Journal Bullet

The economic outlook for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) was already grim as the region struggles to cope with the fallout of the coronavirus pandemic. On Monday, that horizon darkened further as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) projected an even deeper recession for the region, and warned of the spectre of rekindling social unrest as inequality and poverty deepens. The IMF now sees economic growth in the Middle East and Central Asia shrinking 4.7 percent this year - a full 2 percentage points lower than its April forecast. "The unusually high level of uncertainty regarding the length of the pandemic and its impact on firm closures, the resulting downside risks (including social unrest and political instability), and potential renewed volatility in global oil markets dominate the outlook," the IMF said in its latest update. The IMF said 2020 oil income for the region would be $270bn less than last year.  MENA economies that are heavily dependent on energy exports...

Renegade military commander Khalifa Haftar's self-styled Libyan National Army (LNA) has said it would maintain a blockade on oil production and exports that the National Oil Corp (NOC) says has cost the country $6.5bn in lost revenue. Friday's loading of a first tanker since January with oil from storage had force majeure on all exports, though it warned that damage to fields meant it would take a long time to fully restore production. However, LNA spokesman Ahmed Mismari on Saturday said in an online statement the country's oilfields and ports are "closed until the orders of the Libyan people are implemented", laying out conditions to lift the blockade. Mismari demanded that oil revenue should flow into a new bank account outside Libya to be distributed between regions; that it should not fund what he called "terrorists and mercenaries"; and an audit of central bank accounts to investigate past spending. Libya has been split since 2014 between the Turke...

The United Nations Security Council has approved aid deliveries to Syria from Turkey, but only after caving in to Russian pressure to close one of the two access points into the war-torn country. Following a week of division and seven ballots, the UNSC on Saturday passed a proposal submitted by Germany and Belgium allowing the use of the Bab al-Hawa crossing point for one year. Western nations say the closure of the second access point will cut a lifeline for 1.3 million Syrians in the country's northwest. Authorisation for the continued transport of aid to Syria, a system in place since 2014, expired on Friday night. The 15-member UNSC had been deadlocked, with most members pitted against Syrian allies Russia and China over the issue. Russia and China, which hold veto power at the council, wanted to halve the approved Turkey border crossings to one, arguing that northwest Syria could be reached from within the country. In the session, the measure was approved by 12 of 15 memb...

Pope Francis has said he was hurt by Turkey's decision to make Istanbul's  Hagia  Sophia  museum a mosque, but Ankara said the decision will  maintain a relationship of equality and mutual respect in the country. It was the Vatican's first reaction to Turkey's decision to transform the Byzantine-era monument back into a mosque, a move that has drawn criticism from around the world. "I think of Hagia Sophia and I am very saddened," Pope Francis said towards the end of his midday sermon in Saint Peter's Square.  The World Council of Churches has called on  Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan  to reverse his decision and Patriarch Bartholomew, the Istanbul-based spiritual leader of the world's Orthodox Christians, called it disappointing. On Saturday, Erdogan rejected international condemnation over the decision to change the status of Istanbul's landmark Hagia Sophia from a museum to a mosque. "Those who do not take a step against Islamophob...

Yemen's Houthi rebels have agreed to allow the United Nations access to a stranded oil tanker that risks causing an environmental disaster off the coast of the war-divided country, Reuters news agency has reported, citing UN sources familiar with the matter. The decaying oil tanker has been abandoned off the coast with 1.1 million barrels of crude on board which experts say could rupture at any time. A breach of the vessel would have disastrous results for Red Sea marine life and tens of thousands of impoverished people who depend on fishing for their livelihood. The 45-year-old FSO Safer is anchored off the port of Hodeidah under the control of Houthi rebels, who have previously blocked efforts to send inspectors to assess its condition. The UN Security Council (UNSC) will hold a special meeting on July 15 to discuss the crisis, after water entered the vessel's engine room "which could have led to disaster", UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said on Friday. Dujarric sai...

