Al Ain: The weather returned to normal on Monday after a sandstorm hit the country.

The unstable weather conditions were particularly troubling for people with respiratory problems and dust allergies. Fresh and clean north-westerly winds have been blowing with decreasing speed, keeping temperatures at pleasant levels.

The National Centre of Meteorology and Seismology (NCMS) said the weather on Tuesday will be fair to partly cloudy in general.

Winds will be light to moderately rough but slightly stronger over the Arabian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. Some two to four-feet high waves have been rising in the sea offshore.

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Story By: by The Associated Press

The Artist won five Academy Awards on Sunday including best picture, becoming the first silent film to triumph at Hollywood’s highest honors since the original Oscar ceremony 83 years ago.

Among other prizes for the black-and-white comic melodrama were best actor for Jean Dujardin and director for Michel Hazanavicius.

The other top Oscars went to Meryl Streep as best actress for The Iron Lady, Octavia Spencer as supporting actress for The Help and Christopher Plummer as supporting actor for “Beginners.”

The Artist is the first silent winner since the World War I saga Wings was named outstanding picture at the first Oscars in 1929 had a silent film earned the top prize.

“I am the happiest director in the world,” Havanavicius said, thanking the cast, crew and canine co-star Uggie. “I also want to thank the financier, the crazy person who put money in the movie.”

The win was Streep’s first Oscar in 29 years, since she won best actress for Sophie’s Choice. She had lost 13 times in a row since then. Streep also has a supporting-actress Oscar for 1979′s Kramer vs. Kramer.

“When they called my name, I had this feeling I could hear half of America go, `Oh, no, why her again?’ But whatever,” Streep said, laughing.

“I really understand I’ll never be up here again. I really want to think all my colleagues, my friends. I look out here and I see my life before my eyes, my old friends, my new friends. Really, this is such a great honor but the think that counts the most with me is the friendship and the love and the sheer job we’ve shared making moves together.”

Streep is only the fifth performer to receive three Oscars. Jack Nicholson, Ingrid Bergman and Walter Brennan all earned three, while Katharine Hepburn won four.

The 82-year-old Plummer became the oldest acting winner ever for his role as an elderly widower who comes out as gay in Beginners.

“You’re only two years older than me, darling,” Plummer said, addressing his Oscar statue in this 84th year of the awards. “Where have you been all my life? I have a confession to make. When I first emerged from my mother’s womb, I was already rehearsing my Oscar speech.”

The previous oldest winner was best-actress recipient Jessica Tandy for Driving Miss Daisy, at age 80.

Completing an awards-season blitz that took her from Hollywood bit player to star, Spencer won for her role in “The Help” as a headstrong black maid whose willful ways continually land her in trouble with white employers in 1960s Mississippi.

Spencer wept throughout her breathless speech, in which she apologized between laughing and crying for running a bit long on her time limit.

“Thank you, academy, for putting me with the hottest guy in the room,” Spencer said, referring to last year’s supporting-actor winner Christian Bale, who presented her Oscar.

Dujardin became the first Frenchman to win an acting Oscar. French actresses have won before, including Marion Cotillard and Juliette Binoche.

“Oh, thank you. Oui. I love your country!” said Dujardin, who plays George Valentin, a silent-film superstar fallen on hard times as the sound era takes over. If George Valentin could speak, Dujardin said, “he’d say … ‘Merci beaucoup, formidable!’”

Claiming Hollywood’s top-filmmaking honor completes Hazanavicius’ sudden rise from popular movie-maker back home in France to internationally celebrated director.

Hazanavicius had come in as the favorite after winning at the Directors Guild of America Awards, whose recipient almost always goes on to claim the Oscar.

The win is even more impressive given the type of film Hazanavicius made, a black-and-white silent movie that was a throwback to the early decades of cinema. Other than Charles Chaplin, who continued to make silent films into the 1930s, and Mel Brooks, who scored a hit with the 1976 comedy Silent Movie, few people have tried it since talking pictures took over in the late 1920s.

The only other filmmaker from France to win the directing Oscar is The Pianist creator Roman Polanski, who was born in France, moved to Poland as a child and has lived in France since fleeing Hollywood in the 1970s on charges he had sex with a 13-year-old girl.

Hazanavicius, known in his home country for the OSS 117 spy comedies but virtually unheard of in Hollywood previously, won a prize that eluded half a dozen of France’s most-esteemed filmmakers, including Jean Renoir, Francois Truffaut and Louis Malle, who all were nominated for directing Oscars but never won.

Martin Scorsese’s Paris adventure Hugo won five Oscars, including the first two prizes of the night, for cinematography and art direction. It also won for visual effects, sound mixing and sound editing.

The visual-effects prize had been the last chance for the Harry Potter franchise to win an Oscar. The finale, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, had been nominated for visual effects and two other Oscars but lost all three. Previous Harry Potter installments had lost on all nine of their nominations.

The teen wizard may never have struck Oscar gold, but he has a consolation prize: $7.7 billion at the box office worldwide, including $1.3 billion from Deathly Hallows: Part 2, last year’s top-grossing movie.

