A Bigger Screen for Mark Cuban

It’s three hours before a Dallas Mavericks home basketball game, and team owner Mark Cuban is sitting with his bare feet on the coffee table, surfing satellite-TV offerings on five huge screens in his courtside suite at the American Airlines Center. Clicking on Channel 199, he pauses to watch a bikini-clad woman conducting a tour of an Egyptian temple

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Chicago: 10 Things to Do in 24 Hours — Introduction

History’s most famous suicide happened more than 2,000 years ago: rather than surrender to the Romans who had captured her Egypt, the lovelorn Queen Cleopatra succumbed to the venomous bite of an asp. Ancient historians chronicled the act, Shakespeare dramatized it, and HBO even added its own to spin to the tragedy with the lavish TV series “Rome.” Yet while we may know how Cleopatra died of snake poison, after her consort Mark Antony fell on his sword, archaeologists have yet to pin down where the legendary couple was laid to rest.

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‘Buy This Satellite’: Ensuring Internet and Texting Access in Egypt

When the Egyptian government blocked Internet access and mobile texting capabilities in an attempts to thwart protesters’ ability to organize, Kosta Grammatis had new ammunition to pitch his big idea: what if there was a satellite service for Internet and phone — affordable for the average Egyptian — that could not be shut off?

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The World of Islam

“We Muslims are one family even though we live under different governments and in various regions.” Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, leader of Iran’s revolution “The real force of Islam is the feeling that you belong to a brotherhood with the obligation to serve that brotherhood and thereby serve God.” Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani, Saudi Minister of Petroleum “Islam judges, Islam protects, Islam urges resistance when there is injustice.” Anwar Gamall, Egyptian university student Those are only a few of the voices of Islam, as powerful and compelling today as the muezzin’s ancient call of the faithful to prayer. The voices speak Russian and Chinese, Persian and French, Berber and Malay, Turkish and Urdu—and Arabic, of course, the mother tongue of the Prophet Muhammad and language of Islam’s holy book, the Koran

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Egyptian woman protest ban on austere veil

There’s more to wearing the “niqab” — the austere, all-covering veil favored by ultra-religious Muslim women — than meets the eye. A recent declaration by a leading Egyptian cleric that women will not be allowed to wear the niqab in university areas frequented only by women has sparked demonstrations by female students in Cairo determined to wear the all-encompassing veil wherever they go

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Middle East hungry for TV during Ramadan

Ramadan, that holy month of fasting and dawn-to-dusk abstinence, is a key period in the Muslim calendar apart from its standing as one of the five Pillars of Islam. More typically associated with praying, fasting and religious contemplation, it’s also the month that Muslims are more glued to the tube than at any other time during the year, much like Thanksgiving or Christmas in the United States.

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