Gulf States' Efforts to Deploy Soft Power of Soccer Runs Through South America, Messi - 0 views
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Earlier this year, Messi signed a deal with the kingdom to promote tourism there as it reportedly mulls a candidacy to host the 2030 World Cup. The terms and length of the deal were not made public, but The Athletic reported Messi may be receiving as much as $30 million per year. A potential Saudi Arabian bid would pit the country against Argentina’s own proposal to host the tournament together with Chile, Uruguay, and Paraguay.
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Embracing international sports icons is just one way that Gulf countries have worked in recent years to boost their international influence. Qatar sits on the world’s third-largest natural gas reserves and has found itself in a powerful position in the age of energy supply strains. Since the start of the World Cup just two weeks ago, Qatar has signed a 15-year deal with Germany to supply it with natural gas, and the United States—whose largest military base in the Middle East is already near Doha—greenlit a $1 billion arms sale to the country. Washington considers Qatar a major non-NATO ally critical to stability in the Persian Gulf and beyond.
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when Brazil hosted the World Cup in 2014, FIFA successfully pressured the country to change its legislation to permit alcohol sales in stadiums. But Qatar was able to impose its own laws on FIFA, in this case prohibiting alcohol sales to regular fans in the stands (though alcohol is freely available to VIP guests in luxury suites). It was one sign of the varying degrees of power held by recent World Cup host nations
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EMAJ 2009: EMAJ 2009 Participants - 0 views
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Abousamra, Hanan | Egypt Abusrour, Rawan | Palestinian Authority Alloui, Soumia | Algeria Aoussar, Abdellah | Morocco Bacher, Marion | Austria Di Maio, Alessandro | Italy Halfon Ovadia Adi | Israel Helmink, Alwin | The Netherlands Kayi, Elif | France Manhalter, Dániel | Hungary Melkonian, Elsy | Syria Nordberg, Kim Michael | Sweden Pfisterer, Sophia | Germany Rojo, Cristina | Spain Shaker, Issa | Palestinian Authority Soliman, Hossameldin | Egypt Spriņģe, Inga | Latvia Stanciu, Larisa | Romania Thebian, Assaad | Lebanon Yazan, Aylin | Turkey
Targeting the messenger: Investigative journalists under extreme pressure - Mapping Med... - 0 views
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What do criminals, corrupt corporations and crooked politicians have in common? They all fear investigative journalists, whose job is to expose wrongdoing and hypocrisy by holding the powerful to account.
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For their work, investigative reporters have come under threat from multiple sources with the shared aim of stopping information that’s in the public interest from coming to light. Index on Censorship’s Mapping Media Freedom project, which monitors violations against media professionals throughout Europe, recorded 206 cases of investigative journalists in the 35 countries that are in or affiliated with the European Union (EU35) being targeted in their line of work between 1 May 2014 and 31 December 2018. An additional 77 reports from EU35 showed media workers other than investigative journalists being targeted for their role in reporting on corruption.
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The country with the largest share of reports was Italy (40), followed by Hungary (25), Serbia (24), France (19) and Turkey (18).
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Fewer Germans plan to visit Turkey after minister's threats - Turkish Minute - 0 views
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The number of Germans buying holiday packages in Turkey dropped significantly after Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu vowed to detain and deport tourists at airports if they are suspected of links to terrorism
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in Berlin, the daily number of holiday purchases has fallen from around 1,000 to between 300 and 500.
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Germany on Saturday changed its travel advice for visitors to Turkey, warning its citizens that they risked arrest for expressing opinions that would be tolerated at home but may not be by Turkish authorities.
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Mapping the Journeys of Syria's Artists | The New Yorker - 0 views
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Last year, wondering what it means to be a Syrian artist when Syria in many ways no longer exists, I began to map the journeys of a hundred artists from the country. As I discovered, a large portion of the older guard of artists has ended up in Paris, thanks to visas issued by the French Embassy in Beirut. Many of the younger generation headed for the creative haven of Berlin, where rent is relatively cheap. Only a scant few remained in the Middle East, which proved expensive or unwelcoming.
