NEW YORK: An exhibit of American Indian art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art throws the connection between art and collector into unusually sharp relief.
MUMBAI: An outcry over Salman Rushdie’s participation in Asia’s largest literary festival has threatened to overshadow an event to showcase the best of Indian, South Asian and international writing that is rapidly growing in global cultural clout.
JOHANNESBURG: Young people tweeting from Blackberries and iPhones are driving the growth of Twitter in Africa, with South Africans by far the most vociferous, according to new research published Thursday.
MOSCOW: Kremlin-funded English-language channel Russia Today has given WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange his own TV talk show, the station said this week.
DAVOS, Switzerland: Microsoft chairman and philanthropist Bill Gates pledged a further $750 million to the troubled global AIDS fund on Thursday and urged governments to continue their support to save lives.
CANBERRA, Australia: An Australian lawmaker is getting bad reviews for a speech that seemed to mirror a Hollywood movie.
Government minister Anthony Albanese told the National Press Club that Australia had serious challenges and that opposition leader Tony Abbott was uninterested in solving them.
PARK CITY, Utah: Paul Simon recalls his return to South Africa like a family reunion — musical brothers getting back together after decades apart.
ISLAMABAD: A senior health official says the number of people in eastern Pakistan suspected to have died in the last month from taking bad heart medicine has risen to 69.
BAKU, Azerbaijan: A property developer in oil-rich Azerbaijan says the company is aiming to construct the world's tallest building on a chain of artificial islands in the Caspian Sea.
LONDON: For Daniel Radcliffe, it’s time to forget Harry Potter.
NEW YORK: President Barack Obama plans to “hang out” in a video chat room to answer questions about his upcoming annual State of the Union address, part of a White House effort to test new social networking tools and the latest evidence of the growing intersection of social media and politics.
BUENOS AIRES: British adventurer Felicity Aston completed her crossing of Antarctica Monday, becoming the first woman to ski across the icy continent alone.
PARIS: Preparing the biggest homecoming yet of its kind, authorities in New Zealand on Monday received 20 ancestral heads of Maori ethnic people once held in several French museums as a cultural curiosity.
KYOTO, Japan: They no longer speak the same language, but two brothers separated nearly 60 years each think the other hasn’t changed a bit.
TOKYO: A major earthquake is far more likely to hit Tokyo in the next few years than the government predicts, researchers at the University of Tokyo said on Monday, warning companies and individuals to be prepared for such an event.
TOKYO: A nationwide poll has shown that 65.7 percent of respondents support Tokyo’s bid to host the 2020 Summer Olympics.
THE CAVIAR is considered the food of the rich people only because of its imaginary high prices that may reach SR1 million per kilogram. This is the diamond caviar that is found in the Caspian Sea. A single kilogram of it takes at least four months to collect.
ALKHOBAR, Saudi Arabia: Shamel Food Company, the master franchisee of Subway Restaurants for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, held its second annual Franchisee Meeting in Alkhobar. The meeting was headed by Mohsen Adeeb, CEO of Shamel Food Company, and was attended by all sub-franchisees of Subway in the Kingdom. The event dubbed as “Moving Forward” has capitalized in its Global Strategic Plan of achieving 120 stores by the end of 2017 along with stabilizing its Kingdomwide operations and supply chain.
RIYADH: On the occasion of Riyadh Food Festival in Association with Spanish Embassy in Riyadh & Saudi Commission for Tourism & Antiquities, Riyadh, Marriott Hotel is hosting a two-week Spanish Seafood Food Festival called ‘Viva España’ at its Mosaic Mediterranean Restaurant from Jan. 18 — Feb 3 in cooperation with Renaissance Barcelona Airport Hotel.
JERUSALEM: A former Israeli peace negotiator says thousands of young Jewish and Arab activists from across the Middle East plan to hold an online peace conference this week on Facebook.
JAIPUR, India: Oprah Winfrey says she is confident that President Barack Obama will win another four-year term in this year’s US election.
ROME: A coast guard officer's "Get back on board damn it!" order to the fleeing captain of the capsized Costa Concordia liner is being printed on T-shirts by a company hoping to inspire Italians to rescue their country from economic crisis.
