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On Tuesday the Libyan ruler, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, called Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, his first known direct outreach to a European leader.

Libya supplies much of Italy’s natural gas. In 2008, under Mr. Berlusconi, the two countries signed an accord in which Italy pledged $5 billion over 20 years in exchange for Libya’s help in blocking the flow of illegal immigrants toward Europe and granting favorable treatment for Italian companies seeking to do business in Libya.

Arabpop the magazine found a home in the Neapolitan indie publishing house Tamu — the Italian South has always been more ready to embrace its Arab culture, often being mocked by right-wing Italian politicians and their supporters, who openly dream about dividing Italy into North and South and often refer to the South as ‘Africa’, ‘Morocco’ or something along those lines.

While the team of editors is fully Italian, some contributing journalists are Italians with an Arab background while most of the writers are Arabs.

while there is a wealth of academic texts to be found, little is written about Arab culture that is suitable for the general public

Since Kais Saied's assumption of the Tunisian presidency in 2019, the number of African migrants who have arrived in Tunisia without being stopped or registered has dramatically increased. “Officially, 10,000 irregular migrants have crossed the borders from Libya to Tunisia during the first half of 2022”, M.E., a former UNHCR employee in Medenine revealed. In reality, the numbers are much bigger.

it is believed foreign migrants in Tunisia far exceed a million. 

Since the start of his tenure, Saied has put the army and the police at the behest of his political project. After his referendum on a new constitution, Saied sacked and replaced nine high-ranking police officers. Furthermore, Saied's Interior Minister Taoufik Charfeddine has been appointing his own friends to key positions in the police and the National Guard.

the central idea of journalism — the conviction, as my old boss Peter Kann once said, “that facts are facts; that they are ascertainable through honest, open-minded and diligent reporting; that truth is attainable by laying fact upon fact, much like the construction of a cathedral; and that truth is not merely in the eye of the beholder.”

the responsibility to separate truth from falsehood, which is never more important than when powerful people insist that falsehoods are truths, or that there is no such thing as truth to begin with

a period in which the executive branch of government is engaged in a systematic effort to create a climate of opinion against the news business

In Iran it is rare to hear a woman sing in public. So rare, in fact, that when Shiva Soroush did so for all of three minutes last year the entire audience took to their feet. Grown men wept. With an aria in a performance of Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, Ms Soroush, 27, became the first woman since the 1979 Islamic Revolution to sing opera for a public audience.

“At first I thought it would be dangerous and I wouldn’t be able to perform... [but] I can feel there is more freedom in the theatres now,” she says, adding that hopefully other women may now be blessed with similar opportunities. Her troupe, the Tehran Opera Ensemble, is the brainchild of Hadi Rosat, who returned to Iran in 2012 after more than a decade studying in Austria and Italy. But Tehran music lovers seem to place particular hope in Ms Souroush, as if she were single-handedly serenading Iran out of what many recall as the “eight dark years” under former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which ended last August.

Some 600 student members of the Basij, a militia run by the powerful Revolutionary Guard, recently wrote a letter to the president. Warning Mr Rohani not to let his declared agenda of “moderation” be infiltrated by reformists, the students demanded strict supervision of the arts, cinema and press to avoid “any kind of secularist tolerance.”

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.

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.

The country with the largest share of reports was Italy (40), followed by Hungary (25), Serbia (24), France (19) and Turkey (18).

Pop music in the region today truly represents the Westernization of classical Arabic music defined by traditional elements of improvisation (where songs often last as long as an hour), instruments native to the region like the oud, and maqam, which is a system of melodies and pitches native to Arabic music. Classical Arabic artists like Oum Kulthum and Asmahan thrived on this style and are considered icons of Arabic music because of their ability to evoke emotion through their artistry.But in conjunction with colonization, Arabic music began to shift from its classical roots with the Cairo Congress of Arab Music in 1932, organized by King Fuad of Egypt. This symposium brought together renowned composers and ethnomusicologists from the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe who created a set of proposals for the modernization and standardization of Arabic music, one of which was the incorporation of European instruments into Arabic ensembles because “such instruments possessed tremendously varied, expressive means and depictive powers.”The other notable event that pushed this modernization further was the introduction of the phonograph to the region. Phonographs could only play songs for a limited duration, making the traditional improvisation and hour-long running times of classical Arabic music nearly impossible.The final nail in the coffin was the burgeoning film industry in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly in Egypt, the cultural epicenter for creative output in the Middle East and North Africa. Movies were heavily Westernized at the time, forcing directors and producers to modify accompanying music to incorporate Western-style elements in their instruments and duration.

a new movement is rising in North Africa.Rappers and emcees from the region are boldly approaching hip-hop and the larger Arab music landscape by exploring taboo themes and proactively deconstructing societal markers of North African identity. They are experimenting with beat production and dialect as they go about creating a space for their music and for these conversations to be held in a public domain. This is not a knock on the Levantine or Khaleeji rap scenes; there are many artists who are doing this currently. But North African emcees are using their lyrical flows and melodic rhythms to grapple with the essential question of identity. The music sounds fresh and breathes new life into the pop-dominant Arabic music scene.

A vast majority of North African rappers primarily use their regional Arabic dialects and French in their music. But many artists, specifically North African artists based in Europe, also use Spanish, Dutch, and English on their albums. A few artists will even use all four languages in one song.