3-day trip becomes 3-week ordeal for 2 Jamaicans

 It was supposed to be a three-day fishing trip at most. It turned into a three-week ordeal, drifting under an intense sun for hundreds of miles in the Caribbean in a small boat with a broken motor.
The two Jamaican fishermen survived by eating raw fish they caught and drinking water from melted ice they had brought to preserve their catch. The Colombian navy finally plucked them from the sea a week ago and delivered them home Saturday after treating them for severe dehydration, malnutrition and hypothermia.
Everton Gregory, 54, and John Sobah, 58, recounted their story in a telephone interview from Jamaica, while the boat owner and the men's employer also provided details.
The men set off from Jamaica's southeastern coast on Nov. 20. The water was glassy, the wind was calm and their boat was laden with 14 buckets of ice, 16 gallons of water and several bags of cereal, bread and fruit.
They headed to Finger Bank, a nearby sand spit 8-miles-long (13-kilometers) that is known for its abundance of fish like wahoo, tuna and mahi mahi. The owner of the 28-foot (8-meter) boat said she usually joins them on fishing trips, but she couldn't go that afternoon.
After spending a couple of days around Finger Bank, the two men set off for home with their catch. But the boat's engine soon died. The water was too deep to use the anchor and the current too strong to use the oars, so the boat slowly drifted away from Jamaica.
At first, the men got by on sipping the water and eating the food they brought with them. But days turned into weeks, and they began to eat the fish they had caught and drink the melted ice that had kept it fresh.
Gregory and Sobah kept eating raw fish and used a tarp to try to collect water, but the rain clouds remained at a distance.
Back home, friends and family called police and used their own boats to search the area where the men were last seen. The two fishermen work for the Florida-based nonprofit group Food for the Poor, which chartered a plane to search along Jamaica's coast.
Marva Espuet, the owner of the boat, said she knew she had packed it with more food and water than needed for a three-day trip, but the thought provided little relief.
"If I had gone, there would have been two boats going," said the 52-year-old woman, a longtime friend of both fishermen.
With searches proving fruitless, Sobah's niece grew frantic, recalled Nakhle Hado, a fishing manager for Food for the Poor who helped lead the search. She "begged me that she wanted John back for Christmas," Hado said.
Hado said some people believed the two men would never be found, but he and others didn't give up. "My gut was telling me that they were still alive," he said.
Hado said he had trained Gregory and Sobah on how to survive at sea.
"In case something happens, they don't have to think twice. They know how to react," he said. "It's very important, their mental state."
Gregory and Sobah finally ran out of fresh water and went several days without drink. A healthy human being can die from dehydration anywhere from three to five days without water.
Then on Dec. 12, a Colombian navy helicopter patrolling off the coast of that South American country spotted the men near Lack of Sleep cay, more than 500 miles (800 kilometers) from where they started. It took two days for a navy vessel to reach them because of bad weather. The men were hospitalized for several days at the Colombian island of San Andres before boarding a plane back home to Jamaica.
"It feels good," Sobah told the AP in a brief phone interview after arriving.
Gregory said he had lost hope, but Sobah tried to keep him positive that they would be rescued. "I just had that belief," Sobah said. "I believe in the Creator."
Yet it is Gregory who plans to keep fishing despite the ordeal because he needs the job.
Sobah said he's done. "I'm not going to go fishing again. No way.

