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10 The Muslim Observer international Volume 16, Issue 34; Aug 15 - 21, 2014 Russia to Boost Trade with Egypt after Western Food Ban By Alexei Anishchuk SOCHI, Russia, Aug 12 (Reuters) - Russia will increase exports of wheat to Egypt and imports of other agriculture products from it, Russian officials said on Tuesday as the two countries discussed the potential for free trade. The move comes as Russia seeks new sources of supply after it banned most food imports from the United States, the European Union, Australia, Canada and Norway last week in retaliation for Western sanctions over the crisis in Ukraine. “Egypt has already increased (agricultural) supplies to our market by 30 percent (and) is ready to increase (supplies) by yet another 30 percent in the near future,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said after meeting with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. Increased Egyptian shipments of products such as potato, onion, garlic and oranges will compensate for up to half of the shortfall of these products caused by the ban, Russian Agriculture Minister Nikolai Fyodorov told reporters in Sochi. Egypt is the world’s biggest wheat importer and the largest buyer of Russian wheat. The North African country bought 3.6 million tonnes of Russian wheat in the marketing year to end-June. “Our partners were interested in opportunities for this year’s export,” Putin told reporters. “For Egypt it will be at least 5-5.5 million tonnes.” Putin did not say who would supply the additional volumes. Russian grain exports are dominated by foreign and local nongovernment trading firms. Putin and al-Sisi discussed on Tuesday the creation of a free trade zone between Egypt and the Moscow-led Customs Union of Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan, Putin said. They also discussed the possibility of setting up an Egyptian transport logistics hub on the Russian Black Sea coast and the creation of a Russian industrial hub in Egypt as part of its Suez canal development project. Russia last year imported $17.2 billion worth of food from the countries covered by the sanctions, of which $9.2 billion was in the affected categories, according to the International Trade Center, a joint venture of the United Nations and World Trade Organization. (Writing by Polina Devitt and Katya Golubkova; Editing by Alexander Winning and Jane Baird) Bombed Three Times, 85-year-old Palestinian Is Refugee Again By Sylvia Westall GAZA (Reuters) - Palestinian Ibrahim Mohammad al-Toum, 85, sleeps on the floor on a thin mattress in a Gaza schoolroom, displaced for the third time in six years. A farmer of oranges and lemons, his house in northern Gaza City has been bombed in each of the three Israeli-Palestinian conflicts since 2008. He has no idea why he has been singled out in this way. “Why did they do it? Why? It is unfair, unfair! I am a peaceful man!” he said, sitting on the mattress in the schoolroom, surrounded by members of his extended family. At any rate, he will not blame the Palestinian authorities in the Gaza Strip, a coastal enclave of 1.8 million people dominated since 2007 by the Islamist Who’s Your Mummy? Egyptian Mummification Older than Was Thought By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - It has long been known that the practice of mummification of the dead in ancient Egypt - fundamental to that civilization’s belief in eternal life - was old, but only now are researchers unwrapping the mystery of just how long ago it began. Researchers on Wednesday said a form of mummification was being carried out there more than six thousand years ago, much earlier than previously thought. They said embalming substances contained in funerary textiles from the oldest-known Egyptian cemeteries showed mummy-making from as early as about 4300 BC. The embalming agents were infused into the linen used to wrap the corpse to provide an antibacterial and protective barrier. It was not as elaborate as the process used much later on the bodies of powerful pharaohs and other elites as well as many ordinary Egyptians, but came more than 1,500 years earlier than Egyptian mummification had been thought to have started. There is evidence of mummification involving remains from around 2600 BC of Queen Hetepheres, mother of Khufu, the pharaoh who commissioned the Great Pyramid at Giza outside Cairo. There also is evidence of linen that contained resin being used to wrap bodies around 2800 BC. The researchers were amazed to find that the plant, animal and mineral components used in preparing the mummies at the cemeteries in Mostagedda in central Egypt were essentially the same embalming “recipe” used thousands of years later at the pinnacle of the ancient Egyptian civilization. “I was surprised that the prehistoric Egyptians, who lived in a tribal society 1,000 years before the invention of writing, were already in possession of the empirical science that would later become true Ibrahim Mohammad al-Toum, 85, poses in his home that he says has been bombed three times in six years by the Israeli