An Afghan talent show contestant’s striking resemblance to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has turned him into an unlikely celebrity in the war-torn country — and potentially given him the winning edge. Abdul Salam Maftoon, a wedding singer from a village in the remote and impoverished northeastern province of Badakhshan, had never even heard of his more famous doppelganger until a judge on the popular television music contest Afghan Star pointed out the uncanny likeness.

Egyptian comic star Mohamed Henedy has returned to the stage after more than 16 years absence with a smash hit, Talaat Ayam Fi El-Sahel (“Three Days on the North Coast”). The play, which is on at the newly opened Cairo Show Theatre in 6 October city, has reportedly broken Arab theatre records by earning almost EGP 1 million in just three nights.

The fiftieth annual Cairo International Book Fair opens on Wednesday and will run until 5 February, featuring 1,273 publishers from 35 countries, and for the first time is taking place in the outer suburbs of the city. The fair has moved from the fairground in Nasr City to the Egypt International Exhibition Center in the Tagamoa El-Khamis, in the suburb of New Cairo.

Two Roman tombs have been uncovered during excavation work at Beer El-Shaghala site in Mut village in Dakhla Oasis. The walls of the two uncompleted tombs are painted in bright colours with religious scenes. Mostafa Waziri, the secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, explains that the first tomb has a 20-step staircase covered with plaster, which leads to a native made of limestone.

A giant panda born in a Malaysian zoo celebrated her first birthday Monday with a cake made of ice in front of adoring visitors. The youngster looked around shyly as a zookeeper carried her to a platform in her enclosure where the cake, which had a large number "one" on top, was waiting.

During World War II, Wojciech Narebski and his fellow Polish servicemen had to lift crate after heavy metal crate of artillery. Fortunately for them, one of the soldiers had superhuman strength: Corporal Wojtek, a Syrian brown bear. “When he saw that we were struggling, hed want to help… Hed come over, grab a crate and carry it to the truck,” Narebski, now 93, told AFP of his days with Wojtek in the 22nd Artillery Supply Company. This can be heavy work, even for a bear. When Wojtek got tired, he would simply stack one crate on top of the other, “which also helped us, because we didnt have to lift the crate off the ground,” recounted the veteran who spent two and a half years with the friendly giant he considered a brother.

Egypt’s Ministry of Environment said on Tuesday that the ministry has rescued a rare wolf of the jackal family before it would have been sold at shop in Alexandria and then sent it back to Wadi al-Rayan Protectorate in Fayoum governorate, reported al-Ahram gate. Jackals are medium-sized omnivorous mammals of the genus Canis, which also includes wolves, coyotes and the domestic dog.

Luxor governorate has launched President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s campaign “Shabab fi Hob Misr” (Youth and Love in Egypt) on Wednesday to plant one million fruit trees as part of a plan to develop Luxor city. Head of Luxor City Ayman al-Sherif said that the campaign would plant the trees in al-Mattar district during the first stage and then go to the rest of Luxor city.

Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquities have received an antique stone carving with a cartouche of King Amenhotep I on Tuesday, after the Ministry of Foreign Affairs managed to retrieve it from an Auction Hall in London. The ministry said that it previously displayed the stone at the open museum in Luxor’s Karnak Temple before it was stolen and smuggled abroad.

More than 100 scientists, most of them in China, have condemned as “crazy” and unethical altering human genes after a geneticist claimed he had changed the genes of twin girls to create the first gene-edited babies. In an open letter circulating online, the scientists said the use of CRISPR-Cas9 technology to edit the genes of human embryos was risky, unjustified and harmed the reputation and development of the biomedical community in China.

Culture Minister Enas Abdel Dayem, in cooperation with the President of the Egyptian Opera House Magdy Saber, announced a 50 percent discount on ticket prices for students and people with special needs. The discount will be on tickets for all shows performed in Opera House affiliated theaters in Alexandria, Cairo and Damanhour starting January 1, 2019 until .