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Peru's capital highly vulnerable to major quake

The earthquake all but flattened colonial Lima, the shaking so violent that people tossed to the ground couldn't get back up. Minutes later, a 50-foot (15-meter) wall of Pacific Ocean crashed into the adjacent port of Callao, killing all but 200 of its 5,000 inhabitants. Bodies washed ashore for weeks.
Plenty of earthquakes have shaken Peru's capital in the 266 years since that fateful night of Oct. 28, 1746, though none with anything near the violence.
The relatively long "seismic silence" means that Lima, set astride one of the most volatile ruptures in the Earth's crust, is increasingly at risk of being hammered by a one-two, quake-tsunami punch as calamitous as what devastated Japan last year and traumatized Santiago, Chile, and its nearby coast a year earlier, seismologists say.
Yet this city of 9 million people is sorely unprepared. From densely clustered, unstable housing to a dearth of first-responders, its acute vulnerability is unmatched regionally. Peru's National Civil Defense Institute forecasts up to 50,000 dead, 686,000 injured and 200,000 homes destroyed if Lima is hit by a magnitude-8.0 quake.
"In South America, it is the most at risk," said architect Jose Sato, director of the Center for Disaster Study and Prevention, or PREDES, a non-governmental group financed by the charity Oxfam that is working on reducing Lima's quake vulnerability.
Lima is home to a third of Peru's population, 70 percent of its industry, 85 percent of its financial sector, its entire central government and the bulk of international commerce.
"A quake similar to what happened in Santiago would break the country economically," said Gabriel Prado, Lima's top official for quake preparedness. That quake had a magnitude of 8.8.
Quakes are frequent in Peru, with about 170 felt by people annually, said Hernando Tavera, director of seismology at the country's Geophysical Institute. A big one is due, and the chances of it striking increase daily, he said. The same collision of tectonic plates responsible for the most powerful quake ever recorded, a magnitude-9.5 quake that hit Chile in 1960, occurs just off Lima's coast, where about 3 inches of oceanic crust slides annually beneath the continent.
A 7.5-magnitude quake in 1974 a day's drive from Lima in the Cordillera Blanca range killed about 70,000 people as landslides buried villages. Seventy-eight people died in the capital. In 2007, a 7.9-magnitude quake struck even closer, killing 596 people in the south-central coastal city of Pisco.
A shallow, direct hit is the big danger.
More than two in five Lima residents live either in rickety structures built on unstable, sandy soil and wetlands, which amplify a quake's destructive power, or in hillside settlements that sprang up over a generation as people fled conflict and poverty in Peru's interior. Thousands are built of colonial-era adobe.
Most quake-prone countries have rigorous building codes to resist seismic events. In Chile, if engineers and builders don't adhere to them they can face prison. Not so in Peru.
"People are building with adobe just as they did in the 17th century," said Carlos Zavala, director of Lima's Japanese-Peruvian Center for Seismic Investigation and Disaster Mitigation.
Environmental and human-made perils compound the danger.
Situated in a coastal desert, Lima gets its water from a single river, the Rimac, which a landslide could easily block. That risk is compounded by a containment pond full of toxic heavy metals from an old mine that could rupture and contaminate the Rimac, said Agustin Gonzalez, a PREDES official advising Lima's government.
Most of Lima's food supply arrives via a two-lane highway that parallels the river, another potential chokepoint.
Lima's airport and seaport, the key entry points for international aid, are also vulnerable. Both are in Callao, which seismologists expect to be scoured by a 20-foot (6-meter) tsunami if a big quake is centered offshore, the most likely scenario.
Mayor Susana Villaran's administration is Lima's first to organize a quake-response and disaster-mitigation plan. A February 2011 law obliged Peru's municipalities to do so. Yet Lima's remains incipient.
