Welcome to the winter solstice, the day your morning coffee and your evening glass of wine occur in what feels like the exact same fifteen-minute window of daylight. Today, the sun wakes up late, takes a look around at the shivering populace, and decides to leave early, around 4:53 PM, leaving us to navigate the pitch-black abyss of the late afternoon. It’s the one day of the year where "sleeping in" until 8:00 am means you’ve successfully missed a solid quarter of the da

Illegal Israeli settlers set fire to land belonging to the village of Taybeh, the last of the West Bank’s ancient Christian-majority communities, on 9 June. The attack escalated into assaults on individuals when the settlers impeded locals’ efforts to extinguish the fire. Taybeh residents have reported increasing violence and intimidation in recent months months, and the parish priest of the Latin rite Church of Christ the Redeemer, Fr Bashar Fawadleh, said this latest atta

Today June 17 is the anniversary of the event that caused the creation of the Taj Mahal. On June 17, 1631, Empress Mumtaz Mahal died from complications while giving birth to her 14th child (a daughter named Gauhar Ara Begum) in Burhanpur. Her husband, Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, was so completely shattered by her death that court chroniclers noted his hair turned white from grief within months. To channel his sorrow and honour a deathbed promise to build her a monument of unma

On this day in 1963 US President John F Kennedy declared that segregation is morally wrong and that it is "time to act." While state-enforced segregation laws such as South African Apartheid or Jim Crow in the United States have been officially dismantled globally, racial and ethnic segregation still exists. Today, it primarily persists as de facto segregation—driven by systemic inequality, historical redlining, socio-economic divides, and deeply ingrained cultural prejudic

Imagine you are sitting around a campfire. The fire crackles, the sweet smell of smoke touches the air, the sounds of the night bush orchestra provide accompaniment to the rhythm of the storyteller's tales. His style is personal and intimate, as a friend, seated beside you. His stories are in plain speech, "no frills" as his younger years were never spent in school. His memory sharpened by the lack of any written diary and forged by the gauntlet of challenging experiences f