Tag Archives: entertainment
Shaikh Khalifa reshuffles Abu Dhabi Executive Council
Shaikh Khalifa reshuffles Abu Dhabi Executive Council (Wam) / 16 March 2014 The President issued a second Emiri decree on the restructuring of the Adec, appointing Shaikh Hazza bin Zayed Al Nahyan, as Vice-Chairman. The President, His Highness Shaikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, in his capacity as Ruler of Abu Dhabi, has issued an Emiri decree appointing General Shaikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces, as Chairman of the Abu Dhabi Executive Council (Adec). The President issued a second Emiri decree on the restructuring of the Adec, appointing Shaikh Hazza bin Zayed Al Nahyan, as Vice-Chairman with the following as members: Shaikh Hamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Chief of the Crown Prince Court; Shaikh Mohammed bin Khalifa Al Nahyan; Shaikh Sultan bin Tahnoun Al Nahyan, Chairman of the Department of Transport; Dr Ahmed Mubarak Al Mazrouei, Secretary-General of the Abu Dhabi Executive Council; Khaldoon Khalifa Al Mubarak, Chairman of the Executive Authority Affairs; Hamad Mohammed Al Hurr Al Suwaidi, Chairman of the Department of Finance; Nasser Ahmed Al Suwaidi, Chairman of the Energy Authority; Dr Mugheer Khamis Al Khaili, Chairman of Health Authority; Saeed Eid Al Ghafli, Chairman of the Department of Municipal Affairs; Ali Majed Al Mansouri, Chairman of the Department of Economic Development; Dr Amel Abdullah Al Qubaisi, Director-General of Abu Dhabi Education Council; and Mohammed Khalfan Al Rumaithi, Deputy General Commander of Abu Dhabi Police. For more news from Khaleej Times, follow us on Facebook at facebook.com/khaleejtimes , and on Twitter at @khaleejtimes Continue reading
Malaysia Airlines: What may have happened to MH370
Malaysia Airlines: What may have happened to MH370 AFP / 12 March 2014 We take a look at the possible scenarios being weighed up by industry experts as the world waits for clues as to the fate of the Boeing 777, which has one of the best safety records of any jet. Nearly five days since it disappeared while en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, there is still no trace of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370. Also read: Last words of MH370 revealed | Click here to see complete coverage Conflicting information, false alarms over debris and confusion over the focus of the search have produced more questions than answers. Here we take a look at the possible scenarios being weighed up by industry experts as the world waits for clues as to the fate of the Boeing 777, which has one of the best safety records of any jet. WHY: According to Malaysian authorities the plane was cruising at 35,000 feet (11 kilometres) above sea level when it last made contact and vanished without making a distress call, pointing to the possibility of a sudden catastrophic event. The presence on board of two suspect passengers travelling on stolen passports fuelled fears of a terrorist attack. It was revealed Tuesday they were probably just Iranian migrants, but CIA Director John Brennan said a terror link had not been ruled out. Other possibilities include a strike by a missile or military aircraft. EXPERT VIEW: “I don’t believe it is anything to do with the serviceability or the design of the aircraft,” Neil Hansford, chairman of leading Australian airline consultancy Strategic Aviation Solutions, told AFP. “The way I see it there are three scenarios. There was a bomb on board… the aircraft was hit by a military aircraft or a rogue missile; or…the captain is locked out of the cockpit and the plane is put in a dive,” he said. WHY: The sudden disappearance could also point to a technical problem that could have led to a rapid descent. Reports from the Malaysian authorities that the jet may have made a sharp turn west before it lost contact, possibly pointing to the pilots struggling to rectify a problem, have bolstered this theory. EXPERT VIEW: “To me that (the veer) suggests there was a stall,” says former Inspector General of the US Department of Transportation and aviation lawyer, Mary Schiavo. “That doesn’t mean you lose your engines. It means that you’re losing your air flow over your wings, sufficient speed to keep the plane in the air…it would lose altitude really dramatically.” She compared the possible scenario to the fate of Air France 447 — which crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009 after its speed sensors malfunctioned — in an interview with Australia’s ABC television. If the plane did crash, a combination of technical difficulties and pilot error would be a likely scenario, Frost & Sullivan Asia Pacific aerospace consultant Ravi Madavaram said. “There is no single factor which generally leads to an airplane crash, but a combination of technical glitches and pilot decisions. Each of these glitches and decisions taken independently are harmless and often happen. It is the combination of these factors that lead to a catastrophe.” WHY: The lack of wreckage or black box transmission has led to speculation that the plane may have disintegrated mid-air. EXPERT VIEW: While structural disintegration has been behind some previous aircraft disappearances, new planes use “better materials, technology and maintenance schedules”, Madavaram says. “This last happened to China Airlines flight 611, during its cruise at 35,000 feet in 2002. Flight 611 was a Boeing 747 aircraft and the reason for that crash was faulty repair.” He added that the technology on a Boeing 747 was 20 years older than on a 777. WHY: The absence of debris around the intended flight path, the possibility that the flight turned back, and conflicting reports over whether the plane was spotted by Malaysian military way off course have added to speculation of a hijack, which has still not been ruled out by investigators. Malaysia Airlines says that all its aircraft are equipped with the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS) system — which puts out information about location and airspeed — but has so far declined to release whatever data it got from flight MH370. EXPERT VIEW: The reports of a “turn back” raised yet more questions, says Scott Hamilton, managing director of US-based aviation consultancy Leeham Co. “If it were near the Vietnam coast, why turn back when there probably would have been a closer airport in the