Sudan approved wide-ranging amendments to its criminal law including repealing the death penalty for apostasy as well as no longer requiring w omen  to need a permit from male family members to travel with their children. According to the 1991 Criminal Law introduced by the overthrown Omar al-Bashir government, the punishment for apostasy - or the abandonment of Islam through actions or words - was stoning to death. Public flogging will also be ended and the consumption of alcohol by non-Muslims will now be permitted.  In a televised interview on Saturday, Sudanese Justice Minister Nasredeen Abdulbari said the government is currently working to reform other legal provisions to incorporate them in a constitutional declaration. "We cancelled the Article 126 of the Sudanese Criminal Law and have ensured religious freedom and the equality in citizenship and rule of law," he said. The minister said his ministry is working to make new personal law that will drop all discriminat...

Libya's National Oil Corp (NOC) has accused the United Arab Emirates of instructing eastern forces in Libya's civil war to reimpose a blockade of oil exports after the departure of the first tanker in six months. The UAE, along with Russia and Egypt, supports the eastern-based self-styled Libyan National Army (LNA) of renegade military commander Khalifa Haftar, which on Saturday said the blockade would continue despite it having let a tanker loaded with oil from storage. Libya, which sits atop Africa's largest proven crude oil reserves, is torn between the rival powers of the UN-recognised Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli and eastern-based Haftar. "NOC has been informed that the instructions to shut down production were given to (the LNA) by the United Arab Emirates," it said in a statement on Sunday, resuming force majeure on all oil exports. There was no immediate comment on NOC's accusation from either the LNA or the UAE. Haftar has been on th...

At an open-air, riverbank factory where the Blue Nile and White Nile meet in Sudan, Mohamed Ahmed al-Ameen and his colleagues mould thousands of bricks every day from mud deposited by summer floods. "I consider the Nile something I have not parted with since I was born," al-Ameen said, as workers around him shaped bricks with blistered hands and laid them out to dry in the sun. "I eat from it, I farm with it. And I extract these bricks from it." But the labourers on Tuti Island in Sudan's capital, Khartoum, fear a giant dam Ethiopia is building close to the border between the two countries could endanger their livelihood. They worry the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam upstream could weaken the Blue Nile's force, putting at risk an industry that locals say provided bricks for some of Khartoum's first modern public buildings about a century ago. Pottery makers, farmers and fishermen around the Nile's convergence share similar concerns, though other res...

Yemen's Houthi rebels say they have attacked a large oil facility in an industrial complex south of the Saudi Arabian city of Jizan as part of an overnight operation. The Saudi-led military coalition fighting the Houthis said on Monday it  intercepted and destroyed four missiles and six bomb-laden drones launched by Houthi rebels towards the kingdom. The missiles and drones were launched from Yemen's capital Sanaa and directed at civilian targets, coalition spokesman Turki al-Malki said in a statement carried by the official Saudi Press Agency. The Houthi rebels claim they also killed and injured dozens of ranking military officers in Saudi Arabia. The Houthis' military spokesman, Yahya Sarea, confirmed in a statement that the rebel group had launched attacks on Saudi military sites. He said the group's ballistic missiles and drones had destroyed a number of military bases and installations of the Saudi coalition in Jizan, Najran and Assir near the border with Yemen, in...

Bahrain's top court has upheld death sentences against two men convicted of bombing a convoy and killing a police officer, as human rights groups said their  conviction  was based on confessions extracted through torture. Mohammed Ramadhan and Husain Moosa lost their final appeal on Monday against death sentences that were initially handed down by a criminal court in December 2014, a statement from the kingdom's public prosecutor said. The kingdom's highest court in 2015 confirmed the death sentences but then overturned them after the emergence of a previously undisclosed medical report by the Minister of Interior,  which Human Rights Watch (HRW) said  appeared to corroborate claims the detainees had been tortured to force them to confess to fabricated charges. But an appeals court in January 2020 reinstated the sentences, which were upheld on Monday. Security forces arrested Moosa, a hotel employee, and Ramadhan, a security guard in Bahrain's international airp...

