Sixty years ago, the term whistle blower referred to umpires who blew their whistle excessively to indicate foul play.

One of my late mother’s dearest wishes was to learn to drive a car, but that hope remained unfulfilled because my father absolutely forbade it.I do not judge him too harshly for this attitude because, after all, he was born in 1904.

Years ago, when I was a student in Paris, I committed a faux pas in a conversation with a colleague from Bilbao, by referring to her as Spanish.She immediately retorted sharply: “I am not Spanish, I am Basque.”From then on, I avoided embarrassment with my Catalan colleagues by di

When Japan’s Foreign Minister Taro Kono came to Amman earlier this month, he could hardly have imagined the controversy that would surround his goodwill visit, which was intended to emphasise Japan’s strong support for Jordan and the continuation of its considerable economic aid

One of the highlights of my morning on September 4, the day after the week without newspapers, the Eid holiday, was to reach for my Jordan Times.My attention was immediately captured by the headline “Addressing campus violence remains unfinished business as debate goes on” atop a

It is difficult to walk through any street in Amman without passing by the diwan of one tribe or another.The word diwan, which originates from Farsi, historically came to indicate a high seat of government, but in this context it indicates a place where members of a tribe get tog

Amid all the unpleasantness that makes daily world news, there was one happy report that Malala Yousafzai has gained a place at Oxford University to study philosophy, politics and economics. For those with short memories, Malala is the daughter of a Pakistani school principa

In today’s global economic uncertainty, with signs of the long-awaited recovery remaining few and far in between, Jordan’s economy naturally feels the pinch of this situation, and the Jordanian government looks for ways to jumpstart economic recovery.One of the priority areas is

Ever since Adam took a bite of the forbidden fruit, for which he and his family were banished from the Garden of Eden, woman has been viewed as the root of all evil in most of the world’s cultures.  She is portrayed as the temptress and the originator of sin, while man is th