By Andrew Torchia

CAIRO, Jan 18 (Reuters) – Two months after mass protests ousted Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak last February, Ahmed Essam resigned from his job at a well-established software company to set up a six-person venture developing applications for smart phones.

The economic turmoil which engulfed the country after Mubarak was overthrown played a part in his decision, says Essam, 28. With many firms freezing investments and shedding jobs, his salaried post no longer looked as stable.

“I felt the current situation might not continue after the Revolution. Most of the old companies will not make it in the new era,” he said.

But the euphoria of the Revolution was also a factor. With the end of 30 years of rule by Mubarak, during which much of Egypt’s economy was dominated by state-run companies and businessmen linked to the Mubarak regime, Essam thinks hard work and commercial vision have a greater chance of succeeding.

“People had lost hope — you would walk along the street and nothing was yours, nothing was under your control. The Revolution created a feeling that people can change the world for the better.”

In a 1920s apartment building across the street from the Giza Zoo outside Cairo, Essam now works 15-hour days to develop an application which rearranges social network feeds such as Facebook and Twitter according to their relevance to the user. He hopes the application will be used not just in Egypt or other Arab countries but around the world.

A year after Mubarak’s ouster, economic conditions in Egypt remain grim. The risk of a currency devaluation, and continued uncertainty over how much power the military is willing to hand over to a democratic government, are deterring new projects by many large businesses, including foreign investors.

Unemployment officially stands at 11.8 percent, according to the latest data from the second quarter of 2011, but this figure understates the problem as it does not include people struggling in part-time jobs outside the formal economy. Economists estimate unemployment among young people at around 25 percent.

At the same time, the new political landscape is encouraging a flowering of entrepreneurial activity among some Egyptians. Around the country, thousands of young people are developing ventures based on original business ideas or laying plans to do so — efforts that could, if they prove successful, eventually help to solve Egypt’s unemployment problem.
There are no comprehensive statistics for the number of new ventures but Abdelrahman Magdy, chief executive of Egypreneur, which helps entrepreneurs find the contacts and services they need, promotes their ideas and provides training, says the change in the past 12 months has been dramatic.

Before the Revolution, Egypreneur had between 2,000 and 3,000 followers on Twitter; now it has about 20,000, Magdy said. The number of public conferences for entrepreneurs in Egypt’s big cities has increased eightfold, he estimated.

As in Essam’s case, there is a push factor behind the growth of entrepreneurship: seeking a long-term job in a government bureaucracy or a big corporation, traditional avenues for educated Egyptian youths, no longer seems as possible or as attractive with the government in disarray and the economy sagging.

But many entrepreneurs say the Revolution has also been a pull factor for young people: the protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square showed how, through cooperation and planning, it was possible to beat the established system.

Egypt had entrepreneurs and a growing information technology industry well before the Revolution, noted Ramez Mohamed, chief executive of Flat6Labs, a U.S.-style “startup accelerator” that was established last year to provide starting capital and support to ventures in their initial stage. But people’s new sense of political empowerment is providing a boost, he said.

“The Revolution has affected the scene,” he said. “People learned that they could set their hopes higher. They feel they can make it on their own, that anything is possible.”

Many of the new entrepreneurs are focusing on software and information technology because those areas require relatively little capital, and in some cases because the anti-Mubarak protests, organised with the help of Facebook and Twitter, raised the profile of social media in Egypt.

But Magdy said he saw entrepreneurs operating in other areas too. One example is Mashaweer, a service which helps customers avoid the traffic in Egypt’s gridlocked cities by running errands for them, from shopping and paying bills to arranging replacements for lost IDs.

With an average age of 26 among its staff, Mashaweer started in Alexandria in 2010 with three scooters and investment of 30,000 Egyptian pounds ($5,000). It launched in Cairo last month and now boasts 130 of its distinctive orange scooters, 15 cars and a speedboat. It aims eventually to operate airplanes.

Gilan Kamal, digital marketing manager at Mashaweer, said poor business conditions did not deter the firm’s expansion as its cost base was lower in a sluggish economy. The political turmoil “motivates us because we want people in our generation to see how it is possible to increase productivity”, she said.

There are big obstacles for entrepreneurs in Egypt. In the World Bank’s annual 2012 rankings for ease of doing business, Egypt came 110th out of 183 economies: 21st for ease of starting a business, such as registering with the government and signing up to pay taxes, but 101st for obtaining electricity, 147th for enforcing contracts and 154th for handling construction permits.

“The pieces for the chess game are there. The board is not there yet,” said Scott Gerber, a U.S.-based author who founded the Young Entrepreneur Council, a global group of entrepreneurs. He visited Egypt last year to meet businessmen and investors.

Egypt badly needs legal reforms — “the tax laws are all over the place” — as well as government support for entrepreneurs in areas such as public-private partnerships; “the banking system needs a complete overhaul” to prepare it to lend to smaller enterprises, Gerber said.

With Egypt’s new, democratically elected parliament likely to remain distracted for months by political manoeuvring and macroeconomic challenges such as coping with the state’s budget deficit, the obstacles to new ventures may not be removed any time soon.

Ahmed El Alfi, chairman of Sawari Ventures, which invests Egyptian and foreign money in local start-ups and helped to fund Flat6Labs, acknowledges the difficulties. But he says the strong tradition of teaching engineering and computer science skills at universities gives Egypt huge potential.

According to the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, Egypt’s exports in that sector grew at an average annual rate of 37 percent between 2007 and 2010, hitting $1.1 billion in 2010. It aims for $2 billion in 2013.

El Alfi said Egypt, with a population of over 80 million, by far the largest in the Arab world, had a chance to become the main source of innovation in information technology for the region. Israel’s IT industry took off after a few globally recognised successes with start-ups in the 1990s, he noted.

