DAMASCUS — Hundreds of ceramic doves are suspended over the streets of the Old City of Damascus, part of an art installation that had been set to debut before the start of Syria's war. The lifelike figurines crafted by Buthaina Al Ali, a professor at Damascus University's faculty of arts,...

(THE CONVERSATION) Millions of girls and women are displaced and on the move right now globally. An especially important but often overlooked issue is one of the most basic parts of life for women – menstruation. This routine part of female life is a pronounced burden for women in low-income...

The Syrian musician girl, Brolin Thani, learned music before she learned to walk and speak, and the environment in which she lived contributed to the development of her musical talent for playing.    The sound of the violin played by her two older brothers attracted her more...

POMPEII, Italy (AP) — In a few horrible hours, Pompeii was turned from a vibrant city into an ash-embalmed wasteland, smothered by a furious volcanic eruption in A.D. 79. Then in this century, the excavated Roman city appeared alarmingly close to a second death, assailed by decades of...

LONDON (AP) — Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor wasn’t born to wear the crown. But destiny intervened. The woman who became Queen Elizabeth II will mark 70 years on the throne Sunday, an unprecedented reign that has made her a symbol of stability as the United Kingdom navigated an age of...

A Lebanese father tells his teenage daughter she is free to choose whether to have sex with her boyfriend despite his reservations. An Egyptian wife discreetly slips off her black, lacy underwear from under her clothes before heading out for dinner, and it’s not her husband she’s trying to...

 War kept him away from his beloved homeland for decades. Now, virtuoso oud player Naseer Shamma hopes to help rebuild conflict-scarred Iraq through a series of concerts and other projects to support culture and education. The audience at the Iraqi National Theater were on their feet,...

ROSKILDE, Denmark (AP) — For thousands of years, wooden sailboats allowed the peoples of Northern Europe to spread trade, influence and sometimes war across seas and continents. In December, the U.N.’s culture agency added Nordic “clinker boats" to its list of traditions that represent the...

NEW YORK (AP) — The Oscar race may be missing in-person glitz this year, but it doesn't lack for star power. Will Smith, Lady Gaga and Ben Affleck landed individual nominations for the 28th Screen Actors Guild Awards on Wednesday, while the casts of “Belfast” and “CODA” were among those...

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Betty White, whose saucy, up-for-anything charm made her a television mainstay for more than 60 years, whether as a man-crazy TV hostess on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” or the loopy housemate on “The Golden Girls,” has died. She was 99. White’s death was confirmed Friday by...

Peter Parker’s good fortune continued over the holiday weekend as Hollywood prepares to close the books on a turbulent 2021. Even with some mighty competition from new Matrix and Sing movies, and rising concerns over the omicron variant, “Spider-Man: No Way Home” stayed in the No. 1 spot and...

The Royal Film Commission of Jordan decided today, Thursday, to withdraw the nomination of the movie “Princess” from the competition for the Oscar for Best International Film, which is reserved for films produced outside the United States. The film, starring Jordanian Saba Mubarak and...

London (AFP) – ABBA's first studio album in nearly 40 years has made it to the top of the UK charts, becoming the fastest seller of the year so far, the Official Charts Company said on Friday. "Voyage" by the Swedish quartet of Agnetha, Bjorn, Benny and Anni-Frid racked up 204,000 chart...

TORONTO (AP) — Omar El Akkad, an Egyptian-Canadian author and journalist, the author of a story of the global refugee crisis through the eyes of a child, has won Canada’s richest literary award. El Akkad won the Scotiabank Giller Prize for his book “What Strange Paradise” on Monday night....

Megan Mylan’s latest documentary feature takes a humble idea — telling intimate and humanizing stories of Syrian families affected by their home country’s civil war — and achieves it on a nakedly ambitious scale. Filmed over five years in five separate countries, “Simple as Water” is anything...

Syrian singer Sabah Fakhri, considered one of the most famous in the Arab world, died in Damascus on Tuesday at the age of 88, his son told AFP. "He died a natural death in Damascus. His heart stopped beating," said Anas Fakhri, lamenting his father's passing as a "huge loss for Syrian art."...

A new Russian film tackles one of the country’s great taboos: the role of Russian mercenaries in trouble spots around the world and the toll this takes on the family members of the often unacknowledged soldiers who die in combat. “Mama, I’m Home”, produced by Alexander Rodnyansky, who is...

Nobel literature laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah on Friday criticized the “lack of compassion” of governments, including Britain’s, that treat migrants as a problem or a threat. Gurnah grew up on the island of Zanzibar, now part of Tanzania, and arrived in England as an 18-year-old refugee in the...

In August 2014, after Islamic State (Isis) militants attacked the Sinjar district in northern Iraq, Hogir Hirori realised his calling. Although he had been living in Sweden since 1999, his home town was only about two hours’ drive from Sinjar. “When Daesh [Isis] attacked, I realised that I...

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Peering out into the darkened audience of a Dubai bar, comedian Imah Dumagay leaned into the microphone and addressed the mistaken perception that many people have across the Middle East when they see a Filipina at a nightclub. “I am from the Philippines...