4/16/2012

News Dump - For the Spaniards

Posted by Andrew |

  • More than 40 pro-Palestinian activists have detained by Israeli authorities at Tel Aviv's international airport for taking  part in an attempted "fly-in". The Welcome to Palestine campaign, now in its third consecutive year, aims to gather activists from more than 15 countries in Israel from April 15 to 21 to "challenge the Israeli siege of the occupied territories", it says on its website.

  • Implementation of the first phase of the Jordan Red Sea Project (JRSP) will start early next year, Minister of Water and Irrigation Mousa Jamani said on Tuesday. Projected to supply the Kingdom with around one billion cubic metres of water by 2022, the JRSP will be the key to addressing the Kingdom’s water scarcity, Jamani said yesterday.

  • Oil revenues have already fuelled a high-profile construction frenzy in the former Soviet state of Azerbaijan, but in an attempt to raise its profile further, the Caspian Sea country is looking to build the tallest building in the world.

  • Food prices have fallen in the UAE this year after the Government tightened its control on suppliers and retailers to contain inflation. Measures introduced in the first three months of the year have helped to lower the prices of basic commodities, according to an analysis by The National.

  • How to deal with Cairo’s crowds is a complex dilemma that IAMZ Design Studio has approached with this soaring Father and Son Skyscraper. Inspired by the relationship between a father and son, the young Egyptian architect has fused traditional Islamic architecture with modern design in a concept for an 8,000 square meter building that receives its energy from the sun and boasts a series of carbon-sapping green roofs. Read on for more details and then let us know: do you have any ideas for revitalizing a once vibrant downtown Cairo?

  • Mubadala, the Abu Dhabi government investment company, made a 4.2bn UAE dirham ($1.14bn) loss last year as declining financial and real estate markets led to big writedowns. The sovereign wealth fund, which owns stakes in Carlyle Group and General Electric, is one of the few Gulf state investment vehicles to publish audited financial results. Its disclosure is a rare insight into the performance of one of the region’s most high-profile investors.

  • Kitchen workers at a celeb-packed Manhattan Chinese restaurant allegedly use a culinary technique they don’t teach at Le Cordon Bleu — making mock penises out of the dumplings before serving them to diners, an ex-bartender claims in a lawsuit filed yesterday.

  • The Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed last night strongly condemned yesterday's visit by Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to the UAE's island of Abu Musa.

  • Qatar Airways plans to invest in California’s Byogy Renewables to produce cleaner jet fuel from alcohol, curbing carbon output to meet emission goals.

  • A prominent Saudi businessman announced last week that the Sudanese government agreed to give his country two million acres of land as a farming investment that would allow the Arab Gulf state to ensure safe and steady food supply.

  • After the peace plan for Syria just about collapsed over the weekend, Syrian forces fired across the Turkish border Monday, wounding at least five people in a refugee camp.  The Associated Press reports that the Syrian soldiers were apparently firing at fleeing rebels

  • Saudi Basic Industries Corp (SABIC), the world's largest chemical producer by market value, said it was planning to invest $100 million to build a technology research and development centre in China. The facility in the Shanghai region will house a total of about 400 employees when it is completed in 2013, the company said on Friday.

  • With the bulk of Saudi Arabia’s drinking water coming from desalination plants, the country’s sky-rocketing population growth puts enormous demand on water supply. Arab News reports that a new desalination plant in the Eastern Province is gearing up to go online. When it is producing, it will nearly double the amount of water flowing into the capital, Riyadh.

  • Abu Dhabi: National Energy has sold its 7 per cent stake in Tesla, cashing in on a stock rally that has seen the electric carmaker's shares surge more than 20 per cent over the past year. The move, which netted the company — also known as Taqa — a profit of Dh415 million on the book price, came as the energy giant announced that it has taken a 50 per cent stake in a Kurdistan power plant.

  • The protracted fight among Yemen's elites spilt into the street - and onto the runway - again yesterday after the country's new president, Abdrabuh Mansur Hadi, tried to sack a number of old-regime officers and officials.

  • It was here that the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) conducted training, beginning in 2005, for members of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, a dissident Iranian opposition group known in the West as the M.E.K. The M.E.K. had its beginnings as a Marxist-Islamist student-led group and, in the nineteen-seventies

  • UAE authorities said on Friday they were investigating an employee of a US pro-democracy group after briefly detaining him as he tried to leave the Gulf state. Slobodan Milic works for the National Democratic Institute which was last week ordered to close its UAE offices. The Serb was detained at Dubai airport on Thursday evening, questioned and then allowed to return to his apartment in Dubai, NDI said.

  • Palestinian negotiators are prepared to drop one of two key preconditions for the resumption of peace talks with Israel if the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agrees to halt all settlement construction in the West Bank, a top Palestinian official said yesterday. Nabil Shaath, a member of Fatah's Central Committee, said the Palestinians would give up their demand that any negotiations with Israel take place on the basis of borders that existed prior to the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. In exchange, he said, Mr Netanyahu's government must end settlement building.

  • Saudi Arabia's Shoura Council is considering taxing unused land, al-Eqtisadiah daily reported on Wednesday, in a move that could help uncork a serious housing bottleneck in the world's top oil exporter.

  • Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu overruled the planned eviction on Tuesday of Jewish settlers from a building in an occupied West Bank city that is flashpoint of tensions with Palestinians. Some 20 settlers moved into the Hebron building last Thursday at night, seeking to expand a settlement of some 500 families in the heart of a biblical city overwhelmingly populated by Palestinians who regard Israelis as interlopers.

  • If you get arrested, better have an alibi and a clean pair of underwear. The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that people arrested for any offense may be strip-searched before going to jail.

  • The tombstone marking the grave of Adolf Hitler's parents, a place of pilgrimage for neo-Nazis, has been removed from an upper Austrian village cemetery at the request of a descendant, and the grave is ready for a new burial, officials said Friday.

  • Qatar has reportedly frozen plans to set up a $67m fund for entrepreneurs from France's often-deprived suburbs to set up businesses. According to reports in France, the Gulf state has put the fund on hold until after the country‘s presidential election.

  • The UAE has closed the Dubai office of the National Democratic Institute, a US-funded pro-democracy group that was the subject of a crackdown in Egypt, the U.S. State Department said on Friday.

  • Germany's Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, a think tank close to Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives which promotes democracy abroad, said on Thursday authorities in Abu Dhabi had ordered it to shut its office there.

  • The Arkansas Supreme Court on Friday overturned a state law that had made it illegal for a teacher to have sex with a student under the age of 21.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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