"How are the injured going to be attended to? What is the ability of hospitals to respond? Of basic services? Water, energy, food reserves? I don't think this is being addressed with enough responsibility," said Tavera of the Geophysical Institute.
By necessity, most injured will be treated where they fall, but Peru's police have no comprehensive first-aid training. Only Lima's 4,000 firefighters, all volunteers, have such training, as does a 1,000-officer police emergency squadron.
But because the firefighters are volunteers, a quake's timing could influence rescue efforts.
"If you go to a fire station at 10 in the morning there's hardly anyone there," said Gonzalez, who advocates a full-time professional force.
In the next two months, Lima will spend nearly $2 million on the three fire companies that cover downtown Lima, its first direct investment in firefighters in 25 years, Prado said. The national government is spending $18 million citywide for 50 new fire trucks and ambulances.
But where would the ambulances go?
A 1997 study by the Pan American Health Organization found that three of Lima's principal public hospitals would likely collapse in a major quake, but nothing has been done to reinforce them.
And there are no free beds. One public hospital, Maria Auxiliadora, serves more than 1.2 million people in Lima's south but has just 400 beds, and they are always full.
Contingency plans call for setting up mobile hospitals in tents in city parks. But Gonzalez said only about 10,000 injured could be treated.
Water is also a worry. The fire threat to Lima is severe — from refineries to densely-backed neighborhoods honeycombed with colonial-era wood and adobe. Lima's firefighters often can't get enough water pressure to douse a blaze.
"We should have places where we can store water not just to put out fires but also to distribute water to the population," said Sato, former head of the disaster mitigation department at Peru's National Engineering University.
The city's lone water-and-sewer utility can barely provide water to one-tenth of Lima in the best of times.
Another big concern: Lima has no emergency operations center and the radio networks of the police, firefighters and the Health Ministry, which runs city hospitals, use different frequencies, hindering effective communication.
Nearly half of the city's schools require a detailed evaluation to determine how to reinforce them against collapse, Sato said.
A recent media blitz, along with three nationwide quake-tsunami drills this year, helped raise consciousness. The city has spent more than $77 million for retention walls and concrete stairs to aid evacuation in hillside neighborhoods, Prado said, but much more is needed.
At the biggest risk, apart from tsunami-vulnerable Callao, are places like Nueva Rinconada.
A treeless moonscape in the southern hills, it is a haven for economic refugees who arrive daily from Peru's countryside and cobble together precarious homes on lots they scored into steep hillsides with pickaxes.
Engineers who have surveyed Nueva Rinconada call its upper reaches a death trap. Most residents understand this but say they have nowhere else to go.
Water arrives in tanker trucks at $1 per 200 liters (52 gallons) but is unsafe to drink unless boiled. There is no sanitation; people dig their own latrines. There are no streetlamps, and visibility is erased at night as Lima's bone-chilling fog settles into the hills.
Homes of wood, adobe and straw matting rest on piled-rock foundations that engineers say will crumble and rain down on people below in a major quake.
A recently built concrete retaining wall at the valley's head lies a block beneath the thin-walled wood home of Hilarion Lopez, a 55-year-old janitor and community leader. It might keep his house from sliding downhill, but boulders resting on uphill slopes could shake loose and crush him and his neighbors.
"We've made holes and poured concrete around some of the more unstable boulders," he says, squinting uphill in a strong late morning sun.
He's not so worried if a quake strikes during daylight.

