UAE ‘Sultan of Space’ grapples with Ramadan fast on ISS

Astronaut Sultan AlNeyadi arrives to give a press conference at the Museum of the Future, Dubai, UAE, Feb. 2, 2023. (AFP)

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Updated 02 February 2023

AFP

February 02, 2023 15:40

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UAE ‘Sultan of Space’ grapples with Ramadan fast on ISS

Sultan AlNeyadi: ‘On average, there are 16 sunrises and sunsets daily... When do you (start and) break your fast?’
AlNeyadi: ‘I will also take my jiu-jitsu uniform because of my love for the sport’

Updated 02 February 2023

AFP

February 02, 2023 15:40

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DUBAI: The second Emirati to journey into space, martial arts enthusiast Sultan AlNeyadi, weighed up Thursday performing Ramadan in orbit — and promised to pack his jiu-jitsu suit for the ride.
AlNeyadi, 41, dubbed the “Sultan of Space” by his alma mater, will blast off on February 26 for the International Space Station (ISS) aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
During his six months in orbit — a record time for any Arab astronaut — AlNeyadi said he would like to observe the holy month of Ramadan, when Muslims typically fast from dawn to sunset.
But space travel presents unique challenges.
“The ISS travels quickly... meaning it orbits around the Earth in 90 minutes,” he told reporters in Dubai.
“On average, there are 16 sunrises and sunsets daily... When do you (start and) break your fast?”
AlNeyadi said he could fast according to GMT time, which is used on the ISS, if circumstances allow.
Fasting is not compulsory for certain groups of people, including those who are traveling or unwell.
“I will prepare for the month of Ramadan with the intention to fast,” AlNeyadi said.
He will become the second man from the United Arab Emirates to go to space, after Hazzaa Al-Mansoori’s eight-day mission in 2019.
During the voyage, AlNeyadi will study the impacts of microgravity on the human body in preparation for future missions to the Moon and Mars, he said.
Six months “may seem like a long time, but I don’t mind because the schedule is packed.”
It has already been a long journey for AlNeyadi, who served 20 years in the UAE military.
He also studied electronics and communications engineering in Britain, and then completed a PhD in data leakage prevention technology at Griffith University in Australia.
The UAE is a newcomer to the world of space exploration but quickly making its mark.
It sent an unmanned spacecraft to Mars in 2021, in the Arab world’s first interplanetary mission, and last year a rover to the Moon.
AlNeyadi said he was “happy” to embark on the mission and would take along “pictures of my family, maybe some toys that belong to my children.”
“I will also take my jiu-jitsu uniform because of my love for the sport,” he added.
Asked whether he would do any low-gravity grappling while floating around the ISS, he laughed: “We’ll see how it goes.”

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US strikes in Syria kill eight after contractor death

Updated 24 March 2023

AFP

March 24, 2023 05:42

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US strikes in Syria kill eight after contractor death

US troops are in Syria as part of a coalition fighting against remnants of the Daesh group

Updated 24 March 2023

AFP

March 24, 2023 05:42

BEIRUT: US airstrikes killed eight pro-Iran fighters in eastern Syria following a drone attack that killed one American contractor and wounded five US service personnel, a war monitor said Friday.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Thursday that at the direction of President Joe Biden, he had authorized “precision airstrikes tonight in eastern Syria against facilities used by groups affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.”

The IRGC is a wing of the Iranian military and is blacklisted as a terrorist group by the United States.

“The airstrikes were conducted in response to today’s attack as well as a series of recent attacks against Coalition forces in Syria by groups affiliated with the IRGC,” Austin added.

A Department of Defense statement said the US contractor had been killed and the others wounded “after a one-way unmanned aerial vehicle struck a maintenance facility on a Coalition base near Hasakah in northeast Syria.”

Another US contractor was also injured in the UAV attack, the Pentagon said, adding that the US intelligence community “assess the UAV to be of Iranian origin.”

On Friday, Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitor with a wide network of sources on the ground in the war-torn country, said eight people had been killed by US strikes.

