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Ed Webb

Egypt charges former Mubarak ally with corruption - Yahoo! News - 1 views

  • Sherif had also received gifts worth millions of Egyptian pounds from chief editors in the state media in return for keeping them in their positions
Ed Webb

BBC News - Blizzard cuts off Iranian access to World of Warcraft - 0 views

  • "This week, Blizzard tightened up its procedures to ensure compliance with these laws, and players connecting from the affected nations are restricted from access to Blizzard games and services," read the statement. Unfortunately, said Blizzard, the same sanctions meant it could not give refunds to players in Iran or help them move their account elsewhere. "We apologise for any inconvenience this causes and will happily lift these restrictions as soon as US law allows," it added. Although the block on Wow has been imposed by Blizzard, other reports suggest a wider government ban might have been imposed. Players of Wow and other games, including Guild Wars, said when they had tried to log in they had been redirected to a page saying the connection had been blocked because the games promoted "superstition and mythology". Blizzard said it had no information about Iranian government action against online games.
Ed Webb

Egyptian President Seeks Regional Initiative for Syria Peace - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Coming at a moment of acute hand-wringing in the Western capitals over how an Islamist leadership of the largest Arab state might alter the American-backed regional order, Mr. Morsi’s focus bisects Washington’s customary division of the region, between Western-friendly states like Egypt and Saudi Arabia on the one hand and Iran on the other, said Emad Shahin, a political scientist at the American University in Cairo.
  • Mr. Morsi’s specific initiative, in particular, also appears largely harmonious with the stated Western objective of ending the Syrian bloodshed.
  • I don’t think this is a confrontational foreign policy. It is a regional foreign policy, tacking a regional problem through the capitals of the four most influential regional states, without looking through the prism of Washington and Tel Aviv
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  • Mr. Morsi is visiting Tehran this week to attend a meeting of an organization of so-called nonaligned states, but his spokesman, Mr. Ali, said the visit would last only a few hours, without any bilateral talks
  • The unorthodox combination of players in the proposed working group is a measure of the changing dynamics within the region. Mr. Morsi comes from the Muslim Brotherhood, a pan-Arab Islamist movement that has long been opposed to Saudi Arabia’s Western-friendly monarchy, which has outlawed the group as subversive. Both Egypt and Saudi Arabia have been fierce rivals of Iran. And while Iran has provided military and logistics support to the Assad government, both Turkey and Saudi Arabia have helped arm the rebels trying to bring it down. Mr. Morsi, though, may be well positioned to bring together the working group, analysts said. Egypt has credibility as “an emerging player in the Arab world and a somewhat successful model of a democratic transition in the Arab Spring,” said Mr. Harling of the International Crisis Group.
  • Mr. Morsi’s spokesman, Mr. Ali, stressed that the new president intended to make independence and openness the hallmarks of Egyptian foreign policy. “Egyptian diplomacy will be more active, more vibrant,” he said. “We have gone through a very long period of diplomatic stagnation, torpidity and rigidity.” He added: “We’re not counted in any axis or any old groupings. Therefore, our minds are open for everyone, and our hands are extended to everyone.”
  • Egypt has in recent months received $3 billion in loans from Saudi Arabia and Qatar. It is seeking a $4.8 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund. And the United States is in talks over the delivery of more than $1 billion in promised aid.
Ed Webb

Israel wants Egypt's Islamist president to visit | Reuters - 0 views

  • "We definitely hope to see President Mursi receive official Israeli representatives in the near future. We want to see him interviewed by the Israeli media. We want to see him visit Jerusalem as a guest of President (Shimon) Peres in Israel," the ultranationalist Lieberman told a legal conference in Tel Aviv.
Ed Webb

Israeli-Arab Facebook group meets in Berlin - Region - World - Ahram Online - 0 views

  • Nimrod Ben-Zeev of the YaLa-Young Leaders group says 18 members from Israel, the Palestinian territories, Tunisia, Algeria, Lebanon, Egypt, Sudan, Iraq and Kuwait met in Berlin over the weekend.
  • the group was selected from the most active of YaLa's 162,000 Facebook members
  • the movement wants to empower Middle Eastern youths to work together to improve their communities. It plans an online university next year
Ed Webb

