By Donna Abdulaziz - wsj - --  RIYADH, Saudi Arabia—This conservative Islamic kingdom is rapidly trying to ease its staid social norms, allowing women to drive and travel freely in recent years, opening doors to tourists and tolerating music blaring from modern coffee shops. A four-day music festival earlier this month is emblematic of how Saudis are learning to have fun in ways that are common in much of the world but long forbidden here. The festival—called Soundstorm and organized by a Saudi company called MDLBeast (pronounced Middle Beast)—featured 200 performances, including from big-name DJs such as David Guetta. Held north of the capital Riyadh in a vast desert, the electronic-music event drew tens of thousands of people, most of them young Saudi men and women. Many mixed traditional national dress with LED sunglasses, marshmallow helmets, and the face paint common at rave parties, embellished with crystals and glitter.

“I can’t believe this is happening in Riyadh,” said Noura Mohammad, 28 years old, who attended Soundstorm with her twin sister, Ohoud, wearing matching white coats and pink bandannas over their niqabs, a traditional face covering. The sisters said they discovered electronic music through American movies but never expected to be able to dance openly in their home country. “My sister and I love to dance,” Ms. Mohammad said. Dancing and the mingling of sexes was once forbidden here. Now, the Saudi government is betting that events like Soundstorm will give the country’s large population of young people—about 70% of the population is under 35—an outlet for entertainment they are used to seeing in other parts of the world but not here. The government aims to double household spending on cultural and entertainment activities inside the kingdom by 2030, as part of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s drive to diversify and modernize the oil-dependent economy.

by NNA - President of the Republic, General Michel Aoun, affirmed that "From my position as the custodian of the constitution, I call for an urgent national dialogue in order to reach an understanding on three issues, and to work towards their approval later within the institutions, namely: Expanded administrative and financial decentralization. - The defense strategy to protect Lebanon. -A plan for financial and economic recovery, including the necessary reforms and a fair distribution of losses.

The President also clarified that he had called for more than one meeting and conference and proposed solutions, but the people of the organization refused to give up any gain, and did not take any account for the people, reiterating his call to dialogue for every Lebanese woman and man who desires the salvation of Lebanon. The President indicated that "In spite of everything, the solution is possible within the national reconciliation document, and it requires first accountability, that is, determining responsibility for the collapse, protecting people's money and returning it to depositors”. “The solution also requires moving to a civil state, and a new system whose main foundation is expanded administrative and financial decentralization, and the upcoming parliamentary elections should constitute a referendum on this basis” President Aoun said. In addition, President Aoun stressed that "Defending the homeland requires cooperation between the army, the people and the resistance, but the primary responsibility is for the state. Only the state sets the defense strategy and ensures its implementation”.

By LYNN TEHINI AND HAMZA MAKRAOUI -- arabnews.com -- The French-Lebanese production was born from a distant, but still vivid, memories of the Lebanese filmmaker. “Memory Box” deals with the separation of two young Lebanese women — one in Paris and the other in Beirut — who write and send each other recordings every day for six years. The two friends meet again in 2013 at an exhibition and discuss the notebooks and tapes that they gathered every day from 1982 to 1988. Joana, who lives in Paris, retrieves her letters and tapes, which arouses the curiosity of her daughter Alia. Thanks to these letters and recordings, the latter discovers what her mother thought and said when she was her age. For Hadjithomas, “conveying” is the keyword of this cinematographic adventure. ‘Khalil (Joreige) and I are artists; we worked a lot on the image and character of this film, paying attention to both its sound and pictorial dimension.’ Joana Hadjithomas, Lebanese filmmaker “I wanted to tell a story of women and that of three generations of women,” the filmmaker told Arab News. “I wanted to show another relationship to the war, away from the trauma, as seen in the eyes of the youth of the 1980s, driven by this crazy desire to live that was ours,” she said.

The film is a story of women, but, above all, a story of generations amid the disastrous civil war in Lebanon. “When I received an invitation for the film, I did not hesitate. I said to myself: ‘I want to meet this generation’,” Hadjithomas said. “Khalil (Joreige) and I are artists; we worked a lot on the image and character of this film, paying attention to both its sound and pictorial dimension. So we were keen to talk about the development of the film, to convey something of this experience,” Hadjithomas said. Her eyes shine as she recalls how the film was received by the different audiences who had the opportunity to watch it. “I feel overwhelmed every time,” she said. “Whatever their nationalities or background, people understood the movie.” Hadjithomas added: “Maybe it is because the film sheds light on a myriad of experiences and a lot of details that I have taken from my notebooks; maybe also because we see my real notebooks in this film and there is a transition between fiction and reality. Maybe, finally, because it is a story of women and the actresses have put a lot of themselves into it.” She added: “It is also a story of encounters. With Khalil, we met the actresses, we saw them, they inspired us.”

انا اعترف … قال رئيس الجمهورية العماد ميشال عون عشيَّة الميلاد، في لقائه الـمُفعَم بالروحانيات والمعاني الجميلة، إنَّ وصايا السيد المسيح في …