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One in three young Arab women jobless – survey
One in three young Arab women are unemployed in the Middle East, compared with eight out of 10 young men, a new study has found.
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The research, which surveyed 7,670 young adults aged 23 to 29 across 22 Arab countries, said women in the region continue to be held back by cultural and constitutional constraints, despite many being well-educated.
The findings are based on a new Silatech index report ‘Workforce Participation Linked to Wellbeing Differences Among Young Arab Women,’ which examines reasons behind young women’s workforce participation.
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The Land of Broken Promises
In 1958, Baghdad was featured in Time magazine—not as a hotbed of revolutionary, civil or sectarian strife, but for its ambitious plans for the world’s most famous architects, among them Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier and Alvar Aalto, to recapture through their modern buildings the city’s former glory.
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Slide Show: In the Caves of the Nuba
The Nuba people of southern Sudan live among a series of stone massifs west of the Blue Nile. It is said that there are ninety-nine tribes, with scores of languages between them—but they are culturally united. Nubans regard themselves as the descendants of the Nubians, the most ancient indigenous people of the region. They have been fighting the Islamist military regime in Khartoum off and on for three decades. The first war, as they call it, ended after a 2005 U.N.-brokered peace agreement, and, after a referendum, statehood for South Sudan. The Nuba were left out of the independence deal. War broke out again soon after.
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UK galleries join Google Art Project’s virtual tours
Google, the company that has already made it possible to explore our planet from above and discover cities street-by-street, has announced a global expansion of its Art Project site, which allows users to go on a cultural grand tour without ever leaving their computer.
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Screw Your Analysis to the Sticky Point
Via Mark Thoma, a new paper from the San Francisco Fed offers stunning evidence on downward nominal wage rigidity, a topic I’ve written about before. What the paper shows is that many, many workers are getting precisely zero wage growth in dollar.
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2012 National Magazine Award Finalists: Feature Writing
Check some of the best feature writing published last year featured in several magazines including the New Yorker and Rolling Stone.
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NYU Lists 100 Best Journalists
In March 2012 the faculty at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, together with an Honorary Committee of alumni, selected “the 100 Outstanding Journalists in the United States in the Last 100 Years.” The list was selected from more than 300 nominees plus write-ins and was announced at a reception in honor of the 100th anniversary of journalism education at NYU on April 3, 2012.
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Comedian Aziz Ansari is hitting the road
The 29-year-old comedian and star of Parks and Recreation is embarking on a multicity comedy tour, where he’ll be riffing on what he calls the “fears of adulthood.” Read more
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Ex-Microsoft employees launch new iPad sketch app
Paper, a new iPad sketch app, launched last night with quite a bang. That’s not surprising when you consider it has a gorgeous UI, and the fact that many of its creators are ex-Microsoft employees, who once worked on the infamous Courier project.
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Eating Cinnabon in Damascus
As the country began a slow opening to global markets, dozens of foreign chains set up shop in Syria. Costa Coffee opened up in Damascus Boulevard, the outdoor mall adjacent to the Four Seasons, and launched seven other locations throughout the country. From fried chicken to French cuffs, other brands followed — KFC in 2006, Mango in 2006, and Zara in 2011 — all trying to capitalize on Syria’s established middle class.
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Egypt artists “reopen” street by graffiti protest
After Egypt’s ruling military sealed off streets around Cairo’s Tahrir Square with walls of imposing concrete blocks, a group of artists decided to reopen the avenues on their own – in the public imagination, at least.
