20.05.2004 Children on the streets of Baghdad laugh and clap hands like children elsewhere because of the of friends in U.S.-based groups who reach across to them in every way possible.

20.05.2004 In accordance with the Convention on the rights of the child, UNICEF is calling for restraint in ongoing military operation in the Gaza Strip to protect children from direct exposure to acts of violence.

19.05.2004

19.05.2004 Local and international human rights groups are barred from the court martial proceedings in Baghdad on the orders of the CPA.