“Over 50 percent of the good tech services guys in the Arab world are in Egypt,” said El Alfi, who left the country in 1966 and returned from the United States in 2006 to pursue business opportunities. “They just need a chance to do their stuff.”

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By Rachelle Younglai

WASHINGTON, Jan 18 (Reuters) – The Obama administration, still grappling with how to punish a nuclear-ambitious Iran, is focusing on making countries cut their purchases of Iranian oil, rather than allowing them to avoid U.S. sanctions simply by winning price cuts.

The White House intends to play it tough on implementing new Iran sanctions, and officials say they will not waive them on national-security grounds.

Since President Barack Obama signed the Iranian sanctions package late last year, the administration has been struggling with how to implement the rules in a way that will not drive oil prices higher and hurt the fragile U.S. economy in an election year.

The administration is mindful that Congress could seek new legislation to close loopholes on sanctions if lawmakers do not see broad cooperation on punishing Iran for what the United States says is a program to develop a nuclear-weapon capability. Iran maintains its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes.

U.S. SEEING SIGNS COUNTRIES CURTAILING PURCHASES

The new U.S. law prohibits institutions from dealing with Iran’s central bank, which acts as the clearinghouse for OPEC’s second-largest oil exporter. That essentially would force countries and their institutions to choose between working with Iran and having access to the U.S. financial system.

However, the sanctions give Obama the authority to exempt countries and their institutions from sanctions if he determines that the country has “significantly reduced” its volume of crude oil purchases.

Now the administration is trying to define significant reduction, with senior officials from the Treasury and State Departments traveling to Japan and South Korea this week to discuss their ideas.

The administration has considered a number of options, including encouraging countries to impose import tariffs on Iranian oil in order to curtail Iran’s revenues, sources familiar with the administration’s thinking said.

U.S. officials also considered defining significant reduction in terms of a price cut in the total revenues paid to Iran, the sources said. That would have allowed countries to win exemptions from the sanctions if they negotiated lower prices for the oil.

Both approaches would have helped starve Iran of oil revenues while allowing it to continue selling to China, India, Japan, South Korea, Turkey and other countries.

But the top priority for the White House is pushing countries to reduce the volume of oil they buy, even though a number of ways to determine whether a country has reduced its purchases have been considered, according to an Obama administration official.

“Treasury may have been thinking of price reductions internally at one stage, but that is not on the table anymore,” said the administration official. “The administration is getting enough indications that countries will be reducing how much oil they eventually buy from Iran.”

The law also gives Obama the power to waive sanctions if he determines it is in the national-security interest of the United States. Japan, South Korea and Turkey have said they could seek waivers.
So far the administration has been telling countries it will not be granting waivers. “You can ask for a waiver but you are not getting one. What we want is a reduction in purchases and in doing business with Iran,” said the official.

PRICE REDUCTION DEBATE

When the U.S. Congress was debating the sanctions bill in December, the administration proposed a price mechanism that would allow countries to escape penalties if they cut how much they paid Iran for its oil by 5 percent.

But lawmakers saw the decrease as too slight and rejected the idea.

Now Congress is watching how the administration will implement the law. Congressional aides say that if lawmakers are unhappy with how the administration defines “significantly reduced”, they will work on legislation directing the White House to adopt specific parameters.

“A broad interpretation would call into question the seriousness of the country’s Iran policy,” said an aide to Republican Senator Mark Kirk, one of the lawmakers who helped craft the Iranian measure.
Kirk is open to the idea of defining the reduction by requiring countries to reduce how much they pay Iran for oil by 18 percent per year, according to the aide.

A Treasury official said the administration was committed to using this law, in concert with other efforts, to reduce Iran’s access to oil revenue, “both by working with our partners to significantly reduce their imports of Iranian crude and by impeding the Central Bank of Iran’s ability to receive payment for whatever oil Iran is able to sell.” (Reporting By Rachelle Younglai; Editing by Dale Hudson)

14-4

By Parvez Fatteh, Founder of http://sportingummah.com, sports@muslimobserver.com

Pakistan’s Mohammad Zubair broke the world record for longest continual rowing by an individual when he rowed 10 hours straight at a private fitness club in Islamabad, Pakistan this week. Under the supervision of both international and national rowing umpires from Pakistan Rowing Federation, the 31-year-old Mohammad Zubair broke the previous record of 7 hours 11 minutes and 22 seconds held by an Australian on the Concept II indoor rowing machine. He stopped short of completing 100 kilometers for which he started again to finish the remaining 1,200 meters in roughly six minutes. The record in this age group and weight category was previously held by Shane Usher of Melbourne, Australia.

All necessary conditions had been met for continuous rowing and to break the record in single distance or timed pieces without intervals and starting from a nonmoving flywheel with the machine placed on a level surface. Umpires occasionally checked the performance meter attached to the machine to record distances.By the time Mohammad Zubair broke the record he had rowed 72 kilometers. That was equal to 13 laps of the Rawal Lake or rowing from Islamabad to as far as Mansehra.

Pakistans only International Rowing Umpire, and Executive Member of the Pakistan Rowing Federation, Imtiaz Ahmad Khan said indoor rowing was today a recognized sport around the world. “The game requires athletes to row two kilometers. The athlete who rows the fasts wins the race. Pakistans Maqbool Ahmad who has participated in Asian and World Championships in indoor machine rowing holds the record of fastest covering of 2 kilometers in 6 minutes and 18seconds,` said Imtiaz Ahmad Khan a color-holder himself while his colleague Bronze Medalist and National Umpire, Pakistan Rowing Federation Shahid Nazir noted timings on his notepad.

