Author: Ben Debski

“So, you’re calling from the future? Wow,” said my son excitedly as we shared a late-night phone call. In Kuwait, it was already Wednesday. Back in Britain, it was still Tuesday. I was indeed ‘in the future’. Will we ever quite get used to the idea of different time zones? My trip to the Middle East had begun with unexpected bout of jetlag: a short, sharp overnight flight from London left me dazed and dazzled in the bright morning sunshine of Kuwait City.

It was 6am in Kuwait, but it really did feel like 4am in the morning to me. (Or maybe even 3am, the fateful hour when F Scott Fitzgerald noted that things always seem at their worst). The more I told myself that I laugh in the face of jetlag, the more my head drooped and my eyes grew dim. My workaholic plans for a full day at the laptop had given way to a simple desire to get my head down on a soft pillow.

What a wuss. What a lightweight. What a victim to the mighty and mysterious power of world time. When I awoke in my hotel room, with that soft loamy evening light bathing Kuwait’s Liberation Tower, I began a hazy routine which might be familiar to some travellers. The hotel room clock said 6.10. But could it be trusted? Hotel clocks leave the factory with a default setting to display the wrong time. They are made to be inaccurate, to lull the unwary visitor into rushed breakfasts and missed appointments.

My watch read 18.05. But had I remembered to reset it on that bumpy flight east – Or was I still on London time? My Blackberry read 18.06. But these devices can automatically reset themselves, and so can laptops. The machines know what time it is, even when we don’t.

Turning on the TV, it was still hard to fathom the time. Trouble and trivia (the mainstays of global news channels) were happening all over the world – in darkness and in light.

Whatever the time zone, the 24-hour channels are always at the same pitch. They are always brashly In The Now, even when they are not In The Know. Finally, one of the better business news networks displayed a reliable time below the ticker streams on the bottom of the screen. 17.10 CET. Ten past five in the afternoon in Central Europe. Ten past six in Kuwait. Hallelujah at last.

Of course, things were simpler when each little city-state or island around the world had their own time. For centuries, people worked out the time from the rising and setting of the sun exactly where they were. If the town fifty miles away had a different time, it didn’t really matter.

If you were wealthy, you could check your sundial, to make sure you were early for your meeting with the local squire. Blackberries were something you picked and ate, not something you checked ten times a day.

Then came the railroads. In 1847, the first time zone was established, in order to keep the trains running on time. Most British rail passengers will tell you that 164 years later, the rail companies are still trying to be punctual, but not always succeeding.

The ancient connection with solar time – the exact local time, as seen on your sundial – was lost forever. The sun, whether beating down on Kuwait or a sleepy English suburb, was no longer our reference point. To make the world run on time, we had to swap the celestial for something more mundane, the aptly-named mean time.

From now on, mean time would dictate when we got up, went to school or work, worshipped, partied or slept.

Within a generation, hourly time zones had sliced their way longitudinally across the planet. Nepal was the last to fall into line with a standard time zone, offset from the Greenwich meridian, in 1986.

With an idiosyncratic and rugged sense of independence typical of its people, Nepal went for five hours and forty-five minutes ahead of Greenwich Mean Time. Time that, as they might have said in Nepalese.

And so, the whole world entered the era of the time zone. Travellers everywhere could glance at their watch, do the mental math and work out what time it was at home, while feeling oddly tired. But then, as you know, I don’t believe in jetlag and would never admit to suffering from it.

Hywel Jones is a television producer who has travelled the world with the BBC and ITV. He now runs the international broadcast and TV production company hi.tv

The astonishing popular protests against Arab autocrats that have churned the region for three months are the authentic birth pangs of a new Middle East. Israel’s American-backed attempts to bomb Hezbollah and south Lebanon into submission in 2006 did not change the region, as Condoleezza Rice predicted it would. Nor did the US-led invasion of Iraq three years earlier, which former President George W Bush touted as introducing democracy to the Arab world, have much effect either.

The change now is coming from within – and from below.

Ordinary people taking to the streets swept away the presidents of Egypt and Tunisia. The leaders of Libya and Yemen are fighting for survival. Arab leaders almost everywhere else are trying to fend off real or potential challenges with a combination of repression and concessions.

“The rulers are running scared, with good reason – the people have terrified them,” said Rashid Khalidi, professor of Arab studies at Columbia University in New York. “The spectre of popular power haunts the dictators and monarchs.”

The region’s mostly Muslim citizens are at last proving they are no exception to the democratic trends that have transformed Eastern Europe, Latin America and much of Africa and Asia in recent decades. Live media coverage has thrust protests and violence in one Arab city into Arab homes everywhere. Witness accounts ping from cell phones to YouTube and Facebook.

The pro-democracy movement will successfully reshape the Arab world as powerfully as the ideologies of Arab nationalism, socialism, communism and political Islam in the last 150 years, argues Paul Salem, director of the Carnegie Endowment’s Middle East Centre in Beirut.

“It is a sea change,” he said. “The change is profound. It has hit people’s identities, their core. Islam is still the most powerful current, but this paradigm has in a way superseded and absorbed it, creating the democratic, pluralist, human rights value system as the dominant one.”

