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Coining the term “Afro Tarab” for his music, Peninsular might be seen as an extension of the journeys began on the 36-year-old’s last album, Lisan Al Tarab. But the two projects are different in approach and implementation. Subtitled Jazz Conceptions in Classical Arabic, the earlier release, from 2014, saw Yamani re-arranging familiar Levantine melodies from around the turn of the 20th century into an acoustic piano trio style.
It was a thrilling cross of Arabic harmony and improvisatory approach, which cemented Yamani’s place as arguably the most exciting jazz musician working in the GCC today.
By contrast, Peninsular is made up of original material tightly wound around the source material of traditional khaliji rhythms. Composing each tune, Yamani would sit at the piano, playing to a looped recording of a given percussive pattern until inspiration came. He would then work on these melodic fragments in silence.
Recording the project, the beats again formed the backbone, with Emirati multi-percussionist Wahid Mubarak laying down as many as 10 interwoven percussion parts to create a basic rhythm track for the band to record – a technique common in rock and pop – but in conflict with the collective improvisatory nature of jazz.
Playing a mix of acoustic and electric piano – the latter enabling the use of quarter-tones not found in western music – Yamani was again joined by a trio, this time playing alongside bassist Elie Afif and drummer Khaled Yassine, two countrymen he first performed alongside 15 years ago in Beirut.
Born in 1980 in a country in the throes of civil war, Yamani’s family home sat on the divide between East and West Beirut. He recalls a childhood backdrop of bombs and bullet holes – his first piano teacher refused to return to Yamani’s precariously placed home after a few visits.
Playing guitar in heavy-metal bands in his teens, Yamani went on to form the influential Arab hip-hop group Aksser, and later learnt harmonisation while touring with celebrated oud player Ziyad Sahhab.
In 2005 Yamani went on to pursue a degree in jazz piano at The Netherlands’ Prins Claus Conservatorium, a formative opportunity to immerse the 20-something prodigy in the genre.
Shortly after graduating, Yamani won the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz’s Composers Competition in 2010, and a year later, moved to the most competitive jazz marketplace in the world: New York City.
In 2012 he was invited to perform at the United Nations’ headquarters in Manhattan, appearing on stage alongside reigning jazz legend Wayne Shorter.
On the same day, his first album Ashur – a straight jazz trio workout recorded in Germany, intriguingly accompanied by drums and tuba – was released. Yamani’s singular voice was established with a follow-up, Lisan Al Tarab, two years later.
In 2015 the pianist relocated to Dubai, where he has gigged prodigiously as part of local bar-band stalwarts, Afif Jazz and Abri & Funk Radius. However, it is Yamani’s tireless exploration of Middle Eastern melodies and rhythms where his voice sounds brightest, authoring a distinctly holistic fusion of two musical tongues which he is equally well versed in.
Re: “Chiang Mai people will fight to the end for Doi Suthep”, Have Your Say, yesterday.
Since day one, I have doubted the purpose of so-called “citizens of Chiang Mai” in their protest against the Doi Suthep housing project.
If they care so much about the environment, they ought to do something about the smog problem there. They never do. Between February and April every year farmers slash and burn an incredible amount of vegetation and create serious air pollution. Not only do their actions spread fire through forests, they also contribute to the region’s chronic health problems and encroachment on wildlife habitats as well. It won’t be long before Chiang Mai citizens have to wear a space suit when they go outside.
Nowadays when tourists think of Chiang Mai the first thing that comes to their mind is thick and grey smog, not fresh air or blue sky.
As wait for the official result in Thailand's elections continues, scores of opposition supporters in the capital have protested against alleged cheating by the election commission in the country's first polls since a coup five years ago.
A week after the March 24 vote, the outcome remains uncertain. It might not be known until after the commission publishes official results due on May 9.
The body released partial results the night of the polls, and took four more days to publish fuller counts, showing a party supporting the military government winning the popular vote but the opposition Pheu Thai party ahead in partial results of House of Representatives seats.
The demonstrators urged bystanders to add to the 830 000 signatures on an online petition to impeach the commission.
On Saturday, the king issued an order revoking royal decorations that had been awarded to Thaksin Shinawatra, a former prime minister who was ousted in an earlier 2006 army coup and is linked to the Pheu Thai party.
Thaksin-linked parties have won every election since 2001. The 2014 coup ousted a Pheu Thai-led government that had Thaksin's sister, Yingluck Shinawatra, as prime minister.
Flexsteel Industries, Inc., (the "Company") (NASDAQ: FLXS) today announced that the Company granted Jerald K.
Looking at the universe of stocks we cover at Dividend Channel, on 12/20/18, Flexsteel Industries, Inc. will trade ex-dividend, for its quarterly dividend of $0.22, payable on 1/7/19.
Flexsteel Industries, Inc. (NASDAQ:FLXS) announces that its operating results for the first quarter ended September 30, 2018 will be released on Thursday, October 25, 2018, after the market closes.
