How tobacco companies are agressively pushing into the Middle East
More worrisome, the tobacco industry is appealing to youth with specific marketing and advertising strategies, such as special packaging, health experts and policy-makers warned at the International Conference on Tobacco or Health that ended on March 21 in Abu Dhabi. The five-day event has called for stricter tobacco control worldwide.
In emerging economies like Morocco or Egypt, it is common to see children as young as seven-year old smoking cigarettes, usually in poorer neighborhoods and slums.
Source: Your Middle East
The war goes on for families of the disappeared
Monday marked the 40th anniversary of the start of the Lebanese civil war. One of the more tragic legacies of that conflict is the fate of the thousands of people who disappeared, their families still caught in a limbo of uncertainty.
This has personal relevance for me because a friend of mine, along with his sister and uncle, was kidnapped in 1985. For years, my friend’s mother continued to believe they were alive, even if this became increasingly more difficult to accept with time. Her waiting ended in May 2009, when, after leaving a gathering of the families of the disappeared, she was hit by a car and killed.
Source: Michael Young for the National
Istanbul Film Festival cancels competitions due to censorship
The thirty-fourth annual Istanbul Film Festivalhas cancelled all of its film competitions at the behest of the various juries, given the extraordinary circumstances at the film festival this year. The festival was forced to withdraw a programmed screening of a Kurdish documentary, Bakur [North] (Çayan Demirel and Ertuğrul Mavioğlu, 2015) from the festival, which resulted in all of the domestic competition films except for two being pulled from the festival by the filmmakers.
Source: Jadaliyya