LOS ANGELES: One of the world's smallest surviving babies has been discharged from the hospital where she spent nearly five months in an incubator — but not before getting the Hollywood treatment.
PADANG, Indonesia: Indonesian police say a civil servant who posted “God does not exist” on Facebook faces a maximum penalty of five years behind bars for blasphemy.
MAUMERE, Indonesia: Officials say a crocodile swallowed a girl in Indonesia as her father looked on helplessly.
ANKARA: A hospital in southern Turkey on Saturday was attempting the world’s first triple limb transplant, attaching two arms and one leg to a 34-year-old man, the country’s state-run news agency reported.
LOS ANGELES: Authorities have determined that a dismembered head and other body parts found in a rugged hillside park near the famed “Hollywood” sign are the remains of a man who lived in an a nearby apartment.
WELLINGTON: New Zealand police broke through electronic locks and cut their way into a mansion safe room to arrest the alleged kingpin of an international Internet copyright theft case and seize millions of dollars worth of cars, artwork and other goods.
JAIPUR, India: Best-selling Indian writer Chetan Bhagat on Saturday criticized the support leant to authors whose books are banned for offending religious communities, a day after Salman Rushdie canceled a trip to India citing threats against his life.
LONDON: The British Museum and the King Abdul Aziz Public Library, who are jointly preparing for the major exhibition, "Haj: Journey to the heart of Islam" that opens to the public on Jan. 26, displayed Wednesday a splendid sitara textile at the British Museum here.
From my observations, Saudi women are a lot like Latin Americans; they love makeup and colors,” said the Venezuelan fashion designer, Carolina Herrera, after her visit to Jeddah to support breast cancer awareness with Zahra Breast Cancer Association.
London’s famous shoe designer Liam Fahy was born to an Irish father and a British mother who both decided to move to Africa and start a family. Fahy was born on a snake farm in Zimbabwe and studied at the Harare International School.
LAGOS: The chaos of Nigeria’s largest city of Lagos gets boiled down to prose as a narrator notes “how unpretty” its sprawl looks, with “its unplanned houses sprouting like weeds.” Another author describes the madness of the commute, how six roads meet and “there is no traffic light.”
JEDDAH: The new YouTube channel Fallimha teaches viewers the English language through watching movies. With 50,000 views of the first episode in less than four days, the channel reached an unexpected success almost overnight.
JEDDAH: Edge of Arabia successfully launched the most significant show of Saudi contemporary art ever held in the Kingdom with support from Abdul Latif Jameel Community Initiatives and Abraaj Capital last week.
In the center of one of the grandest entrances to any museum anywhere, that of the Great Court of the British Museum, stands the monolithic circular tower of the Reading Room.
Working on a design by Sydney Smirke (1798–1877), work on the Reading Room, which stands at the heart of the museum, began in 1854. Three years later, in 1857, it was completed. It was soon acclaimed as one of the great sights of London and became a world famous center of learning. In 2000, it underwent complete restoration.
The Haj exhibition has 209 exhibits. Many are physical objects of religious significance as well as of great beauty in their own right. They celebrate Haj and Islam, but what they cannot do is to show the incredible privations pilgrims were forced to endure in the early days of Haj. The journey, often taking many months at huge expense, involved walking, or at best, traveling by camel over some of the bleakest and most inhospitable terrain on the planet.
Exhibitions do not just happen. They are the product of enormous amounts of effort, coordination, and in the case of the Haj exhibition in particular, trust. Exhibits may have large commercial value but in the case of the Haj exhibition, this was secondary to the considerations of spiritual and cultural value. The curators knew they were dealing with articles of exceptional value to over 1.6 billion Muslims, and getting the slightest thing wrong would cause repercussions at many levels, not least to the high reputation of the 260-year-old British Museum.
AL-JOUF: A number of government and private establishments participating in the ongoing Al-Jouf Fifth Annual Olive Festival have attracted thousands of visitors.
Exclusive interview with Conductor Felix Mayer
One of the activities that Saudi Arabia offers its locals and other residents is a great variety of restaurants and coffee shops that matches all kinds of tastes and styles.
