Frankly Speaking: Groundwork being laid for Gulf economic union by 2025, says GCC chief Nayef Al-Hajraf | Arab News — www.arabnews.com
Highlights:
– Nayef Al-Hajjraf, who took over the organization’s top job in 2020, said that the verdict of last week’s GCC summit was conclusive. “The directions or the decisions made by the supreme council are very clear — it has been set as a deadline 2025. There is a lot of work ongoing. We are working on the customs union, we are working on the common market, and also lifting the barriers that might be in between.”
– He added: “I know 2025 is around the corner. There is a lot of work that needs to be done for the next four years. We have to emphasize that we are not starting from scratch, there is huge work that we conducted and completed actually over the last 20 years since the custom union was announced in 2003.”
– He also talked of the possibility of further political integration in the GCC, the need for a unified rate of value-added tax across the organization, the desirability of a special “business visa” to aid commerce, and the GCC’s commitment to mutual defense security.
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Giant Rave in Saudi Desert Pushes Kingdom’s Changing Boundaries – Bloomberg — www.bloomberg.com
Highlights:
– The electronic music festival in Saudi Arabia this weekend highlighted the changes catapulting through the conservative kingdom under its controversial crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.
– At a recent international film festival in Jeddah, women strutted the red carpet in sleeveless gowns and an openly queer man, Adam Ali, won best actor.
– The scenes at the music festival were the most extreme of any yet. Women flaunted their style, wearing everything from skintight pants to full-length robes and face veils. Inebriated men stumbled through crowds perfumed with the distinct scent of marijuana, alongside a limited but notable display of local queer culture.
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Living at AlJurf
Find Out More About Living at AlJurf
AlJurf Gardens harnesses nature’s raw beauty and combines it with refined heritage-inspired architecture and contemporary design to present a sanctuary of wellness and calm.
Throughout the villa spaces, the refined and controlled raw beauty of nature is repeated in different scales, to showcase its exquisiteness across every typology of homes, gardens and courtyards.
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Web3’s messy vision of a tech future
Highlights:
– Each iteration of the web has rested on new technical capabilities. With the first version, it was the ability to browse between static web pages. With Web 2.0, the web became a more interactive, real-time medium and users themselves became the content.
– What of Web3’s supposed shift to a more decentralised online world? – Its core innovation rests on the distributed consensus made possible by blockchains — the ability to reach binding agreements with complete strangers, without needing to rely on any intermediary or central authority.
– It seems to present an easy answer to the power of Big Tech: You, too, can take back control of your data and your online life, while also getting a chance to share in Big Tech’s insane profits.
– Web3’s promise — of leaving everything to rules baked into the software, assured by supposedly bulletproof cryptography — leave ordinary people feeling any more confident their interests are being looked after?
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Jack Dorsey Stirs Uproar by Dismissing Web3 as a Venture Capitalists’ Plaything — www.bloomberg.com
Highlights:
– You don’t own ‘web3’,” tweeted Dorsey. “The VCs and their LPs do. It will never escape their incentives.”
– Tesla Inc. chief Elon Musk got in on the discussion by asking if anyone has seen Web3, to which Dorsey replied “it’s somewhere between a and z,” hinting that it’s held under the control of the VC firm founded by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, commonly contracted to a16z.
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Biden’s Promise of More Equal U.S. Takes Hit With Spending Plan – Bloomberg — www.bloomberg.com
Highlights:
– The “Build Back Better” bill is now effectively on ice after Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia — whose vote is essential to the bill’s passage — said he wouldn’t support it.
– Biden’s Build Back Better plan would increase the after-tax income of the bottom quintile by about 15% in 2022, the most among income groups and largely the result of the boosted child tax credit.
– The child tax credit expansion would reduce child poverty by about 40%, which would disproportionately help Black and Latino households.
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Billionaire businessman targets UK listing for ‘caviar of iron ore’ project
Highlights:
– The steel industry is searching for ways to reduce carbon emissions and demand for high-quality iron ore, which can improve blast furnace productivity and is suited to new hydrogen-based technologies, is expected to grow over the next couple of decades.
– We like to call it [the] beluga caviar of iron ore because the grade is so high and the impurities are so low,” said Friedland, who has discovered some of the world’s biggest mineral deposits. “It takes a lot less energy to mine it and a lot less global warming gasses are generated when converting it into high-quality steel.”
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