Vatican takes first spot in Internet domain name draw

The Vatican has come out in first place in a long-awaited draw to expand the Internet address system with new domain names that go beyond the usual .com, .org or .net endings.
ICANN, the corporation that oversees the Internet address system, announced this week the domain name .catholic written in Chinese characters will be the first bid it considers in a drive to expand and reorganize sites on the World Wide Web.
The same extension in Arabic letters ranked 25th in the random draw and the Vatican's application for a version in Cyrillic for Russian and other Slavic languages came in 96th.
Ranking high means the applicant could get approval early next year to operate the new domain and approve addresses using it. In the Vatican's case, Rome could then ensure only genuine Roman Catholic institutions get to use that domain name.
"This is a way to give a coherence and authentication to our presence in the digital arena," said Monsignor Paul Tighe, secretary of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications.
"Anyone looking online will recognize the site belongs to an institution that belongs to the Catholic Church," he said, adding the new, so-called top level domain names (|TLDs) could also help speed online searches.
.BIBLE AND .ISLAM
For online retailers such as Amazon, whose application for .store in Japanese came in second, early approval could mean a competitive advantage and prompt a quick introduction of the new name.
But the Vatican did not enter the draw for commercial reasons and would not rush to launch its TLDs, Tighe said. In addition, the main TLD it seeks - .catholic in Latin letters - ended up in 1,366th place and may take months before it is approved.
Website owners are now restricted to a few dozen TLDs such as .com and country code domains such as .co.uk or .fr. Many of the 1,930 applications for new TLDs came from companies, including Internet giants such as Amazon and Google.
Several other faith-based groups applied for other TLDs such as .bible or .islam. The extension .mormon was the next-highest religious application drawn, coming in at 118th place.
ICANN (www.icann.org), the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, has stressed that assigning a certain TLD does not imply any endorsement of the religious group seeking it, just recognition it is the best suited to use the name.
Tighe said the ICANN draw handled applications for TLDs in non-Latin alphabets first, which explained why the Vatican's Chinese, Arabic and Cyrillic extensions came out far ahead of its main TLD in Latin letters.
INTERNET IMPRIMATUR
ICANN invited comments on applications earlier this year. The Vatican's application for exclusive use of .catholic drew criticism from members of several Protestant churches that also use the term, which comes from the Greek for "universal".
"This request is a move by a powerful group to squelch the voices and rights of other Christians," Dave Daubert, pastor of Zion Lutheran Church in Elgin, Illinois, wrote on the ICANN webpage for comments on the applications.
Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam, apparently saw no hope of a consensus on religious TLDs and opposed them all.
Some religions seem to have kept out of the fray entirely. There were no applications for .buddhist, .hindu or .jewish.

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Vatican says pope beats Justin Bieber on re-tweets

Pope Benedict, white-haired, 85, and a neophyte to social media site Twitter, has beaten out 18-year old heartthrob Justin Bieber to set a percentage record for re-tweeting by his followers, the Vatican said on Thursday.
The Vatican newspaper said that as of noon Italian time on Thursday the pope had 2.1 million followers on Twitter, eight days after his first tweet was sent.
While Canadian singer-songwriter Bieber has roughly 15 times as many followers - 31.7 million - the Vatican newspaper said Benedict had beaten Bieber on re-tweets.
It said about 50 percent of the pope's followers had re-tweeted his first tweet on December 12 while only 0.7 percent of Bieber's followers had re-tweeted one of the singer's most popular tweets on September 26, when he commented on the death by cancer of a six-year-old fan.
The Vatican said this was part of a wider trend in which people were looking for more spiritual content.
The pope already tweets in English, German, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish and Arabic. The newspaper said he will start tweeting in Latin and Chinese soon.

