Some Moroccans are tired of getting the Hollywood treatment
Morocco is a very large movie set — from sands to cities. It's served as a stand-in for Arabia in “Lawrence of Arabia,” Abu Dhabi in “Sex in the City 2,” Egypt for “Evil Mummy” and for fantasy locations in “Game of Thrones.”
But rarely is Morocco — Morocco in films.
Narrimane Faquir, a Moroccan filmmaker, was the local casting director for the 2014 film, “American Sniper” (in that one, Morocco stands in for Iraq). “On 100 movies, maybe three movies represent Morocco,” she says.
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Inside ISIS's looted antiquities trade
For excavators – archaeologists, but also looters like the [so-called] Islamic State, or ISIL – the opportunity for discovery in modern Iraq and Syria is dazzling.
The countries lie within the Fertile Crescent, a broad swath of land stretching from the eastern Mediterranean to the Zagros Mountains and the Persian Gulf that gave rise to some of the earliest complex societies.
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Saving the world in 48 hours
For connoisseurs of international summitry, it’s been high season recently in Turkey. We enjoyed a G20 summit featuring Barack Obama, a Islamic summit starring the Saudi monarch and last week in Istanbul the first ever World Humanitarian Summit. For each event, the routine for the media in our security-conscious times is familiar -- get accredited well ahead of time, circumnavigate a vast maze of metal police barriers and metal detectors to get anywhere near the venue and then rush between interviews and press conferences where everything seems to be happening at once. And it’s fair to say that summits have bred a degree of scepticism amongst most reporters, wearily used to seeing leaders arriving with great fanfare but then disappearing before the end and final communiques bringing little more than expressions of hope.
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