Culture
Latest stories
British Museum showcases ancient vessels smashed in Beirut blast  

Eight ancient glass vessels shattered in the 2020 Beirut explosion go on display at the British Museum from Thursday, walking visitors through the painstaking international project to piece them back together.

The vessels, from the Roman, Byzantine and Islamic periods, were reconstructed at the world-famous museum's conservation laboratories, and will be shown as part of its "Shattered Glass of Beirut" showcase, before returning to Lebanon later this year.

W140 Full Story
Dog's life in Cyprus as man's best friend dumped

Dog shelters in Cyprus are overflowing in what some volunteers are calling a crisis caused by the abandonment of canines adopted during Covid as well as complications arising from Brexit.

W140 Full Story
Three winners at AUB GHI’s Global Health Change Makers pitch competition

In celebration of its fifth anniversary, the Global Health Institute (GHI) at the American University of Beirut (AUB) has organized the Global Health Change Makers” pitch competition. The event brought together students from universities of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region to present their project ideas related to Global Health and the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through a 5-minute pitch for a chance to win seed funding.

Seven competitors coming from different countries in MENA including Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates and others were shortlisted to the final stage and participated in the competition that was held at AUB, the university said in a statement.

W140 Full Story
Authors and friends rally and read for Salman Rushdie

Friends and fellow authors spoke out on Salman Rushdie's behalf during a rally on the steps of the main branch of the New York Public Library, one week after he was attacked onstage in the western part of the state and hospitalized with stab wounds.

Rushdie's condition has improved, and, according to his literary agent, he has been removed from a ventilator.

W140 Full Story
Biden to headline anti-extremism conference

President Joe Biden will host a conference on combating racist, anti-democratic and other extremist threats in September, less than two months before tense midterm elections, the White House said Friday.

W140 Full Story
Famed Iran art museum closes to deal with insect infestation

Tehran's contemporary art museum has issued an apology and temporarily closed to handle a pest infestation, raising concerns after footage of insects scuttling across world-famous work spread widely on social media.

Insects, which may attack and eat away at paintings, pose a serious threat to the American and European minimalist masterpieces now for the first time on display at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art since the 1979 Islamic Revolution ousted Iran's Western-backed monarchy.

W140 Full Story
Rushdie attack awakens old demons for Arab writers  

Only ever found in incomplete, clandestine translations in Arabic, "The Satanic Verses" could have gone largely unnoticed in the Arab world, were it not for the Iranian religious edict against its author Salman Rushdie.

Then supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's fatwa calling for Rushdie's death, issued on February 14, 1989, struck a nerve with Arab authors, themselves often in danger of ruffling authoritarian feathers and "offending moral values".

W140 Full Story
Article on 'fat' Arab women sparks uproar over body-shaming

To Enas Taleb, the headline felt like a spiteful punch line.

"Why women are fatter than men in the Arab world," it read in bold, above a photograph of the Iraqi actress waving onstage at an arts festival.

W140 Full Story
Taliban add more compulsory religion classes to Afghan universities

Afghan university students will have to attend more compulsory Islamic studies classes, education officials said Tuesday while giving little sign that secondary schools for girls would reopen. 

Many conservative Afghan clerics in the hardline Islamist Taliban, which swept back into power a year ago, are skeptical of modern education.

W140 Full Story
Long-hidden synagogue mural gets rehabbed, relocated

A mural that was painted in a Vermont synagogue more than 100 years ago by a Lithuanian immigrant — and hidden behind a wall for years— has been termed a rare piece of art and has been painstakingly moved and restored.

The large colorful triptych painted by sign painter Ben Zion Black in 1910 shows the Ten Commandments with a lion on both sides, the sun beaming down, and columns and rich curtains at the borders. Now known as the "Lost Mural," it's a rare representation of a kind of art that graced wooden synagogues in Europe that were largely destroyed during the Holocaust, experts say.

W140 Full Story