WATANI International
5 September 2010
Transportation Minister Alaa’ Fahmi has announced that executive steps have already been taken for a project to expand the Greater Cairo Ring Road. The project will include building four lanes of service roads on both sides of a 100km stretch of the Ring Road, Fahmi said, to ensure better traffic fluidity and safety. The first phase will comprise the expansion of the 30km stretch extending from the Autostrad Road east of Cairo to the Suez highway, and is estimated to cost some EGP600 million.
Consumer protection
Egypt has signed a cooperation protocol with Germany on protecting consumer rights. The protocol focuses on cooperation to facilitate the filing of consumer complaints and directing them to the proper channels. It also promotes joint coordination to stand up to non-original products or those that lie short of standard specifications.
Glass from Egypt
With Egypt participating in the largest international exhibition for glass technology and products to be held in Düsseldorf later this month, a symposium on the future of the glass industry in Egypt was recently held in the Arab-German Chamber for Industry and Trade in Cairo. Glass has been innovatively manufactured in Egypt since the days of the ancient Egyptians, and a modern glass industry now thrives in Egypt in both the public and private sectors.
Among the rarest in the world
The New Valley Governorate, which covers Egypt’s Western Desert and its several oases, together with the Egyptian General Survey Authority are in the process of publishing a guidebook for the oases. The guidebook will be replete with maps and data that can be useful for tourism, development and investment. It will help identify opportunities of tourism marketing in the region which includes 120 ancient sites and two national parks that are among the rarest nature reserves in the world.
The big read
The library sector of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA) is organising four cultural and artistic contests on Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. This will involve seminars, artistic workshops, online activities, and the screening of films, related to the topic. The contest is the newest annual round of the Egyptian American project “The big read: Egypt-USA”, the purpose of which is to familiarise Egyptian readers with American literature and American readers with Egyptian literature. Previous rounds focused on John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, and Naguib Mahfouz’s The Thief and the Dogs.
Settlement at Kharga
A substantial settlement which dates back to the Second Intermediate Period (ca.1650-1550BC) was discovered at Kharga oasis in the Western Desert by a mission from Yale University. Zahi Hawass, Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), said that the newly discovered settlement is 1km long from north to south and 250m wide from east to west, and lay along the bustling caravan routes connecting Egypt with points as far as Darfur in western Sudan. Remains of large administrative mudbrick structures that may have been used as lookout posts were found, as well as parts of an ancient bakery with two ovens and a potter’s wheel used to make the ceramic bread molds in which the bread was baked. Evidence suggests the inhabitants of the site were part of an administrative centre, and were engaged in baking on a massive scale that may have even been feeding an army.