Yemen bombs were meant to blow up in flight

31 October 2010

Update: Explosive devices in cargo packages addressed to Chicago, Illinois, destinations appear to have been designed to detonate on their own, without someone having to set them off, the top White House counterterrorism official told CNN on Sunday.
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The UK government is now reporting that the two discovered bombs that originated in Yemen were designed to explode in the air and bring down the airliners carrying them.

The General Civil Aviation Authority (GCAA) announced in Dubai that the package which was discovered in Dubai International Airport yesterday was shipped from Sanaa on board a Qatar Airways plane heading to Doha and then forwarded from that flight to Dubai. From Dubai it was meant to continue on a Fedex flight to Chicago.

The package was seized in Dubai International Airport after the authorities grew suspicious about. Laboratory tests confirmed the package contained explosive substances, the GCAA said in a statement today.

The second package was found at East Midlands. It had already transited through Cologne from Dubai and Yemen on a UPS flight.

Intelligence experts believe the use of the devices, contained in printer cartridges on board two Chicago-bound cargo planes, represents a shift in terrorist tactics to commercial targets.

Yemen's president, Ali Abdullah Saleh said that security forces had arrested a Yemeni woman in Sana'a in connection with the plot. Officials told Reuters that the woman, who is believed to be in her 20s, had been traced through a telephone number she had left with a cargo company. She is said to be a medical student at Sana'a University.

The woman's lawyer said that her client's mother had also been detained.

Both of the devices, one discovered in the hold of a plane that landed at East Midlands airport after flying from Cologne, the other on a plane in Dubai, were described as "extremely professional" by intelligence officials.

One was linked to a mobile phone, while the other was attached to a timer. The East Midlands device was so sophisticated an examination by experts initially suggested it did not contain explosives. "Even when it was examined, the sniffer dogs couldn't detect it," a security source said. "It was only when they [forensic experts] had a second look at it they realised what it was."

It has emerged the devices were discovered only after a tip-off from Saudi intelligence. "This… started with good information from the Saudis," the US homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano, said. "We were then immediately able to work with other countries, particularly the UK and the UAE, to segregate these packages, to begin the analysis about what they were, what they could have done."

If the devices had blown up over the Atlantic, or any other large stretch of water, identifying the cause would have been difficult because there would have been little trace left of the planes. But the discovery of the packages – addressed to two American synagogues – is a potentially vital weapon for the security services. "Now we've got them, we can figure out how they have been made, who made them and how to stop them," one source said.

The sophistication of the devices is likely to raise concerns about airport security. Investigators in Sana'a searched 24 other suspect packages, according to a security official. Authorities were also questioning cargo workers at the airport and employees of the local shipping firms contracted to work with commercial logistics companies.

The home secretary, Theresa May, said a preliminary examination of the device found at East Midlands airport had confirmed it was viable: "The target of the device may have been an aircraft and, had it detonated, the aircraft could have been brought down," she said.

"But we do not believe the perpetrators … would have known the location of the device when they planned for it to explode.

The Metropolitan police said "early indications suggest [the device] had the potential to bring down an aircraft in flight if detonated".

All unaccompanied air freight originating in Yemen and moving into or through the UK has been suspended.

Now assuming all the above in valid; and assuming that it was suspected that there might be a similar package on the Emirates 201 flight that was escorted by fighters into New York; it makes the decision to allow the flight to continue to New York look very strange; a diversion to a remote airfield would have been exercising greater caution.

The big questions must now be where and when were these devices supposed to detonate and are there anymore out there?

BBC: Q&A: Cargo plane bomb plot

Parcel bomb in Dubai 'looks like al Qa'eda's work'

30 October 2010 - AFP

"A US-bound air parcel intercepted in Dubai that contained explosives bore the hallmarks of "terrorist organisations like al Qa'eda," the Emirate's police said today.

"The investigation into the suspicious packages that came from Yemen ... has shown that [one of them contained] a computer printer whose ink contained explosive material," a police statement said.

"The device was prepared in a professional manner and equipped with an electrical circuit linked to a mobile telephone (SIM) card concealed in the printer.

"The manner in which this device was prepared bears the hallmarks of those used by terrorist organisations like Al-Qaeda," the statement added.

Meanwhile the US said today it was tipped off by Saudi Arabia to the threat of parcel bombs from Yemen, adding that Washington was "grateful" to the Saudis "for their assistance in developing information that helped underscore the imminence of the threat emanating from Yemen."

US law enforcement officials continued to search for suspicious packages aboard planes today as President Barack Obama said that two parcels from Yemen apparently contained explosive material and were a "credible terrorist threat".

The discovery of the suspicious packages overnight on cargo planes in transit for the United States, one in Dubai and the other in Britain's East Midlands airport, sparked an international security alert.

After the alert, Mr Obama immediately ordered cargo planes at Philadelphia and Newark international airports to be towed to isolation and checked because they were thought to contain further packages from Yemen.

US and Canadian fighter jets were scrambled to accompany an Emirates plane into New York yesterday but Emirati authorities later said it was not carrying cargo from Yemen.

US fighter jets had earlier accompanied the plane to New York after it was determined to be "an aircraft of interest" as it flew into Canadian and then American air space, the US-Canadian military agency Norad said.

But an official source at the United Arab Emirates' civil aviation body, quoted by the official Emirati WAM agency, said late yesterday that the flight had been given the all clear.

"The Emirates plane that arrived today in the United States from Dubai did not contain any packages from Yemen," the source said.

The plane landed at John F. Kennedy airport at 3.40 pm local time (19.40 GMT) and was immediately surrounded by dozens of police cars, the report said.

Norad did not earlier identify the plane in its statement, but US media said it was Emirates Airlines flight 201 from the UAE and was intercepted because it had cargo from Yemen on board.

"Out of an abundance of caution, the North American Aerospace Defense Command diverted two Canadian CF-18s to track a civilian aircraft that was determined to be an aircraft of interest as it flew into and over Canadian airspace," Norad said in a statement.

"The civilian aircraft was passed to two US F-15s as it transited into US airspace and its ultimate destination at JFK airport."

At a special press conference at the White House, Mr Obama told reporters: ""We will continue to pursue additional protective measures as long as it takes to ensure the safety and security of our citizens."

The president made it clear he suspected al Qa'eda's Yemeni-based affiliate of being behind the plot, which could have serious ramifications for the global cargo industry.

"Although we are still pursuing all of the facts, we do know that the packages originated in Yemen," Mr Obama said.

"We know that al Qa'eda in the Arabian Peninsula, the terrorist group based in Yemen, continues to plan attacks against our homeland, our citizens, and our friends and allies."

Yemeni officials said their government had launched a full investigation and was working closely with international partners, including the United States.

Mr Obama's top counter-terrorism adviser, John Brennan, told reporters: "It does appear there were explosive materials in both of the packages" addressed to synagogues in Chicago,

"They were in a form that was designed to try to carry out some type of an attack. The initial analysis (is) that the materials that were found and the device that was uncovered was intended to do harm."

US media reported that the packages, which held a wire-rigged ink toner cartridge and suspicious powder, may have contained the explosive PETN, the same substance used by would-be Christmas day bomber, Farouk Abdulmutallab, used in 2009 and the attempted shoe-bomber Richard Reid used in 2001.

British authorities were probing whether the package contained a "viable" bomb, the Home Secretary, Theresa May, said today.

"At this stage I can say that the device did contain explosive material but it is not yet clear that it was a viable explosive device. The forensic work continues," May said.

Mr Brennan said all packages originating from Yemen would now be "carefully screened",

In the hours after the discovery of the packages, the US authorities gave advance warning to Jewish leaders in Chicago of a threat against synagogues in the city.

However, synagogues in Chicago planned to hold regular services on Saturday.

The cargo scare offered a new twist as Western authorities have usually focused on dangers posed to passenger airliners after the September 11, 2001 attacks, when al Qa'eda hijacked planes and struck targets in New York and Washington."

Breaking news on US bomb threat and Dubai connection

Given the bomb threat to synagogues in the USA it is ironic that EK201 ended up parked at a remote gate next to an El Al Israeli Airlines 747.

29 October 2010 - at 00.30am Dubai - as reported on twitter.

President says the devices found at East Midlands and Dubai did include explosives......they originated in Yemen.
2 minutes ago Favorite Reply Delete

Reuters also reports a UAE official saying that the device found in Dubai today did contain explosives
6 minutes ago

Reuters reports an official UAE source saying that there was no cargo from Yemen on Emirates flight 201 - so why the fighter escort ?
6 minutes ago

"any plane coming out of dubai is looked at suspiciously" - Tim Marshall on #skynews
20 minutes ago

The bad news is that the US will increase its security - and expect everyone to do the same - more airport misery ahead. #flyingishell
37 minutes ago

RT @TerrorismWatch: Emirates Flt 201 from Dubai lands at JFK; airliner has 1 of 15 packages from Yemen the U.S. wants to inspect. #Terrorism
42 minutes ago

Emirates 201 pulls into a remote gate at JFK - not to the main terminal. Pax will presumably be taken by bus to the terminal.
43 minutes ago

Sky News - Dubai is the hub for intelligence agencies in the middle east - for drugs, explosives and terrorism....
45 minutes ago

Now Sky is saying that Emirates 201 originated in Yemen via Dubai - @skynews #fail
47 minutes ago

Sky News says pax may not be aware of the situation - duh !! they were being escorted by fighter jets !!!!
47 minutes ago

Police cars escorting Emirates Ek201 as it taxis - looks like the Keystone Cops giving chase to a 777
48 minutes ago

The issue with Emirates 201 is that she is carrying cargo that came from Yemen via Dubai.
50 minutes ago

Good boy - greased the landing !!! Emirates EK201
51 minutes ago

Sky showing EK landing on 31R - better make this look good !!!
52 minutes ago

Ek201 cleared for 31R landing - Emirates
58 minutes ago

Sky news best for #avgeeks at this time - showing American now !
59 minutes ago

Ek201 down to 2000 feet
59 minutes ago

CNN just said that EK201 originated in Yemen (via Dubai) #fail
1 hour ago

EK 201 on final for 31R at 4000 feet - Emirates
1 hour ago

SKY News showing a 777 being escorted in - problem is that it is Turkish Airways not Emirates - well done @Skynews
1 hour ago

Emirates EK 201 landing at JFK will be on every new york and international tv network for the next 20 minutes. Good or bad publicity ??
1 hour ago

Assume that Emirates 201 is not considered a threat as it is being allowed to continue into JFK. Any concern would have required diversion.
1 hour ago

@travelingcanuck Emirates - Ek 201
1 hour ago

The flight is Emirates flight EK 201
1 hour ago

The UAE jet was determined to be an aircraft of interest as it flew over Canadian airspace - CNN
1 hour ago

CNN says 2 fighter jets are escorting a UAE commercial jet into JFK

RAK succession battle

29 October 2010 - The Guardian

One of the most bizarre international coup attempts of recent times, whose key players include a family solicitor from Buckinghamshire and an exiled Arab crown prince, entered its endgame today with the death of Sheikh Saqr bin Mohammad al-Qasimi, the world's longest-serving ruler, who led the Gulf emirate of Ras al-Khaimah (RAK) for 62 years.

Immediately after the 92-year-old sheikh died at dawn, his eldest son, the exiled crown prince, Sheikh Khalid bin Saqr al-Qasimi, re-entered the kingdom and went to the presidential palace in a bid to reclaim what he believes is his birthright from his younger half-brother, who has claimed the crown. It follows an extraordinary two-year public relations and lobbying campaign by the exiled sheikh who employed Peter Cathcart, a partner in a Middlesex family law firm, to co-ordinate a multi-million pound public relations and lobbying budget aimed at returning him to power. Cathcart is better known locally for his enthusiasm for driving miniature steam railway engines and his chairmanship of the parish council.

RAK is the smallest of the seven emirates, but Sheikh Khalid, who has been living in exile in London and Oman, has used Californian PR firms, Washington lobbyists and American ex-special forces officers to claim it has fallen under Iranian influence and that the kingdom was used as a port for smuggling parts for weapons into Iran and had become a "centre of gravity" for "potential terrorist funding for al-Qaida, Taliban, al-Shabaab". The campaign, costing at least £2.6m according to documents seen by the Guardian, also involved lobbying Hillary Clinton and the Israeli ambassador to London and publishing critical reports on the military and political direction of the current regime.

The government of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) issued a statement of condolence through the state news agency WAM, which stated that Sheikh Khalid's younger half-brother, the crown prince Sheikh Saud bin Saqr al-Qasimi, has succeeded as ruler. Sheikh Khalid did not accept the statement and issued a video message asserting his claim to the throne, and shortly afterwards described the UAE report of Sheikh Saud's succession as unacceptable.

"In honour of my father, I want the constitution on the succession in Ras al-Khaimah to be honoured where the whole family and tribes decide the succession," he said. "I will accept the outcome of a constitutional vote, not a decision taken by others for their own economic benefit … In the coming hours and days, I look forward to meeting with family, friends, members of the supreme council and rulers of the emirates to discuss our shared vision for Ras al-Khaimah and its great people. Until then, we will mourn together as a family, a community and a nation."

Cathcart, who was working at his office in Ickenham, Middlesex, today , did not return calls.

Sheikh Saud announced 40 days of mourning during which flags in the emirate will be flown at half mast and radio stations across the UAE switched to playing recitations of the Qur'an and classical music.

The outcome of the tussle for power will provide a barometer of the direction of the UAE, according to Dr Christopher Davidson of Durham University, an expert in the region. He said the most powerful emirates are the broadly pro-western Abu Dhabi and Dubai, and they should in principle be sympathetic to Sheikh Khalid's argument about the danger of Iranian influence in RAK. However, they must be careful not to alienate the emirate's poorer and more Islamist population. For this reason, many observers believe that Sheikh Saud bin Saqr al-Qasimi will prevail.

"In Defense of Thaksin Shinawatra"

October 27 2010 - Foreign Policy magazine - The unfair attacks against Thailand's former prime minister. BY ROBERT AMSTERDAM

"The former Prime Minister of Thailand Thaksin Shinawatra was recently featured in a negative light in Foreign Policy ("Bad Exes," Oct. 1, 2010). As legal counsel to the prime minister, I would urge your readers to take a closer look at why he remains so popular among Thai voters.

I am privileged to represent the only leader in the history of Thailand since the establishment of the constitutional structure in Thailand in 1932 to complete a full four-year term of office (2001-2005). Prime Minister Thaksin and his Thai Rak Thai party were then re-elected with the first single-party parliamentary majority supported by unsurpassed numbers of the citizens he served. Having won seventy-five percent of the seats in the 2005 elections, his administration only ended after an illegal coup, led by generals and shadowy members of Thailand's elite, in September 2006. Today, four years after the coup, we are required to defend him from a well-oiled propaganda machine that defames him on a daily basis, with the full weight of a strangled media, rubber-stamp courts and absurd parliamentary resolutions at its disposal.

After all the years of defamation, Thaksin's popularity persists because of the unsurpassed results his administration achieved in economic and social policy, rescuing the country from a devastating financial crisis. His leadership brought the impoverished population of the Northeast out of feudal darkness and into the light of basic rights and citizenship, a measure that has been bitterly opposed by an entrenched elite out of the belief that some Thais are meant to enjoy more entitlements than others.

Writing in Newsweek in May 2010, Joel Schectman argued that despite his flaws, Thaksin actually represented the "high-water mark" for Thai democracy and accountable governance. Noting the major successes in rural development and universal healthcare, the author argued that "from 2001 until 2006 he incorporated full participation of the masses and offered the country its best shot ever at a functioning democracy."

Like any political leader, Thaksin has his opponents and critics. But unlike the typical partisan bickering of a normal country, Thaksin's opponents have launched a slew of unsubstantiated cases in an attempt to criminalize him. The only charge that ever stuck concerned his wife's participation in an auction of public land. Although the land sale involved the payment of fair price, Thaksin was convicted of "conflict of interest" based on the finding that his wife should not have been allowed to bid in the auction while her husband was serving as Prime Minister. This conviction, by the way, was not carried out by an independent tribunal, but rather by a panel specially chosen by the very people who removed him from office.

