Stay true to the dreams of thy youth

• Turkey fights for a new prestige - FT.com

  "The story of Turkey today is of a country seeking new customers and new prestige for its products, even as it tries to defend lower end goods from cheaper Asian imports. Now, Turkey is in what some industrialists characterise as a three to four year dash to protect and rebuild its industry in the face of cheap imports from China, and to a lesser extent India and Bangladesh. Hefty tariff increases last year on textiles and clothing bought time for some beleaguered manufacturers while dismaying other companies that look abroad for materials."

  tags: turkey textiles industry middleeast production

• Saudi Ikea: now you see her, now you don’t - FT.com

  "Ikea faced its latest controversy about its foreign operations after it emerged it had removed images of women from its famous annual furniture catalogue in Saudi Arabia. The move stoked controversy in Sweden, home to the world’s largest furniture retailer by sales, where the country’s trade minister, Ewa Björling, complained: “You can’t remove or airbrush women from reality.”"

  tags: ikea furniture consumers environment sweden saudiarabia

• Qatar Airways joins oneworld alliance - FT.com

  "Qatar Airways is set to be the first of the fast-expanding Gulf carriers to become a member of one of the global airline alliances, by agreeing to join oneworld. The move is a coup for oneworld, whose members are led by American Airlines and British Airways, and underlines how the Gulf carriers may no longer be viewed with hostility by western airlines."

  tags: qatar airlines travel oneworld transportation globalization gcc

• How Marriott is designing a smarter business hotel | SmartPlanet

  "Hotels that bill themselves as business hotels usually mean efficiently sized rooms at rates that fall within allowable per diems. The actual amenities for conducting business are limited to conference rooms and lobbies, spaces that aren’t conducive to the actual activities of working. In an effort to redefine the future of how hotels can be used for business, Marriott Hotels & Resorts built a prototype for the hotel industry’s first “purpose-built suite of meeting spaces” in the Redmond Marriott Town Center, outside of Seattle."

  tags: hotels marriiott innovation business travel

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