It’s Been a Deadly Winter Along Israel’s West Bank Border

Israel’s aggressive vigilance of its borders has resulted in the loss of another Palestinian life.

On Wednesday, 15-year-old Yousef Nayif Yousef Shawamrah Abu-Akar was shot dead by an Israeli soldier in the south Hebron hills.

According to the Israeli Defense Forces, Yousef was one of three Palestinian teenagers attempting to sabotage the large barrier wall that separates Israel from the West Bank.

The Inconceivable Atomic Legacy of New Mexico

In 1945, the world’s first nuclear weapon was detonated at the Trinity site, in New Mexico’s Chihuahuan Desert.

The massive blast pulled the white desert sand up into an atomic fireball, the heat transforming the granules into green glass that fell back to the desert floor.

Oktoberfest in Palestine

On a fall Sunday in Ramallah, the courtyard in the $60 million Movenpick Hotel swarmed with hundreds of drunk Palestinians.

On a stage at one end of the crowd, the Jerusalem-based band Khallas played their own brand of “oriental metal.”

Meanwhile, groups of young Palestinians did the classical dabke dance to a song that sounded somewhere between early Black Sabbath and traditional Arab folk.

Meeting the Female Street Racers of Palestine

I’m driving around the streets of Ramallah, Palestine, with Noor Dawood, the celebrated Palestinian street racer and the only female drifter in the Middle East.

Noor is one of four members of the Speed Sisters, the first and only female racing team in the Middle East, who have brought international attention to the burgeoning Palestine street-racing scene, pissing off Muslim clerics and dismantling the caricature of Palestinian womanhood as they go.