Women

The mobile phone is proving to be an unexpected tool of female liberation in the Arab world. In conversation with Dame Ann Leslie, veteran foreign correspondent, Fawziah Bakr Al-Bark, a professor of education at the country's King Saud University, and I debate the state of women in Saudi Arabia.
The conversation is available on the BBC website through the excellent listen again service.

Here's a picture that has just been published around the Middle East -- with a comment from my friend Siraj Wahhab, a senior correspondent for Arab News: Siraj is currently their man in Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province.

"The old saying goes “one picture is worth a thousand words.” Most of Saudi Arabia’s Arabic newspapers carried a photograph on Friday’s front-page that has become a talking point on blogs, Internet forums, shisha places, newsrooms and the corridors of power.