“US strikes targeted a weapons depots inside Deir Ezzor city, killing six pro-Iran fighters, and two other fighters were killed by strikes targeting the desert of Mayadine and near Albu Kamal,” he said.

Hundreds of US troops are in Syria as part of a coalition fighting against remnants of the Daesh group and have frequently been targeted in attacks by militia groups.

The US troops support the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the Kurds’ de facto army in the area, which led the battle that dislodged IS from the last scraps of their Syrian territory in 2019.

Two of the US service members wounded on Thursday were treated on site, while the three other troops and one US contractor were medically evacuated to Iraq, the Pentagon said.

“We will always take all necessary measures to defend our people and will always respond at a time and place of our choosing,” said General Michael Kurilla, commander of US Central Command.

When the strikes were announced, Biden had already traveled to Canada, where he is set to meet with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Last August, Biden ordered similar retaliatory strikes in the oil-rich Syrian province of Deir Ezzor after several drones targeted a coalition outpost, without causing any casualties.

That attack came the same day that Iranian state media announced a Revolutionary Guard general had been killed days earlier while “on a mission in Syria as a military adviser.”

Iran says it has deployed its forces in Syria at the invitation of Damascus and only as advisers.

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Topics: Syria US airstrikes

Male guardianship rules in north Yemen restrict women’s aid work

Updated 24 March 2023

Reuters

March 24, 2023 00:32

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Male guardianship rules in north Yemen restrict women’s aid work

Conflict divided country between Houthis in north and UN-recognized government in south

Updated 24 March 2023

Reuters

March 24, 2023 00:32

DUBAI: Female aid workers in north Yemen cannot do their jobs tackling one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises as tightening male guardianship rules by Houthi authorities restrict their movement, nine female humanitarians have revealed.

When women refuse to take a guardian, they cannot travel to oversee aid projects, collect data and deliver health and other services. When women do take one, gender-sensitive work is difficult and aid budgets must bear extra costs.

One health project manager normally conducts 15-20 visits a year to projects around the country but said she has not made any since the rules requiring Yemeni female aid workers be accompanied by a close male relative — a “mahram” in Arabic — came out a year ago.

“I don’t have a lot of men in my family,” she said, adding that some women struggle to find willing guardians because relatives are against her working. “Sometimes a woman works without informing someone in her family.” She improvises with video calls, but knows other women have lost jobs because they cannot work effectively.

Yemen’s conflict has divided the country between the Houthis in north Yemen and an internationally recognized government in the south.

The conflict has wrecked the economy and destroyed the health system, leaving two-thirds of Yemen’s 30 million population in need of humanitarian assistance. Aid groups say female-headed households are more vulnerable to food insecurity and difficulties accessing aid.

Without female staff in the field, aid groups say they have trouble doing things as simple as identification checks on women, who may need to lift their face veils, to distribute food aid.

“Mahram requirements are making it even more challenging for humanitarian interventions to reach the most marginalized female program participants,” said one representative of an NGO that works on nutrition and sanitation.

For the past year female Yemeni aid workers have had to take a mahram when crossing provincial borders controlled by the Houthi group, a religious, political and military movement that controls north Yemen. In four provinces, they even need a guardian to move within the province.

“Female (Yemeni) staff have not been able to work outside our offices for almost two years which is catastrophic for their development, morale, motivation and also most obviously for us reaching women and girls in the field in a culturally sensitive way,” said an employee of another NGO, describing the situation in some areas.

Project quality in the NGO’s work on food and health provision has been “very damaged,” she said.

The women all requested anonymity due to safety fears.

A spokesman for the Houthis’ aid coordination body SCMCHA said they supported aid delivery, but organizations should respect traditions.

“Mahram is a religious Islamic obligation and a belief culture ... Why do organizations put up obstacles to Islamic teachings and Yemeni culture?” he said.

The Houthis have increasingly promoted conservative social values since ousting the government from the capital, Sanaa, in late 2014.

Movement restrictions increased ad hoc before becoming more systematic and targeting aid workers with mahram requirements.

The UN and governments including the US say the restrictions impact women’s ability to participate in public and political life and must stop.

In protest, most international NGOs have refused to include guardians when applying for aid work travel permits — resulting in those permits being declined. NGOs have also suspended travel on UN flights from Sanaa in protest.

“This smothering rule gives men power over women’s lives and is an unacceptable form of gender-based discrimination,” Amnesty International said.

Yemeni law does not impose male guardianship rules, and authorities in the south do not impose them.

“We want to achieve more, to be stronger, more independent. But they restrict that,” said one city-based aid worker who cannot monitor distant projects due to a lack of male relatives.

While humanitarians are the main target of mahram rules, directives requesting car hire and transport companies ensure mahram compliance extended it to all women – although these are less strictly applied.

“If women have to travel without a mahram, they are detained at checkpoints and kept until a male guardian arrives,” another aid worker said.

The women described taking boy relatives out of school, driving sick relatives around to ensure a man in the car, and last minute meeting cancellations.

“You have the burden to pay for your relative. To pay for accommodation, transportation, food ... It is not cost effective for us or for donors,” said a health worker.

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Iraq WMD failures shadow US intelligence 20 years later

Updated 24 March 2023

March 24, 2023 00:21

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Iraq WMD failures shadow US intelligence 20 years later

Updated 24 March 2023

March 24, 2023 00:21

WASHINGTON: In his US Capitol office, Rep. Jason Crow keeps several war mementos. Sitting on a shelf are his military identification tags, the tailfins of a spent mortar and a piece of shrapnel stopped by his body armor.

Two decades ago, Crow was a 24-year-old platoon leader in the American invasion of Iraq. Platoon members carried gas masks and gear to wear over their uniforms to protect them from the chemical weapons the US believed — wrongly — that Iraqi forces might use against them.

Today, Crow sits on committees that oversee the US military and intelligence agencies. The mistakes of Iraq are still fresh in his mind.

“It’s not hyperbole to say that it was a life-changing experience and a life frame through which I view a lot of my work,” the Colorado Democrat said.

The failures of the Iraq w ar deeply shaped American spy agencies and a generation of intelligence officers and lawmakers. They helped drive a major reorganization of the US intelligence community, with the CIA losing its oversight role over other spy agencies, and reforms intended to allow analysts to better evaluate sources and challenge conclusions for possible bias.

But the ultimately incorrect assertions about Iraq’s nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs, repeatedly cited to build support for the war in America and abroad, did lasting damage to the credibility of US intelligence.

As many as 300,000 civilians died in two decades of conflict in Iraq, according to Brown University estimates. The US lost 4,500 troops and spent an estimated $2 trillion on the Iraq War and the ensuing campaign in both Iraq and Syria against the extremist Daesh group, which took hold in both countries after the US initially withdrew in 2011.

Those assertions also made “weapons of mass destruction” a catchphrase that’s still used by rivals and allies alike, including before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which US intelligence correctly forecast.

Avril Haines, the current US director of national intelligence, noted in a statement that the intelligence community had adopted new standards for analysis and oversight.

Only 18 percent of US adults say they have a great deal of confidence in the government’s intelligence agencies, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Forty-nine percent say they have “some” confidence and 31 percent have hardly any confidence.

Shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush ordered an invasion of Afghanistan, where the ruling Taliban sheltered Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and allowed the group to run training camps.

Bush’s administration soon began to warn about Iraq, which was long seen as threatening American interests in the Middle East.

Iraq was known to have sought a nuclear weapon in the 1980s and had chemical and biological weapons programs by the end of the Gulf war in 1991. It had been accused of concealing details about those programs from international inspectors, before they were kicked out in 1998.

The Bush administration argued Saddam Hussein’s government was still hiding programs from inspectors after they reentered the country in 2002 and found no signs of resumed production.

A US intelligence estimate published in October 2002 alleges that Iraq had considered buying uranium from Niger and aluminum tubes for centrifuges, that it was building mobile weapons labs, that it was considering using drones to spread deadly toxins, and that it had chemical weapons stockpiles of up to 500 tons.

Some US officials also suggested Iraqi officials had ties to Al-Qaeda leaders despite evidence of deep antipathy between the two sides.

Those claims would largely be debunked within months of the invasion. No stockpiles were found. Subsequent reviews have blamed those claims on outdated information, mistaken assumptions, and a mix of uninformed sources and outright fabricators.

Bush repeated wrong US intelligence findings before the war, as did Secretary of State Colin Powell in a landmark February 2002 speech before the UN.

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Topics: Iraq US

Kuwait’s Al-Najat Charity distributes iftar meals to Syrian refugees in Lebanon

Updated 23 March 2023

Arab News

March 23, 2023 22:34

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Kuwait’s Al-Najat Charity distributes iftar meals to Syrian refugees in Lebanon

Charity delegation joins refugees in Arsal to welcome Ramadan and hold Taraweeh prayers

Updated 23 March 2023

Arab News

March 23, 2023 22:34

BEIRUT: Kuwait’s Al-Najat Charity has celebrated the advent of Ramadan by distributing iftar meals among Syrian refugees in camps near the border in northeastern Lebanon, Kuwait News Agency reported.
The charity’s public relations officer, Tarek Al-Essa, said a delegation joined refugees in Arsal to welcome Ramadan and hold Taraweeh prayers.
A mobile kitchen prepared breakfast as part of the “One Million Fasting Meals” campaign, which includes Lebanon and other countries.
Food baskets were also distributed to camps in the region.
Al-Essa highlighted the charity’s keenness to support the refugees, especially during the holy month, which represents “mercy, goodness and giving.”

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Topics: Ramadan 2023 Kuwait Syrian refugees in Lebanon

Jordan urges international community to take a stand against hate speech fueling violence in occupied Palestine

Updated 27 min 52 sec ago

Arab News

March 23, 2023 21:03

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Jordan urges international community to take a stand against hate speech fueling violence in occupied Palestine

Jordan’s deputy PM points to ‘reckless and disgusting’ comments by Israel’s Finance Minister Betzalel Smotrich
EU envoy Josep Borrell denounces Israeli minister’s statements, describing them as ‘dangerous and unacceptable’

Updated 27 min 52 sec ago

Arab News

March 23, 2023 21:03

AMMAN: Jordan’s Deputy Prime Minister has called on the international community to take a clear stand against hate speech fueling violence and conflict in occupied Palestine.
Ayman Safadi, who is also Jordan’s minister of foreign affairs and expatriates, pointed to the danger of extremist racist ideology, manifested in a “reckless and disgusting manner” in the statement of Israel’s Minister of Finance Betzalel Smotrich.
Jordan’s News Agency reported on Wednesday that the Israeli minister had denied the existence of the Palestinian people and their historical rights, and presented a map of Israel that included the occupied state of Palestine and Jordan.
In a phone call with EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell, Safadi stressed that Israel’s government should bear the responsibility for “hate speech, racist incitement, and the disgusting behavior of the Israeli minister.”
The government must declare its rejection openly and clearly, he said.
“Staying silent in the face of such statements and racist positions under the pretext of protecting government coalition is unacceptable and dangerous, and will only fan the flames of tension and further spread this extremist ideology.”
Borrell also denounced the Israeli minister’s statements, describing them as “dangerous and unacceptable,” and urged the Israeli government to take a stand.
The EU rejects all unilateral Israeli measures, underscoring its firm position that supports the two-state solution as a way to achieve peace, he added.
The two parties discussed the dangerous deterioration in the occupied Palestinian territories, underlining the need to halt all measures that fuel violence and undermine the chances of a comprehensive peace based on the two-state solution.
Safadi and Borrell also discussed the outcomes of the recent Aqaba and Sharm El-Sheikh meetings on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and Jordan’s efforts to help relaunch negotiations to end the violence.
Safadi lauded the EU’s support for the two-state solution and its condemnation of racist hate speech in all its forms.

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Topics: Jordan Ayman Safadi Josep Borrell hate speech Occupied Palestinian

UAE ‘Sultan of Space’ grapples with Ramadan fast on ISS

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UAE ‘Sultan of Space’ grapples with Ramadan fast on ISS

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