Olivia Sterns

A recent string of suicides by foreign maids working in Lebanon is once again drawing attention to the rampant abuse of migrant domestic workers in the Middle East.

Since October, at least 11 women have either hanged themselves or fallen from high buildings in Lebanon. Six of their deaths...

Last week a member of the Fatah Revolutionary Council kindly gave me a ride home from Ramallah to Jerusalem, and stopped at the Mount of Olives so my friend and I could see one of the best views of the Old City.

We told him we had wanted to visit...

Over the past four months, Dr. Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai has run an inspirational, issues-based presidential campaign.

In the mist of an ethnicity-based political system, built on deal-making and tribal loyalty, he has truly "introduced a new kind of politics to Afghanistan."

The result is nothing...

Summer in Afghanistan is known as "fighting season," but this year it's also voting season. You wouldn't have known it following the news coming out of the country.

With barely two weeks left before the elections, the contest is heating up and the media is finally beginning to notice...

Tens of thousands of people living in heaps of steaming trash in Cairo are quietly cleaning the city far better than Egyptian sanitation services could ever dream.

They are known as the "Zabaleen" (Arabic for garbage collectors) and they earn a living sorting and recycling the majority of Cairo's 10,000...

It's difficult to draw any conclusions from the rapidly unfolding election crisis in Tehran. Not even the regime has any idea what is going to happen, but perhaps that's the most important point.

The announcement of a partial re-count yesterday signals that the regime's power is on shaky ground....

The Taliban's attack on the Intelligence Services in Lahore last week significantly escalated their fight against the Pakistani government. In upping the ante though they may have accidentally triggered public support for the military.

For months now the Taliban have been gaining ground; from their heartland in the rugged...

I recently found myself packed like a sardine with 7 strange Syrian men in a maroon-colored Denali hurdling across the border from Syria to Lebanon. Well, almost hurdling.

To be sure, the driver was speeding and swerving every chance he got, burning similarly overstuffed sedan-size "service taxis" in the dust,...

In the past week a series of disturbing events around the world have spelled bad news for girls.

A video of a teenager being flogged in the Swat, and the clouded case of Pres. Karzai "legalizing rape" offered more evidence that women's rights are retreating in Pakistan and...

Long before Detroit's CEOs flew their corporate jets to D.C. to ask for a bailout, Pres. Mobutu regularly chartered Concordes to court Western donors to increase aid for Zaire.

The response in Washington to the automakers was an outcry of hypocrisy and a re-examination of the prospects of...