Lion cubs turn into stars of Gaza family
A cash-starved zoo in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, sold the cubs to Saadi Jamal, a Palestinian Authority security employee who has taken them home -- to the delight of his four children and their neighbours.
For the past 10 weeks, "they've been living in the house like members of the family", he told AFP. The children in the three-room apartment and their local friends "play all day long with the cubs".
But this extended family comes at a price.
Source: Your Middle East
Will the PKK disarm?
Turkey is making headway with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) on disarmament. In an unprecedented step on February 28, officials from the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and Kurdish-dominated Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) appeared together before the press to read a message from Abdullah Ocalan, the group’s imprisoned leader. In the address, Ocalan called on the PKK to convene a congress this spring to discuss ending the armed conflict, as part of a comprehensive agreement for nationwide democratization as a means to address core Kurdish demands.
Source: Sada
An anthology of the final decade: exploring Iran’s past through art
A lizard-headed strongman and a nineteenth-century noblewoman pose together on a chaise lounge. Outstretched before a crowd of Qajar dignitaries lies a nude woman. A monstrous birdman clutches a bunch of bloodied and shrivelled heads, which dangle from his fist like a cluster of screaming mandrakes.
Such are the surreal and provocative scenes in the sepia-hued Polaroids by Iranian photographer Kaveh Golestan, who entitled these collages Az Div o Dad (Of Beast and Wild, quoted from the classical Persian poetry of Rumi).
Source: Tehran Bureau