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Saudi website editor could face death for apostasy-rights group

The editor of a Saudi Arabian website could be sentenced to death after a judge cited him for apostasy and moved his case to a higher court, the monitoring group Human Rights Watch said on Saturday.
Raif Badawi, who started the Free Saudi Liberals website to discuss the role of religion in Saudi Arabia, was arrested in June, Human Rights Watch said.
Badawi had initially been charged with the less serious offence of insulting Islam through electronic channels, but at a December 17 hearing a judge referred him to a more senior court and recommended he be tried for apostasy, the monitoring group said.
Apostasy, the act of changing religious affiliation, carries an automatic death sentence in Saudi Arabia, along with crimes including blasphemy.
Badawi's website included articles that were critical of senior religious figures, the monitoring group said.
A spokesman for Saudi Arabia's Justice Ministry was not available to comment.
The world's top oil exporter follows the strict Wahhabi school of Islam and applies Islamic law, or sharia.
Judges base their decisions on their own interpretation of religious law rather than on a written legal code or on precedent.
King Abdullah, Saudi Arabia's ruler, has pushed for reforms to the legal system, including improved training for judges and the introduction of precedent to standardize verdicts and make courts more transparent.

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Sri Lanka arrests 100 Chinese for cyber fraud, police say

 Sri Lanka on Saturday arrested at least 100 Chinese nationals accused of an internet fraud scheme targeting people in their home country, a police spokesman said.
The accused, all in Sri Lanka on tourist visas, are suspected of hacking into computers in China and then demanding their owners transfer them money, police spokesman Prishantha Jayakodi told Reuters.
Chinese police requested help from Sri Lanka, he said.
Officials at the Chinese embassy in Colombo were not available for comment.
China has been the top lender to Sri Lanka since the end of a 25-year war in May 2009 and thousands of Chinese are working in the country on Chinese-funded infrastructure projects.

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British retailers start online sales early

British retailers have brought forward their Christmas clearance sales online in the hope that shoppers will log on to buy bargains and offset lackluster spending in stores.
Marks & Spencer launched its sale online at midday on Monday, it said on its website, while department store John Lewis said it would cut online prices when its stores close at 1700 GMT. Debenhams has already started its online sale.
Retailers in recent years have started sales online on Christmas Day, ahead of the clearances in stores from Boxing Day, but are increasingly launching their online offers before Christmas after delivery deadlines for the day have passed.
Hard-pressed shoppers have been leaving it later to buy presents in the hope that retailers would slash prices, the British Retail Consortium said.
It was forecasting that 5 billion pounds ($8.1 billion) would be spent in the shops on Saturday and Sunday combined, the last weekend before Christmas.
Richard Dodd, the BRC's head of Media and Campaigns, said weekend trading had met expectations.
"Christmas, ultimately once all the final sums are done, will turn out to be acceptable but not exceptional," he said.
He said the sector expected a modest increase in cash spending against a year go, but not necessarily any significant increase in real terms once inflation was stripped out.
Many British families' budgets are stretched, according to a survey from Markit that showed the biggest deterioration in household finances for seven months.
Analyst Howard Archer at IHS Global Insight said the weakening in household finances could not come at a worse time for retailers, and it highlighted why many people appeared to have been careful in their Christmas shopping this year.
"The suspicion has to be that consumers will be especially keen to take advantage of genuine major bargains in the sales to acquire items that they cannot otherwise afford or are reluctant to make at the moment," he said.
"However, we suspect that people will likely to be more careful in buying - or reluctant to buy - items that they don't really want or need in the sales."