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Argentina import controls put brake on bike sales

Summer has arrived in the Southern Hemisphere, and bicyclists all over the Argentine capital have hit the streets to enjoy the warm weather. That means this should be peak season for bicycle manufacturers and shops all over town, but the ride hasn't been so smooth this year.
Instead, economic dysfunction has curtailed any possible boom. Cardboard boxes full of partially assembled mountain bikes, missing a pedal, seat or handlebars and unable to be sold, gather dust in a corner of the Musetta bicycle factory in suburban Buenos Aires. Meanwhile, they're running out of stock at Nodari Bikes, a neighborhood cycling store.
Civic leaders have tried to make Buenos Aires a bicycle-friendly city, but that's been stymied by another government initiative — protectionist import bans designed to spur domestic production that have instead strangled supplies of everything from bananas to prescription drugs.
Enacted by the national government on Feb. 1, the new laws block or restrict the importing of some 600 goods while requiring foreign companies to partner with local manufacturers. That's helped Argentina's domestic manufacturing capacity rebound, while unemployment has dropped and the nation's balance of trade has improved. But many products are also hard to find, pushing up prices and further heating up inflation.
For cyclists, fewer bikes are available because the business mostly relies on foreign-made parts.
"We're selling the little that remains and sort of waiting to see what happens next," said bike shop owner Claudio Nodari. "It's too bad because biking was growing — this was a moment of opportunity."
A record 1.8 million bicycles were sold in Argentina in 2011, and the industry had predicted sales would surpass 2 million bikes in 2012, producing an estimated $510 million in revenue.
Now, the Argentine Bicycle Chamber of Commerce and Industry estimates some 1.6 million bikes will be sold in 2012. And that number would have been lower but for a Buenos Aires city program that offered loans of up to $600 per bike purchase, the group says. In its first week, the financing program drew 4,000 requests at the 21 bike shops taking part.
If anything, Argentines have learned how to be creative, as President Cristina Fernandez imposes tight currency controls and other economic measures designed to fight high inflation and stop the flight of dollars.
Musetta owner Adrian Giuliani has had to call off plans to expand into producing high-end specialty and mountain bikes. Instead, the factory is making parts such as seat posts specifically hit by the import restrictions and also turning out simpler bikes.
"Instead of expanding to new models, we are producing many children's and cruiser bikes that don't require many imported parts. And business is steady," Giuliani said.
At manufacturer Bicicletas Enrique in the northwest Argentine city of Corboda, president Enrique Espanon says business will end the year down 15 percent from 2011. The manufacturer depends on foreign parts for much of its production.
Business leaders say the controls have forced companies of all types to come up with creative strategies just to keep going. Italian car maker Porsche, for example, is exporting Argentine wine, while BMW is exporting rice to meet a required balance in selling foreign- and domestically-produced goods.
Argentina's bike sector, however, wasn't prepared to export or otherwise meet local demand, which meant the price of bikes and bike parts has shot up and stock is dwindling, says the bicycle chamber's president, Claudio Canaglia.
At Nodari, a Mongoose bicycle that retails for $150 in the United States now costs the equivalent of $700 in Argentina.
Virtually all high-end bikes use imported parts, made mostly in Asia. When Nodari's shop can't find such foreign parts, it goes to local manufacturers, despite the inconsistent quantity and quality of their products, the store's owner said.
"I've had some trouble getting parts for my bike," says cyclist Diana June Tansey. "It took three stores to find a tube, and then I paid $20 for it, when they normally cost $5 to $10."
Hybrid bikes ridden by many for recreation also require a portion of imported parts, though not as many. Canaglia says that out of the 42 parts that make up a hybrid bike, just one or two may be imported, such as a chain, sprocket or handlebars. But without those parts, the bike is useless and unsellable, he says.
"Last year, imports represented just 11 percent of the industry," Canaglia said. "But that 11 percent is blocking our entire economy."
On the street, the restrictions mean more cyclists riding retro beach bikes with fat seats and wide handlebars, while those who want a higher-end ride suffer.
"It's like going from a Mercedes Benz to a 1970 Citroen," complained Nodari, the bicycle shop owner. "It's taking our business back to where it began."
Following a regional trend, Argentines have been increasingly giving up cars for bicycles, with the number of cyclists in Buenos Aires alone rising from 30,000 to 150,000 over the past three years, the city's government says. Bike sales surpassed used car sales in 2011.
Through its "Better on Bike" program, Buenos Aires has built almost 50 miles of bike lanes since 2009, and more than 30 miles are planned for next year.
"The world's biggest cities, such as Paris, New York, Barcelona and Bogota, have adopted the bicycle," said Sonia Fakiel, a spokeswoman for the city's transportation agency. "It's a strategic way to ease traffic and promote sustainability."
Most cyclists haven't let the restrictions stop them from riding, as the army of bikes on the city's streets this summer proves.
"For so long the people didn't have anywhere to ride their bikes," Nodari said. "But now, with all these bike lanes, they're bringing in grandpa's old bike and asking me to fix it up.

