On the Anniversary of Ataturk's Death, Turkey Brings Back the Arabic Alphabet

Turkey’s Ministry of National Education announced that as of the 2016-17 academic year, Arabic courses will be offered to students in elementary school starting in second grade. It will be offered as an elective language course like German, French and English. According to a prepared curriculum, second and third graders will learn Arabic comprehension and speaking, fourth graders will learn introduction to Arabic scripture, and after fifth grade the emphasis will be on developing basic language skills.

Facebook has a clever way of suggesting products, articles and pages to visit once it picks up on your area of interest and profile history. But this is not an article about Facebook, in fact it is the opposite of that. It is about organic farming and self-sustainability. A few weeks ago, ‘Dibeen Eco Farmhouse’ came as a suggested topic on my news feed, advertising ‘organic cage-free chickens’ delivered to your home. I immediately rang up and placed an order for two whole organic chickens and was impressed by the quality of their meat and the owner’s reliability

Ten years ago today, I took what felt like the longest bus ride of my life. Somewhere over the Atlantic ocean, my parents were on a plane heading from Amman to Toronto where I was finishing my studies, and in anticipation, I spent most of that morning refreshing a webpage tracking the plane’s movement. As the mid-afternoon flight crossed into the continent, I started for the door.

An Arab investor was in a coma for five years. When he woke up from the coma, they put him in a hospital room with a satellite TV. Imagine his shock as he went from one news channel to the next. The world he knew for decades had changed beyond recognition.