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Egypt fears over currency lead to dollar rush

 As Egypt prepared to release official results of the divisive constitutional referendum on Tuesday, the country edged deeper into economic crisis with some worried residents hoarding dollars for fear that the local currency could weaken significantly.
The anxiety over the economy was visible at currency exchanges in the upscale Cairo neighborhood of Zamalek, which ran out of dollars by midday and offered only euros — a rare occurrence. Some banks, too, said they had run out of cash dollars, forcing people to seek foreign currency from exchanges around the city.
"I asked around in many exchange places and can't find dollars anywhere," said Cairo resident Mahmoud Kamel after unsuccessfully visiting one exchange office in Zamalek. "I want to exchange money because I'm afraid the Egyptian pound will not have any value soon."
Both political instability and economic fundamentals are playing a role in Egypt's growing financial distress. A constitution drafted by Islamist allies of President Mohammed Morsi deeply polarized the country and sparked huge street demonstrations that at times exploded into deadly violence. According to unofficial results the constitution passed in a referendum over the past two weekends with a 64 percent "yes" vote.
The official result due out later Tuesday is expected to confirm the unofficial tallies.
The dash to sell Egyptian pounds for dollars prompted the Central Bank of Egypt to issue a statement on Monday calling on banks not to listen to rumors circulating about the fiscal health of the nation.
In a statement carried on official news websites, the bank declared its commitment to guarantee all deposits in local and foreign currencies to banks in Egypt and said banks are "financially strong enough" to ensure the fulfillment of any obligations toward clients.
Late Monday, the president issued a decree banning people from leaving Egypt with more than $10,000 or its equivalent in other currencies.
There was one particularly nerve-rattling report in recent days that longtime Central Bank Governor Farouk Okdah had resigned. The report came on Saturday during the second and final round of voting on the constitutional referendum.
Official media quickly retracted the news after reporting it. The governor then turned up at a meeting of the government's economic team on Sunday in an apparent attempt to quell nervousness over the state of the economy.
Egypt's currency had been stable trading around 6 pounds to the dollar for the first half of the year. It has since slipped, especially in the past two months as political instability worsened. The Central Bank of Egypt listed Tuesday that the dollar was selling at 6.18 to the Egyptian pound. To buy dollars at currency exchanges, the rate was 6.20.
Since Egypt's uprising nearly two years ago, the country has lost more than half of its foreign currency reserves from $36 billion in 2010 to around $15 billion currently. The reserve level has been slightly propped up by some Qatari deposits in past months.
Underlining the cash shortage, unofficial estimates put Egypt's reserves at just around $4 billion in hard currency, with the rest in gold and dollar treasury bills for the local market.
Major foreign currency earners, such as foreign direct investment and tourism, have dropped off because of political unrest and deterioration in security following Hosni Mubarak's ouster in February 2011.
Egypt has requested a $4.8 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund to bridge the burgeoning budget deficit, but talks largely stalled this month after mass protests turned violent over disputes around the draft constitution.
Economic experts say that Egypt's current foreign reserves barely cover three months of imports, which is the IMF's minimum recommended coverage.
In another blow, Standard & Poors downgraded Egypt's long-term credit rating by one notch to B-, six steps below investment grade.
One of biggest problems facing the market, according to those experts, is a lack of transparency on the part of President Mohammed Morsi's government.
"The economy is a reflection of the political unrest," said Khaled Abdel-Hamid, head of Treasury at Union National Bank of the UAE in Egypt. "We need transparency. The people have to know the real position of the economy in Egypt."
He predicted in 2013, the pound will continue to devalue and inflation rates will rise, affecting the price of food and basic commodities.
"What matters is the end result. People want to live. If people can't find food or security, what does it mean if there is a president or constitution?" banker Abdel-Hamid said.
The London-based consultancy Capital Economics has said, though, that the Egyptian pound "looks significantly overvalued" and estimated that it might need to fall by around 20 percent in order to restore competitiveness.
Core inflation, which excludes regulated items and fruit and vegetables, rose to 4.6 percent in October month from 3.8 percent on an annual basis in September. Subsidy cuts and tax increases linked to the IMF agreement could push inflation to 8 percent next year, Capital Economics estimated.
Egyptian Prime Minister Hesham Kandil said Tuesday that his government was focused on luring foreign investors back to Egypt, supporting the foreign reserves and plugging the budget deficit.
"A priority for the government to raise employment rates, reduce inflation levels and increase Egyptian exports' competition abroad," he said.
Leading civil society and rights groups have protested against the IMF deal, saying that the government has not released the terms of the agreement being worked out. Rumors swirling around impending tax hikes, subsidy cuts and other bread-and-butter issues have heightened the public's concern. Around 40 percent of Egyptians live just at or below the poverty line of surviving on around $2 a day.
Promises by Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood group that the Islamist-drafted constitution would bring about the stability Egyptians crave were dismissed by economic experts who warned that without enough currency reserves, there is little to stop the pound from falling steeply in value.
"If anything, we were stable. We are still entering the period of instability," said Haytham Abdel Fattah, head of the Treasury and International Markets Manager at Industrial Development Bank. "The instability of the foreign exchange rate is not at all detached from the political instability. It is a reflection and clear mirror to what is happening," he added.
Tens of thousands of Egyptians protested ahead of the referendum on the charter to demand a new and more diverse assembly to draft the constitution. Instead, the Islamist-dominated assembly hurriedly passed it before a court could rule on the panel's legitimacy. Morsi issued decrees, later rescinded, that gave him near-absolute powers to push the constitution to a nationwide vote.
Backers of the Brotherhood and others Islamist parties also rallied in support of the charter, leaving the country split and leading to violent clashes between the two camps on Dec. 5 that killed 10 outside the presidential palace in Cairo this month. The turmoil rocked Egypt's stock market, delayed the IMF loan talks and hurt the country's peak tourism season.

