Because Iran is throwing missiles at Jordan right now, you need to know something first. Jordan did not grow out of the ground like an old country. It was stitched together in a hotel in Cairo in March 1921 by a handful of British officials who needed a cheap solution and a quiet map.
The Ottoman Empire had just collapsed. Britain was sitting on Mesopotamia, Palestine, and a big empty stretch of desert east of the Jordan River. Keeping troops there cost a fortune. Winston Churchill, then Colonial Secretary, called a meeting at the Semiramis Hotel. They joked they were the forty thieves. Gertrude Bell was the only woman in the room who actually knew the tribes and the roads. T. E. Lawrence was there. Sir Percy Cox came from Baghdad with the files.
They needed Arab kings who would take British money and not demand a giant army. Faisal, son of the Sharif of Mecca, got Iraq. His older brother Abdullah needed a prize too, otherwise the family would sulk. So they gave him the leftover desert and called it Transjordan. Churchill later said he created the place on a Sunday afternoon with a stroke of a pen. That is not poetry. That is how the country entered the world.
Abdullah became emir, then king. The British paid him, trained his force, and used the land as a buffer. After independence the Hashemite throne stayed. Decades later American aircraft and missile batteries moved onto Jordanian air bases because the same strip of desert sits in a useful place between Iraq, Syria, Israel, and the Gulf. King Hussein Air Base. Al Azraq. Muwaffaq Salti. Names on a modern war map that sit on ground first outlined in that Cairo dining room.
So when Iranian missiles fly toward those bases, they are not hitting some ancient kingdom that chose this fight in the year 700. They are hitting a state invented to save British cash and keep two Hashemite brothers employed. The joke is old and it is not funny anymore. A hotel table made the border. The border hosted the bases. The bases drew the missiles. That is the whole chain.
Read it once more if you have to. Cairo, March 1921. Cheap kings. A Sunday map. A country that still has to catch steel that was aimed at someone else’s war.
I’m so proud to finally share ALL WE HAVE a Palestinian animation film about love, stolen time & resistance under occupation. Written & produced by yours truly, and directed by the brilliant Amer Hlehel & Mahmoud Ghalwa. Poetry meets stunning visuals, carried by a powerful original score by Nahed ElRayes.
Learn more: https://t.co/K0H9awVwc8
you don’t know when the last time he ate was or when he’ll eat again.. when u have a spending limit just let them know what it is upfront and they usually choose within reason, to get on socials and post about it is distasteful and unnecessarily nasty
The doctor who delivered Dolly Parton in a one-room Tennessee cabin in 1946 was paid with a sack of cornmeal. Her father farmed other people's land and could not read or write. Eighty years later, the reading program she built in his name has mailed more than 300 million books.
She wrote "I Will Always Love You" on the same afternoon she wrote "Jolene," as a goodbye to Porter Wagoner, and released it in 1974. Elvis wanted it. The night before the session, Colonel Tom Parker called and said Presley would only record it if they got half the publishing, meaning half of everything the song ever earned. She had been in Nashville ten years by then. She said no, and cried all night. Whitney Houston cut her version in 1992, held number one for fourteen weeks, and Forbes later put Parton's royalties from it near $10 million. She put some of that money into an office complex in Nashville and called the place the house that Whitney built.
Dollywood opened in Pigeon Forge in 1986 because she wanted paychecks in the county she came from. Around 4,000 people work there now. Three million visitors come every year. The University of Tennessee put its economic impact at $1.8 billion, and it is the largest employer in Sevier County. Since 2022 the company has paid tuition, fees, and books in full for every worker from their first day, seasonal hires included.
Wildfires tore through those mountains in November 2016, killing fourteen people and destroying more than 2,400 buildings. Her foundation was handing out money within 48 hours. Every family that lost a home got $1,000 a month for six months, regardless of income. The final check was $5,000. Total delivered: $8.9 million.
In April 2020 she sent $1 million to Vanderbilt for coronavirus research. When Moderna's vaccine results ran in the New England Journal of Medicine that November, her fund appeared in the footnotes.
Carl Dean, her husband of nearly sixty years, died in March 2025. The note she wrote to fans afterward ended with the same five words she wrote for Porter Wagoner back in 1974. She died in Nashville today. Her family asked that instead of flowers, people give to the Imagination Library, which still mails 3.4 million books a month to children who will never get to meet her.
Shell is selling its U.S. headquarters, asking about $325 million for the west Houston campus it has called home for more than four decades. https://t.co/wn0WvwEbNY
This is so cute! She is really bringing back old school pop artistry. Mic is on, genuinely interacting with fans, creating a song that has a life of its own (a dance routine, an aesthetic etc) no notes
A Flock camera on Studemont Street was found cut in half Saturday, at least the fifth instance of vandalism of a Flock camera in Houston in the past month. https://t.co/1VrcGuoOnp
A Flock camera on Studemont Street was found cut in half Saturday, at least the fifth instance of vandalism of a Flock camera in Houston in the past month. https://t.co/1VrcGuoOnp
The accusation that I am antisemitic is appalling and fundamentally dishonest. Criticizing the actions of the Israeli prime minister, a military technology contract, or the executives who supply it is not the same as criticizing Jewish people. This critical and necessary dialogue is then dishonestly framed as being anti-Israel. To be clear, my views come from my own political convictions and should never be interpreted as hostility toward Jewish people, for whom I have deep love and respect. Everything I know about acting, activism, and humanism has been profoundly shaped by the Jewish friends, colleagues, and loved ones who have been integral and family throughout every point of my life.
This merger has real consequences for real people, and for the entire country. Scrutinizing the Ellisons, including Oracle’s business built on data, surveillance technology and government contracts, and the serious threat to editorial freedom and the loss of a livelihood for thousands of families, is fair and necessary. The $111 billion deal would hand one family control over CNN, HBO and Warner Bros., backed in part by foreign money whose influence on editorial decisions has never been fully explained to the public.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have called for serious national security review, and regulators still haven’t given the public a real answer. Until they do, the merger shouldn’t move forward. Now is the time to dive boldly into all these issues, not step back or concede.