But ousting authoritarian rulers is one thing, installing stable systems of representative government quite another.

Three responses
Success will depend partly on how well elected governments handle the social problems and economic hardships which, along with a yearning for freedom and dignity, have fuelled unrest from Algeria to Oman. Some Arab rulers will ride out the storm – the monarchies seem slightly less vulnerable than the republics so far. The question, three months on from the first protests in Tunisia, is what happens next?

The answer will differ from country to country. Broadly speaking, Arab leaders have responded in three ways to the pent-up frustrations that have burst into street protests. Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Tunisia’s Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali bowed to people power, grudgingly stepping down after their generals withdrew support and showed them the door.

Others, most especially countries in the Gulf, have tried to pre-empt protests by offering bribes, often combined with promises of political reform. Finally, a few have resorted to naked force to cling to power.

Muammar Gaddafi, who has ruled Libya since 1969, and whose bloody crackdown on protests helped trigger an armed revolt, occupies the bloodiest end of the spectrum. But Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Syria and Yemen have also un-gloved iron fists against protesters not content with economic reforms and handouts

In Yemen, President Ali Abdullah Saleh looks doomed as even his own clan has turned against him. But Saudi Arabia has made clear it will not tolerate dissent at home or serious challenges to Sunni rule in other Gulf countries, particularly in Shi’ite-majority Bahrain where Riyadh has sent 1,000 troops to help suppress the island’s worst unrest since the 1990s.

Violent change in societies already split on ethnic or sectarian lines is unlikely to foster democracy. In countries such as Bahrain, Libya, Sudan, Syria and Yemen, the future may be greater fragmentation much as in Lebanon and Iraq.

Alastair Lyon is special political correspondent for Reuters in the Middle East, also covering current affairs across Turkey, Pakistan and Afghanistan. He lives in Beirut.

Some marry for love, some for money. When airlines cosy up and tie the knot, you know it’s all about the money. So will business travellers find it hard to join the celebrations and learn to love these newly-merged giants?

This thought came to me as I sat on a flight from Madrid to London, and politely asked the flight attendant for a cup of tea. I had booked the flight on the British Airways website, paying the full BA fare and, to be frank with you, felt that slight pang of disappointment when I realised it was operated by BA’s merger partner, Iberia.

The Iberia flight attendant seemed momentarily confused when I, a chunky middle-aged British bloke in T-shirt and jeans, eschewed the complimentary chilled cerveza in favour of a nice cup of tea. Surely my default choice would be something slightly stronger.
“Tea?” she checked. Yes, tea.

I was duly rewarded with a tea bag floating in a clear plastic glass full of tepid water. It looked like some kind of small brown sea creature dying in a specimen jar, and would probably have tasted like it too.

My request for hot water was not warmly received, but I did eventually get something which resembled what we have come to know and love as a cup of hot, refreshing Rosie Lee (though still in the clear plastic glass).

Now, I can keep this small cultural fissure in perspective. I really can. The job of airlines is to transport their passengers safely to their destinations, at reasonable cost. Fussy little details like Best Practice in Serving Beverages aren’t really that important, I’ll admit.            I concede too, that there is compelling a business case for the merger between BA and Iberia. The marriage of two flag-carriers is expected to save £350m a year. In the current market, that is the kind of money that can make or break an airline. This marriage is all about two big players cutting costs after some very tough years.

Bigger really is better in the airline world. There is little room for boutique operators in a business where the list price of a new Boeing 737 is $72m and the best price for jet fuel comes from hedging supplies years ahead.

Ever heard of Cambrian Airways? No, thought not. Cambrian was the first British airline to resume passenger flights after the Second World War, on the improbably short route between Cardiff and Bristol. By the mid-1960s, the airline was whisking planeloads of holidaymakers from the damp, valleys and towns of south Wales to the uplifting sunshine destinations of Palma, Valencia and Barcelona.

The cover shot for the 1972 Cambrian timetable was a deeply-tanned brunette wearing a yellow bikini. History records that the tin serving trays used by Cambrian’s hostesses were frequently damaged in defensive swipes against wayward Welsh rugby fans. It was a different era.

Within a decade, Cambrian had succumbed to the economics of the airline industry, and had been folded in the new British Airways Board, alongside BOAC, BEA and Northeast Airlines of Newcastle. The world was struggling with recession and airlines were losing millions. The options were consolidate or go out of business. Sounds familiar?

The Americans have set the pace in the latest round of mergers. The alliance of Continental and United created a group with more than 80,000 employees and projected revenues of around $30bn. The new branding will blend United’s name and Continental’s blue and gold logo. But creating one airline from two established operators with different cultures will be more of a challenge than simply changing the branding.

Continental has a deserved reputation for quality of service that United does not share. United has more than its fair share of labour-relation problems.

But substantial savings have already been identified. Continental pilots are apparently cleverer at figuring out the optimum amount of fuel for a journey, while still allowing enough to divert the plane if necessary. United, on the other hand, has a better record on auxiliary power usage, the device used to start up airline engines. Put those two bodies of knowledge together, and the new airline thinks it can save around $75m a year.

Hywel Jones is a television producer who has travelled the world with the BBC and ITV. He now runs the international broadcast and corporate TV production company hi.tv.