False legal cases are a common tactic of the current government, and Thaksin is far from the only target. Hundreds of Red Shirt protesters have been imprisoned on specious allegations, more than 100,000 websites deemed inconvenient to the government have been shut down, while various laws from the computer crimes act to the internal security act to the ongoing state of emergency decree have created an Orwellian nightmare. Opponents of Thaksin recently carried out a massacre of more than 80 peaceful protesters, bystanders, and even some journalists, firing upon them in an indiscriminate and disproportionate fashion from rooftop snipers. Ever since the coup, the country has been backsliding on nearly every measurement of freedom of speech, civic, and human rights. For instance, Thailand slipped from the rank of 59 to 84 on Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index between 2005 and 2009. Just yesterday, Reporters Without Borders ranked Thailand 153rd in its annual "World Press Freedom" index; before the coup, Thailand was ranked 66th. And yet, faced with the reality of Thailand's deplorable descent into authoritarianism, certain sections of the foreign media can still be convinced that things were so much worse back when Thaksin was prime minister and the country was still a democracy. (my emphasis - the counter would be that the "backsliding" is a necessary counter to Thaksin's real and perceived attempts at reclaiming his leadership of the country).

When looking at the current Thai political crisis and the role of Thaksin, readers of Foreign Policy would do well to look beyond the travel-poster depiction of the country, and start asking why the Thai regime is still so afraid of free speech and so reluctant to hold a real election."

rascott meets bacon spammer

26 October 2010 - In my mail today.

Dear CEO,

We are the department of Asian Domain registration service in china. We have something need to confirm with you. We formally received an application on October 25, 2010. one company which called "Bacon Trading Co.,Ltd" are applying to register "rascott" as Brand name and the following Domain Names:
rascott.asia
rascott.cn
rascott.com.cn
rascott.com.hk
rascott.com.tw
rascott.hk
rascott.in
rascott.tw

After our initial examination, we found that the Domain Names applied for registration are as same as your company's name and trademark. These days we are dealing with it, hope to get the affirmation from your company. If your company has not authorized the aforesaid company to register these, please contact us as soon as possible. In addition, we hereby affirm that our time limit is 7 workdays. If your company files no reply within the time limit, we will unconditionally approve the application submitted by "Bacon Trading Co.,Ltd".

Best Regards,

Tom Li - Senior Consultant

We don't want democracy

24 October 2010 - Bangkok Post - The Editor

Just worth noting here that while the Nation continues to fawn in its creeping praise of the oppression of red shirted people and the suppression of free speech the Bangkok Post is slowly taking a more critical view - that said Reporters without Borders now ranks Bangkok's press freedom 153rd out of 178 ranked nations. And that is pitiful. Even under Thaksin it was not that bad.

"On Oct 20, Reporters without Borders published its latest world press freedom index. In it, Thailand is ranked 153rd out of 178 countries. We're sandwiched between two former Soviet satellites most Thais have never heard of, Belarus and Azerbaijan. More familiar to us is Cambodia, ranked 128th.

Think about it. In this context, the country under the regime of Premier Hun Sen has more freedom than the nation whose moniker literally translates to ''Land of the Free''.

The UK's Guardian newspaper recently published a story about how Southeast Asian governments - Vietnam, Burma, Cambodia, the Philippines and Thailand - are following in the footsteps of China in the ''authoritarian censorship of the digital world''.

However, those countries rank lower than Thailand on the world press freedom index. But that's like saying a midget is taller than a dwarf. The point is rather moot to everyone apart from the midget and the dwarf. No offence intended to any midget or dwarf.

I will let everybody in on a little secret that is not really a secret. I will not speak for any other Asian country, because it is not my place. But I will speak for Thailand, because it is my right and duty as a citizen.

So prick up your ears and lean a little closer. Ready? Excited? Here goes: ''We don't really want democracy. We only pretend to want it to fool the West.''

Now by ''we'', I of course do not mean all 63.7 million of us. The majority of us unfortunately lack the education to understand, and therefore do not have the knowledge required to decide one way or the other about the ideals of democracy.

For example, the Thai labour force is 37 million strong, and according to the Labour Ministry, 10 million of them have not even completed primary education. The numbers naturally beg to question the word ''strong'' and explain why democracy to most Thais is neither here nor there. We have more immediate worries.

Then there are those idealistic fools like me who stand on a platform and scream ''democracy'', while the real decision makers of the country chuckle and go, ''Yeah, dream on.'' Or if we rock the boat a little too much for comfort, we may end up like Chiranuch Premchiaporn, editor of Prachatai.com, who faces up to 70 years in jail.

Perhaps the political and business elite (after all, the ties between the two are inseparable) are simply masquerading as wanting democracy, but have a not-so-secret desire to build an authoritarian utopia.

For example, look at the ''wonderful'' things China is doing. No need to be a democracy to be rich, power and feared. But we're not China, so we need the word ''democracy''.

And this is why we need to ''fool the West'' _ it's because we want to be a part of the global community, which of course is dominated by Western power and money. To have allies. To trade. To do business. It's what makes the world go round. And they love that word ''democracy'' over there.

But then again, on the flip side, if the Western world is truly sincere about democracy, then no one from the West would be trading with or investing in China. So there you go. A bit puzzling, perhaps?

Burma, North Korea, Cuba and Iran are considered ''rogue states'', supposedly sanctioned for being undemocratic and for their abuse of human rights and freedoms. But China is dhdifferent. What's the difference? Lots of money to be made there. It's what makes the world go round.

Really, Thailand is no more hypocritical than anyone else, are we? In truth, we aren't fooling them, nor are they fooling us. They just have 1st class tickets, while we are 3rd class passengers, but we all travel aboard the same ship of fools.

So let's all pretend. To masquerade as a democracy is easy. All we need to have are elections. So just have them. Lots of countries do.

For many countries of course it's a given that every four or five years you elect an authoritarian ruler, or an oligarch. No need to mind human rights, liberty and civil rights.

Then just make sure to put ''democracy'' under the system of government for your country's entry in Wikipedia _ and no one will be the wiser. You'll be a proud member of the global village.

Human rights abuses? Suppression of freedoms? Bah! There will be columns and reports condemning it, of course. World leaders will make stirring Academy Award-worthy speeches against it, naturally. But at the end of the day, what makes the world go round will continue to make the world go round.

Money doesn't need democracy. Money needs stability.

All that said, my cup is always half full. After all, such is the nature of the idealistic fool. Others may shed tears over the more than 100,000 websites blocked in Thailand. And perhaps many do deserve to be blocked for abusing freedoms rather than exercising them.

But in my half-full cup, I see more than 100,000 websites, even if I strongly disagree with their content, standing up for freedom. And that's more than ever before, isn't it? That is progress. The bans are simply the obstacles. Obstacles to progress are simply the natural order of things. Freedoms aren't served up on a silver platter.

Some may say, ''Voranai, you traitor, you! How can you write so badly about Thailand, saying we are only pretending and masquerading!'' To which I reply: You are very welcome to prove me wrong by putting a stop to the suppression of freedoms."

Thai Air confusion

23 October 2010

The latest news from the confused world of Thai Airways International is that the airline plans to establish a separate full-service, short-haul carrier, so Thai Airways mainline can concentrate solely on widebody operations.

Now Thai still holds some 38% of Nok Air, a Thai low cost carrier. Thai also holds the controlling stake of the proposed Thai Tiger Airlines; the joint venture with Singapore based Tiger Airways; as low cost as it is possible to be.

Meanwhile Air Asia continues to expand its Bangkok based operations.

And of course Bangkok Airways is primarily a domestic full service carrier.

The proposed new carrier will be a separate business unit with its own brand said Teerapol Chotichanapibal, Thai Airways’ acting executive VP-commercial. Having short-haul premium services under a separate business unit means that it will be able to achieve a lower cost base than Thai Airways mainline, he says. It also means Thai Airways can focus on operating only widebodies, and as a consequence deliver a more consistent level of service, says Teerapol. He says it is hard to provide a consistent user experience if one has a mix of narrowbody and widebody aircraft.

Thai Airways in recent years has transferred some Boeing 737-400s and short-haul routes to its low-cost carrier Nok Air, but it still operates five 737-400s, mostly on domestic routes popular with either international tourists or government officials. Teerapol says the yet-to-be named carrier will focus on serving these same premium travelers. Its routes will include Bangkok-Phuket, Bangkok-Koh Samui and Bangkok-Chiang Mai, he says.

Foreign tourists account for more than 50% of Thai Airways’ passenger traffic on the Bangkok-Phuket and Bangkok-Koh Samui routes, and this group accounts for 30% of its Bangkok-Chiang Mai traffic, he adds.

Teerapol declined to say when the new full-service, short-haul carrier will launch.

Teerapol also confirms that the new narrowbody aircraft it plans to order will be assigned to the new short-haul premium carrier. All of its remaining Boeing 737-400s will be transferred to Nok Air, he says.

Nok Air has said publicly it no longer wants 737-400s, and instead wants leased 737-800s, but Teerapol says, “We’ll give them a price they can’t refuse.” Thai Airways owns 39% of Nok Air. How independent is Nok? Not very.

Confused. We will be.

The Iraq war logs - shock and awe of the worst kind

22 October 2010 - The Guardian

The leaking of more than 390,000 previously secret US military reports details the hidden realities of the war in Iraq

The invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq has been one of the most bloodily divisive international conflicts of the past decade. The reputations of George W Bush and Tony Blair, are stained, perhaps indelibly, by it.

Today's gigantic leak from that long-running battleground, of 391,832 previously secret US military field reports, details the unvarnished and often unknown realities of the war in Iraq. It is history in the raw. The story these documents tell is ugly and often shocking.

Between 2004 and 2009, a sectarian civil war merged with a war of "resistance" by nationalist Iraqis, and with a ruthless jihadist campaign by foreign al-Qaida supporters, to plunge Iraq into a three-way bloodbath of roadside bombs, assassinations and high-explosive shelling of villages and towns.

The Iraq logs detail how soldiers, civilians, insurgents, foreign aid workers, private contractors, old men and young girls, Americans, Britons, foreign Arabs and above all, the Iraqi people themselves, fell victim to a new dynamic of "asymmetric warfare", in which guerrillas armed mainly with improvised landmines, competed with the awesome weaponry of hi-tech US air power.

More than 100,000 people died and whole towns such as Falluja were reduced to near-rubble, amid allegations of brutal abuse by some US and UK soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere.

The raw material in these Iraq war logs, like databanks of previous classified files the Guardian has published on the Afghan war, comes from US military archives. A dissident US intelligence analyst, Bradley Manning, formerly based in Baghdad, is currently facing a court martial charged with leaking similar material to WikiLeaks, the online whistleblowing activists.

WikiLeaks has defied the Pentagon to pass this data on to a wide range of media organisations, including the Guardian. WikiLeaks intends to post much of it on its own website.

The Guardian is publishing extracts from original documents where to do so will not endanger identifiable individuals.

It's not getting better

22 October 2010 - Time Magazine on Dubai's property woes

"There's a half-off sale in the world's tallest building.

Even with an address at the iconic Burj Khalifa, rents for residences in the tower are not immune from Dubai's real estate crash. Indeed, nearly a year after it was inaugurated with a massive water-and-fireworks display, about 825 of the tower's 900 ultra-luxury apartments remain unoccupied, according to Better Homes, a real estate brokerage in Dubai.

The cost of renting a studio with floor-to-ceiling windows, marble fixtures and wooden floors has dropped to $1,815 a month from $3,025, while a one-bedroom apartment is available for $2,722 (it used to be $4,536), the brokerage says. Two-bedroom residences are expected to get $4,310, down from $7,183. Interested parties "call every few days and go for a viewing," says Imad Ben Khadra, a Moroccan expatriate who owns two 1,000-sq.-ft. one-bedroom apartments he purchased in late 2008 for about $950,000, both of which he is trying to rent out. "We got some offers [from prospective tenants], but nobody confirms." (See pictures of the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world.)

Varun Chaudhary bought two two-bedroom residences in the Burj for about $1.5 million in 2005 even before construction began. He saw the value leap from $762 per sq. ft. to $3,811 per sq. ft. at the heights of the boom. Today, those values hover just above his purchase price. But he says he isn't worried about his investment. "These properties will recuperate faster than other properties because it's an icon, because it's only one in the world," he says. "You just have to say 'Burj Khalifa.' That's the address; you don't have to explain. It's a style statement in itself."

Still, the Burj, with its one-of-a-kind address and amenities like the first-ever Armani Hotel, is only the most high-profile example how Dubai's once flying real estate market has crashed. Overall in the emirate, property prices have dropped an average of 50%. Some half-built projects, located away from the main highway that runs through the city, may never be completed because their values have dropped too much, analysts say.

But it's the units that will be completed that are looming as a problem. The Dubai economy must still digest a flood of housing units coming on line or soon to be opened, which will further dampen prices. Through September, 27,000 residential units have been put on the market, and another 9,000 are expected to be completed by the end of the year, according to real estate firm Jones Lang LaSalle. For 2011, the firm forecasts that about 30,000 new units will come on line. A glut in commercial property has forced landlords to offer previously unheard-of incentives such as free rent and allowances to finish out shell construction space. "They built the infrastructure for a much larger economy than it can [now] attract," says Wissam Haroun, a Syrian expatriate who owns entertainment and technology companies in Dubai.

Worried about the glut, Dubai's Real Estate Regulatory Agency recently said it was canceling or in the process of canceling about half of all projects registered with the authority. Of about 980 developments, 495 are on the chopping block, according to a Dubai sovereign-bond prospectus made public last week.

Some, however, see opportunity in the depressed prices. "It's a massive change in terms that it's no longer the man on the street or the lady on the street buying property on spec or off plan," says Paul Devonshire, a director with Pramerica Real Estate Investors who specializes in the Middle East and North Africa region. Now, he explains, institutions or more savvy investors are moving in, eyeing distressed or repriced assets.

But the buzz was decidedly subdued at the recent Cityscape Global, the annual real estate exhibition that in the past featured the launch of glitzy projects like the Palm Trilogy, the world's largest man-made islands. The name of the event itself had been changed from Cityscape Dubai in order to expand the focus beyond the city-state. Only a fraction of exhibitors - 200, down from around 1,000 during the boom - showed up to participate.

With speculators gone and credit still tight, Dubai is going about the hard work of adjusting to its new economic reality. Top of the list is paying back creditors that helped finance the boom. Over the past decade, Dubai amassed $109 billion in debt, with about $15.5 billion due this year, the International Monetary Fund estimates. Dubai World, one of the three main holding companies controlled by Dubai's ruler, Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, said last month that 99% of its creditors had agreed to alter the terms on $24.9 billion of its debt. Last November, Dubai World sent stock markets around the world tumbling when it announced it wanted a moratorium of its debts. "We are back. Of course we are back," Sheik Mohammed said in a Bloomberg TV interview last month while attending the Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games in Lexington, Ky.

But, having been through the financial volatility, few seem to want to part with their cash just yet. The Syrian expatriate Haroun, who has lived in Dubai most of his life and plans to raise his family there, says he would like to buy a home. But his forays into the market so far have left him unsatisfied. "People got stupid rich and stupid poor at the same time," he says. "I'm glad I stayed out of it.""

The dogfight over Emirates

19 October 2010 The Globe and Mail

"It’s Dubai versus Frankfurt in the battle of global hubs, and to the victor go the spoils of lucrative international air traffic.

Emirates Airline, which operates three round-trip flights a week between Toronto and Dubai, has been lobbying the Canadian government for much greater access to Canada. Emirates funnels global traffic through its Dubai hub. By contrast, Air Canada (AC.B-T3.42----%) and its partner Deutsche Lufthansa AG fly between Toronto and Frankfurt, where Lufthansa collects connecting passengers.

After Ottawa declined to grant greater access to Dubai-based Emirates and Abu Dhabi-based Etihad Airways, the United Arab Emirates decided last week to evict the Canadian Forces from Camp Mirage, a Persian Gulf base that serves as a crucial jump-off point to Afghanistan.

