“The organizers of suicide attacks don’t want to jeopardize their missions by recruiting unreliable people. It may be that some psychologically unstable people want to become suicide bombers, but insurgent organizations strongly prefer their cannons fixed.” - Political Sociologist Robert Brym of the University of Toronto, in a paper published in Social Forces. Brym concluded […]

I’ve been following this story since early February and waiting to see if and when Mourtada would be charged by the Moroccan government for creating a Facebook profile of Morocco’s Crown Prince. I had initially thought he would eventually be let go for such a silly thing, since it wasn’t like he was blogging about […]

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Every honor crime story has something unique about it…
The suspect, who was not identified by officials, reportedly stabbed his 26-year-old sister seven times in the stomach on Tuesday, shortly after signing a guarantee that he would not harm his sibling who was in protective custody, the source said. Immediately after the incident, he went to […]

This officially makes it the longest running blog on Queen Zein Al-Sharaf Street. So to celebrate, I will spare people any required reading or lengthy speeches this time around. Suffice to say, my third year of blogging was by far the coolest, as it was the first year spent on blogging about Jordan while IN […]

I.
Tala, the Black Iris reader who sits across from me at work, was telling me about an interesting social observation she noted a while back. People in Jordan like to notice and know other people, so they can say they saw so-and-so the other day, or that they know so-and-so. For example. People seem to […]

With his latest album, Sleep Through The Static, Jack Johnson proves he can still make solid zen-like, beach-side, laid-back tunes that can either put you to sleep or have you sing along. It is certainly not as great as the milestone of In Between Dreams, and some of the best songs on Sleep actually sound […]

Seventy: Number of souls that went down to Egypt to begin the Hebrew’s Egyptian exile (Genesis 46:27)
Seventy: Approximate year the building of Rome’s Colosseum began.
Seventy: Years of marriage representing the platinum wedding anniversary.
Seventy: The number of days Saudi blogger Fouad Farhan has been stuck in jail as of today. He is yet to be charged.
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