To feed and cool his buffaloes, Hashem Gassed must cross 10 kilometres (six miles) of sunburnt land in southern Iraq, where drought is devastating swathes of the mythical Mesopotamian Marshes.
The reputed home of the biblical Garden of Eden, Iraq's swamplands have been battered by three years of drought and low rainfall, as well as reduced water flows along rivers and tributaries originating in neighbouring Turkey and Iran.
Israeli police Sunday arrested a suspect in a pre-dawn shooting spree targeting a bus just outside Jerusalem's Old City that wounded eight people, including a pregnant woman and several US citizens.
"The terrorist is in our hands," police spokesman Kan Eli Levy told Israeli public radio hours after the bloody attack not far from the Western Wall, the holiest prayer site for Jews.
Seven people were injured, two of them critically, after a shooting attack on a bus in Jerusalem's Old City, Israeli police and medics said early Sunday.
"The police were informed of a shooting of a bus ... Police have cordoned off the scene and are searching for a suspect who fled," the police said.
Israel's emergency medical services, the Magen David Adom (MDA), called the incident a "terror attack in the Old City".
Two rival Shiite Muslim blocs are holding competing sit-ins in Baghdad, ramping up tensions in conflict-weary Iraq, but shopkeeper Mustafa says he's more worried about how he's going to make a living.
"We have no work," said the man in his forties as a lone fan pumped hot summer air around his clothes store.
The two camps are "defending their personal interests", he charged, declining to provide his surname due to security concerns.
Political deadlock has left Iraq without a new government, president or prime minister following general elections 10 months ago.
In Tehran's book market, the stabbing of British novelist Salman Rushdie was on everyone's lips Saturday, but only those who approved of the attack dared to speak publicly.
The author, who spent years in hiding after an Iranian fatwa ordered his killing, was on a ventilator in hospital after the attack Friday at a literary event in upstate New York.
Iran's rulers bear responsibility for the attack against the British writer Salman Rushdie as the Islamic republic never repudiated a 1989 order issued by its founder calling for the novelist to be killed, activists and opponents charged Saturday.
While the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini over Rushdie's novel "The Satanic Verses" has for some time not been part of daily discourse in Iran, the clerical leadership under his successor Ayatollah Ali Khamenei also did nothing to indicate it no longer stood and on occasions underlined the decree was still valid.
Iranian ultra-conservative newspaper Kayhan on Saturday hailed the man who stabbed British author Salman Rushdie -- the target of a 1989 Iranian fatwa calling for his death.
Rushdie was on a ventilator after the attack during a literary event in New York state on Friday, more than 30 years after he went into hiding following late supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's fatwa.
Friday's knife attack on Salman Rushdie comes more than 33 years after the fatwa against him by Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in which he sentenced him to death.
- The Fatwa -
On February 14, 1989 Khomeini called for him to be killed for writing "The Satanic Verses", which the cleric said insulted Islam.
In a fatwa, or religious decree, Khomeini urged "Muslims of the world rapidly to execute the author and the publishers of the book" so that "no one will any longer dare to offend the sacred values of Islam."
The man accused of stabbing Salman Rushdie at a literary event pleaded not guilty to attempted murder charges Saturday, as the severely injured author appeared to show signs of improvement in hospital.
Hadi Matar, 24, was arraigned in court in New York state, with prosecutors outlining how Rushdie had been stabbed approximately 10 times in what they described as a planned, premeditated assault.
After the on-stage attack on Friday, Rushdie had been helicoptered to hospital and underwent emergency surgery.
Opponents of populist Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr launched their own Baghdad sit-in Friday, nearly two weeks after Sadr supporters stormed parliament and began an open-ended protest first inside, then outside the legislature.
The opposing encampments are the latest turn in a standoff between Iraq's rival Shiite blocs which has so far remained peaceful in the war-scarred country.
The pro-Iran Coordination Framework said it would hold an "indefinite sit-in" to press for a new government to be formed quickly to end months of deadlock.