The colour holder elaborated that unlike rowing on water, where records were broken every year because of different water and weather conditions around the world, this new world record set by Mohammad Zubair was for lifetime until somebody decided to hop on the machine and attempt to break it by rowing for more than 10 hours.

Mohammad Zubair, a Marketing Executive for Smarts, a private health and fitness gym in Islamabad, was the first Pakistani to take on such a challenge. He started rowing at 10 am on Saturday morning and continued till 9 pm in the night setting a new world record of 10 hours.

14-4

Many Cases of Cooking Fire Damages in Houston – Recent One in Southeast Houston Apartment

On Friday, January 13, 2012, a small cooking fire caused about $10 thousand in damage to a southeast Houston apartment. The Houston Fire Department was dispatched to the apartment fire in the 8200 block of Park Place Blvd. about 5:30 p.m. and arrived on scene within five minutes. Upon arrival, firefighters located a fire in the kitchen and tapped out the incident within 15 minutes. Approximately 30 firefighters responded to the incident. There were no reported injuries.

HFD reminds residents that cooking is the number one cause of residential fires and is preventable by following these safety tips:

-          Always, have a working smoke detector!
-          Over half the people attempting to extinguish a kitchen fire are injured. Often the best advice is to get everyone out of the house and call the fire department (911) from a neighbor’s house.
-          Use a moderate cooking temperature
-          Don’t overfill the container
-          If you must leave the kitchen, turn the burner off (Unattended cooking is the primary cause of kitchen fires. Over half of these are grease/oil fires.)
-          Turn pot handles away from the front of the stove. Curious children may reach up and grab the handle, pulling the hot contents down on themselves.
-          Don’t position handles over another burner, it may catch on fire or burn someone who touches it.
-          Wear short sleeves or tight fitting long sleeves when cooking to reduce a clothing fire hazard.
-          Shield yourself from scalding steam when lifting lids from hot pans.
-          Make sure pot holders are not too close to the stove. They could catch fire!
-          Keep ovens, broilers, stove tops, and exhaust ducts free from grease.
-          If there is a fire in the oven – Turn off the oven and keep the oven door closed.
-          Never try to move the pan, don’t throw water on it, and don’t put flour on it.
-          If you attempt to extinguish the fire, it is best to use a class ABC multipurpose fire extinguisher. Follow the manufacturer’s instructions – stay back 6 to 8 feet and be careful not to spray the grease out of the pan. Baking soda can also smother the fire. Fires can double in size every 30 second.

TxDOT Sets Small Business Briefing Series in Austin, Houston

Community Entrepreneurs’ Should Attend

The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) will conduct its Small Business Briefing Series in Austin and Houston. The briefings are designed to provide small businesses with information regarding how to do business with TxDOT and other major state agencies such as the Department of Information Resources, Health and Human Services, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and others. The Small Business Briefing will provide information on how these agencies procure services and purchase products. General industry sessions will include an overview of TxDOT construction projects, professional services (engineering), consulting contracts and state contracting for information technology products and services. Those attending will also have an opportunity to bid on On-the-Spot contracts under $25,000. To participate in the On-the-Spot contracting, participants must register online at http://tti.tamu.edu/conferences/sbb12/. The Austin briefing will be held Wednesday, Jan. 25, at the Norris Conference Center http://www.norriscenters.com – 2525 West Anderson Lane, and the Houston briefing will be Thursday, March 1, at the OMNI Houston Hotel Westside- 13210 Katy Freeway. For exhibitor and individual registration, please visit http://tti.tamu.edu/conferences/sbb12/ For more information, contact Alta Alexander at 512- 486-5524.

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Press Release by chairman/president Mrs Almas Akhtar

2nd Art Exhibition!

When

Saturday, February 4, 2012

Time

12:00pm until 5:30pm

Where

Marquee Ball Room, Hyatt, Dearborn

Description

“Art is a thing of beauty”

Art Exhibition is the space in which art objects meet an audience!

Age Groups

5 to 10 years
10 to 15 years
15 to 19 years

Categories

paintings,sketches
crafts,sculptures,fabric art

1st and 2nd prize in every category

Professional Artists from Local Art Institutes and Galleries in Metro Detroit will announce the winners all participants will receive certificates

Last date to submit art work: 24th January 2012

Registration

Free for kids residing in the state of Michigan

Please contact Youth Art Exhibition Organizer Almas  Akhtar (akhtar.almas@yahoo.com) for details.

Youth Art Exhibition Coordinators (kids can drop their art work with these individuals)

Seemin Qureshi
Beenish Ikram
Soobia Kidwai
Ayesha Farooqui
Aliya Mirza

Or contact Mrs. Almas Akhtar: akhtar.almas@Yahoo.com   for further information

“Silent Auction” (to support local youth programs)will be presented before the exhibition!!!!

Our sponsors this year are:

The Citizens Foundation
Indus Community Action Network
Pakistan Association of America(youth wing)
Help for the Homeless Foundation
Please encourage our Kids,Please support our Kids,Please appreciate our Kids!

14-4

By Pepe Escobar, TomDispatch

Let’s start with red lines. Here it is, Washington’s ultimate red line, straight from the lion’s mouth.  Only last week Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said of the Iranians, “Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No. But we know that they’re trying to develop a nuclear capability. And that’s what concerns us. And our red line to Iran is do not develop a nuclear weapon. That’s a red line for us.”
How strange, the way those red lines continue to retreat.  Once upon a time, the red line for Washington was “enrichment” of uranium. Now, it’s evidently an actual nuclear weapon that can be brandished. Keep in mind that, since 2005, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has stressed that his country is not seeking to build a nuclear weapon. The most recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iran from the U.S. Intelligence Community has similarly stressed that Iran is not, in fact, developing a nuclear weapon (as opposed to the breakout capacity to build one someday).
What if, however, there is no “red line,” but something completely different? Call it the petrodollar line.

