Year: 2017

Anti-migrant ship ends troubled Med mission

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Defend Europe, the group which sent a ship to waters off Libya to protest and potentially block migrant flows to Europe, has ended its controversial and setback-plagued mission. The multinational network of far-right activists said the chartering of the boat, the C-Star, had been an unqualified success, despite the boat spending less than a week patrolling the area off Libya where hundreds of thousands of migrants have been rescued in recent years. Its crew never got the chance to act on their threats to take any distressed migrant boats they…

Tunisia 3rd in Africa in mobile connectivity (GSMA ranking)

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Tunisia was ranked third in Africa in the mobile connectivity index compiled by GSMA, the global mobile operators Association. Mauritius came first. South Africa (world’s 84th) is second in Africa while Morocco, Egypt, Algeria, Botswana, Namibia and Ghana came behind Tunisia, successively. Angola closes the African Top 10 The ranking features 41 African countries.  Internet accessibility, prices of mobile devices, relevant services and political environment are among the factors the Association considered to determine the rankings. This criterion allowed scores to be awarded from 0 to 100 points. Worldwide, Australia,…

Numerous U.S. allies trust Putin more than Trump, survey finds

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Citizens of U.S. allies — including Japan, South Korea, Germany, Greece, Turkey, Hungary, France, Spain, Italy, and Sweden — trust Russian President Vladimir Putin more than President Trump, a Pew Research Center survey released Wednesday revealed. Although citizens of these countries are leery of Putin, they have greater trust in him than in Trump to “do the right thing regarding world affairs,” Pew found. Of 36 countries surveyed, 22 reported trusting Putin more. In Greece and Lebanon, for instance, citizens trust Putin more than Trump by a margin of 31 percentage points. Putin is…

Tunisia sees relative rebound of FDI in the first half of 2017

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Foreign direct investments (FDI) rose by 1.8 percent year-on-year in the first half of 2017, the Tunisian investment authority said Wednesday. Tunisia’s FDI reached 967.8 million dinars (396.8 million U.S. dollars) in the first six months this year, a slight rebound compared with a total of 950.8 million dinars (389.7 dollars) in the same period of 2016. About 97.6 percent of these outbound investments this year are direct investments while the remaining are portfolio investments. Khalil Laabidi, president of the Tunisian investment authority, estimated that direct investments mainly went to…

Africa is a hot destination for Chinese travelling overseas to escape summer

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The continuous summer heat in many parts of China has led to increased travel to cooler climes overseas, according to the travel industry. Online travel agency Ctrip estimates that about 30 million Chinese will travel overseas during the summer, with about a million making the trip to avoid the heat. “Popular overseas destinations for Chinese tourists to avoid the summer heat not only include countries that are well known for their comfortable temperatures during this season, such as Australia, New Zealand and Britain, but also include places that Chinese tourists know…

Las Ramblas: First terror attack in Spain for years

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(CNN) — Spanish police say they are treating a deadly van ramming in Barcelona as a terror attack — a revelation that is likely to come as a shock to a country that has largely been spared the assaults that have hit its neighbors in recent years. The Spanish capital, Madrid, was hit by its deadliest terror attack in history in March 2004, when coordinated bombings on commuter trains killed 191 people and injured 1,800 more. The bombings were blamed on Islamist militants, who were based in Spain but inspired…

On the move: if in doubt, just take the trip

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Breaking out of your comfort zone is essential if travel is to be beneficial  “How do you not become jaded?” a colleague asked me last week. “With all the places that you’ve been to, is it hard to motivate yourself to go somewhere new?”The truth is that sometimes it is. Sometimes if you’ve been to one country before, or a similar place to the one you’re considering, you do wonder if they’ll be too much the same, if there will be anything new to learn. Readers of this column will also…

The Virgin of Trapani: tolerance and tradition go cheek by jowl in Tunis

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About 150 people are crowded into the 19th-century church of Saint Augustin and Saint Fidèle in the Tunis suburb of La Goulette. More are gathered outside in the summer heat, behind the iron railings lining the narrow streets of Little Sicily, the neighbourhood where the fishing town’s Italian migrants once settled and established themselves. The crowds have come to see the first procession of the Assumption to be staged in the city since the tradition died out in the early 60s. In its heyday, the flower-decked statue of the Virgin…

Tunisia: foreign currency reserves cover only 90 days of import

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The decline in Tunisia’s net foreign currency assets continues. Their level reached on 11.538 billion dinars or 90 days of imports on Monday August 14, against 13,123 billion or 120 days of imports on the same date in 2016. The monetary indicators are there to testify to the fragility of the economic situation. The erosion of reserves may exacerbate the pressure on the dinar exchange rate and make its management more and more complicated. African Manager

Tunisian army captures seven fuel smugglers in Libyan border firefight

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Tunisian army units exchanged fire with armed men crossing the frontier berm from Libya near Medenine early this morning. The clash ended with Tunisian troops capturing six vehicles, one of them loaded with fuel. The defence ministry in Tunis reported that seven men, some from the local towns of Remada and  Dhehiba had been arrested.  The rest of the smuggling convoy, which is said to have included six technicals with machine guns, turned round and headed back into Libya, shadowed by a helicopter gunship. The Tunisians have given no details…