PA says funds needed to reverse water crisis
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from Ma'an News Agency
March 21, 2012 - 12:00am

BRUSSELS (Ma'an) -- Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad on Wednesday said he hoped donors would fund a desalination plant to ease the water crisis in the Gaza Strip. Speaking from Brussels in a weekly interview to the official Voice of Palestine radio, Fayyad said the plant would cost almost half a billion dollars. Over-pumping of the coastal aquifer has reduced the quality and quantity of water in Gaza, Fayyad said. According to a 2009 World Bank report, between 90 and 95 percent of the water available in Gaza is not fit for human consumption.

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The West Bank Through Chinese Eyes
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Daily Beast
by Bernard Avishai - (Opinion) March 19, 2012 - 12:00am

Three weeks ago—just while Benjamin Netanyahu was preparing for his Palestineless AIPAC speech—I accompanied a team of about thirty Chinese businesspeople on a visit to the West Bank, led by a former Duke colleague, Liu Kang, now also the dean of the Institute of Arts and Humanities Shanghai’s Jiao Tong University. It was kind of tour d’horizon for uninitiated but intrigued foreign investors—“some billionaires,” Kang assured me—shoe and leather manufacturers, toy exporters, equity-fund managers, people by now accustomed to seeing the world as their market, if not their oyster.

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Palestinians are up to ears in debt
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Los Angeles Times
by Edmund Sanders - March 18, 2012 - 12:00am

Reporting from Ramallah, West Bank— Ayman and Rahma abu Hussein can't help but feel they are moving up in the world. The database engineer and his wife just bought their first home, and it's large enough for both of their children to have their own rooms. There's a Hyundai parked outside and a flat-panel TV hangs in the living room, one of many new appliances decking out the place.

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Palestinians are up to ears in debt
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Los Angeles Times
by Edmund Sanders - March 18, 2012 - 12:00am

Reporting from Ramallah, West Bank— Ayman and Rahma abu Hussein can't help but feel they are moving up in the world. The database engineer and his wife just bought their first home, and it's large enough for both of their children to have their own rooms. There's a Hyundai parked outside and a flat-panel TV hangs in the living room, one of many new appliances decking out the place.

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Palestinians are up to ears in debt
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Los Angeles Times
by Edmund Sanders - March 18, 2012 - 12:00am

Reporting from Ramallah, West Bank— Ayman and Rahma abu Hussein can't help but feel they are moving up in the world. The database engineer and his wife just bought their first home, and it's large enough for both of their children to have their own rooms. There's a Hyundai parked outside and a flat-panel TV hangs in the living room, one of many new appliances decking out the place.

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Palestinians prepare to lose the solar panels that provide a lifeline
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Guardian
by Phoebe Greenwood - March 14, 2012 - 12:00am

Two large solar panels jut out of the barren landscape near Imneizil in the Hebron hills. The hi-tech structures sit incongruously alongside the tents and rough stone buildings of the Palestinian village, but they are fundamental to life here: they provide electricity. Imneizil is not connected to the national electricity grid. Nor are the vast majority of Palestinian communities in Area C, the 62% of the West Bank controlled by Israel. The solar energy has replaced expensive and clunky oil-powered generators.

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Palestinian solar power: why Israel may turn out the lights
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Christian Science Monitor
by Ben Lynfield - March 11, 2012 - 1:00am

She'b El Buttum, West Bank Israeli scientists defying military occupation restrictions have brought a great leap forward to the lives of traditional Palestinian herders in a remote corner of the West Bank. Over the last several months, tent dwellers in this hamlet on a rocky hillside south of Hebron have been brought out of the dark ages by Comet-Middle East, a German-funded project headed by two Israelis that affords them electricity for the first time through solar panels and wind turbines.

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Palestinians Struggle to Put Their Food on Israeli Tables
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Media Line
by Arieh O'Sullivan - March 4, 2012 - 1:00am

Palestinian farmers say they can’t penetrate the Israeli market because of reluctance by Israelis to buy products with a Palestinian brand. Israeli agriculture officials acknowledged the problem, but said they were trying to help by exposing Israelis to more Palestinian wares. Agriculture is a pillar of the Palestinian economy. While they export to the Arab world, the U.S. and Europe, Palestinians are trying to sell their “Product of Palestine” brands to in neighboring Israel, which is a big market and no more than hour’s truck drive away.

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Israel draws plan for 475-kilometer rail network in West Bank
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from Haaretz
by Chaim Levinson - February 27, 2012 - 1:00am

Israel Railways has prepared a major plan for providing train service throughout the West Bank to serve both Israelis and Palestinians. The plan, prepared at the request of Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz, calls for establishing 11 new rail lines, according to a map that Haaretz has obtained. Katz has on several occasions expressed his intention to build a railway network in the West Bank.

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Israel nixes solar energy for Palestinians
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from Associated Press
by Karin Laub - February 25, 2012 - 1:00am

AL-THALA, West Bank — Electricity from solar panels and wind turbines has revolutionized life in rural Palestinian herding communities: Machines, instead of hands, churn goat milk into butter, refrigerators store food that used to spoil and children no longer have to hurry to get their homework done before dark.

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