On the 10th of May 2013, Westminster Council published a Stopping Up Order Notice, aiming at giving away a large part of the pavement on Edgware Road reducing it in width considerably.

Complaints have been raised among the communities and businesses around Edgware Road, thus leading to launching a petition that got over 600 signatures so far.

The petition rejects the public notice for two main reasons:

“1. Westminster Council are giving away the pavement to a developer for near to nothing. It is an extremely valuable piece of highway, worth millions of pounds, belonging to TfL which is being given away with no benefit to the public.

2. Westminster Council is permitting the pavement width to be reduced dramatically. This action will make these pavements drastically narrower, more congested, unsafe and extremely dangerous, and compromises the future of our school children, their parents, local business, local shoppers and tourists. Edgware Road is one of London’s busiest thoroughfares and to make the pavement so narrow is putting people’s lives at risk.”

The petition is also questioning: “why has Westminster Council chosen to forfeit the safety of its residents, school children and taxpayers? Why doesn’t the developer just remain and build what he likes within his existing boundaries, why does he need the pavement, is it for extra profit? Is it for selfish greed? Is our safety so cheap?”

Supporters of this petition are opposing the stopping up order and demanding its outright rejection. They are also calling on the Secretary of State for Transport and the London Mayor, Boris Johnson who is responsible for TfL, and the Transport Commissioner to order a public inquiry.

To read the public notice in full, visit: http://www.london-gazette.co.uk/issues/60500/notices/1821453/all=edgware+road;sort=newest

To support the petition, go to http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/saveedgwareroad/

A special photo exhibition, ‘Gaza through my eyes’, was held at the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) room in the House of Commons on Wednesday 12th June marking the sixth anniversary of the blockade on Gaza.

In June 2007 Gaza witnessed a total blockade on Gaza, effectively sealing 1.64 million people, more than half of whom are children under the age of 18, into 365 square kilometres.

More than half of the 1.6 million people in Gaza are children. Under the blockade for the past six years, many of the children have never left Gaza and have little opportunity to play, dream, and grow. Still, children in Gaza do have hopes for a better life and are aware of the abnormality of the situation around them.

This exhibition depicts life under the blockade for families and communities through the children’s own eyes.

Lord Frank Judd, part of the Inter-Parliamentary Union delegation to visit Gaza earlier this year, opened the event and offered his own reflections on the situation.

Mr Mark Goldring, Chief Executive, Oxfam, shared the charity’s experiences from working in Gaza for the past 15 years, helping civil society organizations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) and Israel to protect civilians and alleviate poverty; improving livelihoods and increasing access to food, water, sanitation, education and healthcare.

Members of the community as well as representatives of the Embassy of Lebanon and  the Palestinian Mission to the UK were also present at the exhibition.

Those willing to learn Quran memorization and recitation in France can take online courses at www.al-kunuz.com.

The website teaches memorization of the Quran, recitation, Tajweed principles and Arabic language in both French and English.

The courses are instructed by graduates of Islamic sciences universities. Those who register for the courses take a placement test before starting the lessons.

The Al-Kunuz website had been launched in 2006 but its online Quranic courses started nearly a month ago at the request of French Muslims.

France is home to the largest Muslim minority in Western Europe. There are over 5 million Muslims living in the country, making up 8 percent of the population.

The first-ever halal food festival in Canada has drawn record-breaking crowds, showing the diversity of the marketplace in a major North American city.

“Halal Food Fest TO is dedicated to the halal food scene, and hopes to showcase the variety and diversity that makes Toronto what it is,” said Salima Jivraj, Marketing Director of the Halal Food Fest. The festival, held at the International Center in Toronto, was overwhelmed by thousands of visitors who came from the Greater Toronto Area, as well as from cities across Canada, and from as far as the US.

Lineups wrapped around the 100,000 sq ft facility as attendees had to wait as long as two hours to gain admittance to the festival. The two-day event showcased over 60 food booths in a well-planned Sample City and attendees had a chance to try a wide variety of cuisines from around the world.

Visitors also enjoyed seminars, demonstrations and competitions at a Community Stage and were able to take part in cheese-tasting seminars hosted throughout the festival by the Dairy Farmers of Canada.

The festival also featured popular comedian Azhar Usman and up-and-coming nasheed performers, Mustaqeem. Visitors also had the chance to give back to the community by donating non-perishable items to a local charity, Muslim Welfare Center. The idea of holding the festival grew out of the experience of founder Salima Jivraj while she was doing reviews of halal food establishments in Toronto.

The Greater Toronto Area has one of the largest Muslim populations of any North American city and has fast become the magnet for major Muslim conventions and festivals on the continent.

Taghreedat, the largest Arabic crowd-sourcing initiative in the Middle East and North Africa, has recently announced a partnership with Coursera, the world’s leading Massive Open Online Course provider, to translate major international university courses across multiple disciplines for Arab students worldwide, for free.

Leading global universities are offering a number of their courses for free on Coursera in English. With this partnership, some of the world’s top university courses will be accessible for free for all Arabic-speaking users.

