Tag Archives: education
Mursi backers defiant
Mursi backers defiant (AFP) / 12 July 2013 Tens of thousands of supporters of ousted president Mohammed Mursi gathered on Friday vowing to keep fighting for his reinstatement, as rival rallies defending his overthrow underlined Egypt’s bitter divisions. Supporters of Mohammed Mursi wave national flags during a rally outside Cairo’s Rabaa Al Adawiya mosque on Friday. — AFP The rallies come as Germany called for the release of Mursi, who is being held in a “safe place, for his safety” and has not yet been charged, according to the foreign ministry. Holding Egyptian flags and Korans, protesters gathered out-side the Rabaa Al Adawiya mosque in Cairo’s Nasr City neighbourhood, chanting against the military and pledging allegiance to Mursi. “We will continue to resist. We will stay one or two months, or even one or two years. We won’t leave here until our president, Mohammed Mursi, comes back,” influential Islamist leader Safwat Hegazi told the crowd. Hegazi demanded the reinstatement of Egypt’s first freely elected president, immediate parliamentary elections and a committee to oversee a plan for national reconciliation. Mursi supporters set up a field kitchen to cook Iftar for demonstrators. Thousands also massed in support of the ousted president outside the University of Cairo, watched over by a heavy security presence. Despite the turnouts and defiant mood, the gathering has been increasingly out of step with political developments as the interim authorities press ahead with forming a new government and Gulf states help support the faltering economy. The Muslim Brotherhood, the influential Islamist group from which Mursi emerged, is now in tatters, its leadership detained, on the run or keeping a low profile following Mursi’s July 3 overthrow by the military. Pro-Mursi protesters arrived from across the country to join hundreds already camped out at the Rabaa Al Adawiya mosque. The anti-Mursi camp also called huge rallies after Friday in Tahrir Square and at the Ittihadiya presidential palace, with a mass iftar planned at sundown. In Tahrir Square, several dozen demonstrators gathered under a scorching midday sun, adamant that their numbers would rise later. “It is because of the heat and Ramadan, when we have a fast. During the day, people stay at home but this evening, people will come to Tahrir,” Gamal, 48, said. The rival rallies have raised fears of more of the violence that has shaken Egypt since the army removed Mursi after millions of demonstrators demanded his resignation. In the worst incident, clashes at an army building in Cairo on Monday killed 53 people, mostly Mursi supporters. The Brotherhood accuses the army of “massacring” its supporters, while the army says soldiers were attacked by “terrorists” and armed protesters. On Friday, gunmen in the Suez Canal city of Ismailia killed a police conscript and wounded an officer when they tried to stop a vehicle the armed group was travelling in, MENA reported on Friday. The gunmen escaped, but security forces were tracking them down, Ismailiya police chief General Mohamed Eid told MENA. The restive Sinai peninsula, home to Egypt’s luxury Red Sea resorts, has been hit by a surge of violence, with militants killing a police officer in a rocket attack on a checkpoint early on Friday, officials said. A Coptic Christian man was found decapitated on Thursday five days after being kidnapped, and on Wednesday, two people died in an attack on a security checkpoint in the Sinai. Continue reading
Out in the heat without a shade
Out in the heat without a shade Staff Reporter / 12 July 2013 Commuters waiting at bus stops, carrying bags and shielding their faces with sunglasses and scarves is not an unusual sight. But, what is being done about the lack of bus shelters at key traffic junctions in the city? Air conditioning of all shelters has not yet been achieved, and most stops do not have tinted glass to shield them form direct sunlight. When Khaleej Times asked the Roads and Transports Authority why there were neither sunshades nor a place to sit at many stops — including the one opposite Deira City Centre which is used by hundreds of passengers daily — acting director of planning and business development Essa Al Hashemi said: “We are currently installing shades in most of the heavy passenger generation points. Waiting platforms at bus stations will be totally sun-protected during hot months.” He assured Khaleej Times that “robust criteria has been developed to ensure effective utilisation of current shades and many reallocation and installments have occurred to cover the main bus stops including Al Ghubaiba, Al Qouz, Al