Banking on Sanctions?

Let’s start here: In December 2011, impervious to dire consequences for the global economy, the U.S. Congress — under all the usual pressures from the Israel lobby (not that it needs them) — foisted a mandatory sanctions package on the Obama administration (100 to 0 in the Senate and with only 12 “no” votes in the House). Starting in June, the U.S. will have to sanction any third-country banks and companies dealing with Iran’s Central Bank, which is meant to cripple that country’s oil sales.  (Congress did allow for some “exemptions.”)

The ultimate target? Regime change — what else? — in Tehran. The proverbial anonymous U.S. official admitted as much in the Washington Post, and that paper printed the comment.  (“The goal of the U.S. and other sanctions against Iran is regime collapse, a senior U.S. intelligence official said, offering the clearest indication yet that the Obama administration is at least as intent on unseating Iran’s government as it is on engaging with it.”) But oops! The newspaper then had to revise the passage to eliminate that embarrassingly on-target quote. Undoubtedly, this “red line” came too close to the truth for comfort.

Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen believed that only a monster shock-and-awe-style event, totally humiliating the leadership in Tehran, would lead to genuine regime change — and he was hardly alone. Advocates of actions ranging from air strikes to invasion (whether by the U.S., Israel, or some combination of the two) have been legion in neocon Washington.  (See, for instance, the Brookings Institution’s 2009 report Which Path to Persia.)

Yet anyone remotely familiar with Iran knows that such an attack would rally the population behind Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guards.  In those circumstances, the deep aversion of many Iranians to the military dictatorship of the mullahtariat would matter little.

Besides, even the Iranian opposition supports a peaceful nuclear program.  It’s a matter of national pride.

Iranian intellectuals, far more familiar with Persian smoke and mirrors than ideologues in Washington, totally debunk any war scenarios.  They stress that the Tehran regime, adept in the arts of Persian shadow play, has no intention of provoking an attack that could lead to its obliteration. On their part, whether correctly or not, Tehran strategists assume that Washington will prove unable to launch yet one more war in the Greater Middle East, especially one that could lead to staggering collateral damage for the world economy.

In the meantime, Washington’s expectations that a harsh sanctions regime might make the Iranians give ground, if not go down, may prove to be a chimera.  Washington spin has been focused on the supposedly disastrous mega-devaluation of the Iranian currency, the rial, in the face of the new sanctions. Unfortunately for the fans of Iranian economic collapse, Professor Djavad Salehi-Isfahani has laid out in elaborate detail the long-term nature of this process, which Iranian economists have more than welcomed.  After all, it will boost Iran’s non-oil exports and help local industry in competition with cheap Chinese imports. In sum: a devalued rial stands a reasonable chance of actually reducing unemployment in Iran.

More Connected Than Google

Though few in the U.S. have noticed, Iran is not exactly “isolated,” though Washington might wish it.  Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Gilani has become a frequent flyer to Tehran. And he’s a Johnny-come-lately compared to Russia’s national security chief Nikolai Patrushev, who only recently warned the Israelis not to push the U.S. to attack Iran. Add in as well U.S. ally and Afghan President Hamid Karzai.  At a Loya Jirga (grand council) in late 2011, in front of 2,000 tribal leaders, he stressed that Kabul was planning to get even closer to Tehran.

On that crucial Eurasian chessboard, Pipelineistan, the Iran-Pakistan (IP) natural gas pipeline — much to Washington’s distress — is now a go. Pakistan badly needs energy and its leadership has clearly decided that it’s unwilling to wait forever and a day for Washington’s eternal pet project — the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline — to traverse Talibanistan.

Even Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu recently visited Tehran, though his country’s relationship with Iran has grown ever edgier.  After all, energy overrules threats in the region. NATO member Turkey is already involved in covert ops in Syria, allied with hardcore fundamentalist Sunnis in Iraq, and — in a remarkable volte-face in the wake of the Arab Spring(s) — has traded in an Ankara-Tehran-Damascus axis for an Ankara-Riyadh-Doha one.  It is even planning on hosting components of Washington’s long-planned missile defense system, targeted at Iran.

All this from a country with a Davutoglu-coined foreign policy of “zero problems with our neighbors.”  Still, the needs of Pipelineistan do set the heart racing.  Turkey is desperate for access to Iran’s energy resources, and if Iranian natural gas ever reaches Western Europe — something the Europeans are desperately eager for — Turkey will be the privileged transit country.  Turkey’s leaders have already signaled their rejection of further U.S. sanctions against Iranian oil.

And speaking of connections, last week there was that spectacular diplomaticcoup de théâtre, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Latin American tour. U.S. right-wingers may harp on a Tehran-Caracas axis of evil — supposedly promoting “terror” across Latin America as a springboard for future attacks on the northern superpower — but back in real life, another kind of truth lurks.  All these years later, Washington is still unable to digest the idea that it has lost control over, or even influence in, those two regional powers over which it once exercised unmitigated imperial hegemony.

Add to this the wall of mistrust that has only solidified since the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran.  Mix in a new, mostly sovereign Latin America pushing for integration not only via leftwing governments in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador but through regional powers Brazil and Argentina. Stir and you get photo ops like Ahmadinejad and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez saluting Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega.

Washington continues to push a vision of a world from which Iran has been radically disconnected.  State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland is typical in saying recently, “Iran can remain in international isolation.”  As it happens, though, she needs to get her facts straight.

“Isolated” Iran has $4 billion in joint projects with Venezuela including, crucially, a bank (as with Ecuador, it has dozens of planned projects from building power plants to, once again, banking). That has led the Israel-first crowd in Washington to vociferously demand that sanctions be slapped on Venezuela.  Only problem: how would the U.S. pay for its crucial Venezuelan oil imports then?

