photo: Bassam El-Zoghby Former culture minister Emad Abu Ghazi launched the activities of the Children's Day jointly with Minister of Health Amr Helmi and Minister of Education Ahmed Gamaleddin at the cultural park in the Sayeda Zeinab district. The festival was organised by the Supreme Council for Childhood and Motherhood headed by Lamiaa Mohsen in cooperation with the Ministry of Culture to celebrate the International Children's Day. The celebration echoed in a wide range of Egyptian governorates such as Alexandria, Minya, Assiut, Port Said, Qena and Sohag. The 1,200 child-participants in the celebration included school children aged between 6-12 years, orphans as well as children with special needs. Actor and UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador Mahmoud Qabil and head of the National Centre for Children Nadia El-Khouli were present. The Cairo Opera House Main Hall witnessed the grand finale of the 20th Arab Music Festival that featured the powerful voice Angham in a thrilling concert. Among the attendees were Opera House Director Abdel-Moneim Kamel, festival head Ratiba El-Hefni, Angham 's father composer Mohamed Ali Suleiman and former deputy prime minister Yehia El-Gamal. The gifted singer performed 16 songs including her 25 January Revolution song. During the concert, one of her fans offered her Egypt's flag which she hanged on the microphone. The closing ceremony started with honouring veteran maestro Selim Sahab. El-Hefni then announced the names of the winners of the musical competition that accompanied the festival. Some 12,000 celebrities and filmmakers from across the Arab region gathered in Abu Dhabi to attend the inauguration of the first round of the TROPFEST Arabia Short Film Festival. Egyptian filmmaker Ahmed Ghazal won the third place award for his film Biqolo (They Say) in the festival that attracted extensive media attention, while the ceremony was attended by Egyptian actors Ahmed Helmi and his wife Mona Zaki, Emirati director Naela Al-Khaga, Jordanian actor Eiad Nassar, Egyptian scriptwriter Mohamed Hefzi, Saudi producer Mamdouh Salem, MBC anchor Raya Abi Rashad and Emirati filmmaker Abdallah Al-Kaabi. photo: Abdel-Hamid Eid The Italian Institute in Zamalek hosted an opening ceremony for the exhibition entitled "Salvator Mundi" by artist Farid Fadel, showcasing an assortment of paintings and drawings featuring Leonardo da Vinci's lost and unfinished work. The exhibition will run at the Italian Institute in Zamalek through 3 December, and is currently on display at Salah Taher gallery in the Cairo Opera House. Italian Ambassador to Egypt Claudio Pacifico, AUC professor and Fadel 's wife Mona Zaki and cartoonist Mustafa Hussein attended. (see Listings p.28) Korean Ambassador in Cairo Jong-kon Yoon participated in the closing ceremony of the seventh Ambassador's Taekwondo Championship organised by the Korean Embassy, in cooperation with the Egyptian Taekwondo Federation, at the Shooting Club in Dokki. Ambassador Yoon honoured 88 winners from the nearly 600 players -- under the age of 14 years -- who participated in this annual tournament which aims to strengthen and spread taekwondo in Egypt. He emphasised that the Korean Embassy pays a special attention to taekwondo, pointing out that it has recently dispatched a Korean taekwondo coach to the Talented Athletes School, as well as Korean trainers to many governorates in order to introduce the latest methods of taekwondo to the Egyptian youth. He also expressed his hope that the Egyptian taekwondo national team would achieve valuable results in next year's Olympic Games. The American University in Cairo (AUC) Tahrir Campus will host the Tahrir Holiday Book Fair, the biggest and best fair on the Square yet, including new books in English, Arabic, and other languages, as well as gifts for the festive season. Many bookstores, publishers, gift stores and other booksellers will be participating. Come and enjoy a day of shopping at the AUC Tahrir Campus from 1 to 5 December (daily 10am to 6pm). d1sc0nN3ct is a week-long event between 20 and 26 November at the Townhouse Factory space in Downtown. Organised by Ania Szremski, it explores (and provokes) breakdowns in the computer systems. Conceived in response to the international GLI.TC/H festival taking place this November in Chicago, Amsterdam, and Birmingham, England, the event features new work by Cairo and Alexandria-based artists. Experiment with corrupting software, hardware, and digital and analogue media to create (seemingly) meaningless, functionless, and potentially subversive aesthetic errors were on show. Projects by artists such as Sarah Sami, Karim Lotfi, Ahmed El-Shaer, Amr Ali, Emma Benani and others include corrupted files, gifts, deformed codes, and video art games that will be shown alongside contributions from an international roster of new dirty media practitioners. Film screenings, artist talks, and other programming will take place throughout the week. Congratulations! The AUC team of entrepreneurs has won the first place in the seventh Arab Technology Business Plan Competition organised by the Arab Science and Technology Foundation (ASTF) in collaboration with the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) and Intel. The winning AUC team consists of graduate students Sherif Shawqi, Tamer Samir, and Mai Mansour, alongside Ahmed Tolba, assistant professor of Business, and Hassan Azzazi, professor of Chemistry at the School of Sciences and Engineering and founder and leader of the team. The competition was launched in July with over 240 participants. The AUC team has successfully passed all four phases of the competition, securing first place in the fourth and final phase of the contest. The team proposed a plan for the establishment of NanoDiagX, an innovative diagnostics company that would develop nano-diagnostic platforms for direct, rapid, inexpensive, and sensitive detection of active infections. More news on Townhouse artistic activities in November! The Danish theatre company Asterions Hus is visiting Egypt in cooperation with LaMusica Independent Theatre Group to conduct a workshop on verbal and physical improvisation and devising short formats. The visit that started on 14 November with a public performance of six short formats of their work in Alexandria will be followed by daily work sessions with the Egyptian actors, culminating in a combined performance where Tilde Knudsen, Martin Ammundsen, along with actor and director Peter Kirk, will perform, together with the new cast, in Alexandria, Cairo and Port Said, from 24 to 26 November 2011. On 24 November, a theatre workshop presentation entitled "The Maybe(s) of Here and There" will be presented by Asterions Hus and LaMusica Independent Theatre Group at the Townhouse Factory space, 7pm.
