In brief
New year here
(cairolive.com, March 13, 2002)  Thursday is a national holiday commemorating the Islamic New Year. Hijri year 1423 is set to officially begin on Friday, but government employees, the public sector and some of the private sector will be taking Thursday off instead, thus ensuring a long weekend.

Politics/Headline news
Ministry splits in two
(cairolive.com, March 13, 2002) The Ministry of Transportation has been split up into a Ministry of Transport and a Ministry of Civil Aviation. The new Minister of Transport is Hamdi El-Shayib, who replaces Ibrahim El-Demieri, who resigned after the Cairo-Luxor train disaster.
The Minister of the new Civil Aviation portfolio is Ahmed Shafiq. The ministerial readjustment also involved a new Minister of Health, with Mohamed Awad Tageldin replacing the outgoing Ismail Sallam.
After being sworn in by the President, the new ministers joined the Cabinet of Ministers, which met as a whole with Mubarak. Amongst Mubarak's  directives, quoted by the papers, is a call for the ministers to not paint rosy pictures for the press, and make believable statements instead. The President also emphasized the need to buy Egyptian as often as possible, and to only enter into BOT projects as a last resort. 
Al-Akhbar visited the three new ministers on their first day at the office, and found the new minister of civil aviation unwilling to make a statement until he had had ample time to study his new charge, the health minister promising to concentrate on upgrading public hospitals, and the new transport minister placing a revamp of the railways at the top of the priority list. A sidebar reports that the new minister plans on making train cars non-smoking areas, even though he himself was a smoker.
The change was greeted with the usual healthy dose of skepticism in the press, with several columnists pondering the nature of change and whether these particular changes will bring real improvement to the way things are done.

New developments
Trying to get rid of daylight savings
(cairolive.com, March 13, 2002)
A member of Parliament has managed to introduce a new bill aiming to cancel the daylight savings time law that went into effect in 1988. A tiny item on the front page of Al-Wafd indicates that a parliamentary committee -- while discussing the issue -- found that the economic justifications that inspired the law in the first place no longer had relevance, and that "springing the clock forward" was harming commercial interests.
Originally conceived as a way to save on electricity costs by adding an additional hour of daylight in the summer-time, daylight savings time involves setting clocks forward one hour at the end of April, then bringing them back again at the end of September. The law was originally passed, the MP said, while there was an energy crisis.
That may be true, but these days, the price of electricity has also gone up -- meaning one less hour of electric lighting nationwide would certainly be kind to the national pocketbook. It is unclear how the vote may swing if the issue ever made it to that stage.

Travel
Marsa Alam traffic picks up
The number of chartered flights heading into the brand new Marsa Alam airport 300 kilometers south of Hurghada on the Red Sea is going up from 5 to 9 flights a week, as the new resort gains popularity amongst German and Italian tourists, reports Al-Akhbar.  
Does this represent the beginnings of a comeback for parts of the tourism industry -- ailing since September 2001?
It's a good sign, but certainly too early to say.

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