835 So Long, and Thanks for All the Brains

Many thanks to Ahmad Gharbeia for creating section-specific news feeds for Al-Masry al-Youm‘s Web site, which doesn’t offer the service. Ahmad notes that the feeds are created by scraping Al-Masry al-Youm‘s code and so could break at any time if the site’s design changes. So enjoy, and thank Ahmad, while you can!

As I’m going to be spending 36 of the next 48 hours in an airplane, here are a few items of interest in the meantime:

  • “World Migrants Up To 200 Millions, 1.5 Million Arab Brains Overseas” World thanks Middle East for the brains, notes global increase in strange headlines…
  • The good news is that the world financial crisis may put an end to the brain-drain. My barber, who has a great Arab brain, yesterday told me he used to want to move to the United States for work, but now considers himself better off in Cairo. As he snipped and trimmed, the crisis continued to batter Egypt’s stock market, lending emphasis to warnings that poor countries may suffer permanent damage from the current crisis. For the moment, though, shares on the Cairo and Alexandria Stock Exchange are rallying, following Asian markets’ response to European bail-out plans.
  • Journalists Fined for Libeling Sheikh al-Azhar. Yesterday, a court fined Adil Hammuda and Mohammad al-Baz of Al-Fagr newspaper LE 80,000 each for comparing Sheikh Tantawi to the Pope. They were delighted they hadn’t been thrown in jail. A different court hearing Hammuda and three other editors’ appeal of another 2007 ruling against them yesterday said it would reconvene in December.
  • Hundreds of thousands of U.S. voters from swing states may find themselves illegally disenfranchised in this election. In somewhat related news, absentee voters from a New York county were asked to choose between McCain and Osama for president.
  • Dubai, “a failed video game in the desert”, from BLDGBLOG, one of my favorites:

    Atari had a stellar business plan and a first-rate marketing team—but, for all intents and purposes, it had nothing interesting to sell. Following the logic of this example, it is easy enough to see Dubai—or even Tucson, Arizona—as a failed videogame in the desert, ironically under-designed and over-promoted. […]

    One could even say that we have perfected the art of the anti-city—that we have made up anything but truly urban environments. Dubai, for instance, is famously difficult to navigate on foot, requiring a ten minute car ride down six-lane motorways, complete with frequently lethal U-turns, simply to get to the hotel across the street.

  • Abu Dhabi may do it better. I think I dismissed the press release on this as, well, PR when I first saw it, but this sounds very cool and I really hope it works: “The Masdar Initiative is a new 6 million square meter sustainable development that uses the traditional planning principals of a walled city, together with existing technologies, to achieve a zero carbon and zero waste community.”
  • A travel journalist from Connecticut recently visited Egypt and came home shocked at the sexual harassment she experienced. “Welcome in Egypt,” Lynn.

2 Comments »

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  1. I will not see Connecticut maligned on this blog, good sir!

    Comment by Liam — October 20, 2008 #

  2. Who’s maligning the great Nutmeg State? Not me, certainly.

    Comment by The Skeptic — October 20, 2008 #

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