“And yet they only paid 14 percent income tax,” Oscar host Billy Crystal joked about the “Potter” franchise.

Another beloved big-screen bunch, the Muppets, finally got their due at the Oscars. The Muppets earned the best-song award for “Man or Muppet,” the sweet comic duet sung by Jason Segel and his Muppet brother in the film, the first big-screen adventure in 12 years for Kermit the frog and company.

Earlier Muppet flicks had been nominated for four music Oscars but lost each time, including the song prize for “The Rainbow Connection,” Kermit’s signature tune from 1979′s The Muppet Movie.

“I grew up in New Zealand watching the Muppets on TV. I never dreamed I’d get to work with them,” said “Man or Muppet” writer Bret McKenzie of the musical comedy duo Flight of the Conchords, who joked about meeting Kermit for the first time. “Like many stars here tonight, he’s a lot shorter in real life.”

Filmmaker Alexander Payne picked up his second writing Oscar, sharing the adapted-screenplay prize for the Hawaiian family drama “The Descendants” with co-writers Nat Faxon and Jim Rash. Payne, who also directed The Descendants, previously won the same award for Sideways.

Payne said he brought along his mother from Omaha to the Oscars, and that she had demanded a shout-out if he made it onstage.

“She made me promise that if I ever won another Oscar I had to dedicate it to her just like Javier Bardem did with his Oscar. So mom, this one’s for you. Thank you for letting me skip nursery school so we could go to the movies.”

Woody Allen earned his first Oscar in 25 years, winning for original screenplay for the romantic fantasy Midnight in Paris, his biggest hit in decades. It’s the fourth Oscar for Allen, who won for directing and screenplay on his 1977 best-picture winner Annie Hall and for screenplay on 1986′s Hannah and Her Sisters.

Allen also is the record-holder for writing nominations with 15, and his three writing Oscars ties the record shared by Charles Brackett, Paddy Chayefsky, Francis Ford Coppola and Billy Wilder.

No fan of awards shows, Allen predictably skipped Sunday’s ceremony, where he also was up for best director and Midnight in Paris was competing for best picture.

Best-picture front-runner The Artist, which ran second to Hugo with 10 nominations, won two Oscars, for musical score and costume design.

Rango, with Johnny Depp providing the voice of a desert lizard that becomes a hero to a parched Western town, won for best animated feature.

“Someone asked me if this film was for kids, and I don’t know. But it was certainly created by a bunch of grown-ups acting like children,” said Rango director Gore Verbinski, who made the first three of Depp’s Pirates of the Caribbean movies.

Undefeated, a portrait of an underdog high school football team, won for feature documentary.

Crystal got the show off to a lively start with a star-laden montage in which he hangs out with Justin Bieber and gets a nice wet kiss from George Clooney.

Back as Oscar host for the first time in eight years, Crystal also did his signature introduction of the best-picture nominees with a goofy song medley.

Before his monologue, Crystal appeared in a collection of clips inserting him in scenes from key nominees. The montage included re-creations from some 2011 films featuring Tom Cruise of Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol and Clooney’s best-picture contender The Descendants, with the actor planting a kiss on Crystal.

Spoofing a scene from nominee Midnight in Paris, Bieber told Crystal he was there to bring in the 18-to-24-year-old demographic for the 63-year-old host.

Crystal’s return as host seemed appropriate on a night that had Hollywood looking back fondly on more than a century of cinema history.

The top two nominees — Hugo and The Artist — are both love songs to early cinema.

Add the Marilyn Monroe tale My Week with Marilyn which earned Michelle Williams a best-actress nomination as the Hollywood’s greatest sex goddess and Kenneth Branagh a supporting-actor nomination as Oscar winner Laurence Olivier and the show’s producers had a ready-made script for a night of fond recollection and backslapping about show business.

SHANGHAI (Reuters) – China intends to establish Shanghai as the global centre for yuan trading, clearing and pricing over the next three years as part of broader plans to make the commercial hub an international financial centre by 2020.

The plan for Shanghai’s financial innovations through 2015, published jointly by the country’s economic planning agency and the Shanghai government on Monday, set goals on a wide range of areas aimed at further developing Shanghai, though some analysts said many of them appeared ambitious.

“This anticipated pace of development looks a bit quick to me,” said Frances Cheung, a strategist at Credit Agricole in Hong Kong.

China wants to transform Shanghai into an international financial centre on par with the likes of New York and London by 2020. That goal was set in 2009 by the State Council and analysts have taken it as a broad deadline for liberalizing the currency.

The state economic planning agency, the National Development and Reform Commission, outlined a series of goals under the 2015 yuan plan.

These included making the daily yuan mid-point published by the central bank in the onshore yuan market serve as the benchmark for both domestic and foreign yuan trading markets.

Currency traders interpreted the statement partly as a message from Beijing that the yuan’s movements, which have increasingly been influenced by the offshore market over the past few months, should be decided by the government.

“There have been recent developments that have put Hong Kong’s offshore market in the spotlight from time to time, such as its pricing of the yuan quite differently from the onshore market,” said a trader at a European bank in Shanghai.

