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King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture Participates in Sharjah Int’l Book Fair

The Sharjah International Book Fair
The Sharjah International Book Fair
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King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture Participates in Sharjah Int’l Book Fair

The Sharjah International Book Fair
The Sharjah International Book Fair

Saudi Arabia’s King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture (Ithra) is taking part in the 42nd edition of the Sharjah International Book Fair, which opened in Sharjah, UAE, on November 1 and will run until November 12.
Ithra’s pavilion at the fair features its library, which is also accessible through virtual reality (VR) technology. Pavilion visitors have the option to register for Ithra's digital library, offering over 43,000 publications in both audio and visual formats in Arabic and English, along with access to more than 7,000 newspapers and magazines.
Free membership to Ithra’s virtual library allows users to easily access its books and publications through the "Libby" and "PressReader" applications.
The Ithra library has witnessed an impressive attendance rate, showcasing its various services and features during its participation in the fair.
Ithra is the diamond sponsor of the Sharjah International Library Conference, organized by the Sharjah International Book Fair for the tenth time in partnership with the American Library Association from November 8 to November 10.

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Culture

Thousands Greet the Winter Solstice at the Ancient Stonehenge Monument

A person holds up a smart phone as they wait for sunrise during the winter Solstice celebrations at Stonehenge, England, Saturday, Dec. 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Anthony Upton)
A person holds up a smart phone as they wait for sunrise during the winter Solstice celebrations at Stonehenge, England, Saturday, Dec. 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Anthony Upton)
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Thousands Greet the Winter Solstice at the Ancient Stonehenge Monument

A person holds up a smart phone as they wait for sunrise during the winter Solstice celebrations at Stonehenge, England, Saturday, Dec. 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Anthony Upton)
A person holds up a smart phone as they wait for sunrise during the winter Solstice celebrations at Stonehenge, England, Saturday, Dec. 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Anthony Upton)

Thousands of tourists, pagans, druids and people simply yearning for the promise of spring marked the dawn of the shortest day of the year at the ancient Stonehenge monument on Saturday.

Revelers cheered and beat drums as the sun rose at 8:09 a.m. (0809 GMT) over the giant standing stones on the winter solstice — the shortest day and the longest night in the Northern Hemisphere. No one could see the sun through the low winter cloud, but that did not deter a flurry of drumming, chanting and singing as dawn broke.

There will be less than eight hours of daylight in England on Saturday — but after that, the days get longer until the summer solstice in June.

The solstices are the only occasions when visitors can go right up to the stones at Stonehenge, and thousands are willing to rise before dawn to soak up the atmosphere.

The stone circle, whose giant pillars each took 1,000 people to move, was erected starting about 5,000 years ago by a sun-worshiping Neolithic culture, according to The AP. Its full purpose is still debated: Was it a temple, a solar calculator, a cemetery, or some combination of all three?

In a paper published in the journal Archaeology International, researchers from University College London and Aberystwyth University said the site on Salisbury Plain, about 128 kilometers (80 miles) southwest of London, may have had political as well as spiritual significance.

That follows from the recent discovery that one of Stonehenge’s stones — the unique stone lying flat at the center of the monument, dubbed the “altar stone” — originated in Scotland, hundreds of miles north of the site. Some of the other stones were brought from the Preseli Hills in southwest Wales, nearly 240 kilometers (150 miles) to the west,

Lead author Mike Parker Pearson from UCL’s Institute of Archaeology said the geographical diversity suggests Stonehenge may have served as a “monument of unification for the peoples of Britain, celebrating their eternal links with their ancestors and the cosmos.”