Bloomberg's Glen Carey describes life in a Saudi border town within earshot of the Yemeni war.

In Najran, the thump of artillery reverberates all day across a valley ringed by desert mountains along Saudi Arabia’s southern frontier with Yemen ( Read more... )

Bloomberg's Alaa Shahine and Glen Carey report on the intensification of the Saudi-Iranian rivalry.

The confrontation between Saudi Arabia and Iran escalated on Wednesday, as the kingdom said it foiled an Iranian arms shipment to Yemeni rebels and the Islamic Republic again hit out over last week’s fatal Hajj stampede in Mecca ( Read more... )

• blogTO suggests that the Pan Am Games are not turning out to be a disaster.
• Centauri Dreams looks at innovative designs for fast small space probes.
• City of Brass celebrates the end of Ramadan.
• The Dragon's Gaze notes the discovery of Jupiter analogue HIP 11915, and links to a paper arguing that hot Jupiters could evolve into hot Neptunes.
• The Dragon's ( Read more... )

• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly talks about breaking habits.
• Centauri Dreams notes the detection of geological features on Pluto, shares the flyby schedule, and examines Charon.
• The Dragon's Gaze reports on a brown dwarf found to have a Venus-sized world in orbit.
• The Dragon's Tales notes the atmospheric polymers of Titan, argues that worlds like ( Read more... )

• Centauri Dreams argues that humans have a deep-seated instinct to explore.
• Crooked Timber looks at how Greek debt is a political problem.
• The Dragon's Gaze notes an unsuccessful search for gas giant exoplanets around a white dwarf and looks at a new system for classifying exoplanets by mass.
• The Dragon's Tales looks at a report that a Patriot missile ( Read more... )

I've been sitting on Banen Al-Sheemary's Open Democracy essay from March, talking about conflict and prejudice in the very diverse Arab community in the Michigan city of Dearborn, for some time. Conflicts between different groups, like the Lebanese who have accumulated the most social capital and various refugee groups which fare poorly, are sad ( Read more... )

Al Jazeera America's Amel Ahmed describes how Yemeni-Americans caught by the recent Saudi-led intervention are trying to get out before it is too late.

Desperate Yemeni-Americans who find themselves stranded in Yemen due to a no-fly zone and hijacked main roads say they have begun to consider alternate means of escape, including smuggling ( Read more... )

First, Nicholas Alexrod has a photo essay (A precarious living on the Yemeni island of Socotra") showing how the semi-desert island of Socotra, far off the Yemeni coast, is beset by problems as its parent state decays into anarchy.

As interestingly, Mansur Mirovalev's "Russian roots and Yemen's Socotra language notes how the Socotran language--a ( Read more... )

• blogTO takes a look at the reasons for the failure of the Toronto Sushi Festival, a failure that included the blog's own misrepresentation of the event's success.
• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly argues that, in our media-saturated environment, paying attention to everything is exhausting.
• Centauri Dreams and D-Brief react to Dawn's arrival at ( Read more... )

• Al Jazeera notes anti-black racism in Morocco, attacks on Christians in border areas of Kenya, and the ways in which the crackdown on Somali crime in Nairobi is hitting Somali businesses.
• Bloomberg notes that Ethiopian migrants trying to enter Saudi Arabia are being persecuted on their trip by Yemeni criminal gangs, in much the same way that ( Read more... )