Arab News says the big question must now be whether Saudi Arabia will also switch to a Friday-Saturday weekend and follow the UAE and Bahrain. I wonder what Fouad has to say about this.

The ministry of labor is finally considering teleworking as an option to provide more jobs for women in both government and the private sector. Do you think the conservatives will be ok with this or they will hinder it like they did in the Mobily case? Remember, the minister of labor is Ghazi Al Gosaibi, not a very popular figure among conservatives, and they will probably try to do whatever it takes to make him fail.

Study: “The divorce rate in Saudi Arabia is on the rise.”

Two years to the opening, the pictograms of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games are out. I liked them more of those of Athens 2004 and Sydney 2000, but not much more than the ones used in Atlanta 1996.

I found Bookmarked via evhead, but reading that it was from Target made me kinda reluctant to try it out. After using it for a short time, I really liked it. It is a social networking website for book lovers, where you can create your own book club, write reviews, facilitate meetings, and more. Bookmarked looks good and easy to use, but unfortunately it doesn’t support Arabic, which comes as a disappointment to me, especially that most of the new Web 2.0 websites support Arabic from the beginning. I think Bassem and Mocha, and the rest of the SBC guys can make a great use of this.

I first read about Tania Saleh on a Jordanian blog. Tania is a young Lebanese singer and composer, who studied arts and music in France. What makes Tania different? It is her devotion to music as a pure form of art and not some kind of business. And this is why you will never see her on Melody or Mazzika. It is because she is not a part of the mainstream, which is filled with crap by the likes of Haifaa and Marwa. Tania belongs to a small group of Arab artist such as Oumaima Al Khaleel, Jahida Wehbe, and May Nasr (if you know more examples please do tell in the comments) who represent an alternative genre of music than what is available to the public.

I will not be surprised if this was the first time you read about any of these artists as the Arab media do not have space for people like those. I’ve been listening to Tania and Oumaima quite a lot in the past two weeks, and nobody, nobody around me had the slightest idea who they were. When people who consider themselves music-savvy asked me about them, their immediate reaction would be: and how come I never heard of them? I had a really hard time trying to explain to these people what does it mean to be out of the mainstream, and to be honest I did not had much success in that regard.

Do listen to these artists, at least for a change, and if you had a chance to attend a concert for any of them, do not miss it. Those of you living in Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria have a better chance to see such artists performing in concerts, while for us in the Gulf listening to their CDs should be good enough for the time being.

IHT: “But the world should watch Abdullah closely. If his words are backed up with real action, Saudi Arabia could help transform a troubled swath of lands encompassing nearly one-fifth of humanity.”