The Associated Press: China, wary of Arab Spring, hosts Egypt's Morsi - 0 views

  • Morsi's first state visit outside the Middle East and Africa since becoming president, underscoring China's importance as one of five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and as a vital source of trade and investment. The visit is also seen as part of a reorientation of Egyptian foreign policy away from a heavy focus on Washington.
  • China's authoritarian one-party government was decidedly cool toward that movement, criticizing what Chinese state media derided as thuggish "street democracy." Beijing also bitterly condemned the NATO air campaign that brought down dictator Moammar Gadhafi in neighboring Libya and continues to join with Russia in blocking U.N. Security Council actions to force Syrian leader President Bashar Assad from power.
  • While largely a bystander in Middle Eastern politics, China's economic importance to the region has ballooned amid Europe's economic woes and the sluggish U.S. recovery.
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  • Revenues from tourism — one of Egypt's biggest money makers and job sources — fell 30 percent to $9 billion in 2011 and foreign investment has largely dried up. That has forced the country to seek billions of dollars in assistance from the International Monetary Fund and raised the possibility of a cut in subsidies that keep commodities like fuel and bread cheap for a population of about 82 million, 40 percent of whom live near or below the poverty line.
  • Chinese companies also import Egyptian oil products and raw materials such as cotton, while exporting automobiles, electronics and other finished goods.
  • Morsi is to leave Beijing on Thursday to attend the world gathering of self-described nonaligned nations in Iran, the first visit to that country by an Egyptian head of state since relations between them were severed in 1979.
Ed Webb

Something There Is That Doesn't Love a Wall - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • For those on the Palestinian side, the massive concrete wall, double the height of the Berlin Wall, symbolizes the violence of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank.
    • Ed Webb
       
      Also of note: the barrier does not follow any legally recognized border, but arguably creates a de facto one.
Ed Webb

A Critical Perspective from the South - governmentgazette.eu - Readability - 0 views

  • various obstacles have prevented convergence in policy discourses and processes across both shores of the Mediterranean
  • The EU’s emphasis on a security-centered approach in migration management and the prioritization of stability over democracy in the MENA region, have led to widening the Euro-Mediterranean gap.
  • the promotion of democracy and human rights represented one of the major normative objectives of the 1995 Barcelona Declaration. Still, due to a mix of pragmatic and security-driven considerations, the EU has co-operated with authoritarian regimes that upheld stability in the Arab region and in the Euro-Mediterranean order. The EU has moreover promoted a gradualist path of liberalization in the Arab world which consisted in galvanizing economic reforms and providing support to civil society groups. Ironically enough, this gradualist strategy contributed to maintaining the façade of liberalization that autocratic regimes were eager to advertise
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  • political engagement is not necessarily a slippery slope to interventionism
    • Ed Webb
       
      Key word: necessarily
  • boosting liberalization through economic means has proven to be unsatisfactory
  • Since 9/11, the EU has engaged in the MENA region with social and political actors whom it considered as moderate and liberal. Its uneasy relationship with Islamist parties has prevented it from tackling the interface between democratization and the requirement for inclusiveness
  • bridging the gap between a European and an Arab perspective of current changes in the Arab region is crucial
  • financing research and empowering academic and media discourses that help depict Arab narratives away from Western-centric and orientalist interpretative frameworks can set the tone for the development of a more balanced dialogue
  • The former Barcelona process and the Union for the Mediterranean (UFM), currently criticized for compartmentalizing issues of co-operation whilst sidelining core political problems, have called into question the multilateral dimension of Euro-Arab co-operation
  • while the bilateral approach can help boost democratic transitions in individual countries, tackling in the long term structural issues obstructing reform and good governance in the MENA region would still require multilateral channels
Ed Webb

Bitterlemons-international - 1 views

  • We are ceasing publication for reasons involving fatigue--on a number of fronts. First, there is donor fatigue. Why, donors ask, should we continue to support a Middle East dialogue project that not only has not made peace, but cannot "prove" to our satisfaction--especially at a time of revolution and violence throughout the region--that it has indeed raised the level of civilized discussion? Why fight the Israeli right-wing campaign against European and American state funding and the Palestinian campaign against "normalization"? These last two negative developments also reflect local fatigue. There is no peace process and no prospect of one. Informal "track II" dialogue--bitterlemons might be described as a "virtual" track II--is declining. Here and there, writers from the region who used to favor us with their ideas and articles are now begging off, undoubtedly deterred by the revolutionary rise of intolerant political forces in their countries or neighborhood. Then there is the global economic slowdown. Even countries and philanthropic institutions not suffering from donor fatigue still have to deal with declining budgets for promoting activities like ours. Obviously, the donors have every right to do with their limited funds as they see fit. But they are nearly all tightening their supervision and review procedures to a point where the weight of bureaucracy simply overwhelms efforts to maintain even a totally transparent project like bitterlemons and to solicit additional funds.
Ed Webb