army, in Gaza City, August 11, 2014. A farmer of oranges and lemons, his house in northern Gaza City has been bombed in each of the three Israeli-Palestinian conflicts since 2008. REUTERS/Siegfried Modola Hamas faction. Israel says Hamas is responsible because it uses residential areas as arms depots and launchpads for rockets, drawing Israeli strikes. But Toum said it was up to powers outside Gaza to do something to end the conflict, not authorities inside. “The Arab countries were asleep when Israel struck,” Toum said. “The solution is with the Arab countries, with America to put pressure on Israel. I don’t want more war, why was there a war?” Egypt is mediating a new round of indirect peace talks between Palestinians and Israelis, but with the Middle East gripped by a series of crises from Libya to Iraq, attention paid by the Arab world to the Palestinian cause is less than it used to be. This is despite a higher death toll - 1,938 Palestinians and 67 Israelis - than in past Gaza clashes. Local rights activists say the month-long conflict has displaced around 520,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, and at least half of them, like Toum and his family, have been staying in United Nations refugee camps in schools. With a new ceasefire agreed late on Sunday, some families started to return to their homes from the camps on Monday, carrying bags and mattresses on their backs or loading up donkey carts. Toum is not sure how he will repair his house again. When the Israeli army warned it would bomb his district last month, the father of 10 fled Gaza’s northern Tawam neighborhood. Tawam used to be covered in farms but over Toum’s lifetime it has given way to concrete houses that have squeezed the rural land. Toum is worried that his citrus trees have not received enough water during the war and he expects they are dead. The neighborhood has suffered relatively light damage in battles between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian militants this time. Several homes have been destroyed and one of the mosques is wrecked, its dome lying amid rubble. When the fighting began, Toum traveled to the U.N. camp in the school on a donkey cart with members of his family, taking only two mattresses and a coarse grey blanket, which four of them would later share. mummification,” said one of the researchers, Jana Jones, an Egyptologist at Macquarie University in Australia. Biochemical analysis identified the components from funerary textiles retrieved from the cemeteries during excavations in the 1920s and 1930s and held in Britain’s Bolton Museum. The “recipe” consisted of a plant oil or animal fat base, with smaller amounts of a pine resin, an aromatic plant extract, a plant gum and petroleum. “The ancient Egyptians believed the survival of the body after death was necessary in order to ‘live again’ in the afterlife and become immortal. Without the preserved body, this was not possible,” said Stephen Buckley, an archaeological chemist at Britain’s University of York who led the scientific research. Jones said mummification demanded rare and costly ingredients, some from distant lands. Pine resin in the Mostagedda textiles may have come from southeastern Turkey, many hundreds of miles away. The practice of mummification reached its peak during the era known as the New Kingdom, between about 1550 BC and 1000 BC, when powerful pharaohs reigned including Ramses II and Thutmose III, as well as the “boy king” Tutankhamun, better known as “King Tut.” It largely stopped with Christianity’s influence around AD 400. Some Christians continued it in some form until it ended completely with the arrival of Arabs spreading the new religion of Islam in AD 642. The study appears in the scientific journal PLOS ONE. (Reporting by Will Dunham, editing by G Crosse) His simple concrete house was hit shortly afterwards, causing parts of two of its four floors to collapse together. Toum tried to return with his 75-year-old wife Amena several days later but the area was too dangerous. “When I and my wife went back to try to take belongings, they bombed it again, during Ramadan. We did not have the Eid feast this year because of the war,” he said. It is an experience he has gone through twice before during his old age. Each time the journey to the camp could take up to one hour “depending on the health of the donkey”, he said. “In 2008 the planes came and bombed the home. I came to a refugee school in Gaza. We lived on bread and cans of fish for 23 days. Then back to Tawam, and they had destroyed my home,” he said, starting to cry quietly. He was given 4,000 euros ($5,354.34) from the United Nations to rebuild the house but four years later it was bombed for a second time. In 2012, Toum was in the bedroom when the shelling started. When he returned after several days in a refugee camp, the bedroom walls were pitted with bullets and there was a gaping hole near the window. This time he says he will stay in the school until water and electricity are restored to his home and he feels that the area is safe again. “But nowhere is better than home,” he said.
