Haruki Murakami (1949-present) is a contemporary Japanese writer whose works have been translated into fifty languages and won him plenty of Japanese and international awards. His short stories are well constructed in a weird realistic manner and are mixed with elements of surrealism. His novels and short stories fall under the genre of magical realism. One of the major revolving themes that Murakami wrote about was the haunting feeling of emptiness and disconnectedness in a world which seems to care much for materialism and self-interests.

    The paper explores two of Murakami’s short stories in his book After the Quake (2000) and the relevance of their themes and characters to Iraq after the q

ABSTRACT Objective: Cardiovascular diseases are the first ranked cause of death worldwide. Adhering to health promoting lifestyle behaviors will maintain an individual’s cardiovascular health and decrease the risk of cardiovascular diseases. Methods: In this descriptive study, 150 nursing faculty were surveyed via a non-probability (purposive) sampling method to assess their adherence to health promoting lifestyle in order to know the risk of cardiovascular diseases. The Arabic version of Health-Promoting Lifestyle Profile II (HPLP-II) was used to achieve this goal. Results: Seventy-two nursing faculty completed the survey. The results indicated that the study sample had moderate level of health promotion based on Health-Promot

ABSTRACTBackground: In Medical ethics education, improving medical student’s attitudes toward respecting the right of patients is an essential task. The medical students’ attitude has been affected by social, educational and personality background factors.Objective: To investigate medical student’s attitudes regarding medical ethics courses.Method: The study was conducted in Al-Kindy College of Medicine on academic year (2013 -2014) for the period from January to September. A cross- sectional study design was adopted with a self- administered questionnaire form distributed to medical students in the 5th-6th under graduate grades. The questionnaire consisted of 31 items relevant to student’s opinion about attitudes concerning ethi

The current study aims to assess the effectiveness of the cognitive-behavioral programs in reducing stuttering and social anxiety among high-school students. The researchers used the experimental design. The sample consists of (20) male students who reported the highest score on the stuttering severity scale and social anxiety scale. The sample was divided into experimental and control groups (each group consists of 10 participants). The researcher used the type and severity of stuttering scale developed by Onslow et al (2003), translated by Mahmoud Ismail and the social anxiety scale was prepared by the authors. The results showed that there are statistically significant differences in pre-post and follow-up tests amongst the experiment

تشير الادبيات الى ان العنف قد رافق الانسان منذ بدء الخليقة حتى يومنا هذا، الا ان التطور العلمي والتكنلوجي والسرعة الفائقة في التغيير قد زاد من حجمه، وعدد مثيراته واختلفت نوعيته تبعاً لارتقاء الانسان ( العكيلي، 2000، ص91).

يتسم القرن الحادي والعشرين بظاهرة العنف بشكل عام، حيث لم تسلم منطقة منه، وهذا لا يمثل تهديداً لمنجزات الانسان المادية والاجتماعية فقط، ولكنه يمتد نحو الانسان ذاته. وسلوك الع

The study started from the problems of wars and the damage that result from deterioration and destruction of infrastructure and the absence of planning and urban reconstruction. The study aims to address the condition of the bad destroyed bridges that have paralyzed traffic from the right and left sides of the city of Mosul. The study is based on the assumption that the reconstruction of bridges will improve the transportation network in the city of Mosul. The study relied on several approaches, including: the historical approach by reviewing global and local experiences and the descriptive approach to review the reality of the state of Mosul after the liberation process, through maps and the analytical approach through statistics and da

Erbil city is located in the northern Iraq with a population of over one million people. Due to water crises farmers usually use wastewater and well water for the agricultural production. In this study six stations were designed to sample waste water and three from well water to define waste water and ground water characteristics. In this study, Residual Na⁺ Carbonate, Mg⁺⁺ hazard, salinity hazard, Kelley index, %sodium, total hardness, permeability index, potential salinity, sodium adsorption ratio, and Irrigation Water Quality Index (IWQI) were determined. The order of average cation concentrations in water was Mg²⁺> Ca²⁺ > Na⁺ > K⁺. While the proportion of main

This paper attempts to shed light on the most influential factors in the importance of religious buildings were destroyed because of the recent war due to the control of terrorist gangs of ISIS over the city of Mosul, and to prioritize their reconstruction and their role in reviving the historical center of Mosul.

The research’s problem emerged in the lack of knowledge about the identifying the most influential factors in the importance of religious buildings and utilizing them to prioritize their reconstruction. This study aims to analyze the factors influencing the importance of religious buildings using the Expert Choice software through the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to reach an analysis of their weights and propose p

A solar updraft tower power plant (solar tower) is a solar thermal power plant that utilizes a combination of solar

air collector and central updraft tube to generate an induced convective flow which drives pressure staged turbines to generate electricity.

 This paper presents practical results of a prototype of a solar chimney with thermal mass, where the glass surface is replaced by transparence plastic cover. The study focused on chimney's basements kind effect on collected air temperatures. Three basements were used: concrete, black concrete and black pebbles basements. The study was conducted in Baghdad from August to November 2009.

The results show that the best chimney efficiency attaine

Through this research, We have tried to evaluate the health programs and their effectiveness in improving the health situation through a study of the health institutions reality in Baghdad to identify the main reasons that affect the increase in maternal mortality by using two regression models, "Poisson's Regression Model" and "Hierarchical Poisson's Regression Model". And the study of that indicator (deaths) was through a comparison between the estimation methods of the used models. The "Maximum Likelihood" method was used to estimate the "Poisson's Regression Model"; whereas the "Full Maximum Likelihood" method were used for the "Hierarchical Poisson's Regression Model