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wmulnea

BBC News - Falling oil prices: Who are the winners and losers? - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...business-29643612

shared by wmulnea on 13 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • The reasons for this change are twofold - weak demand in many countries due to insipid economic growth, coupled with surging US production. Added to this is the fact that the oil cartel Opec is determined not to cut production as a way to prop up prices.
  • Russia loses about $2bn in revenues for every dollar fall in the oil price,
  • Russia has confirmed it will not cut production to shore up oil prices.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Venezuela is one of the world's largest oil exporters, but thanks to economic mismanagement it was already finding it difficult to pay its way even before the oil price started falling.
  • Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil exporter and Opec's most influential member, could support global oil prices by cutting back its own production, but there is little sign it wants to do this.
  • There could be two reasons - to try to instil some discipline among fellow Opec oil producers, and perhaps to put the US's burgeoning shale oil and gas industry under pressure.
  • Saudi Arabia needs oil prices to be around $85 in the longer term, it has deep pockets with a reserve fund of some $700bn - so can withstand lower prices for some time.
  • were to force some higher cost producers
  • In the 1980s the country did cut production significantly in a bid to boost prices, but it had little effect and it also badly affected the Saudi economy.
  • Saudi Arabia, Gulf producers such as the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait have also amassed considerable foreign currency reserves, which means that they could run deficits for several years if necessary.
  • Islamic State, capturing oil wells. It is estimated it is making about $3m a day through black market sales - and undercutting market prices by selling at a significant discount - around $30-60 a barrel.
  • "The growth of oil production in North America, particularly in the US, has been staggering," says Columbia University's Jason Bordoff.
  • It has been this growth in US energy production, where gas and oil is extracted from shale formations using hydraulic fracturing or fracking, that has been one of the main drivers of lower oil prices.
  • "Shale has essentially severed the linkage between geopolitical turmoil in the Middle East, and oil price and equities," says Seth Kleinman, head of energy strategy at Citi.
  • With Europe's flagging economies characterised by low inflation and weak growth, any benefits of lower prices would be welcomed by beleaguered governments. A 10% fall in oil prices should lead to a 0.1% increase in economic output, say some. In general consumers benefit through lower energy prices, but eventually low oil prices do erode the conditions that brought them about.
mjumaia

UAE's first female fighter pilot led airstrike against ISIS - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...uae-female-fighter-pilot

UAE Women Women pilot female fighter pilot ISIS war politics future

shared by mjumaia on 09 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • mjumaia on 09 Feb 15
     
    The first female fighter pilot in the United Arab Emirates, she led a strike mission this week against the terror group ISIS. The UAE took a step forward toward democratize future.
mjumaia

The Country With That Female Pilot Is Actually Terrible On Women's Rights - 0 views

www.businessinsider.com/omen-despite-the-pilot-2014-10

UAE Dubai women right ISIS human rights

shared by mjumaia on 09 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • mjumaia on 09 Feb 15
     
    A female air force pilot from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) made international headlines last month. However, , the UAE is not at the forefront of women's rights and not even compared to its Arab neighbors.
kkerby223

A Saudi Story of Marriage and Divorce - 0 views

www.emirates247.com/...oned-at-30-2011-02-27-1.361098

married divorce abuse child gender

shared by kkerby223 on 03 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • kkerby223 on 03 Apr 15
     
    This link tells the story of a woman named Salma. Salma was sold at the age of 13 to an elderly man. She was then abused for 17 years and then divorced, the ex husband taking the children. This is one example of gender inequality and lack of a decent legal system and protective laws. I am not saying that all marriages are bad but stores such as this are horrendous and actions should be taken to prevent it from happening in the future.
wmulnea

