Egyptian students rally for return of tourists (AP)

CAIRO – As hundreds of Egyptian college students rallied at the iconic pyramids of Giza Friday to promote tourism, camel guide Salah Shabani stood to the side and looked on with sadness.

It's been two weeks since a popular uprising forced President Hosni Mubarak from power, but there has been no return of the crowds of foreigners who come to gaze at the pyramids and get their picture on a camel.

"I used to make 600 Egyptian pounds ($102) a week, or more," said Shabani, 23, who has given visitors rides on his camel, Oscar, since he was a teenager. "Now there is nothing. There are no tourists."

Shabani, who married two months ago, said he worries he won't be able to support his wife and has doubts about having children. He said he didn't regret the uprising — many Egyptians are still savoring a victory that has captured the attention of people around the world and sparked similar protests across the Middle East — but the reality that it could have negative consequences has set in.

Tourism in this tourist mecca known for pyramids, mummies, colorful markets and the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh has all but come to a halt since the uprising began in January and eventually forced Mubarak out on Feb. 11.

About 210,000 tourists fled the country in the last week of January, costing Egypt about $178 million, according to the government's statistics bureau, and cancellations for February add up to an estimated revenue loss of $825 million.

That is a lot for a nation that gets 5 percent to 6 percent of its gross domestic product from tourism, according to several estimates. As many as 2 million Egyptians work in tourism.

Students who organized Friday's rally said they hoped to combat any perception that Egypt is not safe. They painted their faces with the Egyptian flag, carried signs that said, "Trust me, I'm Egyptian," and wore black T-shirts that said: "I love Egypt."

"If I were a tourist, and seeing all the recent events, I might be afraid to be around here," said George Wagdy, a 23-year-old college graduate who just finished his military service and is looking for a job as an English and Spanish translator. "But what we are saying now that Egypt is safe and everything is back to normal."

Still, there were only a handful of foreigners at the pyramids, a far different scene than the usual dozens of packed tour buses coming and going all day.

Penelope Martinez, a 29-year-old from Mexico City, said she and her traveling companion, her 18-year-old sister, seriously considered canceling their trip.

"A lot of friends and family said we shouldn't come," said Martinez, who noted that many people perceive Mexico as unsafe after much drug-related violence and kidnappings in recent years.

"But I thought that if I feel safe going out in my country, I should feel OK here," she said. "We have only been here two days, but so far we feel very safe."

View the original article here

Oil surge prompts stock sell-off, dollar rally (Reuters)

By Jeremy Gaunt, European Investment Correspondent Jeremy Gaunt, European Investment Correspondent – 1 hr 20 mins ago

LONDON (Reuters) – World stocks fell nearly 1 percent on Tuesday as revolt in Libya drove oil prices sharply higher, prompting fears of disruption to global economic growth.

Widespread risk aversion boosted the dollar and Swiss franc and prompted strong flows into U.S. Treasury bonds. U.S. stock index futures also tumbled, suggesting losses on Wall Street when it opens.

U.S. crude futures hit a 2-1/2 year high, rising close to 8 percent to more than $94 a barrel on the latest contract's last day of trading, as deadly clashes wracked exporter Libya's biggest cities.

Brent oil was up close to $2 a barrel at $107.60, somewhat shy of Monday's intra-day 2-1/2 year peak.

Libya is by no means the world's largest oil producer, ranking third in Africa after Nigeria and Angola, but investors are concerned about the spread of trouble and a serious disruption to supply.

"Investors are scaling down on exposure across the board," said Richard Falkenhall, currency strategist at SEB in Stockholm. "Libya is the first major oil exporting country to be affected ... if this spreads to other oil exporting countries, it will not be a good sign."

Adding to the uncertain mood, two Iranian ships entered the Suez Canal on Tuesday on their way to the Mediterranean, a move that is bound to anger Israel.

Investors are primarily concerned that Middle East/North Africa trouble will keep oil prices high, driving up inflation, cutting into corporate profits and crimping economic growth.

This could be seen most clearly on Tuesday in MSCI's benchmark emerging market stock index (.MSCIEF), which was down 1.7 percent. Leading emerging market economies are among the fastest growing in the world and the most susceptible to inflationary pressure.

Globally, world stocks as measured by MSCI (.MIWD00000PUS) were down 0.9 percent. Europe's FTSEurofirst 300 (.FTEU3) was down about 1 percent. Japan's Nikkei (.N225) earlier lost 1.8 percent.

FLIGHT TO SAFETY

The risk-averse mood triggered a broad flight to safety. The yield on 10-year U.S. Treasuries fell nearly 8 basis points to 3.505 percent. Yields on core euro zone debt lost 5 basis points to 3.131 percent.