Air Canada argues that its connecting points at both Frankfurt and London’s Heathrow Airport would suffer if the UAE carriers grow aggressively in Canada.

As well, with Emirates seeking to add Vancouver-Dubai and Calgary-Dubai routes, Air Canada believes its flights between Western Canada and the Asia-Pacific region would be weakened since Emirates also serves China, Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea – important connecting points.

Emirates deploys the 489-seat Airbus A380 on the Toronto-Dubai route while Etihad operates the 374-seat Boeing 777 for its Toronto-Abu Dhabi service.

Emirates serves 15 destinations in the Middle East, 17 in Africa and 17 in the South Asian subcontinent, which are crucial destination markets for the airline’s Toronto-Dubai service. This map shows some of the key destinations where Emirates and Lufthansa go head-to-head from their respective hubs, as well as examples of where Emirates flies without direct Lufthansa competition.

POLITICS
The UAE’s eviction notice means the Canadian Forces must vacate Camp Mirage within the next three weeks. Emirates has been pushing Ottawa for more flights ever since it launched Toronto-Dubai service in October, 2007. Emirates argues that at a minimum, it needs daily service from Toronto. In an internal newsletter last year, the Air Canada Pilots Association noted the presence of small model planes on MPs’ desks – souvenirs from Emirates’ lobbying efforts on Parliament Hill. Air Canada and Transport Canada oppose the expansion strategy, saying there isn’t any seat shortage between Canada and the UAE.

THE WIDE GAP
Emirates alone wants up to 25 more round-trips a week over the long term, leaving a wide gap between the UAE and Ottawa. In August and September, the Canadian government offered to increase the frequency to one extra round-trip flight a week each for Emirates and Etihad, but it had to be service to a Canadian city other than Toronto. Ottawa also presented a separate offer to allow Emirates and Etihad to spread out their flights with smaller planes over more days, but the Canadian government would have restricted the capacity available to the existing level of roughly 2,600 seats each way weekly.

EMIRATES AIRLINE
Emirates and Lufthansa compete head-to-head in most instances in the Middle East and Africa, although Emirates has a more extensive network into India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. Emirates has been seeking to introduce daily flights to both Vancouver and Calgary, as well as lobbying to gradually boost its Toronto service to twice a day. “In carrying this connecting traffic, Emirates provides enhanced access between Canada and various regions of the world which are underserved or not served at all from Canada,” according to an Emirates’ report presented to Ottawa.

AIR CANADA/LUFTHANSA
Air Canada and its Star Alliance partner, Germany’s Lufthansa, both fly non-stop between Toronto and Frankfurt. Lufthansa and its European subsidiaries boast an extensive network from the Frankfurt hub, as well as from Munich and other European terminals. Connecting travellers make many of Air Canada’s flights viable, and consumers would find they have fewer Air Canada flights to choose from if Emirates were to obtain dozens of new takeoff and landing slots in Canada. Cities such as Calgary, Montreal and Ottawa stand to lose some non-stop Air Canada service if Emirates siphons international traffic."

No marks allowed

19 October 2010

In the 21st century the law should to provide everyone and anyone with protection from physical abuse irrespective of faith or gender. But on Sunday a UAE court on Abu Dhabi ruled that a man has the right to 'discipline' his spouse as long as 'no marks are left.' In the court's judgment bruises proved that the man had gone too far; though a AED500 fine was hardly a deterrent.

The judgment was made in the case of a man who slapped and kicked his daughter and slapped his wife, injuring both slightly.

It is a shame that it is this story that will get attention. As the UAE has made real progress in promoting women's education, entrepreneurship and political participation. It also has very liberal laws compared with neighbouring Saudi Arabia. It has a civil law jurisdiction though Islamic law is applied to aspects of family law.

The court upheld the right of the unnamed man from Sharjah – one of the seven emirates – to beat his wife and children to "discipline" them after he had exhausted two other options: admonition and then abstaining from sleeping with his wife. Scholars differ on what constitutes "beating" but agree it must not be severe.

In the case of the wife, it was the degree of severity that put the man in breach of the law. But his daughter was 23, and therefore too old to be disciplined by her father, the court said. He claimed he did not mean to harm either of them.

The Sharjah court of first instance fined the father for abuse. The decision was upheld by Sharjah's court of appeals but he appealed against the verdict at the federal supreme court in Abu Dhabi.

"Although the [law] permits the husband to use his right [to discipline], he has to abide by the limits of this right," wrote chief justice Falah al-Hajeri in a ruling released on Sunday. "If the husband abuses this right to discipline, he cannot be exempted from punishment."

Jihad Hashim Brown, head of research at the Tabah Foundation, said: "It's unlawful in sharia – if taken in its entirety – to injure one's wife. It's unlawful to insult the dignity of one's wife. That is if we look at the tradition as a whole: the Qur'an, the hadith and writings of Islamic jurists."

Dr Ahmed al-Kubaisi, head of sharia studies at UAE University and Baghdad University, told the paper that under sharia, beating one's wife was an option to prevent the breakdown of the family. It should be used only as a substitute to resorting to the police. Dr Jassim al-Shamsi, dean of the college of law at UAE University, said love and respect were more important among husbands and wives than any discipline.

Left out in the cold

14 October 2010 The Economist

In 2003, Bono, the rock star and activist, warmed hearts in the Great White North when he said that “the world needs more Canada”. This week, the world pronounced itself on the topic, and it does not appear to share U2’s enthusiasm. On October 12th Canada lost its bid for one of the rotating seats on the UN Security Council, for the first time since the organisation was founded in 1945. Although the preference of the 190 voting members for Germany was perhaps understandable, being passed over for Portugal has to sting.

The minority government of Stephen Harper has tried to blame the opposition leader, Michael Ignatieff, for the snub, accusing him of scaring off potential supporters by suggesting ahead of the vote that Canada did not deserve the seat. But the prime minister’s critics contend it stemmed from his controversial foreign policy. Mr Harper has certainly burned his share of bridges: he has devoted far less time to Africa’s 53 countries than his predecessors did, alienated European and island nations with a weak climate-change policy and cosied up to Israel at the cost of relations with the Arab and Muslim world.

The prime minister’s spokesman, Dimitri Soudas, has retorted that Canada would not “barter our principled foreign policy”. In the country’s defence, it is the UN’s seventh-biggest financial contributor, and pushed its counterparts at the G8 summit it hosted in June to support the UN’s maternal and child health programme. Even so, Canada’s foreign ministry seems to have a tin ear for the organisation’s politics. It surely could have waited until after the vote before announcing it would strengthen its trade relationship with Israel, instead of making the policy public the day before.

2010 was supposed to be Canada’s “international year”. It started with a bang with the winter Olympics in Vancouver, and continued with hosting the G8 and G20 summits. Canada’s swift recovery (now slightly tempered) from the world recession lent weight to its views at talks on restructuring the global financial system. But the year is ending with a whimper.

UAE dispute: Holdup at Camp Mirage

14 October 2010 Toronto Star editorial

Did Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government botch talks with the United Arab Emirates over landing rights at Canadian airports? Just maybe. But the UAE hasn’t helped by evicting Canadian troops next month from the Camp Mirage airbase near Dubai, a stopover on the way to Afghanistan. That fit of pique irresponsibly “linked” two unrelated issues.

Ottawa and Abu Dhabi should have papered over this spat; it can only hurt the Afghan mission, and our $1.5 billion trade.

Certainly, Ottawa could have offered the UAE something more than the six flights a week to Canada that its carriers now have, without caving in to their demand for daily flights to Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver. That would put Air Canada’s business at risk. Ottawa was reportedly prepared to offer the Emirates more flights to more cities but with the same number of seats as now, or two extra flights to cities other than Toronto. There was room to sweeten that offer. And the UAE ought to have been content with less than a full loaf.

Yet while Ottawa may have misplayed its hand, the UAE was rash to hold Camp Mirage hostage to commercial interests. We have 2,800 troops on Afghan duty. They have 15. They can’t claim the moral high ground. All this will do is force us to use bases in places like Pakistan, Germany or Cyprus for the few months until our troops come home. It never should have come to this.

UAE says it opposed Canada's Security Council bid

14 October 2010 - The Associated Press

The United Arab Emirates lobbied against Canada's bid for a U.N. Security Council seat in the latest blow to relations that soured after disputes over airline routes, a UAE official said Thursday.

The Gulf country's opposition followed harsh complaints about Canada's refusal to open more flights for the fast-growing carriers Emirates and Etihad. The government in Abu Dhabi is also forcing Canada to leave a military base that is used to supply Canadian forces in Afghanistan.

Earlier this week, Canada pulled out of the race for one of the non-permanent Security Council seats after falling behind rivals in the first rounds of voting. The defeat was seen as a significant setback for a G-7 economic power.

The UAE official said the opposition was based on Canada's "protectionist" trade policies and perceptions that Ottawa is weak on supporting Arab causes in the region, including efforts to ease the Israeli restrictions on Palestinians in Gaza.

It's unclear how much the UAE could have swayed U.N. sentiments against Canada, but the country carries influence beyond its small size because of extensive international business ties.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of standing government rules on behind-the-scenes briefings.

The UAE has pushed hard to expand nonstop flights to Canada to serve major Indian and Pakistani markets, which have significant family and business ties to North America. Dubai-based Emirates and Etihad in Abu Dhabi each run three flights a week to Canada and are aggressively seeking to expand long-haul flights.

But Air Canada argues there is no need for more flights from the UAE and says it can handle the south Asian traffic through alliances with European airlines.

On Monday, the failure to hammer out an airline deal also apparently unraveled a key military pact.

The UAE said it would not extend an agreement for Canada to use a military base as a logistics and supply point for its 2,900 troops in the NATO-led mission in Afghanistan.

The military facility, known as Camp Mirage, is widely believed to be located at al-Minhad Air Base outside Dubai, although neither the Emirates nor Canada have definitively acknowledged the location of any military site to aid forces in Afghanistan.

Canadian Defense Minister Peter MacKay said he was looking into "other hubs in the region" to support the forces in Afghanistan. Canada has said its mission in Afghanistan will end next year.

At the United Nations, Canada withdrew its bid for a Security Council seat on Tuesday after falling behind rivals Germany and Portugal for two Western bloc seats.

Ten of the Security Council's 15 seats are filled by regional groups for two-year stretches. The other five seats are occupied by the council's veto-wielding permanent members: Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States.

Delay in Ikea punch-up case

14 October 2010 - This is something of a farce. Six eye witness statements. A judge that refuse to take CCTV footage into evidence. And a case now postponed until November.

Two men accused of breaking the jaw of a heavily pregnant woman and attacking her husband after a row in furniture store Ikea have appeared in court. 

The oldest defendant, a 52-year-old Emirati, denies punching the Canadian woman with such force that her jaw was fractured during a bust-up over seating in the food court at the store in Dubai’s Festival City last June. 

He told the court the 33-year-old victim, who was seven months pregnant at the time, fell over. 

The second defendant, a 43-year-old Emirati, arrived 30 minutes late for the hearing because he was “trying to find a parking space” and smirked throughout the proceedings. 

He admits punching the woman’s 37-year-old husband but claims he was provoked. 

A third defendant, also charged with assault, failed to appear before the judge for a second time. 

His lawyer said he had been given permission to take his passport from police and was working abroad. 

The woman told 7DAYS: “My heart was pounding just seeing them again. So many times we’ve been asked whether we want to dismiss this case but there is no way that’s going to happen. We will keep coming to court make sure this goes all the way.” 

The couple claim they were eating lunch at 12-seater table in the Festival City store when a trio of men in local dress told them to move because they wanted their seats. 

When the pair refused, they say the husband was beaten unconscious and the wife punched to the ground twice when she tried to intervene.  

One of the men was about to crush the husband’s head with a large wooden chair from the restaurant when a Syrian and Australian diner came to the couple’s rescue. 

The prosecution has written statements from six witnesses.  

There was CCTV in the store but yesterday the judge refused to request a copy of it. 

When 7DAYS asked the defendants to comment, the 52-year-old said: “Why would I want to talk to you?” 

The case has been adjourned until next month.

Chile's Mine Rescue

13 October 2010

The Chile government's official Flickr picture stream is here.

This extraordinary story started on August 5th.

On that day 33 Chilean miners were trapped nearly 700m underground when the copper mine near Copiapo, 450 miles north of the Chilean capital Santiago, in which they were working collapsed. As I write this the rescue has begun.

Contact with the men was not established for 17 days when on 22nd August it was discovered that they had survived the accident. For 17 days the miners were in darkness and had no idea that anyone would ever find them. They kept themselves alive for 17 days by sipping tiny rations of milk and eating two small spoonfuls of tuna and a biscuit every 48 hours.

When the mine collapsed the international media barely blinked. China's mining tragedies were much bigger. All that changed when the men were confirmed alive 17 days later and a rescue operation cranked up for a slow-motion, earthbound version of saving the astronauts in Apollo 13 - and that was almost 40 years ago.

The miners were found when a bore-hole drilled into the mine on August 22, 17 days after the accident, returned with a note from the men: "The 33 of us in the shelter are well."

Three drills – Strata 950, Schramm T-130 and Rig 421 – were deployed to reach the men, and Schramm T-130 finally broke through on 9 October. The top part of the shaft then had to be lined with metal casing to enable the rescue capsule, the Fenix 2 (Phoenix 2), to run smoothly up and down.

Rescue co-ordinators have classified the miners into three groups: the able, the weak and the strong. The miners will be evacuated in that order: a first group of fairly healthy men will test the rescue plan, and the procedure is expected to be well refined by the time the weakest are evacuated. The fittest men are expected to wait to the end, with the whole operation expected to take nearly two days.

The rescued men will be immediately taken to a field hospital for triage. The weakest will receive urgent medical attention and will either be kept on site for observation or flown by helicopter to a military base or local hospital.

After protests from family members, the government ceded to demands for immediate contact with the rescued men. A maximum of two members per family is being  allowed to embrace each man as he is pulled to safety. And that is providing some of the most emotional TV pictures from this day.

The Chile president, Sebastián Piñera, is on site. Hugging everyone. Re-election guaranteed.

The rescue of the 33 trapped miners in this corner of Chile has drawn an astonishing 2,000 journalists to the improvised camp at San José mine. It has come to dominate world headlines, taking attention from Afghanistan, the Middle East and US elections. It has become a media circus. Needing a media centre, wifi, a canteen, wash and toilet facilities. The BBC sent 26 people. Overkill maybe.

The rescue capsule – the Phoenix 2 weighs around 250kg, and is fitted out with oxygen tanks and a mask, and a camera pointed at the face of the ascenders/descender. The base of the capsule can be released and the miner winched back down the tunnel should it become stuck.

It is also fitted with a two-way audio link between the miner and the surface team. The capsule has two sets of spring-loaded rubber wheels, to keep it running smoothly down the tunnel. It takes about 15 minutes to make its ascent to the surface.

23 year old Carlos Mamani will be the fourth miner to be rescued - he had only been working in the mine for five days when the accident happened.

I do not remember anything like this for suspense and human drama since the Apollo 13 rescue. It is remarkable television. It has also put Chile on the map.

The TV pictures are live on every news channel; BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, Bloomberg, MSNBC, RAI, CCTV in Chinese and English etc. I wonder how the Chinese feel watching the rescued miners given China's own appalling mine safety record.

The BBC's Tim Wilcox is excelling on site. He speaks fluent Spanish and has clearly bonded with many of the families at the well named Cape Hope.

Come fly with me

13 October 2010

Air Asia pilot Chananporn Rosjan explains how she made the transition from beauty pageant queen to queen of the skies

On CNNGo

Emirates eyes 120 A380s, works with Boeing on 777

12 October 2010 Reuters

Dubai carrier Emirates, the Arab world's largest airline, aims to have 120 Airbus A380s when new airport space is available and is working with Boeing  on the next generation of 777 jets.

Emirates, whose passengers are growing at 20 percent annually and expects to maintain this level for the next five years, will fulfill all its 90 orders so far for the A380 superjumbo, President Tim Clark told Reuters in an interview.