Libya's civil war: That it should come to this | The Economist - 3 views

www.economist.com/...factional-chaos-it-should-come

shared by wmulnea on 11 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • It is split between a government in Beida, in the east of the country, which is aligned with the military; and another in Tripoli, in the west, which is dominated by Islamists and militias from western coastal cities
  • Benghazi is again a battlefield.
  • The black plumes of burning oil terminals stretch out over the Mediterranean.
  • ...69 more annotations...
  • Libya looked like the latest fragile blossoming of the Arab spring
  • Army commanders, mostly of Arab Bedouin origin, refused orders to shoot the protesters
  • the revolutionaries cobbled together a National Transitional Council (NTC) claiming to represent all of Libya
  • Volunteers from students to bank managers took up arms, joining popular militias and only sometimes obeying the orders of defecting army commanders trying to take control
  • In August Western bombing of government bases surrounding Tripoli cleared an avenue for the revolutionaries to take the capital.
  • Recognised abroad, popular at home and enjoying the benefits of healthy oil revenues—97% of the government’s income—the NTC was well placed to lay the foundations for a new Libya
  • he judges, academics and lawyers who filled its ranks worried about their own legitimacy and feared confrontation with the militias which, in toppling Qaddafi, had taken his arsenals for their own.
  • militia leaders were already ensconced in the capital’s prime properties
  • The NTC presided over Libya’s first democratic elections in July 2012, and the smooth subsequent handover of power to the General National Congress (GNC) revived popular support for the revolution.
  • Islamist parties won only 19 of 80 seats assigned to parties in the new legislature, and the process left the militias on the outside
  • The Homeland party, founded by Abdel Hakim Belhad
  • tried to advertise its moderation by putting an unveiled woman at the head of its party list in Benghazi
  • The incumbent prime minister, Abdurrahim al-Keib, a university professor who had spent decades in exile, fretted and dithered
  • He bowed to militia demands for their leaders to be appointed to senior ministries, and failed to revive public-works programmes
  • which might have given militiamen jobs
  • Many received handouts without being required to hand in weapons or disband, an incentive which served to swell their ranks
  • the number of revolutionaries registered with the Warriors Affairs Commission set up by the NTC was about 60,000; a year later there were over 200,000. Of some 500 registered militias, almost half came from one city, Misrata.
  • In May 2013 the militias forced parliament to pass a law barring from office anyone who had held a senior position in Qaddafi’s regime after laying siege to government ministries.
  • In the spring of 2014, Khalifa Haftar, a retired general who had earlier returned from two decades of exile in America, forcibly tried to dissolve the GNC and re-establish himself as the armed forces’ commander-in-chief in an operation he called Dignity
  • The elections which followed were a far cry from the happy experience of 2012. In some parts of the country it was too dangerous to go out and vote
  • Such retrenchment has been particularly noticeable among women. In 2011 they created a flurry of new civil associations; now many are back indoors.
  • Turnout in the June 2014 elections was 18%, down from 60% in 2012, and the Islamists fared even worse than before
  • Dismissing the results, an alliance of Islamist, Misratan and Berber militias called Libya Dawn launched a six-week assault on Tripoli. The newly elected parliament decamped to Tobruk, some 1,300km east
  • Grasping for a figleaf of legitimacy, Libya Dawn reconstituted the pre-election GNC and appointed a new government
  • So today Libya is split between two parliaments—both boycotted by their own oppositions and inquorate—two governments, and two central-bank governors.
  • The army—which has two chiefs of staff—is largely split along ethnic lines, with Arab soldiers in Arab tribes rallying around Dignity and the far fewer Misratan and Berber ones around Libya Dawn.
  • Libya Dawn controls the bulk of the territory and probably has more fighters at its disposal.
  • General Haftar’s Dignity, which has based its government in Beida, has air power and, probably, better weaponry
  • the Dignity movement proclaims itself America’s natural ally in the war on terror and the scourge of jihadist Islam
  • Libya Dawn’s commanders present themselves as standard-bearers of the revolution against Qaddafi now continuing the struggle against his former officers
  • Ministers in the east vow to liberate Tripoli from its “occupation” by Islamists, all of whom they denounce as terrorists
  • threatens to take the war to Egypt if Mr Sisi continues to arm the east. Sleeping cells could strike, he warns, drawn from the 2m tribesmen of Libyan origin in Egypt.
  • Yusuf Dawar
  • The struggle over the Gulf of Sirte area, which holds Libya’s main oil terminals and most of its oil reserves, threatens to devastate the country’s primary asset
  • And in the Sahara, where the largest oilfields are, both sides have enlisted ethnic minorities as proxies
  • ibya Dawn has drafted in the brown-skinned Tuareg, southern cousins of the Berbers; Dignity has recruited the black-skinned Toubou. As a result a fresh brawl is brewing in the Saharan oasis of Ubari, which sits at the gates of the al-Sharara oilfield, largest of them all.
  • Oil production has fallen and become much more volatile
  • oil is worth half as much as it was a year ago
  • The Central Bank is now spending at three times the rate that it is taking in oil money
  • The bank is committed to neutrality, but is based in Tripoli
  • Tripoli may have a little more access to cash, but is in bad shape in other ways
  • Fuel supplies and electricity are petering out
  • Crime is rising; carjacking street gangs post their ransom demands on Twitter
  • In Fashloum
  • residents briefly erected barricades to keep out a brigade of Islamists, the Nuwassi
  • “No to Islamists and the al-Qaeda gang” reads the roadside graffiti
  • Libya’s ungoverned spaces are growing,
  • Each month 10,000 migrants set sail for Europe
  • On January 3rd, IS claimed to have extended its reach to Libya’s Sahara too, killing a dozen soldiers at a checkpoint
  • The conflict is as likely to spread as to burn itself out.
  • the Western powers
  • have since been conspicuous by their absence. Chastened by failure in Afghanistan and Iraq, they have watched from the sidelines
  • Obama washed his hands of Libya after Islamists killed his ambassador
  • Italy, the former colonial power, is the last country to have a functioning embassy in Tripoli.
  • Even under Qaddafi the country did not feel so cut off
  • Dignity is supported not just by Mr Sisi but also by the United Arab Emirates, which has sent its own fighter jets into the fray as well as providing arms
  • The UAE’s Gulf rival, Qatar, and Turkey have backed the Islamists and Misratans in the west
  • If oil revenues were to be put into an escrow account, overseas assets frozen and the arms embargo honoured he thinks it might be possible to deprive fighters of the finance that keeps them fighting and force them to the table
  • Until 1963 Libya was governed as three federal provinces—Cyrenaica in the east, Fezzan in the south and Tripolitania in the west
  • The old divisions still matter
  • the marginalised Cyrenaicans harked back to the time when their king split his time between the courts of Tobruk and Beida and when Arabs from the Bedouin tribes of the Green Mountains ran his army
  • Tensions between those tribes and Islamist militias ran high from the start.
  • July 2011 jihadists keen to settle scores with officers who had crushed their revolt in the late 1990s killed the NTC’s commander-in-chief, Abdel Fattah Younis, who came from a powerful Arab tribe in the Green Mountains. In June 2013 the Transitional Council of Barqa (the Arab name for Cyrenaica), a body primarily comprised of Arab tribes, declared the east a separate federal region, and soon after allied tribal militias around the Gulf of Sirte took control of the oilfields.
  • In the west, indigenous Berbers, who make up about a tenth of the population, formed a council of their own and called on larger Berber communities in the Maghreb and Europe for support
  • Port cities started to claim self-government and set up their own border controls.
  • Derna—a small port in the east famed for having sent more jihadists per person to fight in Iraq than anywhere else in the world
  • opposed NATO intervention and insisted that the NTC was a pagan (wadani) not national (watani) council
  • Some in Derna have now declared their allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the caliph of the so-called Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Iraq.
  • In December the head of America’s Africa command told reporters that IS was training some 200 fighters in the town.
sambofoster