Volume 16, Issue 34; Aug 15 - 21, 2014 Estimator: Good News for Texas’s Economic Outlook “The Texas ECONOMY continues to expand. We’re through recovery and into expansion.” That was the good news brought by John Heleman, chief revenue estimator for the office of the Comptroller of Public Accounts, to the members of the state’s Legislative Budget Board (LBB) this week. Heleman offered a report on the state’s economy and an overview of Texas state revenue. houston Houstonian Corner In fact, he said, if Texas were a nation, the State would have the 12th largest economy in the world, slightly behind Canada, but larger than Australia. It was good news all around from Heleman, who reported that the state’s economy “CONTIN- UES to outperform” the United States’ economy. Texas is “continuing its trend of growing faster Compiled by Ilyas Choudry, houston@muslimobserver.com than our nation as a whole.” Heleman added that the Comptroller expects to see a little more money than anticipated in the rainy day fund, with an anticipated ending balance of about $8.4 billion for FY 2015. And, that figure assumes passage by Texas voters of Prop. 1 in November, which would transfer $1.7 billion out of the rainy day fund for highway expenditures. And how is the state’s revenue system performing? Heleman offered this analysis: Sales tax – The state’s largest tax has grown quickly. Figures released just this week show fiscal year-to-date state sales tax collections are up more than 5 percent. Motor vehicle tax – Described as “particularly robust.” In 2009, there was an “unprecedented” 22 percent decline in one year during the early part of the recession. There were few NEW CAR PURCHASES. Sales tax receipts are up 6.25 percent this fiscal year. FRANCHISE TAX – The state is nearing the estimated $4.7 billion in receipts. A rate reduction in effect this year could very well be extended – and doubled – next year. Oil production and natural gas tax – Tax receipts in this category are “outproducing what was The Muslim Observer 11 expected,” largely due to Eagle Ford Shale. In spite of these positive numbers, LBB member Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst warned that the state continues to grow in population by 1.7 percent per year, and that growth will have an impact on the money needed to fund public education and the state’s “SAFETY net programs.” In his overview of the state ECONOMY, Heleman said Texas entered the recent recession later than the nation as a whole, exited at the same time, but lost fewer non-farm payroll workers than the United States as a whole. He said Texas’ current payroll worker number are up 3.3 percent over the last 12 months – growing “twice as fast” as employment growth of the nation. And, the state’s unemployment rate of 5.1 percent is a full percentage point better than the nation’s. “We still have 31 states that have yet to recover all their jobs they lost in the recession,” said Heleman. “Many states are struggling. We’re not seeing that in Texas.” The Comptroller’s Office representative said by November 2011, Texas had recovered all of the jobs it lost as a result of the recession. The United States, however, is just now at the same level of employment as it was six and one-half years ago. Regarding housing, Heleman said the United States market is “struggling to recover,” while Texas is doing “somewhat better” and the inventory on the market is growing smaller. Regarding COMMERCIAL office space, Heleman said the Dallas, Houston and Austin Class A office space vacancy rate is below 10 percent, even with new construction and higher rental fees. THE PRICE OF OIL has “settled down,” according to Heleman, and is “relatively stable.” The focus in Texas now is on crude oil. He explained that there are currently about 900 rigs in the state and only 74 of them are drilling for natural gas. The other 800-plus are drilling for crude oil, evidenced by the increase in activity in both the Eagle Ford Shale area and the Permian Basin. Later this week, State Comptroller Susan Combs said she anticipates there will be at least $232 million more in revenue than her official estimate last year. That excess will likely allow the State Legislature to extend the current FRANCHISE TAX cut for most businesses and increase it to 5 percent.
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