Words & Multimedia By: Naseem Tarawnah

Some of the most remarkable scenes have emerged on the streets of Amman these past 48 hours. Word that gas stations were refusing to sell their fuel supplies began to spread on Saturday and gained momentum as the work week began Sunday morning. By 5pm drive-home traffic time, some of [...]

Human Rights Watch condemns the U.S. ally, saying prisoners are tortured and abusers go punished.

Written By: Raed Rafei
7iber - For three days, he was severely beaten by prison guards. Then, early one morning in May, Firas Zaidan was found dead in his solitary-confinement cell in Jordan, one of the United States’ staunchest allies in the [...]

7iberDotCom - In a story a few weeks ago entitled, A Different Kind of Jihad, 7iber reported that the climber Mostafa Salameh successfully reached Everest on his third attempt and became the first Jordanian to climb Everest and narrowly missing out on becoming the first Arab to climb the mountain. In that article, he discussed [...]

American Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama speaking in Amman, Jordan via WSJ.
Written By: Rana F. Sweis
7iberDotCom — On a bustling street in downtown Amman, Farah Al Sayyad, 24, stares at a magazine showing American democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama walking up a flight of stairs while gazing at the sky.
“For me it’s not about if [...]

Jordanians crowd the branch of a currency-trading company in Irbid. Photo Courtesy: Petra

7iber - September saw the collapse of several currency-trading offices and financial companies dealing with foreign investments, who upon postponing the distribution of their clients’ monthly earnings were seen to be preparing to declare bankruptcy. The move sparked charges from the Amman [...]

Iraqi students congregate outside the Shmeissani Al-Qharbi School in Amman, Jordan. Many Iraqi war refugees have missed years of school, but despite new opportunities to be back in class, they get little help catching up.—Christopher Powers/Education Week
War, displacement, and lack of money have prevented Iraqi children from going to school for lengthy stretches of time. [...]

Written by MARY ANN ZEHR with contributions from YASMINE MOUSA
AMMAN - Omar Al-Hmoud gets frustrated when Iraqi parents tell him they haven’t enrolled their children in Jordanian schools because they soon expect to be resettled in another country. The deputy country director for Mercy Corps, an international nonprofit organization that provides aid to displaced Iraqis [...]

Written By Ahmad Humeid from 360east.com
FULL DISCLOSURE: I am a partner in TootCorp, creator of ikbis.com.
Before we start talking about the “failure” of Arab web 2.0, let us first admit that the Arab world is still stuck in web 0.5 and has not even reached web 1.0. By global standards, web 1.0 encompasses things like [...]

From Kabobfest.
Written by Emily
In a new Jordan Times article, Hani Hazaimeh reports again that
According to DHAA officials, the complaints included ill-treatment by employers and being overworked, said Faouri, who believes the workers’ reasons for wanting to leave their posts were homesickness and cultural differences between Jordan and the Philippines.
The Jordan Times still fails to mention [...]

Written by Sam Bollier
What, then, do blogs accomplish in Jordan? Although they have a small readership and play virtually no role in Jordanian politics, it would be a mistake to assume that blogs are irrelevant. The most salient effect of blogging in Jordan is the ability of bloggers to, as Tarawnah put it, “vocalize [...]

No Longer a Novelty: Blogging and Politics in Jordan

Written by Sam Bollier
[Editor's note: This article is the first in a two part series on blogging and politics in Jordan and the wider Arab World. The series is a condensed version that can be viewed in its entirety at: http://saminamman.blogspot.com ]
How much influence do Jordanian blogs [...]

Al-Syjjyl is a new Jordanians Arabic-language weekly newspaper. In its first issue, on Thursday 8th of November, 7iber was mentioned. Click image to enlarge and read in Arabic.
Translated text:
A group of Dot Com youth is seeking to overcome the invisible censorship barriers by publishing articles covering local news on 7iber.com, a website that was [...]

Written By: Naseem Tarawnah
Parliamentary elections are officially up and running now. The first two days of candidate registration saw 916 names and as Lina points out, 15.8% of which are women. That’s a pretty decent percentage in my case, considering that the majority of that number are from fairly conservative cities like Irbid and Kerak. [...]