A look at the rights of women in Arab countries - Middle East - 0 views

www.haaretz.com/...1.578635

shared by sambofoster on 27 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • sambofoster on 27 Jan 16
     
    From Jordan to the United Arab Emirates, a look at women's rights across the Arab world on the occasion of International Women's Day. Jordan Women can travel freely without permission from their husbands or male relatives. They hold public posts and female pilots, police officers and soldiers.
jherna2a

War in Libya - the Guardian briefing - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-sp-briefing-war-in-libya

Libya civil war proxy war

shared by jherna2a on 27 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • jherna2a on 27 Jan 16
     
    Libya's civil war began with the removal of dictator Muammar Gaddafi. The conflict is mainly between Islamists and nationalists but is also considered a proxy war between Qatar and United Arab Emirates.
mportie

Mideast firms don't care about cyber threat - 0 views

www.emirates247.com/...ber-threat-2015-03-04-1.583122

cyber virus Middle East security business hack

shared by mportie on 02 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • mportie on 02 Mar 16
     
    Cyber activity and crime are growing in the Middle East according to anti-virus industry reports. This raises the question of business in the Middle East are prepared or taking action to counter the increase of threat; reports however show that most are not.
mkulach

The Muslim Brotherhood, Terrorism and U.S. Policy - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...-brotherhood-te_b_9329246.html

Muslim Brotherhood United States UAE Egypt

shared by mkulach on 09 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • mkulach on 09 Mar 16
     
    On Wednesday, February 24, the Republican dominated House Judiciary Committee voted 17-10 along party lines to require the State Department to take action to designate the Muslim Brotherhood a foreign terrorist organization. The move would be welcomed by Egypt's President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and the United Arab Emirates who have been waiting for such an action to occur. Many believe the Muslim Brotherhood is what is preventing democracy in the Middle East and have a powerful stronghold that greatly affects these changes in the region.
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