The initiative started on May 19. Taghreedat’s 9,000 translators, writers and editors in 37 countries worldwide will have a chance to translate two university courses, marking the official start of the collaboration with Coursera.

A group of Taghreedat translation language moderators will be managing project quality in the following weeks to ensure the courses are localized accurately and are accent-free.

The Taghreedat – Coursera collaboration is part of a larger global partnership that Coursera announced with more than 15 translation organizations worldwide to translate its courses into the most popular language markets reflected by Coursera students: Russian, Portuguese, Turkish, Japanese, Ukrainian, Kazakh and Arabic. The majority of translated courses are expected to be available by Sept. 2013.

“The institutions that are providing translation services for our free online courses are helping to make the educational content on Coursera more accessible to the millions of people around the world who stand to benefit from these resources but are not fluent in English. The potential to impact global education is greatly elevated by our ability to bridge language barriers,” said Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller.

The Palestinians haven’t elected a president since 2005, but now they are finally getting a chance to do so — virtually — thanks to a hit reality TV show.

“The President” is broadcast weekly on a local TV. It offers contestants a chance to address the Palestinian people on what they would do on a variety of subjects if elected president.

They are grilled by a panel of politicians, professors and businesspeople who, with input from the audience, vote them off — something they can’t do in the real world.

Thousands of young Palestinians who applied to take part in the show have been whittled down to 15.

A winner will be crowned in the finale scheduled for late June and get to travel the world as a mock Palestinian ambassador — and perhaps win a car as well. “We are building a new generation of politicians. They are gaining skills from practice,” said Kholoud Idabis, a former Cabinet minister and member of the panel. Other judges include Palestinian official Hanan Ashrawi.

The original 1,200 participants selected to compete were all between the ages of 20-35, held a university degree and were born in the Palestinian territories.

The show’s producer says that if there are no elections in practice, at least there should be on TV.

Saudi Arabia currently ranks second among the world’s fastest growing countries on Twitter, with a 42-percent increase in the number of account holders after Indonesia, which rose to 44 percent, according to GlobalWebIndex’s ‘Stream Social: Quarterly Social Platforms Update.’

“Twitter appeals to the Saudi user. He just wants to say what is on his mind, float an idea, debate and discuss it and jump onto a new subject,” said Bilal Hallab, social business strategist and general manager at the Social Clinic, a social media and business consultancy firm based in Jeddah.

“We see these phenomena in many countries. In the US for example, Twitter is by far more common and preferred than Facebook.”

Hallab adds that the majority of Internet users in Saudi Arabia are Twitter account owners, with three million users. Facebook has more than six million users. “The growth of Twitter over the past eighteen months in the country is phenomenal.”

According to a report released by the Social Clinic in 2012, Saudi Arabia topped the list of Twitter growth penetration throughout all four quarters of 2012, with a growth rate exceeding 3,000 percent versus the global growth rate of 300 percent. “What is more surprising is that Riyadh held 10th position as a city worldwide in terms of tweets per month,” said Hallab.

Riyadh alone accounts for 50 million tweets. Saudi Arabia has the most Arabic tweets among the other Arabic-speaking countries and it accounts for 30 percent of the entire Arabic tweeting population. This makes Arabic one of the top 5 growing languages on Twitter, according to the Social Clinic report. “Twitter allows for short fast live-updates and conversations that spread information at the quickest speed and with the widest reach,” said Manal Assaad, a social media strategist and marketing consultant at the Manalyst. Assaad said that starting or joining conversations on Twitter with strangers is much easier than on Facebook considering its very public nature.

It is also a more fun and lively source of news that is more accommodating to the nature of the Saudi youth, where important and relevant news come to them instead of them having to look for it.

The largest age group of Twitter users in the Kingdom is the 25-34-year-olds. The second largest group is the 18-24-year-olds.

“From my personal experience, I can say that Twitter can give the youth a great boost in terms of data discovery and knowledge, ideas and value exchange,” said Assaad. “Twitter allows the youth to follow local and international professionals who share their knowledge as well as useful tips and articles in small doses on a frequent basis.”

Assaad herself has over 11,000 followers on Twitter.

She added that Twitter is also a great platform for crowdsourcing, where, with just a single tweet, you can reach hundreds — and even thousands — of users who can answer your questions, give you ideas and opinions, solve your problems, or at least spread the word about your needs.

The 2013 Sheikh Zayed Book Award for Arab Culture in Non-Arabic Languages’ Award was recently awarded to Marina Warner for her book Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights. The author is one of the distinguished cultural historians in the world on the subject of myth, fairytale and folk narrative and art. She is a member of the British Academy, Professor of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex and President of the British Comparative Literature Association.

Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights tells the story of the Arabian Nights in western civilization from a thoroughly new and, until recently, little understood angle. Marina Warner retells a number of the tales in her own words with a verve that brings them to life in contemporary idiom. Upon these retellings she constructs a nuanced view of the ways in which the benign magic and enchantment of the stories affected the reception and ideas of magic and enchantment in the West, even during the period of the Enlightenment – a period more naturally associated with reason and science. Warner is thoroughly versed in the complex history of the Nights corpus and constructs upon this foundation a new vision of the way the West has been in thrall to images and ideas from Arab, and more generally Eastern culture in the 18th through to the 20th century.

The Sheikh Zayed Book Awards were established in 2007 in the memory of Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the late ruler of Abu Dhabi and President of the UAE. The awards, in different literary categories, are presented each year to outstanding writers, literary figures and intellectuals, and publishers whose published works have enriched Arab cultural, literary and social life.

Morocco officially launched recently the construction of a 160-megawatt solar power plant near the desert city of Ouarzazate, the first in a series of vast solar projects planned in the country.

The largest of its kind in the world, according to Mustapha Bakkoury, the head of Morocco’s solar energy agency MASEN, the thermo-solar plant will cost 7 billion dirhams (630 million euros) and is slated for completion in 2015, the official MAP news agency reported. The ambitious project “reinforces the will… to optimize the exploitation of Morocco’s natural resources, to preserve its environment… and sustain its development,” Bakkoury said at the ceremony which was attended by King Mohammed VI. A consortium led by Saudi developer ACWA Power won the contract to build the plant, near Morocco’s desert gateway city, last September.

The World Bank, the African Development Bank and the European Investment Bank are helping to finance the solar complex. It is the first of a two-phase project, due for completion in 2020, which is expected to cover 3,000 hectares and have a generation capacity of 500 megawatts, enough to meet the electricity needs of Ouarzazate’s 1.5 million residents. MASEN’s Bakkoury said in March that companies bidding for the second phase of the project had to submit their proposals by mid-April, with the contract to be awarded sometime next year.

The North African country is aiming to become a world-class renewable energy producer, and is eyeing the chance to export clean electricity to neighbouring Europe. Morocco expects to build five new solar plants by the end of the decade with a combined production capacity of 2,000 megawatts and at an estimated cost of $9 billion. Morocco has no oil and gas reserves to speak of and is hoping, with the solar projects, along with a string of planned wind farms along its Atlantic coast, to raise renewable energy production to 42 percent of its total power supply mix by 2020.

The tensions of Palestinian life under Israeli occupation exploded onto the screen at Cannes early this week, where a tale of love and betrayal won a five-minute standing ovation.

Omar is the new work by Hany Abu-Assad, who shot to prominence in 2006 with Paradise Now, which won a Golden Globe and, in the race for best foreign-language film, became the first-ever Palestinian film to be tipped for an Oscar.

Abu-Assad dips into the conceptual source of Palestinians who take up arms, just as Paradise Now recounted the tale of two men preparing for a suicide attack in Tel Aviv.

The new story, though, is darker and more complex—a political drama interwoven with a story of lovers caught in a vice, with Israel’s secret police on one side and Palestinian gunmen on the other. Both are equally ruthless.

At its centre is a young baker, Omar, who falls in love with Nadia, the sister of an old friend, Tarek, who runs a resistance cell in the occupied territories.

To visit Nadia, Omar must clamber over the occupation wall built by Israel that divides the territories—an act that is fraught with risk.

Arrested one day after scaling the wall, Omar is humiliated and beaten up by police, prompting him in anger to join Tarek and another friend, Amjad, in an operation to kill an Israeli soldier.

From then on, Omar’s life goes into a spiral. Picked up and interrogated by the Israelis, who learn of his love for Nadia, he is under pressure to betray his comrades.

Just as he is fingered as a traitor, he begins to doubt whether Nadia has been true to him as she avows, or whether she has yielded to the wooing of Amjad.

The dramatic denouement led to huge applause at a press screening in Cannes, where Omar is in the “Certain Regard” section—a closely-watched category for provocative films or follow-up works by emerging directors.

The Nazareth-born 41-year-old Dutch-Palestinian studied airplane engineering before dipping his toes in filmmaking, emerging with his first feature, Curfew, in 1994.

Of the five principals, three are making their feature-film debut: Adam Bakri as Omar, a graduate from New York’s Lee Strasberg Institute; Samer Bisharat as Amjad, a 16-year-old high school student;, and Nazareth-born Leem Lubany, another 16-year-old school pupil, who is superb as Nadia.

Omar cost $2mn—less than one-fiftieth of a Hollywood blockbuster—and all of it came from individual Palestinians and Palestinian businesses, said Abu-Assad proudly.

“For the first time, we have convinced businessmen from Palestine to invest in their (film) industry. It’s incredible,” he said.

Asked which audience he targeted, he said: “My first audience, honestly, are the Palestinians and Arabs. I hope from the bottom of my heart that they will be engaged with it, that they will love it.

“Even if they are not on the West Bank or Palestinians, it reflects life where they are divided between two sections and they have to deal between trust and love and friendship.

“It’s about the youth and Arab world now, and I hope they can accept it and that they can relate to it.”