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Web host Go Daddy appoints former Yahoo executive as CEO

 Go Daddy, one of the world's biggest Internet hosting firms, appointed Yahoo Inc's former Chief Product Officer Blake Irving as chief executive.
He will take over from interim CEO Scott Wagner on January 7. Irving left Yahoo, where he headed a centralized products group that straddled several client types, on April 27.
"Blake Irving's deep technology experience and his history of developing new cutting-edge products and leading large global teams make him a ... compelling choice to drive Go Daddy to the next level of its ... growth," said Bob Parsons, Go Daddy's executive chairman and founder.
Irving also served in various positions at Microsoft Corp from 1992 to 2007.
Go Daddy, which describes itself as the top provider of domain names, filed to go public in 2006 but withdrew its IPO due to poor market conditions.

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Intel launches microserver chips, gets nod from Facebook

Intel launched a data-center chip using low-power technology found in smartphones, stepping up competition in the nascent microserver market and winning a nod from Facebook.
The Atom chip rolled out on Tuesday uses much less electricity than Intel's previous processors for servers and comes as Intel's rivals also eye the low-power server niche.
Energy-sipping chips similar to those used in smartphones and tablets lack the horsepower of traditional server processors made by Intel. But data centers that combine many low-power chips instead of just a few heavy-duty processors may provide more computing power for less money, and use less electricity.
Microservers have yet to gain serious traction with traditional corporate customers like banks and manufacturers, and the potential size of the market remains unclear.
But Internet giants like Facebook, Amazon.Com and Google have been experimenting with ways to use low-power chips to make their data centers more efficient.
At an Intel event launching the Atom chips, a Facebook infrastructure executive said the social network has found that low-power chips excel at processing the 4.5 billion updates, likes, posts and comments its 1 billion active users add to the site every day.
"We do face unprecedented scale at Facebook, and that's one of the reasons we're so highly motivated to figure out the most efficient way to scale infrastructure efficiently and support all the people using Facebook," said Frank Frankovsky, Facebook's VP of hardware design and supply chain. He did not say whether Facebook expects to buy Intel's new chips.
Frankovsky said "wimpy" low-power chips in some cases can do the same work as Intel's "brawny" Xeon chips while consuming half or a third as much power.
"How much useful work can you get done per watt per dollar? That's the only metric that matters," Frankovsky said.
Intel dominates the PC and server markets, but was slow to design chips for the mobile market, where chips using technology from ARM Holdings have become ubiquitous.
In October, ARM unveiled new chip designs aimed at microservers. ARM believes servers using low-power chips based on its designs could account for a fifth of data centers by 2020.
Diane Bryant, in charge of Intel's data center business, declined to say how large Intel believes the microserver market could become. She said the Atom chips have been chosen for over 20 upcoming products focused on microservers, storage and communications.

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Google, U.S. regulators close to deal in patents dispute: sources

U.S. regulators are near a settlement with Google Inc in a dispute over the search giant's efforts to stop the sale of products it says infringe essential patents, according to two sources close to the probe.
But the Federal Trade Commission is not expected to reach a deal soon on the larger, more contentious issue of whether Google tweaks its search results to disadvantage rivals in travel, shopping and other specialized searches.
Its rivals say Google fears the specialized sites will siphon away its most lucrative advertising and the revenue that goes with it.
Under the expected settlement, which could be announced this week or next, Google will be required to drop demands for injunctions in lawsuits filed using a special class of patents called standard essential patents, or SEPs, the sources said.
SEPs ensure, for example, that one brand of wireless phone can call another brand.
There would be an exception to the injunction ban, however. Google would be allowed to request injunctions if companies refuse to negotiate SEP licensing at all, the sources said.
SEPs are usually expected to be broadly licensed for a reasonable price. One view is that if a company convinces a standard-setting organization to name its patent as the standard, that company should be barred from asking for an injunction if there is infringement.
The larger investigation, which is more than a year old, addresses search bias as well as smaller items that aggravate Google's rivals in Silicon Valley and beyond.
These include taking data, such as hotel reviews, from non-Google web sites to use on Google products, and preventing the export of data on advertising effectiveness to non-Google software so ad campaigns can be evaluated.
The European Commission is investigating many of the same allegations.
Google's critics, disappointed with the trajectory of the FTC probe, appear prepared to take their grievances to the U.S. Justice Department.
At least one Google adversary met with Justice Department officials recently, pressing them to investigate if the FTC fails to get a satisfactory settlement on search or litigate against Google, according to sources with knowledge of the situation.
The Texas attorney general's office is also leading a probe into Google's practices.