Much was made in the U.S. press of the fact that Ahmadinejad did not visit Brazil on this jaunt through Latin America, but diplomatically Tehran and Brasilia remain in sync. When it comes to the nuclear dossier in particular, Brazil’s history leaves its leaders sympathetic.  After all, that country developed — and then dropped — a nuclear weapons program. In May 2010, Brazil and Turkey brokered a uranium-swap agreement for Iran that might have cleared the decks on the U.S.-Iranian nuclear imbroglio.  It was, however, immediately sabotaged by Washington. A key member of the BRICS, the club of top emerging economies, Brasilia is completely opposed to the U.S. sanctions/embargo strategy.

So Iran may be “isolated” from the United States and Western Europe, but from the BRICS to NAM (the 120 member countries of the Non-Aligned Movement), it has the majority of the global South on its side.  And then, of course, there are those staunch Washington allies, Japan and South Korea, now pleading for exemptions from the coming boycott/embargo of Iran’s Central Bank.

No wonder, because these unilateral U.S. sanctions are also aimed at Asia.  After all, China, India, Japan, and South Korea, together, buy no less than 62% of Iran’s oil exports.

With trademark Asian politesse, Japan’s Finance Minister Jun Azumi let Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner know just what a problem Washington is creating for Tokyo, which relies on Iran for 10% of its oil needs.  It is pledgingto at least modestly “reduce” that share “as soon as possible” in order to get a Washington exemption from those sanctions, but don’t hold your breath. South Korea has already announced that it will buy 10% of its oil needs from Iran in 2012.

Silk Road Redux

Most important of all, “isolated” Iran happens to be a supreme matter of national security for China, which has already rejected the latest Washington sanctions without a blink. Westerners seem to forget that the Middle Kingdom and Persia have been doing business for almost two millennia. (Does “Silk Road” ring a bell?)

The Chinese have already clinched a juicy deal for the development of Iran’s largest oil field, Yadavaran. There’s also the matter of the delivery of Caspian Sea oil from Iran through a pipeline stretching from Kazakhstan to Western China. In fact, Iran already supplies no less than 15% of China’s oil and natural gas. It is now more crucial to China, energy-wise, than the House of Saud is to the U.S., which imports 11% of its oil from Saudi Arabia.

In fact, China may be the true winner from Washington’s new sanctions, because it is likely to get its oil and gas at a lower price as the Iranians grow ever more dependent on the China market.  At this moment, in fact, the two countries are in the middle of a complex negotiation on the pricing of Iranian oil, and the Chinese have actually been ratcheting up the pressure by slightly cutting back on energy purchases.  But all this should be concluded by March, at least two months before the latest round of U.S. sanctions go into effect, according to experts in Beijing. In the end, the Chinese will certainly buy much more Iranian gas than oil, but Iran will still remain its third biggest oil supplier, right after Saudi Arabia and Angola.

As for other effects of the new sanctions on China, don’t count on them.  Chinese businesses in Iran are building cars, fiber optics networks, and expanding the Tehran subway. Two-way trade is at $30 billion now and expected to hit $50 billion in 2015.  Chinese businesses will find a way around the banking problems the new sanctions impose.

Russia is, of course, another key supporter of “isolated” Iran.  It has opposed stronger sanctions either via the U.N. or through the Washington-approved package that targets Iran’s Central Bank. In fact, it favors a rollback of the existing U.N. sanctions and has also been at work on an alternative plan that could, at least theoretically, lead to a face-saving nuclear deal for everyone.

On the nuclear front, Tehran has expressed a willingness to compromise with Washington along the lines of the plan Brazil and Turkey suggested and Washington deep-sixed in 2010. Since it is now so much clearer that, for Washington — certainly for Congress — the nuclear issue is secondary to regime change, any new negotiations are bound to prove excruciatingly painful.

This is especially true now that the leaders of the European Union have managed to remove themselves from a future negotiating table by shooting themselves in their Ferragamo-clad feet.  In typical fashion, they have meekly followed Washington’s lead in implementing an Iranian oil embargo. As a senior EU official told National Iranian American Council President Trita Parsi, and as EU diplomats have assured me in no uncertain terms, they fear this might prove to be the last step short of outright war.

Meanwhile, a team of International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors has just visited Iran.  The IAEA is supervising all things nuclear in Iran, including its new uranium-enrichment plant at Fordow, near the holy city of Qom, with full production starting in June. The IAEA is positive: no bomb-making is involved.  Nonetheless, Washington (and the Israelis) continue to act as though it’s only a matter of time — and not much of it at that.

Follow the Money

That Iranian isolation theme only gets weaker when one learns that the country is dumping the dollar in its trade with Russia for rials and rubles — a similar move to ones already made in its trade with China and Japan.  As for India, an economic powerhouse in the neighborhood, its leaders also refuse to stop buying Iranian oil, a trade that, in the long run, is similarly unlikely to be conducted in dollars. India is already using the yuan with China, as Russia and China have been trading in rubles and yuan for more than a year, as Japan and China are promoting direct trading in yen and yuan.  As for Iran and China, all new trade and joint investments will be settled in yuan and rial.

Translation, if any was needed: in the near future, with the Europeans out of the mix, virtually none of Iran’s oil will be traded in dollars.

Moreover, three BRICS members (Russia, India, and China) allied with Iran are major holders (and producers) of gold. Their complex trade ties won’t be affected by the whims of a U.S. Congress.  In fact, when the developing world looks at the profound crisis in the Atlanticist West, what they see is massive U.S. debt, the Fed printing money as if there’s no tomorrow, lots of “quantitative easing,” and of course the Eurozone shaking to its very foundations.

