Search Results for: saudi arabia

BY RAGHAVENDRA VERMA

May 31, 2009, a quiet Sunday morning at Mumbai’s ChhatrapatiShivaji International Airport: Air India flight 348 to New Delhi and Jet Airways 651 to Calcutta had accelerated on their runways to 180 km per hour when just seconds before take-off they made emergency stops.…

BY SAMI HALABI

BEFORE the county’s 1975-90 civil war Lebanon was an oil transit nation, with pipelines running through its territory from Saudi Arabia, and export terminals on its shores. Today, the country cannot even produce the electricity it needs to power its cities and is completely dependent on imports of oil and gas for energy.…

By Paul Cochrane

Countless times I’ve read analysis and the blurb on the back of books that the Middle East is ‘on the brink’, a ‘tinderbox’ ready to explode due to the nepotistic nature of governments and the dire economic conditions of much of the region.…

BY DEIRDRE MASON

As governments wake up to the need of establishing an infrastructure of charging points for electric vehicles (EVs), commercial players are offering anything from the expertise to set up the network down to the individual chargers. Some innovations will clearly make life a lot easier for those with the job of making the EV marketable.…

BY MEGAN DETRIE

A KEY figure in the Egyptian textile industry has called on his government to invest in the two companies recently re-nationalised, following a court decision which ruled illegal their privatisation by the deposed Mubarak regime.

Judges said that the Shebin El-Kom Textile Company (which has major international clothing sector clients), and the Tanta Company for Linen and Derivatives (which does not sell to the clothing sector) had been sold off without sufficient due process, restoring the companies’ ownership to the state.…

BY PAUL COCHRANE

SAUDI Arabia is rapidly developing the extraction of its bountiful mineral resources, with international companies inking contracts over the past month to explore for zinc, copper and gold. Australian mining company Alara Resources announced that it is to buy a 50% interest in the Khnaiguiyah (NOTE – SPELLING IS CORRECT) zinc and copper project, and the Mutiyah and Umm Hijja projects (all are west of the capital Riyadh) through a joint venture with the Saudi-based United Arabian Mining (Manjem), according to a company statement.…

BY SAMI HALABI

THE LEBANESE government is preparing tenders for around US$13 million security improvements at Beirut-Rafic Hariri International Airport, after a stowaway incident prompted a review. In July, maintenance crews in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia found the deceased body of 20-year old Firas Haidar in the landing gear of a flight from Beirut.…

BY PAUL COCHRANE

THE MULTI-BILLION dollar cosmetics and fragrances industry in the Middle East’s six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries has had a mixed few years in the wake of the global financial crisis, made more unpredictable by demographic change and purchasing behaviour shifts.…

BY PAUL COCHRANE

MUSLIM fashion is traditionally conservative – a far cry from the often flashy fashion runways of the West. But a younger Muslim generation of female ‘hijabistas’ is combining Islamic values with high fashion, working hijabs and other head coverings into high-end, high fashion knitted and crocheted outfits.…

BY MARK ROWE

IS the recession’s worst over for the jet fuel aviation industry? Passenger traffic during this late spring and summer has risen sharply compared with flights year-on-year, giving hope to an industry that Giovanni Bisignani, director general of the International Air Transport Association (IATA), described last year as "structurally sick".…