Forbes Business Magazine released their famous billionaires list this week for 2014, featuring a total of 1,645 billionaires with a collective net worth of $6.4 trillion! Try to wrap your humble heads around that figure! U.S. billionaire Bill Gates “bought out” the competition earning the top spot on the famous list with a net worth of $76 billion, up a whopping $9 billion from last year. While the U.S. might have led the way with Gates’ fortune, MENA representation on the list was not so far behind. A total of ...

Last week marked Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) , the annual international series of awareness-raising events that shines a media high-beam on Israel’s escalating apartheid policies towards Palestine. Click back three decades to 1985’s Artists United Against Apartheid , one of the most effective projects to incite non-violent support for human rights campaigns - quickly politicizing people around the world who might not otherwise have South African apartheid on their playlist. Founded by activist and performer Steven Van Zandt and record producer Arthur Baker to protest South Africa’s treatment of its ...

If random little cartoon shorts have managed to weasel their way into the Oscar lineup , then surely the fashion designers for the Academy Award Ceremony’s A-list guests should be up for consideration as well, don’t you think? Perhaps we’re just biased because we know our region’s designers would snag that figurine year after year, giving the Middle East more props than just a few film nominations a la “The Square”, “Omar”, and “Karama Has No Walls”. Hollywood’s hottest of the hot know the Middle East scorching 'desert' is where ...

From Tunis to Triopoli, Cairo to Damascus, the popular protests that shook the Arab world in 2011 may have now reignited Ukraine’s very own Orange Revolution whose seeds were sewn 10 years ago. Kiev in 2014 is the latest hotspot of revolutionary turmoil to capture news headlines. Last November, as the Ukrainian government sought stronger Russian ties (and rejected a closer EU alliance that was concurrently in play) peaceful student protests flared in the capital city. Stand-offs with authorities veered from calm to angry and quickly morphed into deadly violence ...

There's a fever hitting the region and this time it's not the Arab Spring... If you've experienced any of the following ailments, you may be suffering the distinctly Arab condition (also contagious and untreatable) that's been medically billed 'Very Arab Problems'. It's not even lunchtime and you've probably already felt the urge to shave or pluck away at your fuzzy skin cause a stray upper-lip hair is the last thing you ladies want exposed by the sunny light of day! Or, you've fobbed off five prospective social calendar dates with ...

It might not be the Jamaican bobsled team, but the idea of “Middle Eastern” competitors at the Winter Olympics is sure an athletic oddball, at least in the years when they show up at all! Only one MENA Olympic team appeared in the 2002 winter games in Salt Lake City, in the shape of Lebanon’s snow patrol starring Chirine Njeim and Niki Fürstauer. It would be a no-brainer to blame the low MENA quota on the weather here - a dearth of cooler climes and snow-covered slopes in much of ...

Valentine’s Day is upon us, and the Middle East -- where passions run high at the best of times -- a hotbed of news and political drama-- turns up the heat as it goes violently mad for the love-fest. Arabs have been channeling their pent up over-sentimentalism, sensitivities and emotions into this global love affair for the better part of the last month now. Denizens of Arabia are going mushy over all things heart and red, rapidly turning desert planes into strawberry fields, and driven to distraction by tacky gifts ...