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MOVIE REVIEW: A Heart Needs One Thing, Society Wants Another
“The Deep Blue Sea” is based on Terence Rattigan’s play about a woman’s attempt to live by the dictates of her heart rather than the expectations of society. Read more
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The Many Lives and Languages of a Palestinian Novel
By Olivia Snaije
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Sometimes there are heart-warming stories in the publishing world about books that are granted a second life. Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin, just out in Arabic, is one such story. Abulhawa, a Palestinian who lives in the United States and works as a scientist published her first novel in 2006 entitled The Scar of David. The small publishing house, which was soon to go out of business, made contact with a French editor, Marc Parent, who bought the rights and brought out the novel in translation with a new name: Mornings in Jenin. Read more -
Inspired by ‘Mad Men’
A look at vintage-inspired ads with a “Mad Men” flavor. Read more
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Paintballing with Hezbollah | VICE
We figured they’d cheat; they were Hezbollah, after all. But none of us—a team of four Western journalists—thought we’d be dodging military-grade flash bangs when we initiated this “friendly” paintball match. The battle takes place underground in a grungy, bunker-like basement underneath a Beirut strip mall. When the grenades go off it’s like being caught out in a ferocious thunderstorm: blinding flashes of hot white light, blasts of sound that reverberate deep inside my ears.
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Bulletins from the future
The internet has turned the news industry upside down, making it more participatory, social, diverse and partisan—as it used to be before the arrival of the mass media, says Tom Standage. Read more
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Colonial Exhibitions and Staging of Arab Spring
Watching a popular uprising in real time was indeed a dramatic experience. As viewers tuned in (or streamed in) to the violence, courage, and uncertainty of events in North Africa this year, many of them had the impression of witnessing the “actual” events, free from the framing tactics and analytical bias often found on the six o’clock news. A host of new media celebrities became household names as they reported live from Tahrir, and news outlets such as Al-Jazeera saw an unprecedented rise in viewership. Spectators were made to believe that a return to the event “itself” was once again possible after decades of being locked into what Jean Baudrillard called the hyper-real. The revolution in-and-of-itself seemed to unfold before our eyes, creating a fetish for real-time revolt. Read more
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Entire Clans and Villages Fleeing Syria, Inquiry Finds
Entire Clans and Villages Fleeing Syria, Inquiry Finds. A United Nations inquiry commission on rights abuses in the Syria conflict described the uprooting of extended clans and villages by armed forces bent on crushing armed resistance. Read more
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Ali Ferzat: Revolution redefines art in Syria
That cartoon reveals Ferzat’s own dealings with President Assad, where he soon found the rhetoric of change fell far short of the reality. He recalls that when Mr Assad first came to power, the artistic community in Syria tried to win him over to its side. Ferzat himself was allowed to start his own satirical magazine – the first independent paper to be licensed for decades. Read more
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Editor Not Ready to Write an Ending
While his possible successors are dinner-party fodder, Robert Silvers says he has no plans to step down from The New York Review of Books. Read more
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How to Write a ‘Lives’ Essay
The New York Times Magazine’s editors offer advice and suggestions for submissions.
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NYT joins Mozilla and Knight Foundation to open innovation in news
The New York Times and three other leading global news organizations are joining “Knight-Mozilla OpenNews,” a partnership aimed at driving open source innovation in news. The announcement will be made at SXSW on Saturday, alongside a series of exhibits showcasing how Mozilla and other open source projects are leading innovation in news, in areas like real-time visualizations, augmented video, data-journalism and HTML5 web tools. Read more
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Comment: Turkey’s Jailed Journalists
Quick: What country jails the most journalists?
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If you guessed China, you were close, but no cigar. Twenty-seven reporters are in prison there, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists in New York. If you guessed Iran, you’re getting warmer—forty-two in prison there—but you’re still off.
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POSTSCRIPT: MARIE COLVIN, 1956-2012
For decades, she has been a ubiquitous presence in the war zones of the world and her reports in the Times were admired in the close-knit world of foreign correspondents for their scrupulous and straightforward eloquence. On the telephone from Homs, Colvin told Anderson that the death of the child was an emblem of the overall “reality” of what was happening in Homs.
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Shirin Ebadi: A Warning for Women of the Arab Spring
I hope that in the countries where people have risen against dictatorships, they will reflect on and learn from what happened to us in Iran…Since women make up half of the region’s population, any democratic developments must improve the social and legal status of women in the Arab world. It appears the Tunisian society has strong civil institutions, and there is much hope that democracy can take hold there. But in Egypt, many political actors are talking about returning to Islamic law, which could result in a regression of rights for women and girls similar to what we experienced in Iran in 1979.
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