SDG sponsors UAE traveller’s journey to enter Guinness Records

  Dubai / Emirates Business Under the sponsorship of Smart Dubai Government Establishment (SDG), Jalal Bin Thaneya, a UAE traveller, has set out to create a new record for the Guinness World Records in support of children with disabilities. The move is a part of SDG’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) in line with its commitment towards the welfare of the ...

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IMF needs a better way to pick its leader

  The board of the International Monetary Fund was right to reaffirm its full confidence in Christine Lagarde as the institution’s managing director despite her conviction for negligence on Monday by a Paris court. She has done a good job as the head of one of the world’s most important multilateral institutions. But there’s more to be done by the ...

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In Asian currency-reserves checkup, two nations come out on top

  Less than a decade ago, the International Monetary Fund used to talk about Asian countries piling up too much in their currency- reserve stockpiles. The global financial crisis turned that conclusion on its head, and now that US interest rates are poised to keep climbing, the race is on to identify which countries have the strongest buffers against capital ...

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The Trump world order

  President-elect Donald Trump has made a point of shaking things up. In domestic policy, this taste for disorder is risky. In foreign policy, it could be calamitous. Trump isn’t yet president, so it’s early to be drawing conclusions. But concern is warranted. Trump rejects the status quo in America’s relations with the rest of the world, and seems to ...

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Aleppo needs urgent deployment of monitors

  Thousands of dejected and distressed Syrians left the rebel enclave of Aleppo on Monday as the UN Security Council unanimously voted to deploy observers there. The council also announced the plan for a new peace talks in Geneva in February. Families in Aleppo had spent hours waiting in below-freezing temperatures, sheltering from the rain in bombed-out apartment blocks and ...

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plagued by sickness!

  Nairobi / AFP When Rose Kariuki first felt a lump on her left breast, the spectre of cancer — a disease she had only heard of on television — was the last thing on her mind. “To me, cancer was nowhere near us. It was shocking, I feared death, I feared so many things,” the 46-year-old Kenyan school teacher said. ...

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Abducted, brutalised, ruined: Kidnapped siblings survive the LRA

  Gulu / AFP Lily Atong’s anxious eyes fix on the sky where a helicopter gunship circles over her thatched hut, so low she must shout to be heard. “When I see gunships like this it brings back the fear of being in the bush,” Atong says. Abducted as a young girl and forced to become a wife to Lord’s Resistance ...

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Syria army tells remaining rebels to quit Aleppo

  Aleppo / AFP Buses began entering the last rebel-held parts of Aleppo on Sunday to resume the evacuation of thousands of increasingly desperate Syrian civilians and rebels trapped in the besieged enclave. As international alarm grew over the plight of the residents including women, children, the sick and wounded, the UN Security Council was to vote on whether to send ...

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Russia, Iran, Turkey back expansion of Syria ceasefire

  Moscow / AFP Russia, Iran and Turkey agreed on Tuesday to guarantee Syria peace talks and backed expanding a ceasefire in the war-torn country, laying down their claim as the main powerbrokers in the conflict. “Iran, Russia and Turkey are ready to assist in preparing the agreement in the making between the Syrian government and the opposition and to become ...

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Lavrov urges no ‘concessions to terrorists’ after envoy murder

  Moscow / AFP Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Tuesday there should be no “concessions to terrorists” at talks with his Turkish counterpart on Syria, a day after Moscow’s ambassador was murdered in Ankara. “This tragedy forces all of us to fight more decisively against terrorism,” Lavrov told Turkey’s Mevlut Cavusoglu as they sat down together in Moscow. “For ...

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