Congratulations, dears! Our very own Al-Ahram Editor-in-Chief and Chairman of the Board Ibrahim Nafie joyfully attended the graduation party of his granddaughter Shorouq Ahmed Nafie at the British School in Haraniya. Shorouq was delighted to have her grandmother Ola Barakat, her mother Shahira as well as former minister of environment Mona Makram Ebeid around her at that very special moment. Welcoming the new year were different forms of celebration, dears, among which the dinner party organised by former minister of social insurance Aisha Rateb at the Diplomatic Club was a particular delight. The dinner gathered women who play a crucial role in Egyptian society such as Al-Ahram editor Mona Ragab former first lady Gihan El- Sadat and the wives of the heads of the Shoura Council and the People's Assembly. Egyptian Television's Channel Two celebrated New Year at Pyramisa Hotel, my sweets, where the stars of 2004 in the fields of science, literature and art were honoured: head of the National Research Centre Hani El-Nazer, poet Gamal Bekheit and actors Elham Shahine, Laila Elwie and Yehia El- Fakharani among others. Presented by the versatile popular media figure Samir Sabri, the event was graced by the presence of actress Nadia El-Guindi and up-notch fashion designer Hani El-Beheri The head of the General Organisation for Cultural Palaces (GOCC) Mustafa Elwie proved himself extremely astute in his latest attempt to promote culture, honouring the cultural pioneers of Mansoura, who just happen to be among the country's most prominent. The GOCC's shield of recognition thus went to veteran author Anis Mansour, poet Zakariya El-Hagawi and Governor of Daqahliya Ahmed Said. In addition, on Port Said's national day, dears, my very hard-working friend Elwie, together with Governor of Port-Said Mustafa Kamel, inaugurated an exhibition of the work of the Port-Said calligrapher Mustafa Khoudeir and a cinema week presided over by film critic Magda Maurice While visiting Egypt with scientific cooperation in mind, dears, the Swiss State Secretary Charles Kleiber attended a reception organised in honour of the Swiss maestro Christoph Mueller at the Cairo Opera House -- during which party the opera's director Abdel-Moneim Kamel granted Kleiber the opera shield. Kamel announced that the Cairo Opera Ballet Company and Symphony Orchestra are to perform on several occasions in Geneva, Zurich and other Swiss cities. And in the presence of the Swiss Embassy Deputy Chief of Mission Heinz Walker, Kleiber stated, in response, that Switzerland's best known contemporary dance company will visit the Opera House in December 2005. But this is not all on the Cairo Opera House! Jewellery designers Nagwa El- Mahdi, Nermeen Farouk and Nihal Allam showed their latest creations in a 10- day jewellery exhibition at the Opera House art gallery this week -- which was inaugurated, happily, by Cairo Opera House Director Abdel-Moneim Kamel and Director of the Cairo Opera House's Museums and Exhibitions Department Fayza Abdel-Moneim. To celebrate the India Republic Day, the Egyptian-Indian Friendship Association organises a cultural evening on tanoura art, where the renowned tanoura dancer Faris El- Masri will perform at the Indian Cultural Centre on 9 January. In the course of the evening, a talk by El- Masri and a documentary film showing performances by his Nile Folkloric Arts troupe in the major Indian cities -- Delhi, Kashmir, Jaipur, among others -- will shed light on this delightful art. Last year, it is worth noting, dears, he participated along with his troupe in the second International Sufi Festival which took place in India. The notion that Egypt is the home of young geniuses was corroborated yet again, my sweets, when the American University in Cairo (AUC) won first place in the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) seventh annual International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) in Kuwait -- at which 35 teams representing 26 universities from 11 different countries competed. Cairo University and the American University of Beirut came in second and third places, respectively. The top 75 teams from thousands of teams competing in regional contests worldwide will advance to the World Finals in Shanghai, China, in April 2005, dears. And we can only hope the AUC's team, made up of Mahmoud Abdel-Fattah, Ahmed Ezzat and Fadi Mounir, will do as well as we've been doing. After a year of intensive training, two individual contests and a contest on the national level, which they won couple of month ago, this was a hard-earned victory indeed. The team's coach, AUC assistant professor of computer science Amir Zeid, seems confident enough in his expectations of the China contest, anyway.