Mona Fawaz remembers when traffic lights were first installed in Beirut several years after the civil war ended. It was the late 1990s. The gutted downtown area of Lebanon's capital, a front line throughout the brutal 15-year conflict, was being rebuilt in grand fashion. Prosperity - or at least a sense of normality - felt within reach. Everyone wanted to move forward. But the chaos of the war remained ingrained in the way people drove. Traffic was horrendous, a fast-paced free-for-all on the freeways that turned to gridlock in narrow city streets and a mess of clamouring metal at intersections.  It was overwhelming for 26-year-old Fawaz, back in Beirut on a break from studying in the United States where she had become accustomed to the simple guidance of green, red and amber. When the lights first came up, many Lebanese were slow to adjust. Fawaz "felt like an activist" when she stopped at red, and would intentionally block the path of impatient motorists who tried to ma...

The children of slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi have publicly forgiven their father's killers, sparing five government agents the death penalty. Salah Khashoggi, the late Saudi critic's eldest son, posted the pardon in a tweet on Friday. "On this virtuous night of (Ramadan), we recall the words of God Almighty ... whoever pardons and makes reconciliations, his reward is from Allah," read the statement, referring to Laylit el Qader, or the Night of Power, considered by Islam to be the holiest night of the year. "So we, the sons of the martyr Jamal Khashoggi, announce that we have pardoned (those) who killed our father," the family added in the statement. Muslim governments typically issue pardons on the month of Ramadan. According to Saudi law, a pardon from a son of a murder victim serves as a legal reprieve. Last December, five government agents convicted of Khashoggi's murder at the kingdom's Istanbul consulate in October 2018 to death. Thre...

An unarmed Palestinian man has been shot and killed by police at one of the entrances to Jerusalem's Old City on Saturday. Israeli police said officers believed the man had a gun and opened fire on him when he refused to stop for them. Relatives named the deceased as 32-year-old Eyad Rawhi Al-Halaq from the Wadi Al-Joz area of Jerusalem. They told  he had autism, and the mental age of a six-year-old child, and that he was on his way to his special educational needs school when the fatal incident took place. An Israeli police statement Saturday morning said: "In Jerusalem's Old City, at Lions Gate area, police units on patrol spotted a suspect with a suspicious object that looked like a pistol. They called upon him to stop and began to chase after him on foot, during the chase officers also opened fire at the suspect, who was neutralized." A police spokesman later confirmed that officers who checked the man's body found no weapon on him. A relative of the deceased ...

The face masks which many of us use to protect our faces as well as to protect others, has now turned into a major fashion statement. Now you can often find various of colourful and unique designed face masks while browsing the internet. Face masks are becoming the new must-have fashion item , from small accessory to big business, e ven some of the most legendary fashion houses like  Prada, Louis Vuitton and Dior are getting  involved.  Not only that, these fashion houses  are sewing face masks exclusively for medical workers, turning production facilities that made fancy gowns into mask-creation locations. A Gucci mask was spotted on singer-songwriter ,  Billie Eilish at the Grammy Award last January, which was commented by the public as a balaclava mask, which covers most of the face but not the mouth. Ivanka Trump was also seen at Andrews Air Force Base wearing a face mask by designer Lele  Sadoughi. The designer al...

Dubai is jam-packed with things that designed to be the biggest and most extravagant of the world the tallest building, the second-biggest mall, the most luxurious hotel, and so on. Perhaps no other project in the budding city more epitomizes this quest for absurd grandeur than the Palm Islands, an archipelago of artificial islands that extend off the Dubai coastline like the lair of a movie super-villain who just happens to really like the tropics. When reading about Dubai over the years, the Palm Islands were inevitably one of the first things I learned about. They are so ridiculous an endeavor, so stereotypically what one might expect people with limitless money to do, that it defies comprehension By Safwan Kasim

Although the Middle East is mainly known for their richness in its mineral fuels and natural gas, they are as well quite the catch when it comes to fashion.  Being a lucrative part of the world for the fashion and luxury industry, Middle Eastern culture places a high importance on appearances, and this is the main reason behind the popularity of logos and luxury goods being the main obvious elements that reflect status. However, this way of living has changed for some parts of the Middle East and the culture in the region has evolved in response to several factors such as the exposure to Western cultures through travelling and social media, which has altered the mentality of not to solely rely on logos to portray a certain social class.   Cities such as Dubai  is traditionally known for couture, ready-for-the-red-carpet designs rather than ready-to-wear. But off-the-rack designers are increasingly cropping up. Fashion Forward Dubai  (FFWD) returned last...