A Blog by the Editor of The Middle East Journal

Putting Middle Eastern Events in Cultural and Historical Context

Friday, May 22, 2009

For Your Weekend Reading

It's a three-day holiday weekend here in the US, and I'll be traveling on Monday so posts will resume Tuesday; so some weekend reading as usual:

  • First, a couple of house plugs for MEI events: on June 1, in an event held at the Carnegie Endowment, a panel on "After the Visits: What Next for Middle East Peace?" with M.J. Rosenberg of Israel Policy Forum, Ghaith al-Omari of the American Task Force for Palestine, and Geoffrey Aronson of the Foundation for Middle East Peace. Then on June 10, following the Lebanese elections, a discussion of The 2009 Lebanon Elections: Outcomes and Implications with Graeme Bannerman of MEI and Bilal Saab of Brookings (a former MEI intern, by the way). RSVP for either at the link. Podcasts and/or transcripts usually go up soon after the events.
  • Al-Masry Al-Youm continues to be your key source for all swine flu, all the time, with a piece (English here and Arabic here) Killer quote: "The US Health Department announced for the second time that the number of infected people with the virus may be 100,000 people." But WHO only says 10,000 worldwide, and even this sentence in the article doesn't justify the headline "US Health Department Expects 100,000 to be infected with swine flu." I wish they'd link to that: I'm still not seeing any "Bring out your dead!" carts around here.
  • For continuing English-language coverage of the Lebanese elections (besides, of course, The Daily Star and other papers), the blog Qifa Nabki continues to provide good, solid commentary with enough background for the non-Lebanese to follow.

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