"We would like some more but we are going to run short of space," he said. "120 was the baseline figure that the planners worked to get where we needed to be, but we couldn't order that amount because it was too many for here so 90 was a compromise."

The carrier will order more when it gets additional space at its home base in Dubai, he added.

The target implies a future Emirates order for 30 of the world's largest airliner, worth $10 billion at list prices, at an unspecified date. If the airline went ahead with its growth plans it would have an A380 fleet worth over $40 billion.

Emirates, already by far the biggest customer for A380, announced a record $11 billion order for 32 superjumbos at the Berlin Air Show in June.

At July's Farnborough Air Show, Emirates also ordered 30 Boeing 777-300ER wide-body planes, a deal worth potentially more than $9 billion.

Clark said the airline is collaborating with Boeing to find a solution for the manufacturer's wide-body 777 aircraft, but said he could not share more details.

"We are working with Boeing on the next generation of 777. We are still very interested in a replacement," he said.

Boeing has said it is looking at the future of the aircraft which faces competition from the future Airbus A350-1000.

Only the Nation

12 October 2010

Only the Nation could show how it feels about Thailand's red shirts in a newspaper headline.

H/T to my Bangkok correspondent who spotted this gem today.

Thai Air Asia starts India flights

12 October 2010

From December 1 this year, Air Asia will start flying direct from Bangkok to two major Indian cities: New Delhi and Kolkata. Flights to Kolkata will be operated daily, leaving Bangkok at 10:30am, whereas flights to New Delhi will only be available on Mon, Wed, Fri and Sun at 7:50pm for the time being. The promotional one-way fares start from B990 for Kolkata and B1,490 for New Delhi. The special fares are available until October 17 for travel during December 1 2010 to August 31 2011.

So if you are creative and want to go low cost only you can do now fly from Dubai to Bangkok on a combination of Air Asia and Air Arabia though you would likely still need an India visa.

The Queen is coming - but not to Dubai

12 October 2010

Britain's Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh will the United Arab Emirates in November, Buckingham Palace has revealed.

The State Visit has been organised following an invitation from Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al Nahyan, President of the UAE and Ruler of Abu Dhabi.

The royal couple will also visit Oman at the invitation of Sultan Qaboos bin Said.

They will visit Abu Dhabi between November 24 and 25, and Muscat between November 25 and 28. Dubai is not on the agenda.

This will be the second visit by the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh to both the UAE and Oman. This year’s visit to Oman will mark the occasion of the 40th year of the reign of Sultan Qaboos bin Said.

Thai-Burma port deal: great for trade, bad for reform

12 October 2010

Thai Prime Minister Abhisit looked far too comfortable shaking hands with Burmese junta leader Than Shwe yesterday. Maybe because the two of them are far closer politically than anyone should wish is true. Indeed politically Thailand looks more like North Korea, Pakistan and Burma than it does a democratic state.

So the port deal signed yesterday looks good for trade. Logistically, south-east Asia is a nightmare. Until last year, if you wanted to get a container of goods from Bangkok to Hanoi you would have had to use three different trucks go get it there, one for Thailand, one for Cambodia and one for Vietnam.

But that is changing. The Thai PM signed a deal to build a port on the coast of neighbouring Burma, part of a much larger region-wide infrastructure programme which includes massive investments in the rail network, largely funded by China.

Italian-Thai, Thailand’s largest construction contractor, recently said that it hoped to sign a Bt400bn ($13.3bn) deal to develop the new deep-water port at Tavoy, with an industrial estate and ancilliary transport network, including a 160km railway to Kanchanaburi in Thailand. That sounds familiar ! It was the Death Railway in World War 2.

Assuming that the deal goes ahead, it will be the largest ever single investment in Burma. And I am sure the generals will take their share.

The port would give the region access to the Andaman Sea and the lucrative markets of India. There is a smaller deep water port at Phuket, but much of the region’s westward bound cargo leaves from Thailand’s Map Ta Phut or Laem Chabang ports, both on the Gulf of Thailand. Cargo currently has to dogleg through the crowded Straits of Malacca before heading west.

The Association of South East Asian Nations, underwritten by China, has embarked on an ambitious plan to create a region-wide rail network which will eventually stretch from Beijing to Singapore. Some of the missing links are already being filled in - the World Bank and Australia are funding the rehabilitation of 600km of Cambodian railways; work is due to begin next month on a 580km link between Yunnan province in China and Laos; and negotiations have started on the key missing link, between Ho Chi Minh city in Vietnam and Phnom Penh in Cambodia.

Sadly, the port deal shows just how ineffective international sanctions against the Burmese regime are. Thailand is America’s oldest ally in Asia, and if Washington cannot persuade the Thai government to limit its involvement with the generals who run Burma, there is little hope that the regime’s other major supporters, China and India, will fall into line.

Negotiating with a stick

12 October 2010

Negotiating with a stick is always dangerous. But that is how the UAE is playing out its dispute with Canada.

Now the United Arab Emirates has turned away a plane carrying top officials with the Canadian government and military, a second mark of diplomatic disapproval from the Middle East country over a disagreement about commercial landing rights.

Canada's top soldier and two cabinet ministers were up in the air Monday, their flight plans disrupted after the United Arab Emirates denied them landing in retaliation for a failed business deal.

Defence Minister Peter MacKay, Veterans Affairs Minister Jean-Pierre Blackburn and Chief of the Defence Staff, Gen. Walt Natynczyk were flying home from a three-day visit in Afghanistan when the wealthy Gulf nation closed its air space to their plane, a military source in Ottawa confirmed to The Canadian Press.

The plane had to detour and it was unclear where it was headed afterwards. Government officials were not willing to confirm the location of the three senior officials, but one media report suggested a city in Europe.

A military source told CTV News the group was on its way from a visit to Afghanistan. They were reportedly bound for Europe.

Government’s Use of Emergency Law Under Fire

12 October 2010 By Marwaan Macan-Markar  IPS

 A powerful bomb that ripped through an apartment building on the Thai capital’s outskirts last week – one that killed the suspected bomb maker and three people – has provided the latest twist to an ongoing debate about the Thai government’s continuing use of a harsh emergency law.

The explosion, which shattered the calm of the Samarn Metta Mansion apartment, came a few hours after the government of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva extended the emergency decree for another three months in Bangkok and three neighbouring provinces.

The Abhisit administration is also using this explosion, the latest in a series of smaller bomb blasts that have gone off across this sprawling megapolis, to buttress its claims that the decree needs to be extended due to the unsettled political climate.

In the administration’s crosshairs are operatives within the anti-government protest movement, known as the red shirts for their signature crimson clothing, who are allegedly behind the string of explosions.

"This emerged for the first time with last week’s bomb – to establish the link," Panitan Wattanayagorn, a government spokesman, said Monday during a seminar discussing the emergency laws at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University. "These people are connected to the red shirts, and they are capable of exploding bombs."

"It is clear, the threat is clear," added Panitan, echoing the words of his prime minister, who on Friday warned that there would be more explosions.

"Bangkok is likely to stay under threat of bomb attacks at least until the next month," Abhisit was quoted as having told the ‘Bangkok Post’, an English- language daily. "There is more than one group of instigators on the move at the moment."

Yet going after the alleged perpetrators of the bomb blasts does not need the backing of the harsh emergency law, say analysts and human rights activists who are worried that the continued dependency on a law aimed to target and silence the red shirts would become counterproductive.

"The emergency decree is not needed in the red shirt areas," said Rungrawee Chalermsripinyorat, Thailand analyst of the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank. "The government could use regular laws to deal with the disturbances."

The danger is that the law could harden red shirt attitudes and further widen and deepen this South-east Asian kingdom’s bitter political divide, she explained to IPS. "It has already created a wide sense of resentment against the state, because the law has been used to detain people, (and) many of them are not bomb makers."

Legal experts say the political climate in the Thai capital is steadily inching toward one where laws meant for abnormal circumstances are becoming the norm. "The exception is becoming the rule on many fronts," said Vitit Muntarbhorn, professor of law at Chulalongkorn University. "National security laws are becoming permanent – "the permanence of the temporary."

These alarm bells are being triggered by the sweeping powers under the emergency decree, which allow officials to detain anti-government protesters without charge, deny the suspects information about the charges against them, keep them in "unofficial" detention centres and even impose censorship on red shirt media.

The current emergency decree to target the supporters of the United Front for Dictatorship Against Democracy (UDD), as the red shirts call their movement, was imposed on Apr. 7 to curb violence on the streets of Bangkok. By then, the UDD’s numbers had swelled to tens of thousands of largely working-class protesters from the north and north-east provinces.

The UDD’s protests to force the Abhisit government to dissolve parliament and call an early general election came to a bloody end on May 19, following clashes between heavily armed Thai troops and a shadowy group of armed men in black shooting from behind red shirt lines.

Two bloody clashes between the soldiers and the protesters – the first in April – left 91 people dead, a majority of them civilians, and close to 1,900 people injured.

By late August, the jails in Bangkok and in cities across the north and north-east held close to 470 political prisoners, some of them arrested for their alleged role in acts of violence – including torching government buildings – during the end of the clashes.

"The government is systematically using the Emergency Decree to hold persons without charge for up to 30 days in unofficial places of detention," Human Rights Watch (HRW), the New York-based global rights lobby, charged days before the Abhisit administration extended the period of emergency.

"The category of people subjected to questioning, arrest and detention by the government’s Centre for the Resolution of Emergency Situations (CRES) has apparently been expanded beyond leaders and members of the UDD who directly took part in the protests, and now includes those accused of sympathising with or supporting the UDD," HRW added. "Hundreds of politicians, former government officials, businessmen, activists, academics and community radio operators have been summoned to report to the CRES."

But the government denies that red shirt detainees have been trapped in a legal black hole under the emergency law. "There are no secret jails. No one is held in secret jails," said Panitan. "We have 184 people being detained in normal prisons." (END)

How government holds back Thailand

11 October 2010

A handful of wealthy, privileged Thai students study overseas. The current Prime Minister was at Eton. These are the children of Thailand's wealthy elite. And one of their objectives is to remain an elite.

Which means discouraging international education for the rest of the Thai population.

OK; that is a bit simplistic. But that is how it looks. So many Thai children learn no English or a bare and unusable minimum. But it is the language of international business and will be at the heart of any society that wants to be based up the principles of pluralism and meritocracy.

Yet it is apparently too soon to declare English the second language for teaching in schools, Office of the Education Council (OEC) secretary-general Tongthong Chandransu said recently.

News reports late last week said the Education Ministry planned to declare English the second language in schools on October 22.

But Tongthong denied there would be declarations related to the issue on October 22, as reported by the media.

"The education reform policy committee, chaired by Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva has discussed improving or upgrading English language teaching in educational institutions. But the committee has not yet reached a conclusion of how to develop the teaching," Tongthong said.

How hard is it to make that decision?

Thongthing said that "to initiate a nationwide English language teaching improvement scheme is a big issue. We need to prepare enough basic structure, like instructional tools, technology and qualified teachers as well as arrange funds, which will take a long time." Yes, that is why it needs commitment.

"We need to clarify clearly the term to be used to call the language teaching improvement scheme to prevent confusion. I'm not sure if the committee will state that English will be taught as the second language for teaching in schools or not, but I can now tell that it is considering the language teaching improvement scheme. And, it will be able to give an answer on how it will move this project forward within the next one or two months," he said.

Meanwhile, former Deputy Education Minister Varakorn Samkoses said most Thai people were not ready for communication in English despite the coming Asean community. So, other sectors of society should prepare for the change, as well by seek strategies to help improve their personnel, especially the government and private sector.

"To move the education sector, we should start with training our Thai teachers along with importing foreign teachers," Varakorn said.

All talk; what is needed is action.

Canada, the UAE and the art of negotiation

11 October 2010

There is little else to say on the UAE's botched air negotiations with Canada. Any chance of additional flights to Canada have just vanished for the forseeable future.

While Canadians may have benefited from better connections and cheaper fares the Canadian government has said that it will neither be bullied or seduced.

Sadly the people that are inconvenienced are the Canadian peace keeping forces operating in Afghanistan. For a small nation (in terms of number of people) the Canadians have always taken a high profile peace keeping role that should be applauded and assisted wherever possible. Instead the UAE have managed to turn a commercial negotiation into a geopolitical mess.

Things will change in time but for now all parties will need to rethink how to generate an aviation and business strategy that benefits all parties. Canada does not need UAE money or UAE oil. Canada also has a more transparent approach to business.

Emirates still requires access to Canadian airspace for its flights to the USA.

Air Canada has been given this reprieve. But Canadians will not tolerate expensive subpar service forever. Nor will they support the change of airlines at inconveninet hubs necessitated by Air Canada's protection of its Star Alliance partners.

None of this should be a great surprise. Singapore Airline was another carrier flying transit traffic to Canada that fell foul of the regulators and Air Canada and no longer flies there.

The UAE press sees this rather differently - see below:

An assertive stance on landing rights

11 October 2010, The National, Abu Dhabi

"The ongoing dispute between the UAE and Canada over flight routes is about more than simply space at airports. Yes, the UAE wants more than the six flights a week it is currently permitted to Canada; the Canadians want their domestic carriers to keep as many routes as they can. The dispute has demonstrated a larger point: the UAE has shown an improved ability and willingness to stand up for its economic interests. This should serve as a lesson for its trade partners beyond Canada and in sectors beyond aviation.

While the UAE is known for a moderate and considered approach to diplomacy, that does not mean that the nation should not take a strong stand when it is required. As the UAE has become a global hub for air travel and boasts two of the world's leading airlines, its economy is harmed when its airlines are not allowed to compete freely. This provided the context for the unusually strong words from the UAE ambassador to Canada yesterday. Mohammed Abdullah al Ghafli said that the UAE is "disappointed that despite intensive negotiations over the last five years", no progress had been made. This "undoubtedly affects the bilateral relationship", he added.

Protectionism over landing rights is a continuing concern for the UAE and unlikely to become less of an issue. Many governments are adopting policies to safeguard their national carriers in response to the rise of airlines that provide superior service, such as Etihad and Emirates. It is important that the UAE set a precedent that it will not take protectionism lightly. Other nations should be put on notice. France, for instance, has repeatedly rejected requests for more landing slots in Paris for Emirates Airline, giving preference to its own carriers. Germany's government follows a similar course to protect Lufthansa. These policies are particularly baffling when the UAE has in no small part kept Airbus and the European aviation industry afloat with its orders for new aircraft.

Canada's protectionism clearly comes at a high price to the UAE; the nation has a right to do more than bristle and may need a stronger set of tools to change the Canadian position. The UAE is continually told to open up its borders and its businesses: other governments must now reciprocate.""

RAK Airways resurrected - but for how long?

11 October 2010

United Arab Emirates-based carrier RAK Airways restarted flights on Sunday, after over a year of suspension, with trips to Saudi Arabia and India.

The airline will operate four flights per week each to Jeddah and to the southern Indian city of Calicut.

Calicut was chosen as the gateway to South Indian state Kerala, home to a large number of UAE's expatriate workforce.

RAK Airways, based in the UAE's most northern emirate of Ras Al Khaimah, had suspended operations in May 2009 due to tough economic conditions in the wake of the global financial crisis.

The airline appears to have a single Boeing 737 which will fly both routes for now on this very limited schedule.

flydubai to where?

11 October 2010

With no Indian routes available flydubai is finding ever more exotic destinations:  flydubai has announced the launch of two new routes in Iraq and Armenia bringing the airline’s total network to 26 destinations.

Flights to Sulaimaniyah in Iraq and Yerevan in Armenia will begin in November, the budget airline said in a statement on Sunday. Sulaimaniyah is the second route in Iraqi Kurdistan, following on from the start of flights to Erbil in August.

The service to the Armenian capital Yerevan is a totally new market.

The twice a week service to Sulaimaniyah begins on November 24, departing from Dubai at 10.15pm and landing in Iraq at 12.25am local time. The return service from Sulaimaniyah leaves at 1.10am and arrives at Dubai International Airport Terminal 2 at 4.40am local time.

Flights to Yerevan start on November 21 with the service operating three times a week. Flights depart Dubai at 10.10am, arriving in the Armenian capital at 1.35pm local time. The return service leaves Yerevan at 2.20pm and touches down in Dubai at 5.25pm local time.
 