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Obama election tweet most repeated but Olympics tops on Twitter

An election victory tweet from President Barack Obama -- "Four more years" with a picture of him hugging his wife -- was the most retweeted ever, but the U.S. election was topped by the Olympics as the most tweeted event this year.
Obama's tweet was retweeted (repeated) more than 810,000 times, Twitter said as it published a list of the most tweeted events in 2012. (http://2012.twitter.com/)
"Within hours, that Tweet simultaneously became the most retweeted of 2012, and the most retweeted ever. In fact, retweets of that simple message came from people in more than 200 countries around the world," Twitter spokeswoman Rachael Horwitz said.
Twitter users were busiest during the final vote count for the presidential elections, sending 327,452 tweets per minute on election night on their way to a tally of 31 million election tweets for the day.
The 2012 Olympic Games in London had the most overall tweets of any event, with 150 million sent over the 16 days.
Usain Bolt's golden win in the 200 meters topped 80,000 tweets per minute but he did not achieve the highest Olympic peak on Twitter. That was seen during the closing ceremony when 115,000 tweets per minute were sent as 1990s British pop band the Spice Girls performed.
Syria, where a bloody civil war still plays out, was the most talked about country in 2012 but sports and pop culture dominated the tally of tweets.
Behind Obama was pop star Justin Bieber. His tweet, "RIP Avalanna. i love you" sent when a six-year-old fan died from a rare form of brain cancer, was retweeted more than 220,000 times.
Third most repeated in 2012 was a profanity-laced tweet from Green Bay Packers NFL player TJ Lang, when he blasted a controversial call by a substitute referee officiating during a referee dispute. That was retweeted 98,000 times.
This was the third year running that the microblogging site published its top Twitter trends, offering a barometer to assess the biggest events in social media.
Superstorm Sandy, which slammed the densely populated U.S. East Coast in late October, killing more than 100 people, flooding wide areas and knocking out power for millions, attracted more than 20 million tweets between October 27 and November 1.
European football made the list of top tweets when Spain's Juan Mata scored as his side downed Italy 4-0 in the Euro 2012 final -- sparking 267,200 tweets a minute.
News of pop star Whitney Houston's death in February generated more than 10 million tweets, peaking at 73,662 per minute.
Romantic comedy "Think Like a Man" was the most tweeted movie this year, topping "The Hunger Games", "The Avengers" and "The Dark Knight Rises."
Rapper Rick Ross who notched his fourth No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 chart this year, was the most talked about music artist.

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Publisher Bonnier, Flingo partner to make Smart TV Apps

 Bonnier, the publisher of magazines like Savuer and Popular Science, and Flingo, the largest publisher of apps for Smart TVs, have partnered to create a series of apps extending Bonnier's titles onto Internet-enabled TV sets and set-tops boxes like the Roku.
Together, they will release a new app for each magazine, offering videos, images and archival content for fans. Savuer has a couple of web series, including "The Test Kitchen" which helps home chefs learn how to peel garlic or dice an onion. Those videos, currently on Saveur's website YouTube channel, will resurface in the apps, which will be distributed for free in app markets thanks to advertising and sponsors.
Though smart TVs remain a small segment of the TV market, Bonnier believes it is an ideal platform for leading media companies to extend their brand.
"This is about going after new technologies and being at the forefront," Sean Holzman, Bonnier's Chief Brand Development Officer, told TheWrap. "We don't look closely at what other publishing companies may be doing. Flingo has a universe of 15 million devices and that should double in 2013."
The emphasis will be on video since research demonstrates that it remains the top activity, even more than gaming.
Ashwin Navin, CEO of Flingo, said that while many media companies are putting secondary titles on Internet-enabled TVs, Bonnier is using its top titles.
"Major media companies aren't putting their crown jewels on smart TVs," Navin told TheWrap. He added that when they measure how long users spend online with certain brands, websites register just a few minutes.

