What is going on with Kuwait’s state-owned airlines? Is the government facing a tough time? Is competition very high? What makes others win while we keep faltering?
All rights reserved. © Kuwait Times Newspaper 2012 Source: http://www.albawaba.com/what-happening-aviation-sector-418751
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~ In particular Air Berlin's ~
By Michael R. Granger
AIRPORT--Princess Juliana International Airport (PJIA) operating company PJIAE Director Regina Labega attended and participated in the first Routes America aviation meeting, which was held in the Bahamas recently. It afforded the St. Maarten delegation the opportunity to lay groundwork for possible new airlift and ways to strengthen or expand current relationships. The event attracted more than 400 airlines, airports and industry representatives.
The conference opened with a strategy forum that provided invaluable insight into aviation in the region and an opportunity to meet face-to-face and discuss issues that have a profound impact on sustainable air transport.
Issues discussed, specifically for St. Maarten, included the future pre-clearance strategies for visitors beyond St. Maarten, the service level agreement (SLA) with Curaçao for civil aviation matters, the fuel crisis, taxation and the economic impact of the aviation industry, among other subjects.
The St. Maarten delegation gave individual specific presentations to the airlines, depicting a profile of PJIA, including terminal facilities, the role of St. Maarten, St. Maarten's air travel market as a stopover point, and St. Maarten's air travel market as a regional hub.
One of the highlighted opportunities of the presentations was the interest of Air Berlin, which, according to the Curaçao Tourism Authority, is interested in a double stop with Curaçao, given the recent expansion of service to Curaçao. PJIAE followed up with the Curaçao authority, which was vital considering that Air Berlin was looking at Barbados and not St. Maarten. Curaçao's Tourism Authority and government emphasised its interest in the double stop in St. Maarten.
Air Berlin utilises large aircraft (approximately 300 seats) and any agreement more than likely would have to be based on seat revenue and marketing guarantees. Of the average visitors who travel with Air Berlin to the region, 50 per cent hail from Germany, another 40 per cent from The Netherlands and 10 per cent from Switzerland.
Additional airline news included:
Tiara Air Aruba has interest to commence service to St. Maarten in the third quarter via Aruba from Venezuela and Columbia.
Air Tran also is interested in servicing the island. Its Baltimore and Orlando services present good opportunities.
United/Continental is maintaining its Dulles and Newark frequencies, bolstered by its year-over-year increase in the Chicago-St. Maarten service, which now will run through August.
Gol is interested in resuming its suspended service, however, would require marketing support. Gol also stressed the opportunity that Venezuela represents and encouraged a bilateral agreement.
Spirit Airlines is interested in operating after 11:00pm. This opportunity will be explored further with industry partners, given the apparent information that passengers are in favour of travelling late for a cheaper price.
Copa Airlines will increase connectivity and hence open new secondary markets, i.e. Manaus, Brasilia, Paraguay, etc., and other areas in South America, with improved slots (time of arrival and departure).
Delta Airlines' advance booking numbers are good through March 2012, with April numbers currently below expectations. However, this probably will change, based on the booking period (persons visiting St. Maarten tend to book closer to travel date, hence 45 days).
Labega explained that RedJet's entry into St. Maarten as of May was "the buzz," while pointing out that it was too early to tell whether JetBlue's San Juan-St. Maarten flight was profitable. She said St. Maarten had been a great destination for JetBlue's customers and an Orlando and Fort Lauderdale service seemed to be the next logical step, but not in 2012.
The St. Maarten delegation also paid a courtesy visit to Peter Dolara of American Airlines, who appreciated the presentation and recommended it be presented to other international tourism and industry partners.
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A special sitting day of Parliament will be held tomorrow (March 30) to get approval for six finance bills that have to be passed before the end of the financial year which ends on March 31.
The Bills to be passed are six tax laws which are being amended in keeping with the Budget proposals for this year announced in Parliament last November.
The bills so be taken for debate are Value Added Tax (Amendment) Bill, Inland Revenue (Amendment) Bill, Nation Building Tax (Amendment) Bill, Ports and Airports Development Levy (Amendment) Bill , Economic Service Charge (Amendment) Bill and the Finance Bill.
The relevant taxes have already been increased but the passage of the relevant bills is mandatory before the financial year ends.
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Tripp Lite, a world-leading manufacturer of power protection and connectivity products, announced its successful participation at the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia KSA edition of Datacenter Dynamics DCD Converged’, This unique series of events were tailored to deliver enhanced knowledge and networking opportunities for professionals that design, build and operate datacenters, which was held recently at the Four Seasons Hotel in Riyadh.
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By Sarah Gillespie
'Western civilization? I think it would be a good idea.' -- Mahatma Gandhi
The US army staff sergeant Robert Bales, who shot dead Afghani civilians in their homes two weeks ago, has now been formally charged with 17 counts of murder. Aside from the heartbreaking tragedy of this incident, it’s clear that, in the West, the prototype of the ‘lone wolf soldier’ has some advantageous side effects. He plants a false discrepancy between murder that is permissible, and murder that is a violation of our collective moral code.
We in the West slaughter innocent men, women and children en masse - but we prefer to do it remotely, ‘humanely’, from a palatable distance. We kill without looking into the faces of our victims. We kill with regret, not pride. We do not own our actions. Yet this gap between authorized violence and renegade barbarism is imaginary. From the victim’s perspective there cannot be a significant difference between being executed by a robotic drone or blown up by one American soldier. It is estimated that at least 40,000 civilians have so far been killed in Afghanistan since 2001. Add to that the 36,000 members of the Taliban, the 14,000 from the Northern Alliance and the 10,000 members of the Afghan Security Forces, and the figure is shockingly high. As painful as it may be to admit, Robert Bale’s murder of 17 Muslim peasants was totally consistent with the very ideology that planted him on Afghani soil in the first place. The decorated American father of three was not transgressing the ideology that his uniform represents. He was merely seeing it through. For us to imagine otherwise is a subtle form of self-congratulation, implying that we live in an ethical culture temporarily punctured by the arbitrary whims of a mad man. This is not the case.