Canadian troops must quit U.A.E. base after airline demand rejected

10 October 2010 The Vancouver Sun

"Canadian soldiers and aircrew have only 27 days to pack up and clear out of Camp Mirage, the not-so-secret airbase in the United Arab Emirates that Ottawa established seven years ago to support military operations in Afghanistan.

(RAS: Camp Mirage is a cluster of buildings at the Al Minhad airforce base south and east of Dubai International Airport. Not so secret!)

After two years of on-and-off negotiations, the Emirates on Tuesday suspended a memorandum of understanding with Canada about the base after the federal government balked at a demand that the Gulf sheikdom's two national carriers -- Dubai-based Emirates Airlines and Abu Dhabi-based Etihad Airways -- each be granted daily flights between Toronto and the Emirates, up from the current three apiece each week. The two carriers were also seeking direct flights to the Persian Gulf from Calgary and Vancouver.

According to Transport Canada, there is no shortage of seats to meet demand for flights between the two countries.

"The rights under the current Canada-UAE air transport agreement meet the market demands of travellers whose origin or final destination is either Canada or the UAE," the agency has said. Air Canada has also resisted such a move.

Use of Camp Mirage would already have been wound down after the scheduled end of Canada's military involvement in Afghanistan in 2011. But an early exit is forcing the military to speed up the pullout process and use alternative bases of allies in the region.

That could include use of NATO airfields in Germany as a major staging area for Canada's C-17 and C-130 Hercules cargo aircraft.

Canadian troops rotating into and out of Afghanistan are already using commercial flights into Cyprus, which some soldiers also use as a transit point.

Other options could include using airfields in the NATO ally of Turkey.

In a speech last week, Air Canada president and CEO Calin Rovinescu said it "would be a defeat for Canada" to give in to the U.A.E. pressure for increased access.

What is at stake in the dispute is who gets to transport hundreds of thousands of North America-bound passengers every year from the Middle East, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

Currently, Air Canada's Star Alliance partner, Lufthansa, funnels many of those passengers through Frankfurt, with Air Canada taking them on the final leg of their journeys to Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver.

Emirates and Etihad have extensive and rapidly growing networks of routes across the Middle East, South Asia and elsewhere.

The carriers have used Dubai and Abu Dhabi as a transit point for passengers from the region to transfer to non-stop flights to Europe, Africa, North America and South America.

Emirates and Etihad have hundreds of new aircraft on order. To keep those aircraft busy, the U.A.E. must secure far more landing rights than they presently have.

But there is support in B.C. and Alberta for direct flights to the Persian Gulf.

"Airlines such as Emirates have an enormous ability to add to our economic vibrancy, business and tourism activity," Calgary Mayor David Bronconnier said in February. "This is why we will continue to seek and support more competition and more non-stop flights for our community."

The U.A.E. government issued a statement Thursday admitting that negotiations with Canada had broken down.

"Despite intensive negotiations over the last few months the U.A.E. and Canada have been unable to arrive at an agreement on expanding the number of flights between the two countries," the UAE ambassador to Canada, Mohammed Abdullah Al-Ghafli, wrote.

He hinted at a strain in diplomatic relations, calling the negotiating process "protracted and frustrating."

"The UAE entered negotiations in good faith on the understanding that a solution would be reached and that constructive ideas would be brought to the negotiating table.

"The fact that this has not come about will only negatively impact the populations and economies of both countries."

Military logisticians since last fall have been seriously considering the establishment of a temporary air detachment in Germany to assist with pulling out huge amounts of material from Afghanistan when the combat mission in Kandahar ends next summer.

For security reasons, much of that kit cannot be sent by road through Pakistan to the port in Karachi for a long sea voyage home."

Who controls the internet?
By Misha Glenny Financial Times

9th October 2010

Squared-jawed, with four stars decorating each shoulder, General Keith Alexander looks like a character straight out of an old American war movie. But his old-fashioned appearance belies the fact that the general has a new job that is so 21st-century it could have been dreamed up by a computer games designer. Alexander is the first boss of USCybercom, the United States Cyber Command, in charge of the Pentagon’s sprawling cyber networks and tasked with battling unknown enemies in a virtual world.

Last year, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates declared cyberspace to be the “fifth domain” of military operations, alongside land, sea, air and­ space. It is the first man-made military domain, requiring an entirely new Pentagon command. That went fully operational a week ago, marking a new chapter in the history of both warfare and the world wide web.

In his confirmation hearing, General Alexander sounded the alarm, declaring that the Pentagon’s computer systems “are probed 250,000 times an hour, up to six million per day”, and that among those attempting to break in were “more than 140 foreign spy organisations trying to infiltrate US networks”. Congress was left with a dark prophecy ringing in its ears: “It’s only a small step from disrupting to destroying parts of the network.”

In three short decades, the internet has grown from the realm of geeks and academics into a vast engine that regulates and influences global ­commercial, political, social and now military interaction. Neuroscientists tell us that it is changing the development of our cerebral wiring in childhood and adolescence. Social scientists and civil libertarians warn that our privacy is being eroded, as ever more of our life is mediated by the web. It should probably come as no surprise that governments believe control of this epoch-making ­technology is far too important to be left in the hands of idiots like you and me.

If states start monitoring the internet, what does it means for the average user? President Obama has stated that his administration’s pursuit of cyber­security “will not include – I repeat, will not include – monitoring private sector networks or internet traffic”. But not everyone is so sanguine. Richard Clarke, adviser to four presidents and the author of Cyber War, supports US plans to beef up its cyber defences but even he is worried about USCybercom. “We created a new military command,” he wrote, “to conduct a new kind of ­high-tech war, without public debate, media discussion, serious congressional oversight, academic analysis or international dialogue.”

Very few people understand cybersecurity. It is technologically complex and the network environment in which it operates changes at lightning speed. So governments are granting themselves new powers to intervene in computer networks without anyone, including themselves, fully ­appreciating what their implications are.

The establishment of USCybercom is just one element in an eye-popping expansion of security, which includes beefing up the cyber capacity of the Department of Homeland Security to deal with threats to the US’s domestic cyber networks. These moves will lead to a much deeper apparatus of control and monitoring of internet activity by the US.

Some specialists argue that the gargantuan security systems involved simply will not work, and that bureaucrats and corporations are encouraging a new round of profligacy to line their pockets. Civil liberty advocates worry that General Alexander’s new cyber command could dodge privacy laws to monitor our e-mails and social networking activities. And despite Obama’s reassurances about such an Orwellian scenario, so much of Alexander’s written testimony to Congress has been labelled classified that nobody outside the Pentagon and the White House quite knows what the military cyber strategy involves.

The US is not alone in trying to muscle in on the web: across the world, states are trying to assert their authority over the communications of ­individuals and private companies.

The United Arab Emirates has been in dispute with Research in Motion, the Canadian manufacturer of the BlackBerry, for the past six months. The government in Abu Dhabi demanded that the company either lift the e-mail encryption on BlackBerries or establish a local server so the authorities could monitor the traffic going into, out of and across the country. Otherwise, Abu Dhabi warned, all BlackBerry communication in the ­country would be stopped. RIM had refused to budge (despite the fact that it had already agreed to allow China, India and Saudi Arabia access to unencrypted messages). The UAE government announced yesterday (Oct 8) that the threat to suspend BlackBerry services had been lifted as the provider now complied with the Gulf state’s regulatory framework.

Some security experts believe that the UAE’s real concern may be more complex than who says what on their BlackBerries. Tony Yustein, an IT security consultant who has advised the FBI, comments: “More important is the knowledge that the data is not 100 per cent secure in Canada, and that the US can access this data. So the US can monitor communications inside the Emirates.”

BlackBerry is just the opening shot. India said last month it intends to ask Google and Skype to set up servers inside its borders so that it can monitor traffic over Gmail and Skype’s internet telephone system. Other countries seem set to follow.

Iran appears to be in two minds about whether to embrace or stymie technological progress. On the one hand, Twitter accounts helped the opposition mobilise demonstrations in the wake of last year’s contested presidential election and so the authorities blocked the service sporadically. On the other hand, by monitoring Twitter traffic, Tehran was able to identify who was organising the protests.

Taken together, these incidents demonstrate how states are building walls around the internet to regulate what information circulates in their country. The internet is being separated into a series of national intranets that reflect cultural, political and security concerns. “As cyber security and national security become ever more entwined, an increasing number of countries may impose censorship,” says Rex Hughes, a Cambridge academic who heads Chatham House’s project on Britain’s cyber defences. “A number of countries have already gone down this route.”

Try accessing YouTube in Turkey, for example, and you get a message saying that it is banned. In China, the BBC website is often offline – especially when there is a big Chinese story in the news. Nor is the US immune to censorship, having forced the removal of .com websites advertising travel to Cuba from Europe.

Russia has a slightly different approach. It has built up a monumental Big Brother appartus that goes under the acronym SORM-2. A copy of every little byte that goes in, out or across Russia is copied to a central storage computer in Moscow under the control of the FSB, the KGB’s successor. Should the organisation ever need the co-operation of a fellow citizen, then the information stored on the FSB’s computers can provide useful leverage to overcome any reluctance.

It is easy to understand why the paranoid elites of Iran, Burma and Belarus might be monitoring the internet as closely as they do. But why are the military and security services in the west starting to divert so much of their resources into what is known soothingly as “information assurance”?

A series of events has shaken America’s cyber confidence. One of the most dramatic occurred in 2008 when a US soldier based in the Middle East unwittingly plugged an infected memory stick into one of the Pentagon’s laptops. A malicious computer code, explained US Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn III, “spread undetected on both classified and unclassified systems, establishing what amounted to a digital beachhead, from which data could be transferred to servers under foreign control”. It was, he said, their “worst fear: a rogue program operating silently, poised to deliver operational plans into the hands of an unknown adversary”.

The incident led directly to the establishment of USCybercom and it explains why General Alexander insists that his primary job will be “defensive”, ensuring that the Pentagon’s seven million computers, grouped into 15,000 networks that provide the backbone for 4,000 military installations worldwide, can withstand the ­avalanche of daily probes and attacks. But the ­general has also said that the US needs to guarantee its “superiority” in cyberspace – although he emphasised that this is not the same as ­“supremacy” or “dominance”.

This reflects a real fear on the part of the US that the internet is slipping from its control. Until now, the country’s dynamic technological base, alongside the immense power of companies such as Google and Microsoft, have ensured its influence over the world wide web. Maintaining that influence appears to have become a central goal of the Obama administration. The day after Google announced that it and several other companies had fallen victim to a systematic cyber attack by China in December last year, Hillary Clinton, secretary of state gave a speech attacking countries seeking to restrict freedom on the internet.

The message to the Chinese was clear: “The US government considers Google and its ilk to be part of the country’s strategic infrastructure and we will march in step with them around the world.” Under the stewardship of Eric Schmidt, Google’s presence in Washington has become so ubiquitous that a jealous Microsoft manager quipped to me recently: “the US government, fronted by Obama, powered by Google”.

US military and law enforcement agencies such as the FBI enjoy privileged access to data stored by American.com companies, including Google and Facebook, the world’s two largest depositories of personal data. If the Feds are hunting a Russian cyber criminal who has a Facebook account, they can be in there with a judge’s warrant within a day. If a German police officer asked for a similar favour from Facebook, the process could take months.

But there are areas where American control over the administration of the web is slipping. Under pressure from foreign governments, notably China, Icann, the US-based independent body that stipulates how the addresses of websites can be formulated, announced that from now on it will allow the use of most major language scripts – Cyrillic, Chinese and Arabic, among them.

US defence hawks regard this as a disaster. Writing in the Harvard Security Journal, Dan Geer, whose company has advised the CIA on computer security, called it “the single most criminogenic act ever taken in or around the digital world”. He argues that it will be even easier for cyber warriors to launch an attack while disguising their location.

For the moment though, the US appears to enjoy the most advanced “offensive” military capability on the internet. But countries such as China, India, France and Israel are catching up and you don’t need much to be a player in this game. As the security industry repeatedly stresses, all it takes is one smart guy and a laptop to cause trouble.

And there’s plenty of trouble out there. Western governments cite three central threats that justify the increased presence of military, intelligence and law enforcement agencies in cyberspace: crime, commercial espionage and warfare.

Many ordinary people can testify to the sheer audacity of web criminals. In September, Roger Mildenhall, an Australian living in South Africa, got a phone call telling him that one of his two Perth properties had been sold and that contracts were about to be exchanged on the other. Mildenhall thought the call was a joke, for he had no intention of selling either property. It emerged that Nigerian cyber criminals had seized his digital identity and obtained copies of the title deeds to his two houses. The proceeds, nearly A$500,000 (£300,000), were transferred to a bank in China, from where the funds were laundered.

Criminal threats such as this, new security measures and the global growth of web censorship are already changing how we use the internet. We will find ever larger areas of the net difficult to access and we will have to sacrifice some convenience as institutions force us to assume greater respons­ibility for our own security. Already some banks, such as HSBC, insist that customers install proper security software on their PCs, otherwise they will not reimburse them if they fall victim to cyber crime.

Undeniably, banks lose most money from cyber attacks because of the sloppiness of their ­customers. But the banks, too, need to clean up their act. “Financial institutions must invest more in next-generation internet banking technologies and consumers must take a more informed attitude towards the types of e-commerce sites they visit,” says Rex Hughes of Chatham House. “Today, organised crime clearly has the upper hand in online banking but better engineering, regulation and user ­education can help to restore order in financial cyberspace.”

Last week’s bust of an east European gang, which made at least $70m using the notorious malware known as Zeus, proved the point. The hackers targeted small businesses and institutions, knowing that they would have a weak cyber defence in place.

China has argued that the next generation of computer users will need to pass the equivalent of a driving test before its members are allowed to surf parts of the web essential for day-to-day life. The idea has triggered a huge backlash among civil libertarians worldwide who warn that such a move would undermine completely the very freedoms that the internet was designed to promote.

According to a Data Breach report published by US telecom company Verizon, commercial ­espionage accounts for a third of illegal activity on the web. When criminals break into a company’s computer system to steal information, it’s mainly employees’ lax working practices that allow them to do so – people using virus-infected memory sticks that they have received as a gift, for example. Although industrial spying is rife, targeted companies like to keep it quiet. Telling the world that your company is vulnerable to cyber attacks does not inspire investor and customer confidence.

Where the military is responsible for cyber defence and cyber warfare, law enforcement agencies such as the FBI and Britain’s Serious Organised Crime Agency hunt down cyber criminals. The large security companies such as McAfee and Symantec look after private clients threatened by industrial spies. But no act of cyber crime, espionage or warfare can be mounted without the involvement at some point of skilled hackers – often ones who deploy their skills across the board.

Opposing them are the world’s intelligence ­services. Spook central in Britain is the Government Communications Headquarters, housed in “the Donut”, a purpose-built circular structure on the outskirts of Cheltenham. Almost 5,000 spies and geeks sift huge amounts of data gathered ­globally from the internet and mobile communications devices to assess cyber threats facing Britain and its allies. The atmosphere inside is curiously relaxed, with a lot of young people using break-out areas and hot-desking, rather like a successful dotcom start-up. Yet this is one of the most secure facilities in the country, and one that gives Britain a huge advantage in defending itself against modern crime, terror and war. “If you look at cyber capacity of individual countries,” Tony Yustein, the security consultant, told me, “I would say Israel – I mean of course Mossad – are the best; the United States is second not because of the CIA but because of the National Security Agency; and then Britain, MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, is a strong third.” Drawing on this pedigree, GCHQ’s primary aim is to spot and stop the 20 per cent of nasty stuff on the web that sensible ordinary measures such as anti-virus ­programs cannot prevent.