Follow the money. Leave aside, for the moment, the new sanctions on Iran’s Central Bank that will go into effect months from now, ignore Iranian threats to close the Strait of Hormuz (especially unlikely given that it’s the main way Iran gets its own oil to market), and perhaps one key reason the crisis in the Persian Gulf is mounting involves this move to torpedo the petrodollar as the all-purpose currency of exchange.

It’s been spearheaded by Iran and it’s bound to translate into an anxious Washington, facing down not only a regional power, but its major strategic competitors China and Russia.  No wonder all those carriers are heading for the Persian Gulf right now, though it’s the strangest of showdowns — a case of military power being deployed against economic power.

In this context, it’s worth remembering that in September 2000 Saddam Hussein abandoned the petrodollar as the currency of payment for Iraq’s oil, and moved to the euro. In March 2003, Iraq was invaded and the inevitable regime change occurred. Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi proposed a gold dinar both as Africa’s common currency and as the currency of payment for his country’s energy resources. Another intervention and another regime change followed.

Washington/NATO/Tel Aviv, however, offers a different narrative.  Iran’s “threats” are at the heart of the present crisis, even if these are, in fact, that country’s reaction to non-stop US/Israeli covert war and now, of course, economic war as well.  It’s those “threats,” so the story goes, that are leading to rising oil prices and so fueling the current recession, rather than Wall Street’s casino capitalism or massive U.S. and European debts. The cream of the 1% has nothing against high oil prices, not as long as Iran’s around to be the fall guy for popular anger.

As energy expert Michael Klare pointed out recently, we are now in a new geo-energy era certain to be extremely turbulent in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere.  But consider 2012 the start-up year as well for a possibly massive defection from the dollar as the global currency of choice. As perception is indeed reality, imagine the real world — mostly the global South — doing the necessary math and, little by little, beginning to do business in their own currencies and investing ever less of any surplus in U.S. Treasury bonds. 

Of course, the U.S. can always count on the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) — Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates — which I prefer to call the Gulf Counterrevolution Club (just look at their performances during the Arab Spring). For all practical geopolitical purposes, the Gulf monarchies are a U.S. satrapy. Their decades-old promise to use only the petrodollar translates into them being an appendage of Pentagon power projection across the Middle East.  Centcom, after all, is based in Qatar; the U.S. Fifth Fleet is stationed in Bahrain. In fact, in the immensely energy-wealthy lands that we could label Greater Pipelineistan — and that the Pentagon used to call “the arc of instability” — extending through Iran all the way to Central Asia, the GCC remains key to a dwindling sense of U.S. hegemony.

If this were an economic rewrite of Edgar Allen Poe’s story, “The Pit and the Pendulum,” Iran would be but one cog in an infernal machine slowly shredding the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Still, it’s the cog that Washington is now focused on.  They have regime change on the brain.  All that’s needed is a spark to start the fire (in — one hastens to add — all sorts of directions that are bound to catch Washington off guard).

Remember Operation Northwoods, that 1962 plan drafted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to stage terror operations in the U.S. and blame them on Fidel Castro’s Cuba.  (President Kennedy shot the idea down.)  Or recall the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964, used by President Lyndon Johnson as a justification for widening the Vietnam War.  The U.S. accused North Vietnamese torpedo boats of unprovoked attacks on U.S. ships.  Later, it became clear that one of the attacks had never even happened and the president had lied about it.

It’s not at all far-fetched to imagine hardcore Full-Spectrum-Dominance practitioners inside the Pentagon riding a false-flag incident in the Persian Gulf to an attack on Iran (or simply using it to pressure Tehran into a fatal miscalculation).  Consider as well the new U.S. military strategy just unveiled by President Obama in which the focus of Washington’s attention is to move from two failed ground wars in the Greater Middle East to the Pacific (and so to China). Iran happens to be right in the middle, in Southwest Asia, with all that oil heading toward an energy-hungry modern Middle Kingdom over waters guarded by the U.S. Navy.

So yes, this larger-than-life psychodrama we call “Iran” may turn out to be as much about China and the U.S. dollar as it is about the politics of the Persian Gulf or Iran’s nonexistent bomb.  The question is: What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Beijing to be born?

Truthout

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Breast cancer is one of the most devastating news any women can hear. 

According to American Cancer Society statistics, roughly 1 in 8 (12%) women will develop breast cancer in their lifetime.  This year alone, more than 230,480 women in the United States will be diagnosed with new cases of invasive breast cancer and nearly 39,520 women will lose their battle. There are more than 2.6 million breast cancer survivors living in the United States. Breast cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in women exceeded only by lung cancer.  This type of cancer in men is rare. Overall white women have the highest rate of developing breast cancer of any ethnic group in the United States.

Signs & Symptoms

Early breast cancer may not cause symptoms. The most common symptom is new lump or mass. A new painless, hard mass that has irregular edges is more likely to be cancerous. Other symptoms include lumps in the armpits, swelling, skin irritation dimpling of skin, orange skin tone, and nipple changes include pain, swelling, retraction or discharge.

Advanced stages of cancer can lead to bone pain, breast pain, and swelling of one arm and weight loss.

Screening

Women in their 20’s and 30’s should start doing their monthly breast exam by themselves and by their doctor at least every 3 years. After age 40, women should have this done every year along with a screening mammogram and continue it as long as they are in good health. Women who are at very high risk (more than 20 percent lifetime) may be recommended to have a Mammogram and MRI.

Diagnosis

Workup usually starts with a mammogram followed by an ultrasound to see if the lump is solid or cyst. Biopsy is used for definitive diagnosis.

There are two types of breast cancer.  Ductal carcinoma makes up 80 percent of cases while Lobular type makes up the rest. Many of these cancers are sensitive to estrogen called estrogen receptor positive cancer. HER2 positive breast cancers are more aggressive and at higher risk of recurrence.