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A few artists remain loyal to the Assad regime, which has long seen itself as a great patron of the arts. Some of the artists who were still in Syria asked not to be mapped, even anonymously, for fear that the regime would perceive them as disloyal and punish their families. A few took issue with the label “Syrian artist” altogether. “I don’t want to become part of the Syrian-refugee industry,” Sulafa Hijazi, a visual artist now living in Berlin, told me
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the Syria Cultural Index, “an alternative map connecting the Syrian artistic community around the globe and showcasing their work to the world.”
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The New Hybridities of Arab Musical Intifadas - www.jadaliyya.com - Readability - 1 views
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Both extreme metal and hardcore rap have long featured dissonant, even jarring music that is often marked in equal measure by the sophistication of and difficulty in listening to it. Lyrically, the grittiness, anger and themes such as poverty, unemployment, police brutality, and lack of life opportunities—were at the heart of American hip hop culture before it wase taken over by bling. Similarly, extreme metal’s focus on war, corruption, and chaos played a major role in the genre’s increasing popularity with young people across the Middle East and North Africa in the last twenty years.
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During the last twenty years in which both heavy metal and hiphop have developed in the Arab and larger Muslim majority worlds, the closed nature of the political spheres in the region helped encourage these scenes to become sites of subcultural and even countercultural production. The music they have produced is the very antithesis of the far more popular, hyper-commercialized and corporatized (or “Rotana-ized”) Arab pop, whose European and American predecessors Adorno so thoroughly despised. They also stand in opposition to the largely depoliticized and musically unchallenging religious pop of stars like Sami Yusuf and Ali Gohar, who as Walter Armbrust points out, tend not merely to leave unchallenged and even reinforce patriarchal values, but offer aesthetic endorsement of the existing system through the themes and locations of their videos
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whether Adorno would accept it or not, the self-reflexivity and willingness to critique society by its own referents that have characterized the best exemplars of extreme metal and political hip-hop are legitimate heirs of the tradition of critical engagement that have defined Adorno's oeuvre and that of his Frankfurt School colleagues. While critics have long labeled both metal and rap as juvenile, hedonistic, and even nihilistic forms of music, this interpretation is far off the mark when it comes to the more political forms of both genres. They function not merely as the CNN—or in the case of the Arab world, al-Jazeera—of the streets, but as their oped page as well, both educating their audience about political and social realities in their societies and the possibility of creating more positive futures
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BBC News - Wars, public outrage and policy options in Syria - 0 views
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We've heard these pleas before. The BBC reports regularly from inside Syria, as do several American papers, and although coverage of the Syrian war is not wall-to-wall on American networks, it gets regular, consistent attention. So where is the public outrage about a war so chaotic and dangerous that even the UN has stopped keeping track of the death toll? Have we all become numb to the pain of others?
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The world inevitably tires of complex, long conflicts where there are no clear answers about how to end the violence. This cartoon in the New Yorker is a harsh but perhaps accurate look at how the collective conscience deals with the relentless stream of bad news from Syria.
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Spare a thought for the North Koreans, too. A UN report out last week, too horrific even to read, compares the abuses committee by the government to Nazi Germany. I have yet to see much outrage or calls for action
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Al Jazeera English - Middle East - Elite Saudi university set to open - 0 views
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Saudi Arabia has set up a new research university, a multibillion dollar co-educational venture built on the promise of scientific freedom.
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Saudi officials have envisaged the postgraduate institution as a crucial part of the kingdom's plans to transform itself into a global scientific hub - the latest effort in the Gulf region to diversify its economic base.
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the new university will not require women to wear veils or cover their faces, and they will be able to mix freely with men.
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Europe's first 'personalised paper' | The Australian - 0 views
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they said that young people are tired of trawling the Internet for news and would pay for the personalised, tailored service that niiu would offer
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people prefer to read from paper
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very targeted advertising
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