Holland America’s MS Westerdam has received permission to disembark passengers in Thailand.
The Westerdam has set course for Laem Chabang, where the current cruise that departed February 1 will end on Thursday, February 13. Guests will be disembarking in Laem Chabang and be transferring to Bangkok for their forward travel home.
“Despite media reports, we have no reason to believe there are any cases of coronavirus onboard,” said a company spokesperson.
Read further in Cruise Industry News.
Former West Ham striker Teddy Sheringham comments on current striker
Sébastien Haller, the Hammer’s £45 million summer transfer, has been criticized much lately by the fans after a reasonably successful start of the season.
Yet speaking to Love Sport Radio, former West Ham forward Teddy Sheringham predicts that under Moyes Haller will find the net again soon.
“I think the problem with Haller is they haven’t been playing to his strengths, with Moyes coming in – I think he will realise what he’s good at and what kind of service he likes.”
Haller seems to have shared in the rather miserable form of the team in the past months, which is now fighting relegation. He has also been too isolated and hasn’t been serviced good enough.
As TBR wrote, it’s worth noting that Haller has managed to be effective without the help of a strike partner. With six goals and one assist in 23 Premier League appearances he still is West Ham’s top scorer.
At both his previous clubs, the Dutch side FC Utrecht and Bundesliga club Eintracht Frankfurt, Sébastien Haller had a slow start before reaching 29 goals (in 58 appearances) at Frankfurt and 45 at Utrecht (in 87 games).
“He’ll come alive, he’s had that settling in period he hasn’t done great, I think he’ll be alright and we’ll see the best of him from now until the end of the season,” said Sheringham.
ISTANBUL— Largely gone unnoticed during the contested mayoral election in Istanbul, for the first time in Turkish history, female candidates managed to win in more neighbourhoods than men in a district, Turkey’s largest administrative unit after a province. The neighbourhoods of Kadıköy, a district of Istanbul with over half a million inhabitants, will now be ruled by 12 female mukhtars and nine male counterparts, reported bianet.
The Kadıköy district on the Asian side of Istanbul already had 10 female mukthars, heads of a neighbourhood, before the March 31 municipal elections but in two of the three neighbourhoods where the mukhtar changed, female candidates took over. In a country in which only 17.4% of MPs are women — the global average is 24% — and barely eight per cent of municipal politicians are women, this is a very significant development. This could well be the beginning of a trend in which women play a bigger role in Turkish politics in Istanbul and other urban centers like Ankara and Izmir.
The cosmopolitan Kadıköy district faces the historic city centre of Istanbul on the European side of the Bosporus. Kadıköy is also the name of the most prominent neighbourhood of the district, a residential and commercial area with numerous bars, cinemas and bookshops, and the cultural centre of the Anatolian side of Istanbul. The centre-left Republican People’s Party (CHP) is usually successful in Kadıköy in both local and national elections. Since the mid-1990s the mayor has been from the CHP. The CHP traditionally has been much more open to women and women’s political representation than the conservative AKP.
Outside Istanbul women have been successful in the location election too. The left-wing Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) has won the elections in three metropolitan, five city and 46 district municipalities, according to the latest figures from the state-run Anadolu Agency. Using the co-chairpersonship system, the party nominated both a woman and a man for each of the municipalities that it ran for office. Although only one person can be officially nominated for a municipality, a co-chair can come into office after the elections. In five districts that HDP won in the southeastern province Mardin, all five candidates were women.
The economies of Central Asia are slowly opening up to foreign investors after more than two decades of relative isolation. Uzbekistan just sold $1 billion of Eurobonds in its first foray into international debt markets. In doing so, it follows its neighbor Tajikistan, which issued its first bonds in 2017 to finance the construction of a dam and hydroelectric power plant.
Read further in Muftah Magazine.
After twenty years of growth, labor shortages threaten to derail the economies of Central and Eastern Europe. Since the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia joined the EU in 2004, followed by Bulgaria and Romania in 2007, their economies have been boosted through a combination of capital from multinationals and cheap and well-educated local workers.
Read further in Muftah Magazine.
The European refugee crisis is officially over. That was the message of the European Commission when it presented its annual progress report on migration in Brussels earlier this month. “For 3 consecutive years, arrivals figures have been steadily falling, and current levels are a mere 10% of what they were at their peak in 2015,” the Commission wrote.
Read further in Muftah Magazine.
Two years after the massive persecution of sexual minorities, a new crackdown on LGBTQ people in Russia’s Chechnya region appears to be in the making. In January, two queer people were killed and nearly forty detained, as reported by the Guardian. The cause of death was allegedly police torture.
Read further in Muftah Magazine.
In many ways, World War I was a watershed when it came to women’s political rights. Before the war, women had the right to vote in only a few countries. In 1893, New Zealand became the first country in the world in which women won the right to vote, although in Sweden some women had voting rights since the 18th century. The first female members of parliament were elected in Finland in 1907. Yet thanks to the suffragette movement – the 1910s saw the first International Women’s Days –, women’s contribution to the war economies, and revolutionary worker’s movements around the world, many national parliaments adopted universal suffrage during or following the war.
Read further in Muftah Magazine.
Eloy Domínguez Serén is the director of the documentary film “Hamada”, about the daily life of three young Sahrawis in the refugee camps near Tindouf, Algeria. With vitality, humor and unexpected scenarios, the film paints an unusual portrait of a group of young friends living in a camp in the middle of the stony Saharan desert. “Hamada” premiered at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) on November 15, 2018 and has since screened at film festivals in Gijón, Spain, where it was awarded Best Spanish Film and Best Spanish Director, and Porto, Portugal, where it received an award for Best Emerging Director. I spoke with the director the week before the premiere of “Hamada” at the IDFA.
Read further in Muftah Magazine.
Excerpt in Spanish (Cineclub Calle Mayor).
Following Sunday’s parliamentary elections in Moldova, no party secured a majority, which may mean the former Soviet republic remains caught between pro-Western and pro-Russian forces. The vote on February 24 was a three-way contest between the pro-Russian Socialists (PRSM, 31.1%), the ruling Democratic Party of Moldova (PDM, 23.6%), and the pro-EU opposition ACUM bloc (26.8%).
Read further in Muftah Magazine.
