Stay true to the dreams of thy youth

Jordan has become the first country to make a budget airline its official Olympic Games carrier, with the announcement on Monday that easyJet will fly its athletes and support staff between Amman and London this summer.

Tanzania's president has invited investors from the UAE to join the rush for oil and gas in the east African nation, after recent gas discoveries along its coastline, the president's office said on Saturday.

Egypt is on the cusp of its first real experiment in Islamist governance. If the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohamed Morsi comes out on top in the upcoming presidential runoff election, scheduled for June 16 and 17, the venerable Islamist movement will have won control of both Egypt's presidency and its parliament, and it will have a very real chance to implement its agenda of market-driven economic recovery, gradual Islamization, and the reassertion of Egypt's regional role.

The Saudi Industrial Development Fund (SIDF) has approved 17 loans valued at SR 2 billion to establish 11 new industrial projects and expand six existing projects with a total investment of SR 11.48 billion, its director general said yesterday. Mining industries received the lion’s share of SIDF loans amounting to SR 900 million, followed by engineering industries (SR 355 million), chemical industries (SR 257 million), building materials (SR 226 million) and consumer industries (SR 165 million).

“Guess a Nobel in trade means you can pontificate on fiscal matters & declare my country a ‘wasteland’. Must be a Princeton vs Columbia thing,” Mr. Ilves wrote referring to his alma mater and Mr. Krugman’s professorial affiliation. “But yes, what do we know? We’re just dumb & silly East Europeans. Unenlightened. Someday we too will understand. Nostra culpa.”

Israel needs to play a more active role in cyber warfare and is developing both offensive and defensive capabilities, Ehud Barak, the defence minister, said on Wednesday.

Belgian right-wingers have offered to pay a 250 euros ($310) bounty to anyone who reports a veiled woman to police, they said on Tuesday, in the wake of face veil riots in Brussels. Filip Dewinter, a senior figure within Vlaams Belang, a right-wing party, told Reuters the riots had made police apprehensive about enforcing the burqa ban and that the payment should put pressure on authorities to further enforce it.

Sri Lanka will establish an accredited nurses' training institute at a cost of $40m with funds from Saudi Arabia, it was reported on Sunday. Saudi Arabia is to fund the construction of the facility for providing training to the nurses under a joint venture programme, Amal Senalankadikara, chairman of the Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment (SLBFE) told Arab News.

The largest refinery in the US, at Port Arthur on the coast of Texas, is on Wednesday being formally opened by its owners Royal Dutch Shell and Saudi Aramco at a volatile time for the refining industry. Shell, Europe’s largest oil group by market capitalisation, and Aramco, the state-owned oil company of Saudi Arabia, have more than doubled the size of the Port Arthur refinery owned by their Motiva joint venture, raising its processing capacity from 275,000 barrels of crude a day to 600,000 b/d, at an estimated cost of $7bn.