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Egypt constitution passes, economic crunch looms

The official approval of Egypt's disputed, Islamist-backed constitution Tuesday held out little hope of stabilizing the country after two years of turmoil and Islamist President Mohammed Morsi may now face a more immediate crisis with the economy falling deeper into distress.
In a clear sign of anxiety over the economy, the turbulence of the past month and expected austerity measures ahead have some Egyptians hoarding dollars for fear the currency is about to take a significant turn for the weaker.
The battle over the constitution left Egypt deeply polarized at a time when the government is increasingly cash-strapped. Supporters of the charter campaigned for it on the grounds that it will lead to stability, improve the grip of Morsi and his allies on state institutions, restore investor confidence and bring back tourists.
"In times of change, politics are the driver of the economy and not the other way around," said Mourad Aly, a media adviser for the political arm of the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, the backbone of Morsi's presidency and the main group that backed the constitution.
But there are already multiple fights on the horizon.
The U.S. State Department bluntly told Morsi it was now time to make compromises, acknowledging deep concerns over the constitution.
"President Morsi, as the democratically elected leader of Egypt, has a special responsibility to move forward in a way that recognizes the urgent need to bridge divisions, build trust, and broaden support for the political process," said Patrick Ventrell, acting deputy spokesman. "We hope those Egyptians disappointed by the result will seek more and deeper engagement. "
He said Egypt "needs a strong, inclusive government to meet its many challenges."
After a spate of resignations of senior aides and advisers during the constitutional crisis, Morsi appeared to have lost another member of his government late Tuesday night when his communications minister posted on his Twitter account that he was resigning.
The minister Hany Mahmoud said he "couldn't cope with the culture of government work, particular in the current conditions of the country." The resignation could not be immediately verified because it came so late at night.
Morsi signed a decree Tuesday night that put the new constitution into effect after the election commission announced the official results of the referendum held over the past two weekends. It said the constitution has passed with a 63.8 percent "yes." Turnout of 32.9 percent of Egypt's nearly 52 million registered voters was lower than most other elections since the uprising nearly two years ago that ousted authoritarian leader Hosni Mubarak
Morsi is expected to call for a new election of parliament's lawmaking lower house within two months.
In the meantime, the traditionally toothless upper house, the Shura Council, will hold legislative power. But the chamber is overwhelmingly Islamist-dominated so any laws it passes could spark a backlash from the opposition. Many fear a legal crackdown on independent media, highly critical of Islamists.
In a bid to reach out to opposition, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood said he hoped the charter will be a "good omen" for Egyptians.
"Let's all begin to build the renaissance of our country with free will, good intentions and strong determination, men, women, Muslims and Christians," Mohammed Badie said on his Twitter account.
But the opposition said the passing of the document is was not the end of the political dispute. Critics fear the constitution will usher in Islamic law in Egypt and restrict personal freedoms.
"This is not a constitution that will last for a long time," said Khaled Dawoud, a spokesman for the main opposition group, the National Salvation Front, vowing to fight for more freedoms, social and economic rights.
In a sign that the new front for the opposition against Morsi's policies may be the economy, Dawoud said the Morsi administration was "confused" both on the political and economic fronts.