event of an emergency?” he wrote on his company website. The larger question was whether the turn was intentional “under the command of the pilots (or hijackers),” or due to other causes such as engine problems or an explosion. But Frost & Sullivan’s Madavaram believes several factors rule out a hijack, including a lack of a credible claim of responsibility and the difficulty in evading radars and witnesses. WHY: While rare, there have been cases in the past of pilots crashing planes to take their own lives. According to the US Federal Aviation Administration, pilot suicides account for less than 0.5 percent of all fatal general aviation accidents. EXPERT VIEW: A suicide bid “is possible and if that’s the case there might not be a lot of debris because the plane would have come down in relatively structural integrity,” said Terence Fan, aviation expert at Singapore Management University. “The airplane is not meant to float and if the airplane sinks in the water, water will go inside because the door seals are not meant to seal water.” For more news from Khaleej Times, follow us on Facebook at facebook.com/khaleejtimes , and on Twitter at @khaleejtimes Continue reading
Shortages, deprivation blight Syria after 3 years of war
Shortages, deprivation blight Syria after 3 years of war (AFP) / 11 March 2014 The agency released a striking picture showing thousands of residents crammed into a war-scarred street queuing for aid, illustating their desperation. Some survive by eating animal feed, others are reduced to living off vegetable peel. The human degradation in Syria, notably in areas besieged by the army, has reached levels unimaginable three years ago. Since the protests against President Bashar al-Assad in March 2011 descended into a bloody civil war, images of Syrian civilians suffering have become commonplace. Areas such as Yarmuk, Eastern Ghouta and Homs city have become synonymous with dire living conditions and shortages of basic goods, after regime forces besieged them. Authorities say they blockade the areas to root out “terrorists” — the government’s term for the rebels fighting to overthrow it — but NGOs like Amnesty International accuse them of using starvation as a “weapon of war”. Delivery of vital aid has also been hindered by groups hostile to international NGOs in parts of rebel-held northeastern Syria, according to the World Food Programme. The WFP said insecurity in the country had prevented food deliveries reaching 500,000 people. One of the worst affected areas is the Yarmuk Palestinian refugee camp in southern Damascus. Once a buzzing neighbourhood that was home to 170,000 people, Yarmuk became a battlefield between rebel and regime forces in 2012, and government troops imposed a choking siege on the area. Nearly 40,000 Yarmuk residents, both Syrian and Palestinian, are trapped inside, living in abject conditions: Amnesty says at least 60 percent are malnourished, and a Syrian monitoring group has says 120 people have died from hunger and lack of medical care in the camp. “The lexicon of man’s inhumanity to man has a new word: Yarmuk,” Chris Gunness, spokesman for the UN’s agency for Palestinian refugees UNRWA, told AFP. He said some people have been “reduced to eating animal feed,” adding women in the camp were “dying in childbirth for lack of medical services”. The agency released a striking picture showing thousands of residents crammed into a war-scarred street queuing for aid, illustating their desperation. Amnesty said the Yarmuk siege was “the deadliest of a series of armed blockades of other civilian areas, imposed by Syrian armed forces or armed opposition groups… across the country.” Sahar, a 56-year-old Yarmuk resident has already paid a heavy price in the conflict in Syria, losing her husband and son in the violence. But since the government cut the camp off from the outside world, she has lost “20 kilograms,” she told AFP via the Internet, a problem aggravated by her hypoglycemia and osteoporosis. “The shortages are an insult to our dignity”. For Sahar and thousands of others like her trapped in the camp, regular meals are a distant memory. “Days ago, some neighbours managed to bring in aubergines and rice from Babbila,” an area near the camp, she says. “It was the first time that I have had a meal in months,” she says, choking back tears. “We had almost forgot what ‘cooking’ meant.” Others in the camp told AFP stories that showed the extent of the degradation of a country that was once self-sufficient for food. “People are dying at home and the rats eat them before their neighbours can find their bodies,” says Jassem, an activist in Yarmuk. Since January, UNRWA has distributed nearly 8,000 food parcels in the camp, calling this “a drop in the ocean compared with the rising tide of need”. And in besieged areas, shortages of medical supplies, fuel, water and electricity are just as pressing. “Things that were normal before the siege, like television or heating, have become a luxury.” says Tarek, a teacher in the Eastern Ghouta area, which was nicknamed “Damascus’ orchard” before the siege. “A kilogram of margarine has risen from 50 Syrian pounds to 750 ($0.30 to $5), and a litre of diesel from 20 to 1,700 pounds,” he says over Skype. Eastern Ghouta residents have resorted to “digging wells, like in the olden times, but the water there is very polluted,” says Tarek, who teaches by candlelight in basements in case of shelling. The army has also encircled several areas of the central city of Homs, where 1,500 civilians were evacuated by the UN in February. At the beginning of March, the UN-mandated Commission of Inquiry on the human rights situation in Syria said more than 250,000 people were under siege across the country. It said government forces and rebels were using the tactic to force “people to choose between starvation and surrender”. The conflict has already claimed a terrible human toll, with more than 140,000 people killed since the uprising began Another 2.5 million people have fled abroad while 6.5 million have sought refuge inside the country. More than half of the country’s hospitals have been destroyed and 2.2 million children have been forced out of school in a country that once offered free healthcare and education to all. For more news from Khaleej Times, follow us on Facebook at facebook.com/khaleejtimes , and on Twitter at @khaleejtimes Continue reading