Risk Factor

Risk factors for breast cancer includes age over 50, family history of breast cancer (only 20%), BRCAI and BRCA2 gene defect, early start of menstruation and late menopause. Other modifiable risk factors include alcohol use, women who have never had children or had them only after age 30, on hormone replacement therapy, obesity, and radiation to chest area. Breast feeding, mild exercise and maintaining healthy weight can lower the risk of breast cancer.

Prevention

Prevention includes eating healthy diet, more fruits, vegetables, wholegrain everyday and limiting processed as well as red meats.

Tamoxifen is approved for breast cancer prevention in women who are at high risk. It can also be used to reduce the risk of recurrence in localized breast cancer and as a treatment for advanced breast cancer when the tumor is estrogen receptor positive. In some case prophylactic mastectomy may be recommended as risk reduction strategy.

Treatment

Treatment of breast cancer generally includes surgery. Surgery often is combined with radiation, chemotherapy and hormonal and/ or targeted therapy. Prognostic factors are tumor size, lymph node status, estrogen/progesterone receptor and HER2/neu status. The treatment requires a collaborative effort between surgeon, radiologist, medical oncologist, radiation oncologist and pathologist.

Role of Vaccine

Newsweek, December 10, 2011 issue with headline, “Could this be the end of cancer?” reported the case of a woman with metastatic breast cancer cured completely with a newly developed vaccine. Usually stage IV (spread to other part of the body) breast cancer takes the lives of at least 80% of patients within 5 years.  This patient was given vaccine-containing fragment of HER2/neu. She received 5 more shots within the next 5 months.  Subsequent CT scan several years later detected no cancer anywhere. Enough of the 21 women who received the experimental vaccine for metastatic breast cancer are doing so well that its inventor, immunologist Mary Disis of University of Washington, dares to envision a future in which vaccine “control or even eliminate cancer” according to Newsweek article.

The vaccine seems to be in the last stage of testing before it can be approved and be available to the public. Despite having enormous amounts of resources diverted to breast cancer vaccine, the final product may still be long way off. Even when the vaccine becomes available, it will be interesting to know the cure rate and at what cost. There are already many type of vaccines available for other cancers, which are extremely expensive and add very little to the cure rate or longevity of life. The good news is that with the present treatment breast cancer already has a cure rate of 85-90 percent.

Anis Ansari, MD; Chairman, Department of Medicine; Mercy Medical Center; Clinton, Iowa

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By Massoud Hayoun

China’s bold but chimerical quest for soft power in the Islamic world

A Chinese government official at the Sino-Arab cooperation forum in Beijing, in front of an Arabic sign reading “cooperation” / AP

Arriving at a Guangzhou construction site on assignment for a Chinese newspaper in the summer of 2010, I was surprised to find a ruby-red mosque that looked more like a palatial Buddhist pagoda than anything I’d seen in the Middle East. Islam has deep roots in Chinese history, and is believed to have arrived in China with Saad ibn Abi Waqqas, the Prophet Mohamed’s uncle, whom locals say was entombed in 664 AD in a dimly lit, musky hut not far from the newly constructed Chinese mosque.

The local government, devoted to the secular principle of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics that guides today’s China, contributed 15 million yuan ($2.4 million), roughly 90 percent of the overall building costs for the mosque, according to Muslim community figures.

An imam charged with collecting donations from the region’s Muslims for the rest of the construction fees told me the mosque was being built for Ramadan, but a Chinese official in the Guangzhou Ethnic and Religious Affairs Bureau intimated that the goal of the mosque was to “welcome China’s Muslim partners at the Asian Games.” 

Of the 45 participating nations at the Games, more than half were predominantly Muslim, including nations like Khazakstan that fuel China’s burgeoning economy with its vast reserves of oil, gas, and minerals. Some 30 percent of the food served at the Games was certified Halal.

Guangzhou’s new Waqqas Mosque is one of many of China’s recent forays into Islamic infrastructure — a market that promises to earn Beijing as much in soft power with the resource-rich Muslim world as it does contract revenues.

China has even left its mark on Mecca. Early last year, the state-owned China Railway Construction Corporation put the finishing touches on the Mecca Light Rail, a metro linking Mecca and Medina, Islam’s holiest cities in Saudi Arabia, allowing pious Muslims to perform the obligatory once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage in air-conditioned comfort.

Most recently, Algerian authorities granted a coveted contract to build the Grand Mosque of Algiers, the latest of Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s extravagant infrastructure projects, to the China State Construction Engineering Corporation (CSEC), a national enterprise with a broad portfolio of infrastructure projects in the developing world.

The mosque will be the third largest in the world, after those in Mecca and Medina, spanning some 400,000 square meters. And in a kind of my minaret is bigger than your minaret to Algeria’s perennial adversary, Morocco, the mosque will tower at 300 meters, 90 more than Casablanca’s King Hassan II Mosque.

Beating out construction firms from Algeria and Lebanon for the contract late last year, CSEC promised to complete the massive project in only four years for an astounding 109 million Algerian dinars, or $1.5 million.

When news of the contract first broke on ElWatan.com, the Web site for Algeria’s leading independent newspaper, commenters lambasted the project, exclaiming in French that they’d rather anyone build the mosque than the “godless Chinese.”

“Even an Israeli company would be better,” one commenter wrote, “At least they believe in God.”

But not everyone agrees.

“Religion doesn’t and shouldn’t interfere in the business world, I think that the Chinese company got the bid because it presented and justified the competitiveness of its performance,” said Aziz Nafa, an Algerian economist specializing in developmental studies. The Algerian firm’s proposal was $600,000 higher than the winning Chinese bid.

