Israel News | Arabs

The government announced that 13 billion shekels ($3.3 billion) will be allocated towards education, infrastructure, culture, sports, and transportation over five years in predominantly Arab areas.
Poverty, unemployment, underemployment, and lower educational achievement and attainment have long plagued Israel’s Arab minority, which comprises around a fifth of the total Israeli population.
The Mossawa Center, an Arab advocacy organization, criticized the announcement as vague and far short of the funding requested to bring the living standards of Israel’s Arab citizens in line with its Jewish population.

Israel News | Interethnic

The request to include Borderlife by Dorit Rabinyan in the high school curriculum was denied out of fear of escalating already tense relations between Jews and Arabs in the country as violence continues.
As teachers and students protested, the ministry relaxed its ruling, saying the work could be studied in advanced literature classes, but that other controversial content—including its depiction of soldiers—and concerns about national identity would keep the book from the general curriculum.
The book centers on a Jewish Israeli woman and a Palestinian man, who fall in love while overseas in New York.

(Image Credit: Ofer Vaknin/Haaretz)

China’s foreign ministry refused to renew the press credentials of Ursula Gauthier, a reporter for the French magazine L’Obs, following a controversial article crticizing China’s anti-terrorism policies in Xinjiang.
Chinese officials accused her of sympathizing with terrorists and demanded a public apology from her, which lead to the credential revocation when she refused.
Although China’s domestic press is heavily regulated, foreign press have typically had considerably more freedom to report on controversial topics, with the last foreign reporter expelled in 2012.

(Image Credit: Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters)