 |
Al-Ahram Weekly 6 - 12 July 2000 Issue No. 489 
|
||
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
|
Al-Ahram Weekly 6 - 12 July 2000 Issue No. 489
|
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
Egypt Region Focus International Economy Opinion Culture Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Newsreel
Celebrating Cairo
Today -- Cairo National Day -- will be celebrated by the governorate through the inauguration of a multitude of projects intended to alleviate city pressures on Cairenes. The governorate is planning to launch 58 projects, at a total cost of LE550 million, to mark the occasion.One of the most publicised is the expansion of the water station serving Fustat (Old Cairo), to raise its capacity from 800,000 cubic metres to 1.1 million cubic metres per day. At a cost of LE200 million, the expansion will serve some four million people in the Dar El-Salam, Maadi and Madinet Nasr areas.
Moreover, LE100 million has been spent on the development of the Tibbeen water plant and an adjoining training centre for water plant workers, enlisting Japanese technical assistance.
On 8 July, Prime Minister Atef Ebeid will inaugurate the Cairo 2000 Exhibition, featuring information on how to protect the Cairo environment, as well as various aspects of the city's development plans.
Al-Azhar's jurisdiction
The Administrative Court has ruled against a decision by the Islamic Research Academy of Al-Azhar to retract permission previously granted to a production agency to mass produce an audio tape entitled, "Why don't you pray?"According to the court ruling, Al-Azhar only has the right to examine the content of a work to make sure it is in line with Islamic teachings, but it does not have the authority to give permits or interfere with the work of the various parties involved in the production of a book or tape. This is the prerogative of courts-of-law.
News in the air
Following an eight-year hiatus, EgyptAir will resume flights to Libya at the end of this month, organising two trips to Tripoli and a third to Benghazi each week.An EgyptAir delegation will be visiting Tripoli next week to finalise plans for re-activating the air route. A specific date for the visit has yet to be set.
International flights to and from Libya resumed in April 1999, when UN sanctions were lifted after the Libyan government agreed to hand over suspects in the 1988 bombing of a TWA airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, to face trial in the Netherlands.
The resumption of EgyptAir services has been delayed partly due to currency conversion problems in Libya.
EGYPT has paid the United States government $5 million to partly defray the cost of the search and rescue efforts that followed last October's EgyptAir crash in the Atlantic off the Massachusetts island of Nantucket that killed 217 people. The full bill is expected to amount to $10.6 million. Egypt's ambassador to Washington, Nabil Fahmi, said that "Egypt will pay the remaining amount expeditiously."
UNABLE to reach agreement on a Cairo-Gaza air route, Egyptian and Israeli aviation officials have extended the negotiation period for an additional month in order to prevent a potential cut-off of flights. The two sides had earlier missed a deadline for reaching an agreement on the air corridor that should be used. On 3 May, Israeli security services turned back an Egyptian flight after preventing it from landing in Gaza airport. The airport is controlled by Israel in accordance with the terms of agreements signed between the Palestinians and Israel.
At patience's end
WOMEN abusers be warned. Women can hit back, violently. Sceptics are referred to the murder this week of a man by his wife in the working class district of Warraq Al-Hadar.Afaf Rashad, 26, has allegedly confessed to killing her husband, a poultry merchant, by stabbing him with a knife, dousing the body in kerosene, burning it and cutting the remains into pieces which she stuffed in two large plastic bags. At some point, the assistance of a male cousin, who owns a motorcycle, was enlisted to help transport the mess to a nearby irrigation canal and bury it in the mud.
Afaf later filed an official complaint, demanding the financial support of her husband's relatives due to his sudden "disappearance."
Police were alerted by witnesses who saw the young wife leave her house at midnight carrying two plastic bags.
Afaf is said to have confessed to investigators that her husband had returned home drunk, had beaten her, pulled her hair and then attempted to strangle her. She reacted by grabbing a knife.
OR HOW about the case of 38-year-old Iman Shehata, who asked her husband one evening to check for a gas leak in the kitchen and, when he refused, she got up and bashed his head in with the leg of a chair. The husband, 45-year-old Abdel-Latif Mohamed, a ministry of supply inspector in the Nile Delta governorate of Zagazig, was rushed to hospital where he died. Questioned by police, the wife confessed her crime immediately. Are these women inherently violent or are they simply reacting to systematic male brutality and oppression?
Vacation disaster
A collision between a car and a tourist bus on the road between the towns of Dahab and Nuweiba in southern Sinai resulted in the death of nine people, including an unidentified three-year-old boy. Eighty-two others were wounded.According to preliminary investigations, the driver of the tourist bus had been working for 24 hours non-stop. The driver of the other car was speeding.
Interpreting the word
THE NOON prayers last Friday at Cairo's Sayeda Zeinab Mosque were the same but different. For the first time, the imam's words were rendered into sign language for hundreds of worshippers in the congregation whose hearing is impaired. The sign language interpreter is set to be a regular feature at the mosque. Last Friday's sermon at Sayeda Zeinab was the first step in an experiment which will eventually be replicated in mosques throughout the country.The sermon, broadcast live on national television and transmitted via 12 non-Egyptian channels, will soon be emulated at Salaheddin Mosque in Manial and Qahir Al-Tatar Mosque in Heliopolis. The new means of communication will be evaluated then introduced to the majority of mosques across the country, according to Minister of Al-Awqaf (Religious Endowments) Mahmoud Hamdi Zaqzouq. Zaqzouq said that the government is "trying its best to meet the needs of all citizens."
Ahmed Younis, head of the Egyptian Organisation for Rights of the Disabled, said the Ministry of Religious Endowments had given his organisation its approval to start sign language interpretation in the three mosques and to expand in the future. Some churches have also started to make sign language interpreters available at Sunday services, Younis said.
Younis believes that no one should get in the way of anybody wishing to get closer to God. "The deaf and mute, all over the world, are living in a prison of isolation," he said. "We are opening the way, and we hope it will never be closed again."
According to Younis, who is blind, there are seven million disabled Egyptians, including two million who are deaf. "The important thing is that the deaf and mute -- no matter what their nationality, social class, wealth, position, colour or religion -- know their way to God," Younis added.
Sayeda Zeinab mosque imam Sheikh Ibrahim Galhoum's sermon was interpreted into signs by Alaaeddin El-Sayed, a teacher at Al-Amal Deaf and Mute School in Shoubra. A beaming El-Sayed later told reporters he was unable to sleep for two days because he was "so excited and happy" to interpret the Friday prayers. "The joy that I saw on the faces of the deaf and mute made me even happier."
Compiled by Fatemah Farag
