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Obama seeking congress nod for Syria action
Obama seeking congress nod for Syria action (Agencies) / 1 September 2013 Delaying what had loomed as an imminent strike, President Barack Obama abruptly announced on Saturday that he will seek congressional approval before launching any military action meant to punish Syria for its alleged use of chemical weapons in an attack that killed hundreds. With Navy ships on standby in the Mediterranean Sea ready to launch their cruise missiles, Obama said he had decided the United States should take military action and that he believes he has “the authority to carry out this military action without specific congressional authorisation.” At the same time, he said, “I know that the country will be stronger if we take this course and our actions will be even more effective.” Congress is scheduled to return from a summer vacation on September 9. The president didn’t say so, but his strategy carries enormous risks to his and the nation’s credibility, which the administration has argued forcefully is on the line in Syria. Obama long ago said the use of chemical weapons was a “red line” that Syrian President Bashar Assad would not be allowed to cross with impunity. British Prime Minister David Cameron, who suffered a humiliating defeat when the House of Commons refused to support his call for military action against Syria, said on Saturday that he understood President Barack Obama’s decision to ask the US Congress to authorise military action against Syria. “I understand and support Barack Obama’s position on Syria,” the British prime minister said in a tweet. The developments marked a stunning turn in an episode in which Obama has struggled to gain international support for a strike, while dozens of lawmakers at home urged him to seek their backing. Halfway around the world, Syrians awoke on Saturday to state television broadcasts of tanks, planes and other weapons of war, and troops training, all to a soundtrack of martial music. Assad’s government blames rebels in the August 21 attack, and has threatened retaliation if it is attacked. Russian President Vladimir Putin, saying he was appealing to a Nobel Peace laureate rather than to a president, urged Obama to reconsider. A group that monitors casualties in the long Syrian civil war challenged the United States to substantiate its claim that 1,429 died in a chemical weapons attack, including more than 400 children. The new timetable gives time for UN inspectors to receive preliminary lab results from the samples they took during four days in Damascus. Fully assessing the evidence collected by weapons inspectors could take up to three weeks, the organisation in charge of the investigation said on Saturday. United Nations inspectors arrive at the headquarters of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), in The Hague, on August 31. -AFP The team, which included nine experts from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) and three from the World Health Organisation, arrived at the OPCW’s Hague headquarters on Saturday evening after leaving Syria early in the morning. “The evidence collected by the team will now undergo laboratory analysis and technical evaluation according to the established and recognised procedures and standards,” the OPCW said in a statement. The group’s leader was expected to brief Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Sunday. Republicans expressed satisfaction at Obama’s decision, and challenged him to make his case to the public and lawmakers alike that American power should be used to punish Assad. “We are glad the president is seeking authorisation for any military action in Syria in response to serious, substantive questions being raised,” House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio and other House Republican leaders said in a joint statement. “In consultation with the president, we expect the House to consider a measure the week of September 9th. This provides the president time to make his case to Congress and the American people.” It appeared that effort at persuasion was already well underway. The administration arranged a series of weekend briefings for lawmakers, both classified and unclassified, and Obama challenged lawmakers to consider “what message will we send to a dictator” if he is allowed to kill hundreds of children with chemical weapons without suffering any retaliation. While lawmakers are scheduled to return to work September 9, officials said it was possible the Senate might come back to session before then. Obama said on Friday that he was considering “limited and narrow” steps to punish Assad, adding that US national security interests were at stake. He pledged no US combat troops on the ground in Syria, where a civil war has claimed more than 100,000 civilian lives. With Obama struggling to gain international backing for a strike, Putin urged him to reconsider his plans. “We have to remember what has happened in the last decades, how many times the United States has been the initiator of armed conflict in different regions of the world, said Putin, a strong Assad ally. “Did this resolve even one problem?” Even the administration’s casualty estimate was grist for controversy. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an organization that monitors casualties in the country, said it has confirmed 502 deaths, nearly 1,000 fewer than the American intelligence assessment claimed. Rami Abdel Rahman, the head of the organisation, said he was not contacted by US officials about his efforts to collect information about the death toll. “America works only with one part of the opposition that is deep in propaganda,” he said, and urged the Obama administration to release the information its estimate is based on. In the hours before Obama’s Rose garden announcement, he was joined at the White House by top advisers. Vice-President Joseph Biden, who had planned a holiday weekend at home in Delaware, was among them. So, too, were Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel, Secretary of State John Kerry and other top administration officials. Continue reading
Time is over for Abu Dhabi govt staff to relocate
Time is over for Abu Dhabi govt staff to relocate Silvia Radan (Special Report) / 1 September 2013 Abu Dhabi govt employees who shift base from other emirates may find bigger space for a little more money, but their working spouses will now have the highway blue The deadline for Abu Dhabi government employees living outside the emirate to move to the capital has arrived. Starting today, thousands of Dubai and Sharjah residents working for a government office in Abu Dhabi should no longer be commuting. However, the first expected effect of this move, traffic ease on the Abu Dhabi – Dubai highway, has not been visible. “In the past couple of months I had to drive several times to Dubai and the traffic was as heavy as always,” said Diana Oliver, a six-year resident of Abu Dhabi. “I presume this decision was made to reduce the highway traffic, which would also lessen the environmental impact with less pollution on the roads, and also the traffic accidents, especially in the early morning hours when fog often occurs,” she said. Oliver recently moved to Khalifa City, just outside Abu Dhabi, where she is taking care of her two young children, but her husband is still driving daily to work into the city and feels the traffic has become heavier here. “He needs to leave five to 10 minutes earlier every morning since the end of Ramadan. Mind you, this may be also because of people returning from holidays and work hours going back to normal,” Oliver said. The family moved to Khalifa City in March this year, at a time when the property market was still reasonable. Since then, rent for both small apartments and villas have gone up gradually. Government employees living outside Abu Dhabi had over a year to change their residence and many preferred to do it earlier rather than at the last minute, to beat the expected rent rise – which economists say rose about eight per cent in the first quarter of the year alone. Among them was B.M., who spoke with Khaleej Times anonymously since most Abu Dhabi government employees are not allowed to speak publically without a prior approval. “We moved in April to avoid rents going up. We got a much better deal here than we had in Dubai,” he said. B.M. used to live in a flat in Dubai Marina, with one parking space. Now he and his family stay in a three bedroom villa in Al Reef, with a garden and a driveway for four cars – useful since his wife drives to work and needs her own car. “Last year we paid nearly Dh90,000 for the flat in Marina, but rents in Dubai are going up as the job market is improving, so this year we would have ended up paying almost the same as we do here, in Al Reef – Dh 110,000. And you can’t compare a villa with a flat; we have got more space now and a green area outdoors,” said B.M. Moving house, especially for a family with two children was not a cheap affair. In B.M.’s case, the cost was Dh8,000. Of this, Dh6,000 was the moving company costs, the rest being other related fees. According to various moving companies, the cost of relocating from Dubai to Abu Dhabi is mostly the charges for packing and unpacking – it only adds about Dh300-500 per truck. For B.M. it was certainly pricy, yet worth it. Living at a 15-minute drive from work, in a more comfortable house had made life much better for him, he said, with the added bonus of finding a good nearby school for his children. But it’s not happy days for everyone. “It’s all good for me, but now my wife has to commute. She has a really good job in Dubai and doesn’t want to leave it, so she drives there daily. I guess a lot of people in our situation do the same, so the highway traffic may ease off on one side, but pick up on the other.” The close proximity to the Dubai highway, where many family members of those who had to move still work and where social lives are often centred, is a reason for many to search for accommodation in areas such as Al Reef, Al Raha Gardens and Khalifa City. The rents are also much lower than downtown Abu Dhabi. For single individuals, Khalifa City remains the “Mecca”, with good facilities and a location near Abu Dhabi city centre, Dubai, Yas Island and Al Ain. Yet, Khalifa City is a red light for anyone looking for a