“In this sense, the NDRC statement is published at a sensitive time and means the government once again wants to emphasize that it has the final say in the value of the yuan.”

The plan also aims to make the government-backed Shanghai Interbank Offered Rate (Shibor) the benchmark for yuan credit everywhere and targeting to more than double the annual non-forex financial market trading volume to 1,000 trillion yuan by 2015.

While the plan lacked details on how China would achieve these targets, analysts were skeptical on the feasibility of some of the planks in the platform.

“Shibor is not even a very well established benchmark onshore,” Cheung said. Markets currently use the government’s seven-day repurchase rate as the lending benchmark.

Analysts said the NDRC’s plan gave no fresh insight into how quickly China would liberalize its capital account, a crucial step in Shanghai’s attempt to become a global money hub.

China has taken a series of measures over the past two years to invigorate the offshore yuan market in Hong Kong as part of a longer-term plan to promote the use of the yuan overseas and make it a fully-convertible and international reserve currency along with the U.S. dollar.

Earlier this month, Britain said it was teaming up with its former colony to secure London a top spot as an offshore trading centre for the yuan.

The NDRC’s plan would not threaten Hong Kong’s current position as the main offshore yuan centre, analysts said.

“Promoting Shanghai as an onshore yuan centre complements Hong Kong’s growing role as an offshore yuan center, and should help to strengthen the circle of onshore-offshore yuan flows underpinning the yuan trade settlement process,” said Donna H J Kwok, economist at HSBC in Hong Kong.

China will also encourage overseas companies to sell yuan-denominated shares in its domestic stock markets, but the plan did not give a detailed timetable.

Authorities have been discussing launching a so-called “international board” on the Shanghai stock exchange for listing foreign companies’ shares, seen as a centerpiece for the 2020 goal, but the city’s mayor said this month that the time was not currently right for its launch.

Shanghai will explore M&A opportunities involving overseas stock exchanges to increase its global clout, the NDRC’s plan said without elaborating.

(Additional reporting by Zhou Xin in Beijing, Saikat Chatterjee in Hong Kong and Lu Jianxin in Shanghai; Editing by Jason Subler)

By RAMI AL-SHAHEIBI | AP

Published: Feb 28, 2012 01:56
Updated: Feb 28, 2012 01:56

BENGHAZI, Libya: The United Nations said Monday that the situation in a remote southern part of Libya where more than 100 people were killed in tribal warfare this month remains tense although a cease-fire brokered by local officials is still holding.

A statement by the UN Support Mission in Libya said that as much as half of the population of Kufra has fled and that around 200 foreign migrants are still waiting to be moved out of the area.

The clashes that broke out Feb. 11 underscore the struggle facing Libya’s new leaders to enforce security, disarm people and unify multiple militias that took part in an eight-month civil war that ended with the capture and killing of longtime ruler Muammar Qaddafi in October.

Dozens were killed this month by rockets, mortars and gunfire that rocked residential areas in the desert town, which is some 500 miles (800 kilometers) away from the more populated coastal city of Derna.

The UN said it provided people there with food, medicine, mattresses, blankets and hygiene kits to vulnerable communities whose basic services have been interrupted by fighting.

The injured packed the city’s three-room hospital for days during the clashes. Many had no beds to sleep on. There was one doctor and 15 nurses using empty bottles of water as blood bags. Patients had to share one ventilator.

For days, rescuers were unable to get to the bodies of victims who were left on the street.

An Associated Press reporter who was in Kufra during the clashes saw at least 160 houses demolished by rockets in one neighborhood. Families gathered inside a school seeking shelter, but even that came under shelling.

Shops were closed for days, and no one could walk in the street. If one tribe took over one square, the other tribe opened fire and drove it out.

During that time the powerful Arab tribe of Al-Zwia clashed with the African Tabu tribe near Kufra, a border area where Libya, Chad and Sudan meet. The region is a hub for the smuggling of African migrants, goods and drugs.

The two groups are old rivals and speak different languages. The Tabu have long complained of discrimination under Qaddafi.

Abdel-Majed, once an opposition leader who founded a group calling for an autonomous state for the Tabu people, said Qaddafi’s regime would expel Tabu students from schools, take their passports and deprive families of bank loans.

Qaddafi also tried to change the demography of the city by offering incentives to Al-Zwia tribe members to move to Kufra in order to outnumber the Tabu.

The clashes, erupted after an Al-Zwia smuggler shot and killed six Tabu tribesmen guarding a border crossing, lifting the lid on a long suppressed ethnic conflict.

In another sign that the government is struggling to reign in the country’s numerous armed factions, the US-based Human Rights Watch called on a Mistrata-based militia Monday to immediately release two British journalists and three Libyans traveling with them.

The rights group said that the Saraya Swehli militia detained the British citizens nearly a week ago. They work as freelance journalists for Iran’s Press TV.

The Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, Sarah Leah Whitson, said in a statement that militias must stop detaining people and called on the Libyan government to take charge of militia detention facilities. The rights group says the militia has denied them access to the journalists.

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