Karama and Gold Souq.” Miriam Khan, a 32-year-old receptionist at the head office of a beverage distillery in Deira says she faces a problem getting buses because her office was away from the main route. She said she took the metro to work from her Karama home. “But I have to change to the bus. At one stop, the bus comes to the metro station at Baniyas, so I don’t feel the heat … it’s alright because of the air conditioning in the metro, but my neighbour who has to go to office in Ghusais says she has to be even careful about what she carries for lunch, as waiting for a bus in the heat ruins the food.” While the RTA has in the past promised to expand the number of air conditioned shelters, Al Hashimi said: “superior design and technology are adopted for the AC shelters and more than 650 such shelters are located across Dubai. RTA has planned to expand this project to cover other bus stops categorised by passenger volumes and availability of infrastructure.” Dubai buses The Dubai bus fleet consists of 1,574 buses that operate on 22 Dubai Metro Feeder routes out of the 86 inner routes covering 85 per cent of Dubai’s urban districts. The Dubai bus fleet covers over 5,759,116 kilometres (as of February 2013). Service volumes are adjusted on Fridays and public holidays in relation to the passenger demand. Around 309,992 passengers travel per day. The bus fleet made of custom-built and equipped with comfortable seats dedicated for ladies and children, air-conditioning, special needs facilities, electronically operated destination display system and computerised fare equipment. nivriti@khaleejtimes.com Continue reading
Malala celebrates birthday with UN address
Malala celebrates birthday with UN address (Reuters) / 12 July 2013 In her first speech since the Taleban in Pakistan tried to kill her for advocating education for girls, Malala Yousafzai celebrated her 16th birthday on Friday at the United Nations, appealing for compulsory free schooling for all children. Wearing a pink head scarf, Yousafzai told U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and nearly 1,000 students from around the world attending a Youth Assembly at U.N. headquarters in New York that education was the only way to improve lives. “Let us pick up our books and pens. They are our most powerful weapons. One child, one teacher, one pen and one book can change the world. Education is the only solution,” she said. Yousafzai was shot in the head at close range by gunmen in October as she left school in Pakistan’s Swat Valley, northwest of the country’s capital Islamabad, after campaigning against the Islamist Taleban efforts to deny women education. She presented Ban with a petition signed by nearly 4 million people in support of 57 million children who are not able to go to school and demanding that world leaders fund new teachers, schools and books and end child labor, marriage and trafficking. U.N. Special Envoy for Global Education, former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, said Friday’s event was not just a celebration of Malala’s birthday and her recovery, but of her vision. “Her dream that nothing, no political indifference, no government inaction, no intimidation, no threats, no assassin’s bullets should ever deny the right of every single child … to be able to go to school,” said Brown. Pakistan has 5 million children out of school, a number only surpassed by Nigeria, which has more than 10 million children out of school, according to U.N. cultural agency UNESCO. Most of those are girls. Islamist gunmen killed 27 students and a teacher on Saturday in a boarding school in northeast Nigeria. It was the deadliest of at least three attacks on schools in Nigeria since the military launched an offensive in May to try to crush Islamist insurgent group Boko Haram, whose nickname translates as “Western education is sinful” in the northern Hausa language. The Taleban claimed responsibility for the assassination attempt on Yousafzai, calling her efforts pro-Western. Two of her classmates were also wounded. Yousafzai was treated in Britain, where doctors mended parts of her skull with a titanium plate. Unable to safely return to Pakistan, she started at a school in Birmingham in March. Tehreek-e-Taleban Pakistan (TTP), formed in 2007, is an umbrella group uniting various militant factions operating in Pakistan’s volatile northwestern tribal areas along the porous border with Afghanistan. Under Taleban rule in neighboring Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, women were forced to cover up and were banned from voting, most work and leaving their homes unless accompanied by a husband or male relative. Continue reading
