“I am proud because I was not prosecuted for corruption, or for spying, but for saying a word of truth.” - Khalid Mahadin on being cleared of charges of slandering the Lower House of Parliament.
While it’s good to hear that Mahadin is cleared of these idiotic charges levied against him by an even more idiotic […]

AMMAN (AFP) — Jordan plans to begin work on a six-billion-dollar railway next year to bolster trade with its neighbours and create jobs for its cash-strapped population, Transport Minister Sahl Majali told AFP in an interview. “The 4.5-billion-dinar project is vital to Jordan because it will make freight movement faster and easier, cut transportation costs […]

Former Minister of Public Works, Sahel al-Majali, has been the on-again, off-again center of a brewing scandal regarding the royal initiative: decent housing for decent living. Today, columnist Jamil Nimri opened the Pandora’s box on the whole issue with some rather interesting findings.
Briefly, the initiative was set to build 100,000 homes for poor Jordanians, offering […]

By now, pretty much everyone has heard the talk of the town: the latest suicide attempt in Jordan. Amman is a small town that likes to talk, especially when it comes to an event where the attempted female jumper called the media to cover it, and in the process, tied up traffic on one of […]

The Greater Amman Municipality (GAM) and the Audit Bureau said on Tuesday they will review a bureau report which deemed bonuses recently disbursed by GAM as illegal…At the meeting, attended by Amman Mayor Omar Maani, lawmakers questioned the legality of the decision to disburse JD128,000 in bonuses to senior GAM officials.
Defending the decision, Maani said […]

On Ammon today, an interesting article featured a Yarmouk University professor who protested AIDS awareness posters posted by the Ministry of Health that asked “Have you practiced anal sex, oral sex or vaginal sex?”. I’ll let you do the reading but to sum it up, Dr. Azzam’s argument is that the posters promote promiscuity or, […]

Remember when HM King Abdullah said that journalists wouldn’t be jailed any more? Well they can still be sued. As many know by now, Khalid Mahadin was just sued by the Lower House of Parliament for “slander” after publishing an article on Kheberni.com entitled, “For God’s Sake, Abdullah”, where he criticized members of Parliament. To […]

Palestinian officials and analysts have linked the incident to the Jerusalem municipality’s eviction orders of more than 1,500 Palestinians living in some 180 houses in the East Jerusalem suburb of Silwan area. It will become the largest mass expulsion of Palestinians since the Israeli occupation in the 1967 war. [source
We’ve been hearing this for quite […]

A main headline today, as most of you might know already, is the opening of a trial for two Jordanian men who are accused of plotting to kill an Israeli business man who runs a QIZ factory in Irbid. The two men were not able to go through with it, but not before security forces […]

The other day I received an invitation to a meeting with the Prime Minister only a few hours before the meeting was actually held. Apparently, the point was for “electronic news sites” as our government loves to call them, to have a chat with Prime Minister Nader Dahabi. The post-meeting analysis was a brilliant review […]

International markets took a huge plunge yesterday, with the Dow Jones hitting its lowest point since 1997. Everywhere, even here in Jordan, people are feeling the financial pinch. Jobs are being lost and those who still have them are fighting to keep them. Salary raises are almost out of the question.
Except in the Jordan government.
The […]

“There is no greater hypocrisy than a country that just 39 years ago, on Black September in 1970, murdered 10,000 of its Palestinian residents, dealing with international crimes today…Jordan will not be the one to teach Israel what combat morals are.” - Israel’s Internal Security Minister, Avi Dichter, expressing outrage at reports that Jordan planned […]

The new cabinet isn’t the only funny thing happening around town this week. Another funny political joke I’ve heard recently actually took place in the final days of Salah Al-Muwajdeh as minister of health, who announced that smoking in public places such as the airport, malls and tourist-related restaurants will be banned starting the first […]

Sixty percent of Americans in the nationwide survey said they were sympathetic toward the Israelis, compared with 17 percent who supported the Palestinians, CNN reported today on its Web site. A recent European poll showed that 23 percent of French people said the Palestinian Hamas group was primarily responsible for the war while 18 percent […]

This is the breaking news of the day over here. Naturally, the Jordanian military has denied Israeli claims that shots were fired at a border crossing from the Jordanian side. There’s no doubt in my mind that Jordanian military fired anything so much as a wad of bubble gum at the Israeli side. Israeli media […]

8:25pm: Breaking news over the AP wire…
WASHINGTON (AP) - In a Dec. 22 story about gifts to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, The Associated Press, relying on faulty information published by the State Department in the Federal Register, reported erroneously that King Abdullah II of Jordan gave Rice jewelry valued at $147,000 in January 2007. […]