Washington is overflowing with doomsayers. In February, Mike McConnell, a retired vice-admiral and George W. Bush’s intelligence chief, informed Congress that if America became involved in a cyber war now, “we would lose”. He added that “a major cyber attack could shut down our nation’s most critical infrastructure – our power grid, telecommunications, financial services”. There is a danger with such rhetoric of crying wolf. According to Amrit Williams, a specialist with IBM and one of cyber security’s most astute observers: “There is no question that we have a very serious problem; the increased reliance on technology, the ubiquitous nature of broadband connectivity and more digital commerce all create an environment that will breed increasingly sophisticated crime.” But he warns that deploying the so-called “Fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) strategy of rhetoric doesn’t work – it drives up hysteria”.

Nonetheless, following the emergence of Stuxnet this summer, there can no longer be any ambiguity about whether military cyber security is an issue for governments. This complex virus directly targets Siemens-designed software in industrial systems, allowing the malware to take control of power plants. Although it has been found across the world, many believe the virus’s primary target was Iran’s Bushehr nuclear reactor. The infection of employees’ laptops has led to cries of western sabotage from Iranian government officials.

As investigations continue, even the most sober voices are agreed: Stuxnet has stepped up the cyber arms race by two or three notches. “This virus could only have been developed by a team of sophisticated security professionals with time and money at their disposal,” explains Mikko Hyppönen, chief research officer for F-Secure, the Finnish-based computer security company. He believes Stuxnet’s sponsor was a state, not a group of random hackers. “We have known about it for several months and still haven’t managed to decode it fully.” What this means, he says, “is that we now have proof that states are investing serious resources into the development of next-generation viruses. It is without question the most significant virus we have seen in a decade.” It is also our most significant indication to date that the struggle for control of the internet is just beginning.

Misha Glenny’s ‘McMafia: Seriously Organised Crime’ is published by Vintage

China's unwanted prize

9 October 2010 The Globe and Mail The Economist and other sources

The Nobel peace prize committee’s announced yesterday that they are giving the award to an imprisoned Chinese dissident, Liu Xiaobo. This has greatly annoyed the Chinese leaders. It may also give extra ammunition to hardliners in China who argue that the West is bent on undermining Communist Party rule. This is the same faction that argues the party should take advantage of the West’s economic malaise to assert its own interests more robustly.

Liu Xiaobo yesterday is the first Chinese national to win the Nobel Peace Prize. This is one award that the Chinese did not want and the Communist Party’s censors are hard at work trying to keep the news from this country’s 1.3 billion citizens.

China reacted with outrage in 1989 when the Nobel peace prize was awarded to the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan leader in exile, to all appearances as a rebuke to the government for having crushed the Tiananmen Square protests earlier that year.

Mr Liu however is an ethnic Han Chinese who has devoted himself to addressing the politics of China proper. He is a seasoned campaigner, a veteran of the Tiananmen protests who has shown no sign of succumbing to the party’s intimidation in spite of three periods of incarceration over the past two decades (more than five years in total). He is a mildly spoken literary critic who created Charter 08, a document that calls for democracy that was signed initially by more than 300 liberal thinkers (and then by thousands of others online). It struck a reasoned tone to which radicals and moderates alike could subscribe. The debate over “universal values” that it helped to fuel still rages within the party today.

Mr Liu was arrested in December 2008, two days before Charter 08 was made public. The authorities chose Christmas Day, 2009, to announce his 11-year jail term for “inciting subversion of state power”. The charter and a handful of Mr Liu’s online essays were all the evidence that the court required. In May this year he was transferred to a remote prison, 500km (310 miles) north-east of Beijing.

Yet Liu admire his homeland. He writes positively about the growth of civil society in China. But he is scathing about the willingness of the Chinese public to bend to party authority, so long as the party continues to provide opportunities (no matter how underhand) to get rich.

The award will lead to more in demands from abroad for Mr Liu’s release. But they will be muted. Major Western powers are little inclined to jeopardise their relationships with China for the sake of individual "dissidents".

Within minutes of the announcement that Mr. Liu had been chosen by the Norwegian Nobel committee in recognition of “his long and nonviolent struggle for fundamental human rights in China," people on the streets outside his Beijing home were whispering that it was a “big problem for the government."

Within hours, terms like “Liu Xiaobo" and “Nobel Prize" were among the most searched-for terms by China’s 420 million Internet users.

Inevitably, many will go on and try to read Charter 08, the pro-democracy manifesto that Mr. Liu drafted two years ago, just before the 54-year-old was jailed for “inciting subversion of state power." If they can get around China’s Internet restrictions, they will read Mr. Liu’s demands for change and perhaps wonder why their rulers found his words so threatening when the rest of the world sees them as so admirable. China’s democracy movement, in retreat since the Tiananmen Square protests were crushed in 1989, has been emboldened for perhaps the first time since.

Mr. Liu’s Wikipedia page, as well as the main website where Charter 08 was originally posted, both have long been blocked by China’s so-called “Great Firewall."

But, in an era when so many of China’s citizens are online, and an increasing number of them know how to get around the Great Firewall using virtual private networks and other tricks, news of Mr. Liu’s win quickly burst through the dam.

“Who is Liu Xiaobo? I’m confused …he was sentenced to 11 years for subverting the state. What is it all about?" asked one contributor to an online forum in Fujian province.

The answers came from his fellow “netizens," encouraging the curious to dig a little deeper into the issue. “Read Charter 08, then you will know why [the Communist Party] hates him so much. [Charter 08] means killing the Party!" wrote one respondent. Another posted a timeline of Mr. Liu’s actions and arrests, while a third outlined the key points of Charter 08.

Some who did find out about the news through circuitous routes seemed dismayed that they had to try so hard to find out that a fellow citizen had won a Nobel prize. “Blocking the Internet can’t block people’s mouths. Blocking people’s mouths can’t block their hearts," wrote blogger Ma Yingshi.

The Chinese authorities are not impressed dubbing Mr. Liu’s award “an obscenity" and warning darkly that it would hurt relations between China and Norway. The Nobel committee had earlier complained that a Chinese diplomat had clumsily tried to warn them against choosing Mr. Liu.

“We have to speak when others cannot speak," Norwegian Nobel committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland said in explaining the choice of Mr. Liu. “As China is rising, we should have the right to criticize."

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said: “I would hope the fact that he’s now a Nobel Peace Prize winner would cause our friends in the Chinese government to look seriously at that issue of his release from prison. But I would say, more than anything, we’re delighted for him and send him our congratulations."

The only mention of the award on the official Xinhua news wire was a short item attacking Mr. Liu and saying that his win had “desecrated the prize." At the direction of the Central Propaganda Bureau, other media outlets ignored the news completely.

The Internet – the freest political forum in China – quickly became the main battleground. “Websites are not to create news items or exclusive stories on the Nobel prize. Exclusive stories that do exist must all be deleted," read an order from the propaganda office, according to the Berkeley University-based China Digital Times, which regularly posts directives from authorities that are circulated to the media in China.

As his name was being read out in Oslo as this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, Liu Xiaobo was likely in the cell he shares with five others in a prison in northeastern China.

In the aftermath of the Tiananmen crackdown, Mr. Liu was fingered as one of the protest leaders and arrested after a minivan rammed him while he was riding his bicycle. He was detained 20 months in a maximum-security prison before being released without charge after signing a “letter of repentance."

But he would not be quieted. Mr. Liu was jailed again for six months in 1995 after publicly calling on the government to address the Tiananmen massacre. Nine months after he finished that term, he was sentenced to spend three more years in a re-education-through-labour camp for “disturbing the social order."

He was freed in 1999, then jailed again in 2008 following the publication of Charter 08, a manifesto that calls for freedom of expression, judicial independence and the election of public officials in China. Though more than 300 dissidents put their names on the charter, and thousands more have signed it since, Mr. Liu was singled out by police as its primary author.

It was while he was interned in the labour camp that Mr. Liu and his long-time friend, Liu Xia, decided to marry. The two had been courting for years, brought together by a shared love of poetry. Their 1996 wedding was a brief ceremony conducted inside the camp, followed by a modest lunch with relatives. But in his closing statement to the court before beginning his current 11-year sentence, Mr. Liu said his relationship gave him his strength to keep fighting.

“Given your love, sweetheart, I would face my forthcoming trial calmly, with no regrets about my choice and looking forward to tomorrow optimistically," he told the court, speaking to an absent Liu Xia.

Remarkably, he showed the same open heart to his accusers. “I still want to tell the regime that deprives me of my freedom, I stand by the belief I expressed 20 years ago [on Tiananmen Square] – I have no enemies, and no hatred. None of the police who have monitored, arrested and interrogated me, the prosecutors who prosecuted me, or the judges who sentence me, are my enemies. While I’m unable to accept your surveillance, arrest, prosecution or sentencing, I respect your professions and personalities," he said in the same closing statement.

But, he added, “I do not feel guilty for following my constitutional right to freedom of expression, for fulfilling my social responsibility as a Chinese citizen. Even if accused of it, I would have no complaints."

Blackberry out of Dubai jam

9 October 2010

BlackBerry users have been granted by a reprieve by the United Arab Emirates which had threatened to cut off services to the handsets from Monday. All services will now continue to operate normally.

So since the earlier announcement of the ban the Telecoms Regulatory Authority (TRA), Etisalat and du have done little more than boost iPhone sales. And the net result; a loss of any last remaining credibility.

TheTRA confirmed that  "All BlackBerry services in the UAE will continue to operate as normal and no suspension of service will occur."

The TRA said the decision had been taken as a result of "the positive engagement and collaboration of RIM in reaching this regulatory compliant outcome".

It was not immediately clear what concessions had been made by RIM. No change at all according to RIM. RIM said it doesn’t do “special deals for specific countries” and there have been no changes to the security of its corporate e-mail system.

“Contrary to any rumors, the security architecture is the same around the world and RIM truly has no ability to provide its customers’ encryption keys,” RIM said in August.

As BlackBerry mobile phones access the internet and email through RIM's own network of secure Network Operations Centres around the world using specialist encryption, it is regarded as more secure than other services. But some governments have been concerned that they are not able to access the data for the purposes of national security.

Maybe some kind of workaround has been agreed which allows the UAE and local carriers to monitor messages sent with the BlackBerry.   

A ban would have hurt the image of the U.A.E., home to the business hub of Dubai, as place that is business-friendly. So the final result makes sense but did we really need to create so much fuss just to leave things as they are?

UAE threatens to kick Canada out of covert military base Camp Mirage


8 October 2010 The Globe and Mail

"It was during a secret meeting in Paris this September that Canada realized there was little room for a compromise that would enable its Afghanistan-bound troops to keep using a covert military base near Dubai.

The Canadian government is now preparing to relocate forces from the United Arab Emirates to somewhere such as Cyprus rather than give in to what it considers unreasonable demands from the host country.

The prospect of a time-consuming move to a potentially costlier and more distant staging location has Defence officials angry and frustrated. The Forces are already engrossed in complicated logistical preparations to withdraw from Afghanistan next year.

In a remarkably blunt diplomatic gambit, the UAE has been threatening to evict Canada from Camp Mirage if the Harper government doesn’t grant its two commercial airlines lucrative additional landing rights at airports in Toronto and other cities, sources familiar with the negotiations say.

Trouble has been brewing for months, and contingency plans were already in the works when officials from the Canadian government – including the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade – met with UAE officials in Paris last month.

Canada’s goal at the behind-the-scenes-talks was to explore the idea of a compromise, to see whether the UAE could be persuaded to put some water in its wine. International air negotiations are usually made public, but these discussions were not.

UAE and its state-owned carriers, including Emirates Airline, have been seeking dozens of new landing slots in Canada in return for letting the Canadian Forces stay in Camp Mirage. Air Canada and Transport Canada oppose the idea of linking air negotiations to geopolitics, though. The fear is that UAE is more interested in stealing lucrative international traffic from Air Canada to cities such as Frankfurt than simply flying more customers to its domestic airports.

Canada wasn’t prepared to give much ground under the circumstances. And neither were UAE officials, it turned out.

A federal government source said there was a “ huge gap” between the number of new landing spots the UAE wanted and the number Canada was willing to give.

The meeting confirmed for Canada that the UAE was not willing to consider alternatives to what they wanted, the source said.

“It ended with nothing.”

The Harper government had nothing to say officially on the future of Camp Mirage on Thursday, even though sources inside and outside Ottawa said the UAE has sent Canada official notice to vacate it within 30 days.

Officials say the Canadians ramped up plans for a move after the Paris meeting and are eyeing Cyprus as an alternative staging ground. Cargo pallets from Canada might be routed through a German base.

There’s still time for a compromise, but it’s not clear how much good will exists for one.

The UAE government vented its frustration in a statement on Thursday, warning that failure to reach a deal on more landing rights will hurt both countries, saying six flights a week for its carriers are insufficient.

“It is unfortunate that this process has been so protracted and frustrating,” UAE Ambassador Mohammed Abdullah Al-Ghafli said.

“The UAE entered negotiations in good faith on the understanding that a solution would be reached and that constructive ideas would be brought to the negotiating table. The fact that this has not come about will only negatively impact the populations and economies of both countries.”

Catherine Loubier, director of communications for Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon, would say only that the Canada-UAE relationship is strong and mutually beneficial.

“The government of Canada is fully capable of supporting our military commitments in Afghanistan, and we choose arrangements that are in the best interests of Canada.”

Both Dubai-based Emirates Airline and Abu Dhabi-based Etihad Airways want greater access to Canada.

In June, 2009, Emirates introduced the 489-seat Airbus A380 double-decker jet to its Toronto-Dubai route, saying the larger aircraft was needed to meet high demand.

Air Canada says that Emirates isn’t really interested in transporting customers between Dubai and Canada, accusing the foreign carrier of plotting to steal international traffic with Dubai as a stopover, not as a destination.

“Our position is that the UAE, under the current bilateral agreement, has enough capacity to serve the size of the local market,” Air Canada chief commercial officer Ben Smith said Thursday.

Tiger to play in Thai skins

7 October 2010

Tiger Woods will play in a one-day skins tournament in Thailand next month.

Organizers announced Thursday that Woods will return to his mother's home country for the first time in 10 years to compete in an event that was part of celebrations to mark King Bhumibol Adulyadej's 60th year on the Thai throne.

The skins tournament will be played on Monday November 8th, at the Amata Spring Country Club in Chonburi; the venue for the annual Asia vs Europe Royal Trophy.

England's Paul Casey, Colombia's Camilo Villegas and Thailand's top player Thongchai Jaidee are also competing in the event.

The event will be held the day after the HSBC Champions tournament in Shanghai.

So the guys are going to play in Shanghai - fly late night to Bangkok - travel to Amata Springs and then play the course sight unseen. Anything for a quick dollar !

Lets hope Tiger has time for a night out in Bangkok - after all one night in Bangkok and..............

Canada and UAE dispute escalates

7 October 2010

Canadian troops will be pulling out early from the not-so-secret Camp Mirage military base near Dubai after failing to reach an agreement with the government there for its continued use.

Camp Mirage in Dubai has been an important staging ground for the Canadian Forces mission in Afghanistan but it's also become a pawn in a dispute over access to Canada's airspace.

The UAE has been lobbying Ottawa to get additional landing rights for its two major commercial airlines and it has previously been reported that there is a link between those efforts and Canada's lease for the Middle East military base. Its existence is supposed to be kept under wraps for national security reasons, but Camp Mirage is a poorly kept secret.

Government officials would not confirm the end of Canada's lease agreement with the UAE, saying they don't comment on operational matters, but sources said the options to renew it were too expensive and not in Canada's interest.

Simultaneously, the UAE government issued a statement Thursday indicating negotiations over expanding the number of flights to Canada have broken down.

"The UAE is disappointed that despite intensive negotiations over the last few months the UAE and Canada have been unable to arrive at an agreement on expanding the number of flights between the two countries," the UAE ambassador to Canada, Mohammed Abdullah Al-Ghafli, wrote.

While his statement said the UAE "values its strong relationship with Canada," it also hinted at a strain in diplomatic relations.

"It is unfortunate that this process has been so protracted and frustrating," he wrote. "The UAE entered negotiations in good faith on the understanding that a solution would be reached and that constructive ideas would be brought to the negotiating table. The fact that this has not come about will only negatively impact the populations and economies of both countries."