Turkey rebuffs Iranian invitation to NAM summit - 1 views

  • Turkey, whose relations with Iran have recently become strained, is not expected to attend the 16th summit of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in Tehran later this month, neither at the presidential nor ministerial level, Turkish diplomatic sources told Today's Zaman.
  • Iran perceives the summit as an important opportunity to portray itself as part of the international scene despite concerted efforts by the United States and the European Union to isolate it diplomatically and economically over its disputed nuclear program
  • According to the Now Lebanon News Agency, Iran will submit a proposal to NAM to end the conflict taking place on the soil of it close ally, Syria, Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi said in comments published on Friday. "[Iran] has a proposal regarding Syria, which it will discuss with countries taking part in the NAM summit," the Fars News Agency and Mehr News Agency quoted Salehi as saying in comments to state television
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  • Iran has temporarily suspended visa-free travel with Turkey. Iran has explained this decision as part of security precautions it is taking in connection with the summit in Tehran, which currently holds the three-year rotating NAM presidency
  • Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, Cuban leader Raul Castro, Armenian President Serzh Sarksian and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh are expected to attend the summit. Also, Qatari Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani and Lebanese President Michel Suleiman are expected. Yet, there is no signal that Iran's close ally, Syria, will attend
  • Israel on Thursday warned Ban and other world leaders not to fall into an Iranian propaganda "trap" when they attend the summit
Ed Webb

How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis - By Frederick Kaufman | Foreign Policy - 2 views

  • in 1999, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission deregulated futures markets. All of a sudden, bankers could take as large a position in grains as they liked, an opportunity that had, since the Great Depression, only been available to those who actually had something to do with the production of our food
  • After World War II, the United States was routinely producing a grain surplus, which became an essential element of its Cold War political, economic, and humanitarian strategies -- not to mention the fact that American grain fed millions of hungry people across the world
  • Futures markets traditionally included two kinds of players. On one side were the farmers, the millers, and the warehousemen, market players who have a real, physical stake in wheat. This group not only includes corn growers in Iowa or wheat farmers in Nebraska, but major multinational corporations like Pizza Hut, Kraft, Nestlé, Sara Lee, Tyson Foods, and McDonald's -- whose New York Stock Exchange shares rise and fall on their ability to bring food to peoples' car windows, doorsteps, and supermarket shelves at competitive prices. These market participants are called "bona fide" hedgers, because they actually need to buy and sell cereals. On the other side is the speculator. The speculator neither produces nor consumes corn or soy or wheat, and wouldn't have a place to put the 20 tons of cereal he might buy at any given moment if ever it were delivered. Speculators make money through traditional market behavior, the arbitrage of buying low and selling high. And the physical stakeholders in grain futures have as a general rule welcomed traditional speculators to their market, for their endless stream of buy and sell orders gives the market its liquidity and provides bona fide hedgers a way to manage risk by allowing them to sell and buy just as they pleased.
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  • Every time the due date of a long-only commodity index futures contract neared, bankers were required to "roll" their multi-billion dollar backlog of buy orders over into the next futures contract, two or three months down the line. And since the deflationary impact of shorting a position simply wasn't part of the GSCI, professional grain traders could make a killing by anticipating the market fluctuations these "rolls" would inevitably cause. "I make a living off the dumb money," commodity trader Emil van Essen told Businessweek last year. Commodity traders employed by the banks that had created the commodity index funds in the first place rode the tides of profit
  • dozens of speculative non-physical hedgers followed Goldman's lead and joined the commodities index game, including Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Pimco, JP Morgan Chase, AIG, Bear Stearns, and Lehman Brothers, to name but a few purveyors of commodity index funds. The scene had been set for food inflation that would eventually catch unawares some of the largest milling, processing, and retailing corporations in the United States, and send shockwaves throughout the world
  • when the global financial crisis sent investors running scared in early 2008, and as dollars, pounds, and euros evaded investor confidence, commodities -- including food -- seemed like the last, best place for hedge, pension, and sovereign wealth funds to park their cash. "You had people who had no clue what commodities were all about suddenly buying commodities," an analyst from the United States Department of Agriculture told me. In the first 55 days of 2008, speculators poured $55 billion into commodity markets, and by July, $318 billion was roiling the markets. Food inflation has remained steady since
  • The average American, who spends roughly 8 to 12 percent of her weekly paycheck on food, did not immediately feel the crunch of rising costs. But for the roughly 2-billion people across the world who spend more than 50 percent of their income on food, the effects have been staggering: 250 million people joined the ranks of the hungry in 2008, bringing the total of the world's "food insecure" to a peak of 1 billion -- a number never seen before.
  • a problem familiar to those versed in the history of tulips, dot-coms, and cheap real estate: a food bubble
  • The more the price of food commodities increases, the more money pours into the sector, and the higher prices rise
  • Not only does the world's food supply have to contend with constricted supply and increased demand for real grain, but investment bankers have engineered an artificial upward pull on the price of grain futures. The result: Imaginary wheat dominates the price of real wheat, as speculators (traditionally one-fifth of the market) now outnumber bona-fide hedgers four-to-one.
  • speculation has also created spikes in everything the farmer must buy to grow his grain -- from seed to fertilizer to diesel fuel
  • from 2005 to 2008, the worldwide price of food rose 80 percent -- and has kept rising
  • I asked a handful of wheat brokers what would happen if the U.S. government simply outlawed long-only trading in food commodities for investment banks. Their reaction: laughter. One phone call to a bona-fide hedger like Cargill or Archer Daniels Midland and one secret swap of assets, and a bank's stake in the futures market is indistinguishable from that of an international wheat buyer. What if the government outlawed all long-only derivative products, I asked? Once again, laughter. Problem solved with another phone call, this time to a trading office in London or Hong Kong; the new food derivative markets have reached supranational proportions, beyond the reach of sovereign law
  • nervous countries have responded instead with me-first policies, from export bans to grain hoarding to neo-mercantilist land grabs in Africa. And efforts by concerned activists or international agencies to curb grain speculation have gone nowhere. All the while, the index funds continue to prosper, the bankers pocket the profits, and the world's poor teeter on the brink of starvation
Ed Webb