flat. Intended for Emiratis who were granted land to build their homes there, most private developers built villas, got it approved by the municipality, then leased it to a real estate agency, which has split the villa into apartments – then rented to individuals illegally. Most people, especially those new to Abu Dhabi, were unaware of the legal status, and followed a fairly simple procedure of viewing properties with real estate agents, finding one they liked, signing the contract and moving in. Regular municipality raids in Khalifa City have now drawn tenants’ attention to the illegal status, and because their rent contract does not bear the municipality stamp some are landed with a fine and told they have two weeks to move out. Getting the rent back is out of the question, as the real estate companies are not found at fault by anyone, while those licensed by the municipality continue to rent out illegal properties to anyone who doesn’t know the rules. “Etihad Airways, which has its headquarters in Khalifa City, had 200 employees this year who lost their rentals and had to move out of their homes in Khalifa City,” revealed M.T., a new Etihad employee who moved from Dubai to Abu Dhabi a couple of months ago. “Initially I was planning to find accommodation in Khalifa City, but we were told to stay away from it as most villa flats come with illegal contracts. Only when you rent out a full villa do you get the municipality approved stamp on the contract,” she added. M.T. has found a Dh60,000 one bedroom flat in the 15 minutes drive further away Al Reef, which is Dh10,000 more expensive and smaller in space than what she initially found in Khalifa City, but at least she has “peace of mind”. silvia@khaleejtimes.com Continue reading
It’s school time again
Sarah Young As school gets back in session and new shoes are on the agenda, getting the right fit is a must for children, says a long-time shoe fitter. An expert on feet and shoe fitting for 44 years, Clarks International global children’s consultant Bob Hardy is visiting Dubai to provide training for Clark store managers, and parents with advice on shoe fitting for children, as school begins. It was extremely important for parents to get the right shoes given the wrong size could do a lot of harm when worn for the whole year, he said — especially considering children would walk about a million steps and spend 1,000 hours in those shoes – absorbing 50 litres of perspiration by the time the year is out. The development of children’s feet was ‘a total mystery’ to many parents, he said, who did not realise how quickly they grew. In the first year alone, a child’s feet would grow 25 millimetres, while from age one to five, they would grow 16mm each year, and then eight to 10mm per year from school age to mid-teens when the feet stopped growing, he said. Shoe companies offered half sizes, and width options, as well as integrating ‘growing room’ into the shoes, he said. Children often did not feel pain from ill-fitting shoes due the large amounts of fatty tissue in their feet, but the damage was still being done and would be felt when they were older, he said. Seventy per cent of adults would have had some sort of serious foot problem by the time they were 30, he said. Only 30 per cent of people actually had a standard fitting, he added. Hardy said a ‘geographical blip’ led him to his profession, as he was born one kilometre from the Clark headquarters. He left school in 1970 at the age of 16 and ended up standing in the Clark’s shoe factory “wondering what the hell I had done”. But it has proved a long love affair taking him on training trips to 45 countries. “I’ve been to so many different countries and met so many people … and it’s nice to see people using the things you’ve passed on or taught them on a daily basis.” His first visit to Dubai was in 1989, and much has changed since that time when a tractor drove up to the plane to collect their luggage. The UAE was one of the most challenging markets, given it was one of the most diverse in the world, and like a “mini-United States” in terms of the various population groups and differing lifestyle choices and tastes, he said. The warm weather and the amount of time spent in air conditioning meant customers could want from sandals to heeled, long boots. And, traditional local preferences meant styles exclusive to the Middle East had to be catered for, such as the men’s Arabic style sandal, he said. The biggest mistake he saw here was the tendency for people to wear ill-fitting sandals, and the number of people he saw “shuffling around and not walking properly, curling their toes up to hold their shoes on,” was worrying, he said. Traditional, natural materials such as leather and rubber were still the best for breathing, flexibility and toughness, he added. So what about his most challenging shoe-fitting experience? An Englishman who was convinced he had size 13 feet that were very wide, and no amount of measuring his feet or fitting shoes would make him believe his feet were actually a narrow size 11. “The shoes he walked in with could have held both his feet. “Although this probably wasn’t a foot problem….” sarah@khaleejtimes.com Continue reading