"The situation in the Middle East is overshadowing everything else, and we've broken a series of technical levels on the way up," a trader said.

On foreign exchange markets, the dollar rallied broadly, up 0.6 percent against a basket of major currencies (.DXY) while the euro lost close to 1 percent to $1.3551.

The euro also fell 1 percent on the day to 1.2793 Swiss francs, pushing the traditional safe-haven currency to its strongest in three weeks.

Separately, the New Zealand dollar hit a near two-month low against its U.S. counterpart after investors fretted about the economic damage caused by a strong earthquake which rocked the country's second biggest city, spurring speculation about the chance of an interest rate cut.

(Additional reporting by Naomi Tajitsu and William James, editing by Mike Peacock)

View the original article here

Algerian police break up crowd at pro-reform rally (AP)

ALGIERS, Algeria – Algerian police thwarted a rally by thousands of pro-democracy supporters Saturday, breaking up the crowd into isolated groups to keep them from marching.

Police brandishing clubs, but no firearms, weaved their way through the crowd in central Algiers, banging their shields, tackling some protesters and keeping traffic flowing through the planned march route.

The gathering, organized by the Coordination for Democratic Change in Algeria, comes a week after a similar protest, which organizers said brought an estimated 10,000 people and up to 26,000 riot police onto the streets of Algiers. Officials put turnout at the previous rally at 1,500.

The new protest comes on the heels of uprisings in neighboring Tunisia and Egypt that toppled those countries' autocratic leaders.

Police presence at Saturday's march was more discrete than the week before, when huge contingents of riot police were deployed throughout the capital the night before the march. On Friday night, by contrast, the capital was calm, with police taking up their positions only Saturday morning.

Still, by breaking up the crowd, the police managed to turn the planned march into a chaotic rally of small groups.

Opposition lawmaker Tahar Besbas, of the Rally for Culture and Democracy, RCD, party, was hospitalized with an apparent head injury after he was clubbed by police. Besbas' supporters said police initially refused to take him to a hospital, though he was eventually taken away in an ambulance.

It was not immediately clear how serious Besbas' injury was.

Human rights advocate Ali Yahia Abdenour, of the Algerian League for the Defense of Human Rights, was undeterred by the police. The frail elderly man cried out, "We want democracy, the sovereignty of the people."

Another demonstrator, 23-year-old Khalifa Lahouazi, a university student from Tizi Ouzou, east of the capital, said he "came here to seek my legitimate rights.

"We're living an insupportable life with this system," said Lahouazi, a university student from Tizi Ouzou, in the Kabylie region 60 miles (100 kilometers) east of Algiers. "It's the departure of the system, not just Bouteflika, that we want," he said, referring to President Abdelaziz Bouteflika.

The new march comes amid weeks of strikes and scattered protests in the North African country, which has promised to lift a 19-year state of emergency by month's end in a nod to the growing mass of disgruntled citizens.

University students and nurses are among those who have held intermittent strikes, joined by the unemployed. Even the richest region, around the gas fields of Hassi Messaoud, was not spared as around 500 jobless youths protested Wednesday, the daily El Watan reported.

A group of communal guards — citizens armed by the state to fight the two-decades-long Islamist insurgency — joined the protest Wednesday in front of the governor's office in Medea, around 60 miles (100 kilometers) south of Algiers to demand a variety of social benefits.

Rising food prices led to five days of riots in Algeria last month that left three people dead.

The second march comes as the pro-democracy fervor sweeping the Arab world is gaining ground, moving from neighboring Tunisia and Egypt, where longtime autocratic leaders were forced from power, to protests in Yemen, Bahrain and Libya.

In Algeria, Bouteflika has promised the lifting of a state of emergency by the end of the month. The measure, put in place to combat a budding insurgency by Islamist extremists, bans large public gatherings.

Prime Minister Ahmed Ouyahia acknowledged Wednesday that Algeria "cannot ignore events taking place in Arab and Islamic countries."

Foreign Minister Mourad Medelci, on a visit to Madrid, said Friday the march has not been officially banned, but only because no one has requested authorization to hold it. He praised the work of police a week earlier, noting that they did not carry firearms and that no one was injured.

He said in a French radio interview earlier this week that the protesters were only a minority.

"Algeria is not Tunisia. Algeria is not Egypt," he said in an interview with France's Europe 1 radio.

Algeria does have many of the ingredients for a popular revolt. It is riddled with corruption and has never successfully grappled with its soaring jobless rate among youth despite its oil and gas wealth. Still, experts say that this country's brutal battle with Islamist extremists that peaked in the mid-1990s, but continues with sporadic violence, has left the population fearful of a new confrontation. The violence left an estimated 200,000 people dead.

View the original article here