Talk Like an Iranian - Christopher de Bellaigue - The Atlantic - 1 views

  • Ta’arof comes from an Arabic word denoting the process of getting acquainted with someone. But as with so many other Arabic words that have entered the Persian language through conquest and acculturation, the Iranians have subverted its meaning. In the Iranian context, ta’arof refers to a way of managing social relations with decorous manners. It may be charming and a basis for mutual goodwill, or it may be malicious, a social or political weapon that confuses the recipient and puts him at a disadvantage. Ta’arof is the opposite of calling a spade a spade; life is so much nicer without bad news. As I discovered in the Department of Alien Affairs, ta’arof can also be a way of letting people down very, very slowly. It often involves some degree of self-abasement, through which the giver of ta’arof achieves a kind of moral ascendancy—what the anthro­pologist William Beeman has called “getting the lower hand.” Thus, at a doorway, grown men may be seen wrestling for the privilege of going in second. For years in Tehran, we had a cleaner who insisted on calling me “Doctor” as a way of lifting me up the social scale. “I am not a doctor,” I snapped one day. Undaunted, she replied, “Please God, you shall be!”
  • Ta’arof can be particularly dis­orienting for Americans, who tend to prize efficiency, frankness, and in­formality. John Limbert, a retired diplomat who has been involved in Iranian affairs for 50 years, has given this culture clash more thought than most. Iranian society, he notes, is full of apparently inconsistent elements that we in the West regard as hypo­critical. “Our instincts are to reconcile the contra­dictions,” he told me recently, while Iranians prefer “to live with them.” Limbert was among the Americans held hostage by a group of Iranian militants for 444 days in 1979–81. In April 1980, he was paraded on Iranian TV alongside the revolutionary cleric Ali Khamenei. In flawless Persian, Limbert joked that his captors had “overdone the ta’arof”—­going on to explain that they were such diligent hosts, they had refused to let their guests go home. The joke was itself a very Iranian way to level a sharp criticism: it allowed Limbert to highlight the hostage-takers’ breach of traditional Iranian hospitality.
  • Ta’arof is not always supposed to have a resolution; the best conclusion may be an open-ended one. So it has proved with Iran’s nuclear dossier. So, too, with my own, more personal, diplomacy. I applied for Iranian citizenship in 2004. My “accomplish­ments” have not diminished. But I am still waiting for a reply.
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