The Associated Press has a long story out about Trump fundraisers and business partners Elliott Broidy and George Nader, who reportedly functioned, for a time, as an obscenely high-paid backchannel between crown princes from the UAE and Saudi Arabia and the Trump White House as the countries sought to position U.S.…
Netflix announced on Tuesday that it is developing its first Arabic original series, called Jinn, a six-part young adult supernatural drama.
If you are an amateur collector of antiquities and suddenly seeing a lot of great deals online, you might want to pump the breaks, lest you find yourself items looted from conflict zones.
Outgoing Secretary of State John Kerry, who’s been tasked with the increasingly grueling job of dealing with right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ideologically rigid leadership, gave an unusually fiery speech on Wednesday outlining the Obama Administration’s reasoning in not vetoing last week’s UN…
Donald Trump has reportedly picked David Friedman, an Orthodox Jewish lawyer who supports moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, as his ambassador to Israel. Friedman, in addition to having helped Trump make money bankrupting his own casinos, has called Barack Obama an anti-Semite and referred to members…
Since late September, Bana Alabed, a seven-year-old girl from war-ravaged Aleppo, has narrated her experiences on Twitter. The account, begun by her mother, accumulated over 100,000 followers as Bana delivered stark and harrowing messages of life amidst brutal chaos. But as of today, the account has disappeared.
On the second Saturday of April, 44-year-old Mahsa Torabi put on a pair of black running pants and a blue sweater with green reflective stripes. That day, she would become the first woman to ever publicly finish a marathon in Iran. She chose a pink-patterned hijab, and she set out for Naqsh-e Rustam, an ancient…
Today marks the five year anniversary of the military operation that led to terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden’s death. To honor the occasion, the Central Intelligence Agency spent the day “live-tweeting” the raid that took place on May 1, 2011.
Hobby Lobby, the craft store made famous by winning a Supreme Court case on “religious freedom and government mandates,” may be guilty of looting ancient artifacts from the Middle East.
Two Syrian civilian women were publicly beheaded alongside their husbands by the Islamic State this week, according to a report by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
According to a UN envoy on sexual assault, ISIS is selling kidnapped teenage girls from Iraq and Syria “for as little as a pack of cigarettes.” The envoy, Zainab Bangura, visited the region in April and spoke to numerous women in girls who had escaped ISIS-controlled areas.
Supporters of the Islamic State, or IS, are turning to social media to recruit their next batch of warriors: radicalized Muslim sympathizers on Tumblr who desperately want to become wives.
The 1992 Disney movie Aladdin has been retooled into a Broadway musical, opening this Thursday in New York. But unlike other Disney/Broadway hits — Beauty and the Beast and the long-running Lion King — Aladdin comes with baggage the size of a vest-wearing elephant.
Like most Americans, 23-year-old Jennifer Grout can't speak Arabic. Unlike most Americans, 23-year-old Jennifer Grout has not let that inconvenient tidbit stop her from singing traditional Middle Eastern music so expertly performed that she might be on her way to winning Arabs Got Talent.
Egyptian-American writer, activist and public speaker Mona Eltahawy — a strong, inspiring, fearless women who became known for her work bridging the hermeneutic divide between Egypt and the West — gave a TED Talk yesterday on the topic of healing. Specifically, she discusses the process through which she physically,…
These days, Asma al-Assad — wife of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad — has a lot on her plate. She's got 3 kids to Mom, a whole country to First Lady, an unstable, despotic, maybe-evil chemical weapons-wielding husband to Wife, and, most importantly, luxury goods to consume. Juggling the multiple responsibilities of…
Get ready to claw your way through your computer screen, because we've got what you've all been waiting for.
Yeah, you read the headline right. A group of men was deported from Saudi Arabia to the United Arab Emirates because their chiseled features and perfectly coifed hair was deemed "too handsome." The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vices was reported to have feared that female visitors of the…
When Saudi Arabia's public education system-issued textbooks are in the news, it's usually because impressionable young readers are learning how to cut off a thief's hands and feet under Sharia law or that homosexuals should be "put to death."
A mustache is a man's best friend, at least according to the ironic novelty holiday gift table at Urban Outfitters that's always surrounded by giggling unsupervised tweens and mothers who don't know what to buy their adolescents for Christmas. While in the US the 'stache currently appeals to hipsters and Ron Swanson…