In some ways, says Portuguese ex-boxer Jorge Pina, the loss of most of his sight was the making of him. “I didn’t lose my sight, I just see things differently,” he says. Forced to abandon his world title dreams, Pina devotes his time to helping troubled kids from rough neighborhoods stay on the right path by channeling their energy into sport. “Before, I was a selfish and troubled person from a difficult neighborhood,” he says. “But now I want to help young people, win the combat of life.”

Leather riding boots are neatly lined up on a carpet, a picture shows blood-thirsty hounds on a fox hunt and a fountain spews water from the mouths of stone horses. It may have the trappings of upper-class Britain, but this is in fact suburban Shanghai and the County Down Club, the self-styled first exclusive membership club in China for horsemanship and fox-hunting.

A central committee is preparing to officially register three Jewish cemeteries as antiquities in the Ministry of Antiquities’ records, announced Mohamed Mahran, chairman of the Central Department of Jewish Antiquities at the Ministry of Antiquities. The committee has been preparing a comprehensive report for several days on all the rare and unique monuments and structures in three main Jewish cemeteries for rabbis and Jewish families in the Azarita and Shatebi areas of Alexandria, stated Mahran, who is heading the committee.

Grammy award-winning pianist, composer and producer Fathy Salama, alongside four members of his band Sharkiat, will play in Oslo on Friday and Saturday with The Source band, at an annual event called “The Source of Christmas.” Salama s band have been playing at the event for almost a decade. "The collaboration with the great Norwegian band The Source started in the the mid-2000s when I met saxophonist and composer Trygve Seim at a concert in Cairo, as his father, a great fan of arts and music, was the ambassador at the time," Salama told Ahram Online.

They hung up their bowler hats decades ago, but Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy remain cinema’s most iconic comedy duo, with a unique chemistry explored in a new feature centered on their careers’ tricky end. “Stan and Ollie,” released in the US this Friday, marks the first time a feature filmmaker has tackled the slapstick comedy geniuses, known for films including “Sons of the Desert” (1933) and “Way Out West” (1937). Along with Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy embodied the late 1920s golden years of silent film.

The American Archaeological Mission of the University of Chicago, which works in the archaeological area of ​​Tell Edfu in Aswan, has uncovered a fragment of a cylindrical column of limestone dating back to the beginning of the Eighteenth Dynasty of the New Kingdom. The discovered column is 165 cm long and its diameter is 28.5 cm, Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities Mostafa al-Waziry said.

It all started in 2016 with a bronze statue commemorating the tragic day in November 1963 when a giant octopus upended the Staten Island ferry, killing nearly 400 people in New York. Wait, what — a giant octopus? Artist Joseph Reginella smiles. Yes, you read that right. In 2017, another statue appeared in Battery Park, at the lower tip of Manhattan — a monument to the Wall Street bankers trampled to death in October 1929 when circus impresario P.T. Barnum s elephants broke into a panicked stampede while crossing the Brooklyn Bridge.

In a special achievement for Arab cinema, Lebanese director Nadine Labaki’s “Capharnaum” has been shortlisted for the Oscars’ Best Foreign Language Film, on Sunday. The shortlist includes nine films that will compete for the final nominations in this category, which will be announced in January 2019, state-run newspaper al-Ahram reported.

Egyptologist and former Antiquities Minister Zahi Hawass called for the return of a bust of Nefertiti from Germany to Egypt, during his lecture in the Brazilian city of Sao Paulo, organized by the Egyptian Embassy in Brazil. “Nefertiti s head came out of [Egypt] illegally, and I call for its return to be seen by Egyptians at the inauguration of the Great Egyptian Museum,” he said. Nefertiti s story dates back to 1912, when a German archeological mission headed by Egyptologist Ludwig Borchardt visited Cairo and signed a contract with the Egyptian government, giving it the right to acquire some of the artifacts found in the area of Tell el-Amarna, which was built by Akhenaten, and became the capital instead of Thebes.

Every December, thousands of people make a pilgrimage to the central Turkish city of Konya for 10 days of ceremonies and events commemorating the death of the 13th-century Islamic scholar, poet and Sufi mystic Jalaladdin Rumi. Among the most visually stunning tributes is a mesmerizing ceremony by the whirling dervishes.