The trouble with this statement is how are you negotiating in good faith when you muddle landing rights with the lease of a military base. The issue of landing rights already has both governments negotiating in the perceived best interests of their national airlines; which says little for the the so-called independence of all three airlines. Introducing Camp Mirage to the negotiation gave the Canadians the moral high ground and looks like the actions of a school bully. Not good.

The two airlines, Emirates and Etihad Airways, currently each fly three times a week to Toronto and want to add other Canadian destinations such as Calgary and Vancouver.

The Canadian government has resisted the pressure, explaining that it's not in Canada's commercial interest to allow for the expansion, and that the current number of flights satisfactorily meet the demand.

Air Canada has been a strong opponent of the expansion. In a speech last week to the International Civil Aviation Organization, the airline's president and CEO, Calin Rovinescu, said it "would be a defeat for Canada" to give in to the UAE pressure.

"It is well-known in our industry that these state-owned and subsidized carriers are pushing hard to capture and divert as much global flow as possible to Dubai and elsewhere in the region even if the point-to-point market between the two countries is very thin," he said, according to a copy of the speech obtained by Postmedia News.

Now I have issues with Rovinecsu here. Air Canada has been bailed out too often by the Canadian taxpayer and has been allowed to systematically wipe out almost all domestic and international Canadian airline competition, barring Westjet, over the last 20 years. It is also using the Canadian government to protect not Air Canada but the Star Alliance and in particular its relationships with United and Lufthansa.

With no agreement on the airlines and no agreement on the use of the military base in Dubai, diplomatic relations between the UAE and Canada appear to have hit roadblocks.

It is not clear when Canada will remove all of its equipment and personnel from Camp Mirage, but it could be within weeks. Use of the base would have been wound down anyway after the end of Canada's military involvement in the Afghanistan mission in 2011 but the early exit will force the military to speed up the pullout process and use alternative bases in the region. Canada has already been making increased use of a base in Cyprus.

"The government of Canada is fully capable of supporting its military commitment in Afghanistan," a spokeswoman for Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon said. "Of course the government will choose arrangements that are in the best interest of Canadians," Catherine Loubier said.

Military analysts say logistically it would have been ideal to keep the deal for Camp Mirage going for just another year.

"It would be easier for the Canadian Forces to keep the arrangements they've got at Mirage because we've been there for years and it's a good setup," Ret. Col. Alain Pellerin, executive director of the Conference of Defence Associations, said.


Canceling Dubai Property Deals Is Nearly Impossible

6 October 2010 - New York Times

"On a sultry June evening in 2007, more than 100 people camped out at the offices of Emaar, a prestigious Dubai property developer, to ensure that they would land a coveted spot in a gleaming new skyscraper scheduled for opening this year near the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building.

Today, the property, designed by the New York architect Frank Williams, who died this year, is, like a number of others around Dubai, little more than a rotting foundation. Its value has plunged by more than 40 percent since 2008, after the collapse of Dubai’s real estate boom.

“It’s really a disaster, the situation in Dubai,” said Silvia Turrin, a real estate agent who bought into the property, 29 Boulevard, and has been unable to get her money out. “It’s not like in Western countries — it’s very difficult to exit here if there’s a problem. And we’ll never get our money back, but now we’re stuck dealing with this hole.”

Dubai lured people to a gold rush in sought-after properties at the height of its real estate boom — including business and political leaders from Afghanistan who invested the deposits from Kabul Bank, one of the country’s largest. The near-collapse of the bank in September was largely a result.

At the time, few asked if there was a legal framework for resolving potential disputes. Now, with the glitter gone, interviews with investors, legal experts and real estate analysts here show that many who bought in are finding it hard to get out.

Despite the construction delay, Emaar is still holding the down payments of as much as 80 percent required to secure an apartment, Ms. Turrin and other property holders said. And Dubai’s opaque property laws have made it virtually impossible for those who bought in to walk away, even as interest accumulates on their construction loans.

In a statement, Emaar acknowledged that 29 Boulevard was still “under construction” but said that it upheld transparency standards and had “taken several proactive measures to address the concerns of investors on developments that are in the pipeline.”

It said those measures included the option of purchasing other completed properties. Investors, however, say the properties being offered are in some cases smaller, less attractive, and more highly priced than those they agreed to buy.

Emaar is not the only developer with similar problems. Scores of other buildings around Dubai are well past their delivery date, or have yet to be started. Apartment buyers who made down payments for property construction are unable to find out what is happening with their funds, these people said. Bank loans held on undelivered property often cannot be forfeited, and borrowers have had to pay higher interest rates even as banks have refused to let them walk away from the mortgage.

“The rules of the game are definitely opaque here,” said an investor who has bought several properties in Dubai and who insisted on anonymity because of talks with developers and regulators. “In the United States, I would know my legal position much more clearly and could take actions if necessary.”

Most developers have also thwarted the formation of owners’ associations that could take control of their building’s finances and ensure the transparent management of condo fees, which many owners say are used by developers to take in yet more money.

Dubai has compressed decades’ worth of real estate development into the last 15 years. But the legal framework for resolving property disputes, and the nature of the contracts themselves, are still as incomplete as many of the buildings around town, analysts said.

“Dubai has evolved rapidly in just a short time,” said Graham Coutts, the head of Middle East management services at Jones Lang LaSalle. “The legal system is evolving with it.”

Still, concerns about resolving disputes here are mounting, even as developers struggle to find foreign and domestic investors for what has now become one of the largest property overhangs in the world.

Commercial real estate vacancies in particular are still rising.

Although about 70 percent of empty lots from three years ago have been filled, the construction of new real estate since then has far outstripped the purchases, more than doubling the amount of vacant space available, said Timothy Trask, the director of corporate ratings at Standard & Poors in Dubai.

Dubai is not the first place where soaring ambitions have outpaced reality. Shanghai, Singapore and Hong Kong all suffered from overbuilding within relatively short time frames. But these places were able to curb their real estate overhangs by drastically reducing construction until demand picked up.

Building is continuing in Dubai, however, even though potential corporate tenants are showing little interest in developments like the Dubai Silicon Oasis or the Jumeirah Lake Towers, an 85-building development that looks like a Las Vegas-version of lower Manhattan planted on the fringes of the desert. Jones Lang LaSalle recently proposed that some buildings should simply be sealed for the next five years, until buyers return.

Even if investors eventually respond to slumping prices, they would still have to be wary of contracts and vigilant about how legal disputes in Dubai are resolved, said Ludmila Yamalova, a managing partner at the law firm HPL Plewka & Coll, who handles lawsuits for individual and commercial property investors.

She recently sued Damac Properties, one of Dubai’s biggest builders, on behalf of a German investor who claims that from 2006 onward he invested nearly $10 million in five off-plan properties that were not delivered on time. The investor, Lothar Hardt, has also claimed that the developer mismanaged escrow accounts related to the properties and that he lost money by signing contracts with retailers who planned to set up shop in the buildings.

Ms. Yamalova is now trying to bring suit in a court run by the Dubai International Financial Center, a government body set up to attract investors, which operates largely on British-based law and is independent of the opaque Dubai court system, where cases are conducted in Arabic and plaintiffs must go through local Emirati representatives.

Dubai’s real estate regulators have issued a flurry of rules since 2008 to clarify the situation and to comfort potential investors. But new rules sometimes contradict others issued just months earlier, often in ways that leave developers with the advantage and property buyers in a legal limbo, making many wary of ever investing in Dubai again, Ms. Yamalova said.

Mr. Coutts, the Jones Lang LaSalle executive, said that because Dubai grew so fast, the government was learning on the job. In more mature markets, “you had 200 years to develop a legal framework,” he said. “It’s now becoming clearer what kind of a legal framework is needed to regulate development here.” "

Dubai Properties Group says all is well

6 October 2010

The Gulf News reported yesterday that Dubai Properties Group (DPG) is focusing this year on the delivery of existing projects and will be set to announce where the rest are heading in 2011.

"We're now in the phase of challenge we must manage carefully. The strategy is to review projects and coordinate closely with all concerned parties to successfully deliver," Khalid Al Malek, group CEO of Dubai Properties Group, told Gulf News.

Less advanced projects are on hold. But Al Malek stressed that none has been cancelled but it is rather about when to bring them back to the market.

"We're reviewing each of them and will have clarity to announce the details next year," he added. The Culture Village, where Damac and Sunland Group have projects, for example, and The Lagoons, Al Malek said are going ahead. Why cancel a beautiful project like The Lagoons, for example, he said.

"We have investors into the project and will support them and are coordinating with the authorities to make sure the infrastructure is there. If developers are serious they can get on with building their projects," he said.

So anyone who has bought into the Lagoons and paid their deposits has to accept an unlimited delay or forfeit their deposits. The projects are not cancelled so no money need be returned.

For 2010 the developer continues to focus on the completion and delivery of existing projects. Phase one of Remraam and The Villa phase two, both in Dubailand, are being prepared for delivery in the second quarter of next year.

Owners and tenants in freehold areas also want what they expected to get when they made the purchase. The absence of beach parks and enough gyms in Jumeirah Beach Residence (JBR) has been an issue for residents.

"We're very focused on delivery and giving customers what they have been promised. We're carrying out surveys as residents demand changes and adapt accordingly," Al Malek said. There is no evidence of any such survey in Executive Towers. I love the fact that CEOs can say anything to the Dubai media and it is taken as fact. Nothing is checked for reality.

In the case of JBR, it will get its first beach club next year as DPG is in the process of completing the transformation of the old sales centre. More gyms are going to emerge with the podiums and prayer rooms have also been requested.

"Several parties have expressed interest in developing the other beach park plots," Al Malek said.

Dubai Properties Group (DPG) says Business Bay "will be completed one way or another". One way or another - what does that mean !?

"Our policy is to make sure Business Bay will look really nice. More and more people are moving in so the environment has to be right. We tell sub-developers they can't just leave their plots like that, whether that is completing their projects or something else," Kahlid Al Malek, group CEO, DPG, told Gulf News. Many sub developers in the development have been facing financial difficulties leaving unfinished structures or empty plots behind. But Al Malek said most of them are willing to complete their projects.

"It is financing which is the issue, we just need banks to lend again. The return of Tamweel was good news. We need more news like that," he said

The developer has put a dedicated team dealing with non-developed plots on-site to communicate with and assist sub-developers. The team has started classifying developers and is sitting with the authorities to find a solution.

Al Malek welcomed the Land Department's recent move to endorse projects already 60 per cent complete in certain areas, including Business Bay, to encourage banks to finance them.

"Any other projects which are not going ahead we have to clean the plots up, they have to look nice," he added.

DPG meanwhile is in the process of handing over the Vision Towers. It expects to complete Bay Square next year and is taking care of the rest of the landscaping of the master-community.

Anyone who lives in Executive Towers will no that this is all talk. Nothing said by Dubai Properties or its subsidiaries should be believed.

Recovery or more gloom?

6 October 2010

There have been some widely different reports on Dubai’s residential property sector in the last few days.

Emirates 24/7 together with the ever loyal Gulf News and Khaleej Times have all excitely reported on Dubai's Cityscape Show which was opened by Sheikh Maktoum bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Deputy Ruler of Dubai.

Cityscape Global 2010 opened for business on Monday. Emirates Business 24.7 descibed the event as being held "amidst a wave of optimism from regional and international investors after a spell of positive economic indicators since the Dubai World debt restructuring was completed earlier in September."

Attendance appears to have been the lowest since the show started with the only real interest being in distressed assets.

Hilariously the show is said to have evolved from Cityscape Dubai as a result of the increased international participation it has attracted. Nonsense. It is just that no one is buying in Dubai.

Chris Waight, Associate Director, Cluttons, Dubai, told Emirates 24|7 that “as long as the property supply doesn’t surpass the demand too much, we should see a stabilisation of Dubai’s residential property prices within the next two to three years. As per the statistics, there are as many as 25,000 residential units scheduled to be developed in Dubai this year as well as in 2011. But it’s not certain whether all of these 25,000 units would be delivered. Although rents would continue to fall gradually, they are expected to flatten out by the end of 2011 and 2012.”

He said Dubai’s property market has switched from being a speculator-driven market to being an end-user market that is a good sign.

But there are few end users. Mortgages are rare. And with no new jobs being created (except in Abu Dhabi) there is little evidence of demand. Any buyers that may exist are adopting a wait-and-see attitude in anticipation that the prices will fall further.

Meanwhile back in the real world JP Morgan have given a much more sober and pessimistic assessment saying that the Dubai real estate market has not yet hit rock bottom and is likely to decline by around 80 percent from the peak prices of 2008 according to the managing director of JP Morgan’s private banking arm.

Paolo Moscovici, head of JP Morgan’s Middle East private banking unit, said prices are currently down by 60 percent and forecast they “might go down another 20 percent. I think that is realistic.”

“It has continued to drop and, peak to trough, I think it could be down 80 percent,” Moscovici told Arabian Business.

Last month it was revealed that 495 of the 980 projects registered with the emirate’s Real Estate Regulatory Agency (RERA) have been scrapped. A poll of regional banks by Reuters found that Dubai property prices have tumbled 55 percent since their peak in 2008.

Moscovici said he believed it would take years for the oversupply problem in the emirate to be rectified. “I personally think it will take five years for all that supply to be absorbed, so prices continue to come down. Do I believe things will come back in Dubai? Yes, but it will take time,” he said.

Nick MacLean, managing director of global real estate consultancy CB Richard Ellis in Dubai, agreed with Moscovici’s forecast for a further decline in prices. However, he believed the emirate’s property market is fragmented, with some areas having already hit bottom.

“I think that [Moscovici] is right in certain locations. Some parts of the market are still clearly falling and have a long way to fall.”

However, he said some areas, such as Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC), Emaar Square and Sheikh Zayed Road have shown some price stability and prices were unlikely to decline further.

“The best located buildings, in single ownership [and] of a high standard have reached the bottom, but those that are geographically challenged still have some way to go,” he said.
 

Tim Clark on the A380

6 October 2010

Tim Clark, President of Emirates Airline made a few comments on the airline's A380 operations in an interview with Airliners.de.

He said that:

EK currently does not plan to introduce two-class only A380 as they are seeing good premium loads (C and F).

Load factors in premium in all markets are better then projected.

When the two-class A380 come the will have only 575-585 instead of 604 seats as they want to keep the bar on the upper floor.

After receiving their 15th A380 in November they will get the next only in September 2011. Remember it was Emirates who asked for this delay in deliveries - I always assumed that this was so that they could complete the new concourse at DXB which is dedicated to A380 traffic. Clark is now suggesting that he needs the A380s earlier as business has returned quickly and Boeings 777 deliveries are slow.

Ideally EK would need 120 A380s if there were no airport capacity restrictions.

He also added that there are no new concessions with regards to flying to further German airports. Emirates wants rights to Berlin and Stuttgart. Lufthansa is lobbying hard to keep then out. But just how many German jobs has EK provided through its 90 plane A380 order. Germany needs to offer something in return.

In the interview there is also a reference to a possible restart of the HAM - JFK route, but that the unavailability of aircraft is an issue.

Dubai finds itself between Hollywood and reality

5 October 2010 - The Financial Times

"When I read that the fourth movie in the Mission Impossible series would soon be filming in Dubai, my mind went back to a conversation I had with a local official a few years ago.

Notice, he said, how often Dubai’s name was being mentioned in Hollywood movies. He pointed to this as evidence that the city-state had most definitely become a player on the international stage.The conversation took place during the days of Dubai’s rise. As boom turned to bust and the global financial crisis struck, Dubai probably wished it had never made it to Hollywood.

One reference to the emirate I came across this year was anything but flattering: in a scene in the second Sex and the City film, Dubai was described as a story of the past, while its sister and richer emirate, Abu Dhabi, was portrayed as the future – though by the end of the movie Abu Dhabi too had received its share of abuse.

Will the latest Mission Impossible show us Dubai is back?

I have no idea how the movie depicts the emirate. But, judging by the satisfaction evinced by the government, whose media office proudly announced last week that “filming in Dubai would be the longest among other international cities that will feature in MI4”, I suspect there will be few complaints locally.

