Media in Middle East & North Africa

The story of how a Nobel Prize-winning novelist would come to open a museum

Among the objects: 4,213 cigarette butts, 237 hair barrettes, 419 national lottery tickets and 1 quince grinder.

“My novel honors the museums that no one goes to, the ones in which you can hear your own footsteps.” Over the years, he visited hundreds of these queer, lesser-known monuments to collecting — from the Chinese Traditional Medicine Museum in Hangzhou, China, to the Ava Gardner Museum in Smithfield, N.C. His character Kemal visits museums, too — 5,723 of them, we learn from the novel. The similarities between Kemal and Orhan inspire a question that never fails to exasperate the author. He threw his voice, a complicated musical instrument, into the rhetorical query: “Mr. Pamuk, are you Kemal? Enough. No, I am not Kemal, but I cannot convince you that I am not Kemal. That is being a novelist.”

"The security sector is taking a lot of resources. If you put the same amount of money into education, you get a better society," Adel Abdellatif of the United Nations Development Program said at the launch of the Arab Knowledge Report 2009.

"The security sector is taking a lot of resources. If you put the same amount of money into education, you get a better society," Adel Abdellatif of the United Nations Development Program said at the launch of the Arab Knowledge Report 2009.

Arab states could face political and social instability if they underinvest in the education of their young, expanding populations, a regional education report said on Wednesday

the generational chasm

Because of the growing alienation of young Iranians, family dynamics could be complex, particularly among the families of elite government officials. “These children are more affected by society and even Facebook and Twitter on the Internet than their families,”

“This was an explosion of 30 years of suppression and intimidations of my generation,” she said of the protests. “I am happy that we finally found the courage to speak up.”

A court in Morocco on Monday sentenced two journalists to suspended jail terms and fines for falsely reporting that the North African nation's King Mohammed VI was sick.

One of the key issues to be taken up by ICANN's board at this week's gathering is whether to allow for the first time entire Internet addresses to be in scripts that are not based on Latin letters. That could potentially open up the Web to more people around the world as addresses could be in characters as diverse as Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Greek, Hindi and Cyrillic

Of the 1.6 billion Internet users worldwide, Beckstrom — a former chief of U.S. cybersecurity — said that more than half use languages that have scripts based on alphabets other than Latin.