CAIRO: Bright lights illuminated the Egyptian Museum in Cairo’s Tahrir Square on Monday during a celebration that could mark the last time the two-story museum is feted as one of Egypt’s main tourist attractions.
Located in one of Egypt’s most famous squares, the museum has been the country’s principal keeper of antiquities for over a century, but a bigger museum is under construction.
Officials celebrated the 116th anniversary of its founding and insisted it will not become obsolete once the Grand Egyptian Museum opens its doors. Antiquities will be moved to the new museum, which is expected to partially open next year.
“Our ceremony this evening is to tell the world this museum will never die,” said Antiquities Minister Khaled Al-Anany.
The old museum will be used to display recent discoveries as well as antiquities from store rooms, the minister said.
Housing the world’s biggest collection of pharaonic antiquities has been a challenge for the museum building, which was established in 1902.
Tens of thousands of objects have been sitting in its storerooms and galleries were often said to be too packed.
The Grand Egyptian Museum will be located near the Pyramids and Cairo hopes it will help a tourism industry that has suffered from the turmoil that followed a 2011 uprising.
Highlights of the evening were exhibitions of mummies and the ornamented coffin covers of pharaonic courtier Yuya and his noblewoman wife Thuya.
A 20-meter-long papyrus said to be the longest on display in Egypt was also on show during the ceremony.

CAIRO: One of the biggest Egyptian travel companies, Travco Group, said on Tuesday that hotel bookings are rising as tourists return to the country after years of political turmoil and security concerns.
Tourism is a cornerstone of Egypt’s economy, a source of income for millions of citizens and a major source of foreign exchange. But the sector suffered severely in the years following 2011’s popular uprising and was further hampered by a spate of militant attacks which targeted visitors.
Egypt’s revenues from tourism jumped 77 percent year-on-year in the first half of 2018 to $4.8 billion, while the number of tourists arriving in the country increased by 41 percent to just over 5 million.
Travco Group, which owns over 40 hotels in Egypt and abroad and is the local agent for Germany’s TUI Group, raised its prices by 30-35 percent at the beginning of this winter season, its CEO Hamed El Chiaty told Reuters in an interview.
“The level of tourist bookings during the current winter holiday season in Egypt is promising,” Chiaty said, adding that bookings from Germany, Italy, Poland and Ukraine were particularly promising.
In a devasting blow to the already struggling sector, Russia halted all flights to Egypt, and Britain stopped flights to Sinai, after an Islamist militant bomb attack brought down a Russian passenger plane in October 2015, killing everyone on board.
There have not been any major attacks aimed at the tourist sector in well over a year and Russia resumed flights to Cairo in April, although it has yet to authorize its aircraft to land in the Red Sea resort of Sham Al-Sheikh.
Chiaty said that Travco’s price increases were the highest in seven years, rising to pre-2011 levels, while occupancy levels at the group’s hotels were more than 80 percent, with the exception of Sharm Al-Sheikh.
Travco has market share of between 15 and 20 percent of the Polish, Belgian, English, Italian, Ukrainian and Austrian markets, Chiaty said, adding that it had recently refurbished its hotels.

CAIRO: For years, Mostafa Mahmoud struggled to pay for his expensive drug addiction, spending much of his meagre income on hashish. A few months ago, he switched to a cheaper way to get high which he says is pushing him to his death.
The 27-year-old man is among a growing number of Egyptians using Strox, a potent narcotic that is mixed with tobacco and smoked, and that Egyptian officials see as one of the biggest threats to the country’s young population.
Drug addiction has long been a problem in Egypt, the most populous country in the Arab world with nearly 100 million. But the speed at which Strox use is spreading has posed a new challenge.
Experts say the drug is made in local workshops by adding chemicals often used by veterinarians to a herb like marjoram. Some add pesticides for greater impact, but effectively make the drug more deadly.
Users describe painful convulsions leading to hallucinations and loss of consciousness.
Authorities say the drug has killed dozens of people and has caused a spike in crime.
“It is cheaper than hashish, but when you smoke it you choke, pass out and suffer cramps,” said Mahmoud, who lost his job at a fruit shop due to his drug habit.
While the price for one hashish joint was 50 Egyptian pounds ($2.80), he said two Strox joints cost 30 pounds.
It is spreading in impoverished areas, where living standards have plunged since a 2016 IMF-backed reforms package forced currency devaluation and cut state subsidies. Many victims are aged 15 to 20, according to Amr Othman, director of the state-run drug rehabilitation fund.
While statistics are scarce, officials say some 104,000 drug addicts were receiving free treatment at a rehabilitation center run by the ministry of social solidarity.
Of those, about 25 percent are Strox addicts, officials said, up from 4.5 percent last year.
The number of arrests is also up. Over the past six months, the number of Strox-related arrests soared by 300 percent, and Strox addicts have surged to 40 percent of total drug users in Egypt from 9 percent of the total at the start of the year, according to a security source estimate.
Experts say Strox is a type of synthetic narcotic like those that spread in Western nations more than a decade ago.
“Some are 100 times more potent than others,” said Justice Tettey, chief of the laboratory and scientific section at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in Egypt.
“The frightening part is not that it’s more potent than cannabis,” he said. “It’s that most people have no idea what they’re taking. Your first one or next one could be your last one,” he added.
“I don’t know why I use it. It is awful,” Mahmoud said, describing waking up after one session to find a friend had died in his sleep from an overdose. Mahmoud and his friends were held for a few months but later freed without charge.
Recognizing the threat, authorities in September banned the unlicensed sale of chemicals used to make Strox.
Othman said the decision came due to combined efforts by the ministries of health, justice and interior.
Authorities have also enlisted the country’s mosques, devoting a Friday sermon to rally Muslims against drugs.
“Just as we are in a comprehensive fight against terrorism, we need a quick and comprehensive battle against addiction and drugs,” the sermon said. “Drugs are another kind of terrorism.”

($1 = 17.8600 Egyptian pounds)

BAGHDAD: Iraq launched an air strike on an Daesh target inside neighboring Syria on Tuesday, its military said on Monday.
F-16 fighter jets destroyed a building where members of the ultra-hard-line Sunni militant group were storing weapons, killing 10 of them, the Iraqi military said in a statement.
A second air strike destroyed a building housing 30 Daesh fighters, the statement said.

BEIRUT: Lebanon’s foreign ministry said on Tuesday it would stand by Nissan and Renault boss Carlos Ghosn, who is of Lebanese descent and holds Lebanese citizenship, a day after his arrest in Japan on financial misconduct allegations.
Ghosn, one of the best-known leaders in the car industry, was arrested after Nissan Motor Co. said he had engaged in wrongdoing, including personal use of company money and under-reporting how much he was earning for years. The Japanese carmaker plans to remove him as chairman this week.
France moved on Tuesday to oust Ghosn from the helm of Renault but sought to defend the carmaker’s alliance with Nissan, which has been rocked by the scandal..
Lebanon’s caretaker Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil has asked the ambassador in Tokyo to meet with Ghosn and follow up on the case, the ministry said in a statement.
“Carlos Ghosn is a Lebanese citizen who represents one of the Lebanese successes abroad and the Lebanese foreign ministry will stand by him in his adversity to ensure he gets a fair trial,” it said. Ghosn, who has Lebanese roots, was born in Brazil and is also French citizen.