Had shahrazad lived today she might have been on the first boat of middle eastern refugees to europe, posits the theater director Mahmoud al-Hurani in his new play 1001 Titanics. First performed in September 2015 by the Arab Puppet Theatre at the Metro al Madina Theater in Beirut, the play toured in Lebanese refugee camps throughout the fall. In al-Hurani's play Shahrazad tells the tale of a skinny boy named Ahmad, a refugee driven by the fall of rockets from his quaint village to an unnamed Arab metropolis symbolized by the paper cutout of a skyline of high rises. The production relies on silhouette, puppetry, and mime to tell its story. In one climactic scene, two characters play cards over an upturned fan, and when a cutout of a missile drops to the stage their cards are blown into oblivion.

The in vitro effect of cadmium (Cd) on apical segments of Pterocladiella capillacea was examined. Over a period of 7 days, the segments were cultivated with the combination of different salinities (25, 35, and 45 practical salinity units) and Cd concentrations, ranging from 0.17 to 0.70 ppm. The effects of Cd on growth rates and content of photosynthetic pigments were analyzed. In addition, metabolic profiling was performed, and samples were processed for microscopy. Serious damage to physiological performance and ultrastructure was observed under different combinations of Cd concentrations and salinity values. Elementary infrared spectroscopy revealed toxic effects registered on growth rate, photosynthetic pigments, chloroplast, and mitochondria organization, as well as changes in lipids and carbohydrates. These alterations in physiology and ultrastructure were, however, coupled to activation of such defense mechanisms as cell wall thickness, reduction of photosynthetic harvesting complex, and flavonoid. In conclusion, P. capillacea is especially sensitive to Cd stress when intermediate concentrations of this pollutant are associated with low salinity values. Such conditions resulted in metabolic compromise, reduction of primary productivity, i.e., photosynthesis, and carbohydrate accumulation in the form of starch granules. Taken together, these findings improve our understanding of the potential impact of this metal in the natural environment.

Taking as its point of departure Rushdie’s use of Burton’s Nights and South Asian travelogues in Shame and The Satanic Verses, this paper reads Burton and Rushdie against their cultural moments and their variant understandings of cosmopolitanism. Contra Appiah’s deployment of Burton in his seminal study of cosmopolitanism, it suggests that Burton’s prejudices were not as Appiah ventures “counter-cosmopolitan” but (because they were often acquired abroad) integral to his cosmopolitanism. In his fiction Rushdie repeatedly deploys the image of a boy’s discovery of Burton’s Nights in a patriarch’s library as emblematic of a neglected cosmopolitanism. Yet he may also be invoking Burton to critique the prejudices of Burton’s cosmopolitan personae in commenting on South Asia and the Nights. In engaging the legacy of Burton’s Nights, Rushdie’s narrators appear most certain of the dangers of neglecting the inheritance of a cosmopolitan tradition than of the virtues of embracing it.

Rocas is the only atoll in the south-western Atlantic and comprises a shallow platform area of about 360 km2, distant 230 km from the continent and 130 km from Fernando de Noronha Archipelago, in Brazil. Since the 1970s, its marine flora has received the attention of several authors, giving rise to considerable and well-established knowledge about its algal biodiversity, with a total of 143 seaweed species reported for the area. Previous efforts stressed the interesting absence of the green algae Halimeda, usually abundant in tropical reefs and one of the most important seaweed groups in the structure of the tropical benthic community. Herein, we report for the first time the presence of Halimeda opuntia at Rocas, collected during an expedition in January 2012. Based on phylogenetic analysis, was proposed that H. opuntia was originated in the Indo-Pacific Ocean and that its establishment in Brazil was independent from populations of the Caribbean as a whole and the Bahamas in particular. Another hypothesis is the current scenario of increased frequency and intensity of extreme events along the Brazilian coast, which could explain the transport of propagules from adjacent areas towards the atoll.

Coralline algae are important reef-builders which can form nodules, known as rhodoliths, occurring worldwide in beds sustaining a high biodiversity. Although considered a non-renewable resource, they are exploited as a source of calcium carbonate used mainly for agricultural purposes. In Brazil between 96,000 and 120,000 metric tonnes of rhodoliths are extracted per year. Besides the direct impact caused by removal on the coralline bed, the dredge process may also produce a plume of fine sediment, which can change the primary production of the remaining organisms. In this study, four treatments, with three replicates, were used to acquire Lithothamnion sp. net photosynthetic rates with and without a sediment layer using a Clark-type oxygen microelectrode and micromanipulator. The results demonstrated that, under controlled conditions, the addition of a thin sediment layer resulted in a 30% reduction of the irradiance, decreasing the Lithothamnion sp. net production in 70%. For this reason direct and indirect effects of mechanical exploitation of the rhodolith beds should be included in future studies that focus on environmental impacts of dredging activity, whether it is linked to the extraction of these algae.