"We want stability and economic prosperity like everybody else. But we don't believe that the policies of Morsi and the Brotherhood will lead to more stability," he said.
The turmoil over the constitution sparked huge protests that turned deadly at times. For a moment, the tension looked like it was spiraling out of control and only added to an already weakened economy.
At the height of the protests, the government called off its talks with the International Monetary Fund over a $4.8 billion loan which Morsi's government viewed as a way to attract much needed foreign investors, and deal with a high budget deficit.
Major foreign currency earners, such as foreign direct investment and tourism, have dropped off because of political unrest and deterioration in security following Mubarak's ouster in February 2011.
Over the last two years, the country has lost more than half of its foreign currency reserves from $36 billion in 2010 to around $15 billion currently. The reserve level has been slightly propped up by some Qatari deposits in past months.
Economic experts say that Egypt's current foreign reserves barely cover three months of imports, which is the IMF's minimum recommended coverage.
There were signs on Tuesday that some Egyptians were starting to hoard dollars for fear that the local currency could weaken significantly.
The run on the dollar was fueled in part by a decree issued by Morsi late Monday banning people from leaving Egypt with more than $10,000 or its equivalent in other currencies.
Some currency exchanges in the upscale Cairo neighborhood of Zamalek ran out of dollars by midday and offered only euros — a rare occurrence. Some banks, too, said they had run out of cash dollars.
"I asked around in many exchange places and can't find dollars anywhere," said Cairo resident Mahmoud Kamel after unsuccessfully visiting one exchange office. "I want to exchange money because I'm afraid the Egyptian pound will not have any value soon."
The dollar rush prompted the Central Bank of Egypt to issue a statement on Monday calling on banks not to listen to rumors circulating about the fiscal health of the nation.
The bank declared its commitment to guarantee all deposits in local and foreign currencies to banks in Egypt and said banks are "financially strong enough."
There was one particularly nerve-rattling report in recent days that longtime Central Bank Governor Farouk Okdah had resigned. The report came on Saturday during the second and final round of voting on the constitutional referendum.
Official media quickly retracted the news after reporting it. The governor then turned up at a meeting of the government's economic team on Sunday in an apparent attempt to quell nervousness over the state of the economy.
Egypt's currency had been stable trading around 6 pounds to the dollar for the first half of the year. It has since slipped, especially in the past two months as political instability worsened. The dollar was selling Tuesday at 6.18.
Rumors swirling around impending tax hikes, subsidy cuts and other bread-and-butter issues have heightened the public's concern. Around 40 percent of Egyptians live just at or below the poverty line of surviving on around $2 a day.
In a sign of the worsening economy, the number of people living on under $1 a day rose to 25 percent in 2011, up from 21.6 percent in 2009, according to government statistics released last month.
Promises that the Islamist-drafted constitution would bring about the stability Egyptians crave were dismissed by economic experts who warned that without enough currency reserves, there is little to stop the pound from falling.
"The instability of the foreign exchange rate is not at all detached from the political instability. It is a reflection and clear mirror to what is happening," said Haytham Abdel Fattah, head of the Treasury and International Markets Manager at Industrial Development Bank.

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