Laziness? I um’d and ah’d for a bit, then emailed her an idea for a story about a new hotel opening in East Jerusalem – in fact, the first new luxury hotel to open there in almost 50 years, the St George.

Luckily, she commissioned me – and the piece appeared in the paper today (subscribers only). She also took two more ideas from me. Thank you, Jane. Travel eds: please form an orderly queue. Travel hacks: Twitter works.

As for the story itself, I think it’s a cracker – how many hotels can claim to have been their city’s first new luxury property twice? Click here to view the article – or click on the embedded image to enlarge.

Credit: jewlicious.com

Ahead of a forthcoming trip to Palestine and Israel, a couple of days ago I went to check the weather on my iPhone’s preinstalled Yahoo weather app. Tel Aviv loaded fine, but it was when I did a search for Jerusalem that the oddness began.

I started by typing “Jerus” – waiting for Yahoo’s database to find the most obvious entry. It came up with “Jerusalem, Ohio” top of the list. Bizarre. So I carried on typing, till “Jerusalem” sat in the search bar. Pause for search. Top of the list now? “West Jerusalem, Yerushalayim“. ['Yerushalayim' is the Hebrew name for Jerusalem.] Huh? There was no weather forecast for the city of Jerusalem, only for West Jerusalem. Even in the mad world of Middle East politics, that made no sense.

So I sighed and loaded the weather page for West Jerusalem, then tried to find the weather for the half of the city that I’m going to visit. There was nothing under “Jerusalem”. After failing with “Quds”, “Palestine” and various combinations thereof, I finally found it. “East Jerusale” brought up Gangtok in India (huh again?), but if you add that final M you get “East Jerusalem, West Bank“. Extraordinary.

So I loaded both. Incidentally, they’re identical.

Conclusions? On the one hand, if you type “Jerusalem” you only get West Jerusalem. On the other hand, it’s now possible to have the weather solely for East Jerusalem on your iPhone if you persevere.

The Israeli and Jewish blogospheres are, understandably, up in arms. This is one example – and this Israeli news site reports today (June 6th) that Israel’s ambassador in Washington has send a letter of protest to both Yahoo and Apple.

But the Arab, Muslim and/or Palestinian blogospheres? I can’t find a single word of comment.