Meanwhile, the case of the Algerian French ‘lone wolf’ of Toulouse, who gunned down seven civilians in France last week, highlights the embarrassing disparity between the way in which the actions of individuals are interpreted as being indicative of the collective from which they hail. When a Muslim commits an atrocity, his actions are understood to represent the values maintained in his culture. American Robert Bales is an isolated maniac with anger management issues, but Mohamed Merah is acting on behalf of ‘a group’. We may not know who the group is (so far alleged links include al-Qaeda, ‘The Knights of Pride,’ Syrian extremists and Salafism in general), but it’s definitely ‘a group’. It’s inconceivable that it could just be him.
Regardless of what the truth of the matter may be, it’s clear that when it comes to appropriating the Enlightenment notion of ‘the sovereign individual’, we are conspicuously selective. We do it only when it suits us. This applies to the victims in France as well as the perpetrator. The death of the first two (Muslim) men shot dead on 11 and 15 March did not qualify as headline news in the global media until they became an appendix to the harrowing murder of a Rabbi and his sons.
Hence the very concept of ‘war crimes’ appears to be a western luxury. The My Lai Massacre committed by troops in Vietnam, the Haditha massacre of Iraq, the killings in Sabra and Shatila, the bombing of United Nations shelters in Gaza, were all understood as aberrations. In order to reconcile ourselves with this endlessly unfolding catalogue of carnage and abuse, we enjoy the prototype of the young, vulnerable, undereducated soldier who just got slightly over excited by the chauvinist revenge rhetoric inherent in their training. Lynndie England, of ‘Human Pyramid’ fame, for example, is often described as a ‘poor, brain-washed, trailer-park dimwit’ rather than an ordinary American patriot enjoying her moment of Schadenfreude.
Perhaps its time that we ponder on the clue loaded in the often-used phrase describing this phenomenon: ‘the lone wolf’. In the animal kingdom and in war, the lone wolf’s singularity is shaped by his essentialist nature as a pack animal. It is because of the pack, not in spite of the pack, that he strikes out alone.
- Sarah Gillespie is a singer-songwriter living in London. She contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Visit: www.sarahgillespie.com.
Source: http://palestinechronicle.com/view_article_details.php?id=19191
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Minister Duncan said the modernisation of the prison's sanitary facilities would form a major part of the "extremely needed" renovations, which will be carried out by construction company Liccom. He emphasised that the project was not to expand the prison, but to bring its current facilities up to standard.
Duncan said the renovations would take 24 months, against a total budget of NAf. 7.5 million.
He declined to provide information as to how exactly prisoners would be moved from Pointe Blanche to Simpson Bay and vice versa due to safety reasons, but said the renovations would be carried out per prison block and with inmates' human rights being taken into consideration.
The signing of the contract for the prison renovation came on the heels of a report by two Dutch justice experts who had looked at the situation of detainees in cells at the Philipsburg police station and at the Pointe Blanche prison early last year. According to these experts, essential human rights of people locked up in St. Maarten's police cells were being violated and the hygienic situation at the prison had deteriorated.
Without mentioning an exact time frame, Duncan said the renovations were to start as soon as prison inmates could be relocated temporarily to the new detention facilities on the top floor of the renovated police station in Simpson Bay.
"Construction of the Pointe Blanche prison is to start as soon as we're ready to move inmates to Simpson Bay," Duncan said.
He said the prison renovation fit in his ministry's plans to "substantially" change the way in which persons were being detained. One of the changes will be that persons held in pre-trial detention and persons who already have been tried and are sitting out prison sentences no longer will be detained at the same location.
This is prescribed by law, but up until now St. Maarten never had a separate so-called House of Detention (Huis van Bewaring).
Duncan said the "brand-new, totally modern" cells in the Philipsburg police station as well as the top floor of the police station in Simpson Bay had been designated recently as Houses of Detention. Management of the Houses of Detention and of the Pointe Blanche prison will be put in the hands of the prison director.
The old situation, in which suspects were held at the police station and were being looked after by police officers, often led to complaints by lawyers, because they could not see their clients, who often also were not being taken care of properly.
"The police officers who managed these cells are not organised and set up to look after a House of Detention," Duncan said. "That is why I put management of these cells in the hands of the persons who are supposed to know how to handle the daily operations in this type of detention centre."
Three types of detainees will be held at the Houses of Detention: illegal immigrants, crime suspects awaiting trial and convicts, who may be divided into persons sentenced for minor crimes and long-term hardened criminals.
Minister Duncan said that after completion of the prison renovation it was the intention to separate these two types of criminals, with Pointe Blanche being the location where long-term criminals are to be housed.
"That is why 'The Box' [in Cay Hill, ed.] is so important, because that will become a big House of Detention, with a 15-bed youth detention facility," Minister Duncan stated, adding that in Country St. Maarten it was against the Constitution to detain young delinquents together with adults.
However, as long as The Box is not available, young criminals "will be juggled around" between Simpson Bay and the police station in Philipsburg to keep them apart from their adult counterparts, the Minister said.
Duncan thanked USONA for providing additional funding to make the prison renovations possible.
Dekker said USONA was pleased to assist in the "really needed" project to take good care of prisoners in St. Maarten, and thanked the Dutch Representation in St. Maarten VHP for making the organisation's contribution possible.
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