Cairo's historic Islamic quarter, a maze of congested, rubble-strewn streets smelling of car fumes and uncollected trash, is being made over with the opening last fall of a 74-acre park and continuing efforts to restore some of the area's many monuments and noteworthy buildings.

The $30 million project, which began about 10 years ago, has been undertaken by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, a Geneva-based organization focusing on the revitalization of cities in the Muslim world.   The hope is that it will act as a catalyst for tourism and urban renewal in a neglected area more than 1,000 years old that boasts a rich concentration of Islamic architecture...

[More]  The New York Times, New York, USA, February 6, 2005.

At last month’s Florida Huddle 2005 held at the Ocean Centre in Daytona Beach, the Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention and Visitors Bureau announced the return of King Tut to the United States. Fort Lauderdale will host December 2005-May 2006 at the Museum of Art the world’s most important and extraordinary display dubbed Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs, a National Geographic Exhibition. The 50-object display welcomed eight million people alone in New York in the seventies.

Twice the size of the first King Tut global tour that lasted from 1976 and 1979 and launched an era of “blockbuster” museum exhibitions in seven cities from coast to coast, the new exhibit promises to generate millions of dollars of economic impact in a two-year tour of Florida, Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia. California alone expects to generate an earning of $137 million when the show, which carriers more than two decades of the precious artefacts buried with the mysterious boy king, returns in June 2005...

[More], TravelVideo.tv, Canada, February 03, 2005.

Official exhibition website: King Tut exhibition. Tutankhamun & the Golden Age of the Pharaohs. Treasures from the Valley of the Kings. Los Angeles, Fort Lauderdale, Chicago.