You must drive up a hill to get to Birzeit University, which is just outside Ramallah (West Bank, Occupied Palestine Territory or OPT). It is a beautiful campus, established in 1924 as a school for girls by the remarkable Nabiha Nasir, 1891-1951, and then converted...

On August 31, 2023, the President of the Communist Party of Chile Guillermo Teillier was buried in the historical cemetery of Recoleta. In this graveyard lies the remains of a range of important people, from former Chilean President Salvador Allende to the socialist singer Victor...

The twentieth century saw the emergence of public funded universities and technical institutions, while technology development was concentrated in the R&D laboratories of large corporations. The age of the lone inventor—Edison, Siemens, Westinghouse, Graham Bell—had ended with the nineteenth century. The twentieth century was more...

Since 1975, thousands of Sahrawi people have lived in five refugee camps in the Algerian Sahara. They named these camps after cities in Western Sahara: Ausserd, Boujdour, Dakhla, Laayoune, and Smara. In a straight line, Smara the camp is some 400 kilometers from...

In China, the educational pressure on children is intense, and it begins when they are very young. A mother living in Shanghai describes the demands of her six-year-old child’s education, saying, “In kindergarten, children already need to spend the whole weekend learning pinyin.” Pinyin is...

Days after the Taliban drove into Kabul on August 15, its representatives started making inquiries about the “location of assets” of the central bank of the nation, Da Afghanistan Bank (DAB), which are known to total about $9 billion. Meanwhile, the central bank...

At the end of 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic was continuing to ravage the populations of many nations, Israel stood out as a success story, administering more doses of vaccines to its modest-sized 9-million-strong population than any other country after China, the U.S., and...

Just before the state elections in Kerala, in southern India, a television channel ran a program called “The Great Political Kitchen.” The anchor went to kitchens across the state to talk to homemakers about their views on politics. In one kitchen, the anchor asked...

The Great Lockdown lingers month upon month. The virus continues its march across the world; the disease continues to infect people and take lives. Uncertainty grips all of us, unsure if the disease’s peak has been reached and if the Great Lockdown will...