China has engaged in and often won a number of such cutthroat races to bring Islam to Muslims in Algeria and across the Muslim world. Analysts say that, after September 11, 2001, Islamic infrastructure projects have seen little competition from the United States.

“There is no question that China has reached out to Muslim-majority countries over the past ten years [since 9/11],” said Haris Tarin, director of the Washington D.C. office of Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), a group advocating against Islamophobia in American society.

China’s push to provide its international business partners with Islamic infrastructure, Tarin said, is part of a larger strategy to win over the Muslim world. Although many foreign Muslim individuals continue to do business with the United States, America has lost much of its soft power and economic discourse with the governments of many Muslim-majority nations over the past decade, leaving China an opening.

“China sees that strain. The EU, Brazil, and China will have the upper-hand with interests in Muslim-majority countries. We’ve got to deal with the reality and the dynamic changes in those countries,” Tarin said, referring to such changes as the emergence of Islamist parties in post-revolutionary Tunisia and Egypt.

Chinese business and political leaders will sometimes admit that the People’s Republic has sopped up U.S. business over the past decade, when U.S. foreign policy alienated much of the Muslim world and domestic changes made it exceedingly difficult for non-American Muslims to obtain U.S. working visas.

“After 9/11, a large bulk of Arab investment and business turned away from the U.S. and toward India and China,” said Hussein Ma Hongjian, the Muslim Chinese President of the China-Arab Council for Investment Promotion. “America lost a large part of its Arab business.”

In 2001, Beijing founded The Chinese-Arab Friendship Association to promote political and economic exchanges between China and 22 Arab states.

Asked whether he thought Beijing’s recent movement to build Islamic infrastructure represented a pragmatic slip in secular socialist values, the Friendship Association’s Deputy Secretary General Zhang Yue said that China in no way opposes any Islamic religious activity and, in a later email, replied with a quote from Confucius:

[Chinese text]~ How happy we are to meet friends from afar. Noble gentlemen seek harmony but aren’t afraid of diversity.

Pluralism and tolerance may be the official Chinese policy externally, but there have been numerous reports of restrictions against the practice of Islam internally, particularly in the restive province of Xinjiang, where many Muslims live.

Still, Beijing politicos like Zhang often seem keen to embrace the cultural nuances of their international Muslim business partners. 

In a speech to the Sino-Arab business community at an event late last month, Zhang compared heping, the Chinese wording for the Islamic concept of peace and submission, to hexie, Beijing’s oft-uttered catchphrase for a harmonious, law-abiding society.

Zhang is widely travelled in the Arab world and speaks fluent Arabic, as does most of his staff. When I met Vice Minister of Commerce Wei Jianguo as a dinner to promote Sino-African economic exchanges, he addressed me in a very lightly accented Koran Arabic and explained that he had studied abroad in Tunisia. Wei, who is the secretary general of China’s Center for International Economic Exchanges, also speaks French, which is frequently used by political and business elites in North and West Africa.

Also present at the dinner were ambassadors and attachés from the now-defunct pre-revolutionary governments of Tunisia and Libya, dining on a fine, 100% halal multi-course dinner, all while protests raged on back home.

Beijing has gotten so very good at Islamic diplomacy that everything from traditional Muslim headdresses to prayer beads and rugs are available for purchase on China’s Ministry of Foreign Commerce Web site. These products are mainly manufactured at Chinese-owned factories in Yiwu, an industrial town in Zhejiang Province that has become a hub of Arab and Muslim commerce in the People’s Republic.

The U.S. may have a tough time catching up with China’s new crop of Islamophiles, especially given the GOP candidates’ recent gaffes on Chinese affairs. It seems that China, for which ideology is at once all-important and ever-flexible, could become better skilled at reaching out to certain foreign cultures than the United States, which has spent so much of the post-Cold War era with a monopoly on hard as well as soft power. 

Still, American Muslims like Tarin advise U.S. officials to observe the importance of dynamism and building soft power in Muslim-majority nations.

“I generally tell folks in government, if we don’t know how to engage some of the different tendencies in the Middle East — Islamist groups rising — if we don’t know how to engage them and can’t get beyond the national security conversation, there are powers that want to work past that conversation,” Tarin said.

“But we can’t build mosques and metros like that,” he said, acknowledging that U.S. soft power works differently than China’s, and is not always quite as direct. “We make investments in civil society.”
Despite China’s strong foray into the world of Islamic infrastructural projects, Sino-Muslim relations will still have to overcome a past tarnished by a “win-win” in corruption as well as non-payment of wages and construction fees. And China is still figuring out how to maneuver lethargic bureaucracies and fickle monarchies. The China Railroad Construction Company expected to book losses of up to $623 million earlier this year after the Saudi authorities in charge of the Mecca Light Rail requested, and then failed to pay for, some mid-construction changes.

But Chinese state-owned companies like CRCC aren’t always the victim.

The Grand Mosque in Algiers won’t be the first so-called “challenge of the century” China has helped Algerian President Bouteflika construct. CRCC and Citic, another Chinese national company, are still under scrutiny from the Algerian public for allegations of corruption and non-payment of wages in the construction of the East-West Highway, the largest highway in Africa and the grandest of Bouteflika’s showpieces.

The prospects for a more favorable climate with CSEC, the Chinese company charged with the ongoing mosque project, could be difficult. The World Bank blacklisted the CSEC from receiving loans between 2003 and 2006, after it investigated allegations of contract “bid-rigging,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

Algerian Minister of Religious Affairs Bouabdellah Ghlamallah, charged with the realization of Algiers’ Grand Mosque, was cheerful and friendly when I called, but hung up immediately after he was asked to comment on his contract with CSEC. He failed to pick up subsequent calls.

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