Every little image-boost helps, even if movies are certainly not what will decide Dubai’s fate. In any case, it makes a welcome change to see Dubai portrayed in a more favourable light after two years of financial struggle.

A string of happier news, from the near completed restructuring of the troubled Dubai World conglomerate, to a successful return to international capital markets via a sovereign bond issue, and another convertible bond launched by developer Emaar Properties, suggest the emirate’s image is beginning to turn. At least investors are now willing to believe that fixing the emirate is not a mission impossible.

But Dubai is not out of the woods: a more than $100bn debt pile and a moribund real estate market still cast a shadow over the city. A report by Cluttons, the real estate specialist, released on Monday, shows that residential rents and sales are still falling, even if not as fast as a year ago.

What is more, for all the attention on the bond issue, the funds were raised by the emirate’s government, not the troubled state-backed conglomerates. Lenders probably under the assumption that Abu Dhabi would back Dubai’s sovereign debt.

For a template of how Dubai is likely to deal with the debts of other government-related companies – and these are Dubai Inc’s over-ambitious, over-leveraged entities – the Dubai World deal, in which lenders have had to share in the pain of restructuring, is the better indicator.

“The signal from the bond issue is limited to the central government’s own finances, which are not really the subject of much discomfort,” says Farouk Soussa, chief economist for the Middle East at Citigroup. The real question, he argues, is: “To what extent will the contingent liabilities of Dubai Inc burden government finances? ... The bond issue provides no greater clarity on that subject.”

More broadly, the real question for Dubai is how much it has learnt from its past mistakes. The bond prospectus offers encouraging signs on that score, underlining that the emirate has reassessed its strategic plans and will now focus on sectors where it has traditionally been strong – transport and storage, tourism and retail. Gone are construction and even financial services.

On the management front too, there has been some change, as a more traditional old guard has been put back in charge of the city’s restructuring.

If it can stick to what it now promises to do, returning to the core businesses that drove its rise as a regional hub in the first place – and, most importantly, if it can stick to more reasonable ambitions – Dubai will be back, and not only in the movies."

Sports picture of the year?

5 October 2010

This is the moment when Mail on Sunday photographer Mark Pain found himself in the line of fire at the Ryder Cup - at the 18th hole on Saturday as Toger Woods shanks from the rough.

Woods was partnering Steve Stricker and attempted to chip his third shot on the final hole of their fourball against Europe's Ian Poulter and Ross Fisher on to the green.

But Woods hit the ground behind the ball and shanked the shot straight at Pain. The photographer's reaction was not to dive out of the way but to take this picture just before the ball hit his camera, bounced on to his chest and came to rest at his feet.

For the record, Pain was using a Nikon D3S camera, with a 24-70 mm lens and a shutter speed of 1/1000 of a second.

But there is so much more to the picture: look at it. The eyes of every single person in the shot, chief among them the world's most famous, and infamous, athlete, are focused directly at you (and of course by you we mean at the lens of photographer Mark Pain of The Daily Mail). Then there's the golf ball, which is hurtling straight at you like a meteor.

Check out the pained expression on the face of Woods' caddy, Steve Williams (red windbreaker). He realizes earlier than most that his boss has shanked the shot.

Best of all is the turbaned, cigar-chomping, Groucho Marx hipster dude on the right. Who is this guy? Why hasn't he been on TV yet.

Cigar Guy is the most outstanding member of the gallery. What else do you see? Any other people of African-American descent outside of Tiger? Any Asian? How many females? Only one in the first three or four rows.

The picture has gone viral. Cigar Guy has been photoshopped into all sorts of situations. But I will let you search for them.

Tough sport golf - not just avoiding balls - as over the weekend there were at least six fractured ankles and one dislocated shoulder as well as three suspected heart attacks.

Woods is back

5 October 2010

The USA may have lost the Ryder Cup but a great individual career might just have been rekindled.

Tiger Woods, despite suffering his biggest-ever matchplay defeat on Sunday, ended up as joint-top scorer in the event with Steve Stricker, Luke Donald and Ian Poulter and although it was the last thing on the minds of thousands of rapturous European supporters as they jigged back to the coach parks, it could be that they had been present at Tiger's competitive rebirth.

His card read nine under par when his singles match against Francesco Molinari came to an end on the 15th green. No one could have beaten Tiger on that form.

Having reduced the deficit to one-down with a birdie at the sixth, Woods birdied the long ninth to make the match all-square, the start of an astonishing run of five birdies and an eagle in seven holes, which gave him an emphatic 4&3 victory.

With Steve Stricker he was hammered 6&5 in the second round of foursomes on Sunday, by the rampant Lee Westwood and Luke Donald, but yesterday's performance was the response of a champion.

Indeed, if there was a major championship next week, it might once again be safe to wager the mortgage on him.

In truth, his round yesterday was like his entire golfing career writ small, featuring brilliance — not least, a full wedge shot holed for an eagle two on the 12th — as well as petulance, dazzling smiles as well as angry expletives, and even one shot that belonged to a 16-handicapper mucking up the midweek medal.

That shot, a clumsy chip on the par-five second, yielded merely a par when he had all but reached the green, more than 600 yards from the tee, in two. After that he scarcely put a foot wrong.

With Woods these days, of course, there is also the ever-present issue of his not-so-private private life, which the huge crowds at Celtic Manor were, for the most part, too respectful to mention.

True, there was the odd chant of “Elin is a Euro,” a cheeky reference to his Swedish ex-wife, and there were some ironic cheers when he was spotted hugging a couple of his team-mates' spouses once his match was over, but the Tiger-baiting could have been a great deal worse and in fact a highly supportive tone was struck as early as last Thursday's opening ceremony — it already seems like months ago — when his name drew a much bigger ovation than that of any of his team-mates.

He was manifestly moved by that reception and repaid it not only with the quality of some of his golf, but even with some generosity of spirit, not always in plentiful supply when Tiger is a loser.

As he was driven away in a buggy from the celebrations that erupted on the 17th green after Europe had won back the cup, he asked the driver to stop so that he could smilingly sign autographs.

It was a classy thing to do by a man whose class as a golfer has never been in the slightest doubt, but whose class as a human-being has been questioned relentlessly and let's be honest, perhaps rather unfairly. As for his points tally, it thoroughly undermines the notion that he is not really a team man. He missed the 2008 Ryder Cup through injury, but he was the biggest US points scorer four years ago at the K Club, too.

Arrested for poor sandals?

5 October 2010

Thailand's political repression continues in the strangest of ways. At the weekend a woman was arrested at a red-shirt event in Ayutthaya for selling slippers with Abhisit’s face on them.

On 3 Oct, at about 5 pm, police arrested Amornwan Charoenkij, 42, for an offence under Section 9(3) of the Emergency Decree which prohibits ‘press releases and distribution or dissemination of letters, publications or any means of communication containing texts which may instigate fear amongst the people or is intended to distort information which leads to a misunderstanding of the emergency situation to the extent of affecting the security of the state or public order or the good morals of the people either in the area or locality where an emergency situation has been declared or the entire Kingdom.’

That by the way is a nasty piece of legislation which could be used to stop any form of political debate.

Amornwan said that she had sold the slippers at red-shirt gatherings at Ratchaprasong, Imperial shopping mall [red-shirt headquarters in Lad Phrao, Bangkok] and in Chiang Mai. In addition she is selling rice with omelets.

"It’s hard to make ends meet. What’s so wrong with just selling slippers? I have to live with it. If you’re a red shirt, anything you do will be wrong,’ she said, adding that she had joined rallies since 3-4 years ago at Sanam Luang because she could not tolerate what is wrong, despite the fact that she was born in Trang and always voted for the Democrat Party.

She expected that the remaining 40 pairs of slippers, out of 60 she had brought to sell, would be confiscated by the police. The slippers were printed with a message, ‘People died at Ratchaprasong,’ and photos of Abhisit and Suthep Thaugsuban.

‘When asked by the police, I answered frankly that people did die there. What else could I say? I had no problems selling these elsewhere. This is too much. These are not weapons.’

She said that, in fact, local policemen had bought several pairs from her, and they probably showed them to others, resulting in her arrest.

Ayutthaya is not under the Emergency Decree which adds to the concern.

Presumably the search is on for the “terrorists” who manufactured the shoes.

Meanwhile as the Bangkok Post has been ranting all weekend child pornography is openly being sold by market vendors along Sukhumvit Road. Priorities are a real problem for the Thai authorities.

The full Monty

5 October 2010

It was a bit closer than expected - just a point in it with only four European winners in the final twelve singles matches; with two  matches finishing all square. Even the sun shone at last.

Below is the obligatory picture with girls from Emirates who were a major sponsor; and pictures of a winner and loser; the wonderful Miguel-Angel Jimenez and a disappointed Tiger Woods.
 

No evidence required

4 October 2010

With tears in his eyes, Bhum Jai Thai Party de facto leader Newin Chidchob Monday begged former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra to stop harming Thailand and Thai people.

Newin alleged that Thaksin was behind the alleged training of gunmen in a neighbouring country to assassinate important figures in Thailand.

Too much. Does anyone ever believe anything that Newin says?

Newin may be the government’s leading supporter, but he remains a banned politician. In theory.

Newin says the "former boss" has put up 20 million baht for the assassination. "There are a few people in this country who hate me and are angry with me, but there is only one person who can afford to hire somebody to harm me," Newin said. Thai assassins are not that expensive !

Claims of assassination plots have been abundant in recent years; including against Thaksin when he was PM. Newin claimed that Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, Deputy Prime Minister Suthep Thaugsuban, Defence Minister Prawit Wongsuwon and former national army chief Anupong Paojinda were also probably on the hit list.

A little evidence would be nice before throwing around wild claims. But this is the uber-ambitious Newin and it is Thailand. And his message is just what the government and the CRES needed to continue the state of emergency which was conveniently renewed this morning !

A tale of two cities

3 October 2010
 

There can be few places more different than Bedford and London and few venues more different than The Corn Exchange and the Borderline Club.

It was Friday night that a handful of Blue Rodeo faithful and some curious Bedfordians gathered in the Corn Exchange. The concert was originally to be held in the much smaller Harpur Suite with a capacity of about 160. Instead we gathered in the far larger Corn Exchange Building.

Honestly this was the strangest of venues for the band. Yes it is on the way from Leeds to London – but then so are Birmingham, Coventry and other much larger cities. Bedford is a quiet rather conservative market town.

And as we gathered – after a quick visit to the very friendly-priced bar – we sat at round tables as though we were attending a corporate presentation or the aftermath of the wedding reception. Strange. The people at my table were very friendly but had never seen or heard Blue Rodeo. But to the credit of the Bedford venue they have the most varied of concert schedules and entertainers and seem to be well supported in the community.

Up first – local band – The WhyBirds – retro rock, and with more hair that almost anyone in the audience. They are popular locally and were well received.

Then the hard working Luke Doucet – solo – singing his own songs – with piano on one song from Mike Boguski. Loved the story of writing a song for his ex. That should frighten off any other romantic interest.

And then Blue Rodeo; with Luke Doucet as Luke Doucet rather than as a baby-faced Greg Keelor.

The playlist:

Candice
Better off as we are
Waiting for the world
Always getting better
One more night
Now and Forever
5 Days in May
Bad Timing (vocals shared with LD)
Finger Lakes
Walk like you don’t Mind
Basil sings – Stage Door
Rain Down on Me
Montreal
Cinema
Photograph
Till I am Myself
Head over Heels

Encore:

Mystic River
Try
It could happen to you

Sorry if I missed anything. I like Luke Doucet. Yes I miss Greg and it is a different show as the playlist shows. But the band always look like they are enjoying themselves. But this was not really a party crowd. It was a sit back and listen crowd. But they enjoyed what they heard. Mr. Cuddy got a few people dancing. Not me – my other half could not get the time away from work to be in the UK.

So that was Bedford. It was almost midnight before the show wrapped up. Mr. Cuddy did his PR role generously to shake hands and take pictures. And I caught the 1.20 back to St Pancras – I can report there are some interesting folk on those late night trains – including three guests from the concert – I enjoyed meeting you!

And so to London. Now the Borderline is like an old student union bar. Other than a few people who must have arrived mid afternoon to grab the handful of seats, it is standing room only for an audience (I guess) of 300+. And this was an audience of either Blue Rodeo faithful or homesick Canadians. And it was a singalong. The band had fun. The energy was great.

Luke Doucet opened with his solo show. His ex girlfriend must really dislike him by now!

Then Kacey Cubero – she is also headlining her own tour in England at the moment – and that includes Bedford later in the month. I thought she might sing a song or two with Blue Rodeo – but no. Opportunity missed?

And then Blue Rodeo. Now I think Luke Doucet was fabulous tonight. Some of his guitar work is outstanding and he appears very comfortable with the band and fronting alongside Jim Cuddy.

By popular request there had to be one Greg Keelor song – to try Diamond Mine was ambitious – maybe more coal mine than diamond mine – but it was fun, it shows off the band so the lyrics don’t matter so much and the audience loved it. Thanks to one of the audience for helping out on vocals!

But the Borderline has a 10.30pm curfew so time was limited. No Finger Lakes, Stage door, Rain down on me, Montreal or Mystic River. The encore was Try and a fabulous Trust Yourself.

It was raining cats and dogs outside. It still is. Time to head back to the Desert.

PS - I know that technically Bedford is a town and not a city - but that would spoil the headline !

On my wish list

2 October 2010

The Nikon D7000 is set to be the replacement for the über-popular D90 DSLR snapper.

Among the expected features are a 16.2MP sensor (up from the D90’s 12.3MPs), 6fps shooting and a dual SD card slot. From the photo you can see a dedicated live view switch to the right of the screen, as well as a dual mode dial on the left shoulder.

The D7000 should also take on many of the new features seen in the entry-level Nikon D3100 like Full HD video with autofocus (the D90 only manages 720p and no autofocus).

It’s expected to be out in October, but we’ll be briging you all the details after the announcement.
 

The Ryder Cup sell out

1 October 2010

When legendary singer Tom Jones was asked about the rain today at the Ryder Cup in Wales, he said "It's not unusual." But 45,000 people paid gbp100 each to stand in the rain for 7 hours yesterday. They got four hours of golf and not one of the opening four matches was concluded.

That the crowd seemed determined to enjoy the day was to their great credit.

But it should never have come to this. The Ryder Cup has been sold out to hard cash - and the biggest losers are the golf fans.

Rain happens, of course, but the responsibility of the organisers of the 38th Ryder Cup was always to set acceptable levels of risk and by pitching the event so late in the year, on a course where millions spent on drainage could never match the natural facility of the sandy linksland of some of Britain's best and most prestigious golf courses, any burden of care for the live spectators was disastrously neglected.

As play resumed in early evening, officials conceded that forecasts of further grim weather on Sunday means there is limited hope of completing the match before Monday – and no guarantee against a farcical, arbitrary guillotining on play at a sunset timed for 6.43pm that evening.

At that time any matches on the course would be declared halved whatever the score. Useless. The Ryder Cup limps to a farcical conclusion.

Part of the responsibility undoubtedly belonged to the US PGA Tour. The tour required the Ryder Cup dates be pushed back in order to protect the tournament that represents their biggest motherlode of hard cash, the FedEx Cup which last week left American team member Jim Furyk $11.5m (£7.25m) richer.

Denied revenue from major tournaments – and the Ryder Cup – the American tour fiercely protects the place of the FedEx on the golf calendar. The Ryder Cup date has simply been pushed back and back.

Profits may have been secured but as yesterday's inclusive action came to a close there was another reason to believe that financial opportunity had come at too high a price. The match might just be settled by tomorrow night. But already a change of format which takes away much of the challenges facing the rival captains. Montgomerie and Pavin are no longer required to leave out players on the way to the singles showdown with the introduction of a final team session of two foursomes and four fourballs. This rips away the character of this Ryder Cup. It is, more than anything, another bogey for greed.

And as a part of the sell out the Ryder Cup gave the UK TV rights to minority broadcaster - Sky TV. Sky is a satellite delivered pay network. The Ryder Cup has always been on the terrestrial BBC network until now. So millions of TV viewers have missed out; and to be honest, the Ryder Cup has lost much of its interest.