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"I Tried To Divorce Him 100 Times" - Arafat's Widow Speaks

SABAH(Turkey), THE GUARDIAN (UK), YNET (Israel)

Worldcrunch

Nine years after her husband’s death, Suha Arafat regrets her marriage to the former Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat. They married in a secret wedding in Tunisia in 1990 when Suha was 27. Arafat, then 61, was 34 years older.

In an interview given last week to the Turkish newspaper Sabah, Suha Arafat said that she loved her husband, but the marriage “was a big mistake and I regret it.”

Suha Arafat says she has lived two lives "My childhood and my youth were my first life. Arafat became my second my identity was completely destroyed."

Born in Jerusalem to a prominent Palestinian Christian family, she would later study in a convent and eventually move to France, where she met Arafat in 1989. She would later convert to Islam to marry the legendary Palestinian leader.

“Had I known what I would endure, I clearly wouldn't have married him. True, he was a huge leader, but I was lonely," said Suha

“We were married for 22 years; however it felt like it was 50," she told the Sabah journalist. "My life with him was hard I tried to divorce Arafat more than 100 times and he didn’t let me.”

Since Arafat’s death in a Paris hospital in 2004 Suha said she has had multiple marriage proposals,but rejected them all with the same answer: “Arafat was my hero.” Last year, she asked French authorities to open a murder investigation into her husband's death, and authorized the exhumation of his body.

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Green

How Climate Change May Be Triggering More Earthquakes — And Vice Versa

Researchers have identified a possible link between climate change and the frequency of earthquakes — and the quakes may also start a vicious circle of accelerating climate change.

Image of a man trying to measure the offset of a crevasse on a glacier

Crevasse on the Canwell glacier created by the earthquake that struck near Denali National Park in Alaska in November 2002

Paul Molga

PARIS — Between 1900 and 1950, the Earth recorded an average of 3.4 earthquakes per year with a magnitude greater than 6.5. That figured doubled to 6.7 a year until the early 1970s, and was almost five times that in the 2000s.

Their intensity would also have increased with more than 25 major earthquakes per year, double the previous periods. This is according to the EM-DAT emergency events database, which compiled the occurrence and effects of 22,000 mass disasters worldwide in the 20th century.

Can we conclude that there is a causal relationship with the rise of human activities, as some experts suggest? The idea was first suggested in 2011 by an Australian research team led by geology professor Giampiero Iaffaldano. At the time, it reported that it had found that the intensification of the monsoon in India had accelerated the movement of the Indian tectonic plate by 20% over the past 10 million years.

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