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Highlights from Egypt's draft constitution

CAIRO (AP) — Egypt's draft constitution, which is being voted on in a referendum Saturday, is made up of an introduction, an 11-part preamble and 236 articles. Critics have raised concerns over issues including Islamic law and women's rights:
— Shariah (Islamic) law
Like a previous constitution, the draft states, "Principles of Islamic Shariah are the principal source of legislation." For the first time, the draft defines those principles, rooting them in "general evidence, foundational rules" and other rules from the long tradition of Islamic jurisprudence. Both critics and ultraconservative supporters of the charter say that opens the doors for stricter imposition of Islamic law.
— Role of clerics
The draft gives Islamic clerics unprecedented powers with an article stating, "Al-Azhar senior scholars are to be consulted in matters pertaining to Islamic law," referring to the most respected center of scholarship and rulings in Sunni Islam.
— Morals
An article commits "the state and society" to "entrenching and protecting the moral values" of "the authentic Egyptian family." Critics worry the broad phrasing will allow not only the government but also individuals to intervene in personal rights.
—Women's rights
The draft mentions women in the framework of the traditional Muslim family, adding, "The state shall ensure maternal and child health services free of charge and ensure reconciliation between the duties of a woman toward her family and her work." The preamble underlines equality "for all citizens, men and women, without discrimination or nepotism or preferential treatment, in both rights and duties." But opponents charge that the document does not protect women from discrimination.
— Civil rights
The draft guarantees freedom of expression, creativity, assembly and other rights. It also has a direct ban on torture and stricter provisions limiting detentions and searches by police. But it says the rights "must be practiced in a manner not conflicting with" principles of Shariah or the morals of the family. There is also a ban on insulting "religious messengers and prophets," opening the door to arrests of bloggers and other activists.
— News media
Independent publications closed for a day to protest the lack of an article banning arrest of journalists for what they write. The draft has this: "Freedom of the press, printing, publication and mass media shall be guaranteed. The media shall be free and independent..."
—Religious minorities
The draft guarantees the freedom of Christians and Jews to practice their rites, live by their religions' rule on marriage, inheritance and personal status and establish places of worship. But it hedges those rights on the condition they do not "violate public order" and that they will be "regulated by law." In the past, the building of churches has been limited by law because of claims it disturbs public order. The draft guarantees those rights for "the divine religions," meaning Christianity and Judaism, but not others, raising concerns of persecution of smaller sects.
— Military
The charter ensures an independent status for the powerful military. The president is the head of the national security council, but the defense minister is the commander in chief of the armed forces and "appointed from among its officers." Control of the military budget is not mentioned. It also allows civilians to be tried before military courts in some cases.

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Oman holds first municipal elections

MUSCAT, Oman (AP) — Oman says more than 1,400 candidates are competing in the Gulf nation's first municipal elections, a concession following Arab Spring-linked unrest.

Oman has seen sporadic protests demanding more job opportunities and a greater public voice in the tightly run sultanate.

The official Omani News Agency says the candidates, including 46 women, are vying Saturday for 192 seats on local councils that have no direct powers but will serve in an advisory role.

Gulf Arab leaders have managed to ride out the region's upheavals, but have promised some limited reforms and offered financial incentives such as expanding state jobs.

Strategic Oman shares control of the Strait of Hormuz with Iran. The narrow waterway at the mouth of the Persian Gulf is the route for one-fifth of the world's crude oil.

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