Trade pact makes Israel and Egypt closer neighbours
From Ian MacKinnon in Jerusalem and Issandr El Amrani in Cairo
ISRAEL and Egypt signed a three-way trade deal with the United States yesterday in a move that signalled a further warming of relations between the two neighbours and gave momentum to renewed hopes for peace negotiations in the Middle East.
The pact will enable Cairo to export some goods free of duty to the US. It was hailed as the most important agreement to be reached by Israel and Egypt since they signed their peace deal 25 years ago.
Under the agreement seven Qualified Industrial Zones will be set up in Cairo, Alexandria and Port Said, where goods produced using Israeli input can be sold to the US.
The agreement could create as many as 250,000 jobs in Egypt’s textile sector — the country’s largest area of export — next year, and help to offset the ending next month of beneficial US quotas on the import of textiles. Beyond the trade deal Egypt and Israel believe that the agreement could pave the way for greater co-operation in the search for peace. Israel appears more willing to accept Cairo’s help in its planned disengagement from Gaza next year after Yassir Arafat’s death last month.
There are hints that Cairo may return its ambassador to Tel Aviv and of the possibility of a meeting between Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister, Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian President, and the new Palestinian leader after the January 9 elections.
“This is good business for all of us and it will also be one more important ingredient to change the atmosphere in the Middle East,” Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Trade and Industry Minister, said.
Israel, which has a free-trade agreement with the US, would benefit from the low cost of labour in Egypt, making production by Israeli firms more competitive...
timesonline.co.uk
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Freedom in Farsi blogs
Tens of thousands of Iranians have embraced weblogs as a way to access the forbidden and challenge the sanctioned, writes N Alavi
"In September 2001, a young Iranian journalist, Hossein Derakhshan, devised and set up one of the first weblogs in his native language of Farsi. In response to a request from a reader, he created a simple how-to-blog guide in Farsi, thereby setting in motion a community's surreal flight into free speech; online commentaries that the leading Iranian author and blogger, Abbas Maroufi, calls our "messages in bottles, cast to the winds".
With an estimated 75,000 blogs, Farsi is now the fourth most popular language for keeping online journals. A phenomenal figure given that in neighbouring countries such as Iraq there are less than 50 known bloggers.
The internet has opened a new virtual space for free speech in a country dubbed the "the biggest prison for journalists in the Middle East", by Reporters sans Frontieres (RSF). Through the anonymity and freedom that weblogs can provide, those who once lacked voices are at last speaking up and discussing issues that have never been aired in any other media in the Islamic world. Where else in Iran could someone dare write, as the blogger Faryadehmah did, "when these mullahs are dethroned ... it will be like the Berlin wall coming down ..."?"
guardian.co.uk
found at chrenkoff.blogspot.com |