Looking at the universe of stocks we cover at Dividend Channel, on 9/20/18, Flexsteel Industries, Inc. will trade ex-dividend, for its quarterly dividend of $0.22, payable on 10/8/18.
Flexsteel Industries, Inc. (NASDAQ:FLXS) announced that Karel Czanderna has retired from her positions as President, Chief Executive Officer and Director, effective September 9, 2018.
Flexsteel Industries, Inc. (NASDAQ: FLXS) announces the national Built for Life Sweepstakes in celebration of the Company's 125th anniversary.
Flexsteel Industries, Inc. (NASDAQ:FLXS) today reported fourth quarter and fiscal year-to-date financial results.
Flexsteel Industries, Inc. (NASDAQ:FLXS) announces that its operating results for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2018 will be released on Thursday, August 23, 2018, after the market closes.
Looking at the universe of stocks we cover at Dividend Channel, on 6/14/18, Flexsteel Industries, Inc. will trade ex-dividend, for its quarterly dividend of $0.22, payable on 7/2/18.
Flexsteel Industries, Inc. (NASDAQ:FLXS) announces that its operating results for the third quarter ended March 31, 2018 will be released on Thursday, April 26, 2018, after the market closes.
Until September last year, little separated Government Primary School at Chananwala village in Fazilka from the others in Punjab. About 13 km from Fazilka city, and among the last schools near the India-Pakistan border, it too had leaking roofs and blocked bathrooms, students had started moving to private schools and there were few blackboards or lights in classrooms.
Then, on October 1, 2018, Lovejeet Singh Grewal took charge of this school as Head Master. And in less than six months, with help from his friends, and government schemes including the MGNREGA, the school has been renovated.
It now sports a new library and computer lab and furniture and air conditioners have been installed in most classrooms. Work has begun on an open gym and experts have been roped in to teach Vedic Maths, Calligraphy and Abacus. There are also coaches for Karate, Giddha, Bhangra and Gatka.
The Chananwala school is an English medium school now but older students have an option to pursue studies in Punjabi. In the new session, English will be the medium Class 1 onwards. And all new facilities come with no extra cost, thanks to Grewal’s enterprise.
Speaking to The Indian Express, Grewal said the school had enough space, and a dozen rooms, but their condition was deplorable. “When I joined Chananwala school, some rooms were just dumpyards. The school badly needed a whitewash. There weren’t lights or even blackboards in classrooms. I and my friend Navdeep Asija, President, Graduates Welfare Association of Fazilka (GWAF), chalked out a renovation plan,” he said.
The plan included tapping the MGNREGA scheme to build parks, pathways with interlocking tiles, and boundary walls. Then, they approached voluntary donors for resources. And the turnaround shows. The school now has green lawns and eight of the 12 rooms are air-conditioned, well painted, decorated and have new furniture.
The furniture was provided by the Education Department, and in all the school spent Rs 18 lakh, of which Rs 12 lakh came from the MGNREGA, which has been reimbursed up to Rs 5 lakhs.
Grewal said arrangements have been made for the surge in power bills. “I am aware of the power bill issue. But we have arranged donors who will pay the power bills in months the AC works. It is for four months only and the rest of the year, we can get the bill reimbursed from the education department as usual,” he said.
The infrastructure upgrades have even ensured a spike in admissions – from 137 students in October 2018 to 200 in April, according to Grewal. “We will have a class strength of 40 given availability of staff. We can enroll not more than 240 students (including the KG section). As of now, 20 students are in KG and 180 in primary. So, we can admit 20 more students in KG and primary sections, respectively,” he said.
Students who left for private schools have returned too, said Grewal. “It was just another government school earlier. We too had a staff shortage. But the change is beyond our imagination. Students used to bunk classes but now they don’t want to go back home,” said Sakshi Nagpal.
Before joining this school, Grewal was posted at the Government Primary School Dona Nanka which is also close to the Indo-Pak border, where his work earned him a state award in 2015 and a national award in 2017.
Sahib Ram, a mason at the Chananwala school said: “Students now rush to school as they get a conducive environment and a school close to the Indo-Pak border is a surprise for all where border tension is a serious issue,” he said. His relatives’ grandchildren study in this school.
2 What’s dragging Delhi University down?
LaSalle councillors cut $190,000 in spending to keep the 2016 municipal tax rate increase at 2.2 per cent but also agreed to ask the police services board to find savings in its budget.
Mayor Ken Antaya said if cuts can be made to the police portion of the town’s 2016 budget — which was approved Tuesday night — council will decide where to allocate that money.
“(The police service) was the only department … I’m not going to say were overlooked but they weren’t asked (to make cuts) so there had to be a resolution from council at least requesting that they look at it,” Antaya said following the meeting.
Council approved in principle the 2016 budget on Dec. 17, but asked administration to go back and look for ways to make further cuts to bring the blended rate tax increase down to an estimated 1.5 per cent. Without those cuts, the overall increase would have been approximately 2.14 per cent.
The 1.5 per cent blended rate increase adds $58.50 to the tax bill for an average home assessed at $250,000.
The blended tax rate includes county and education levies.
The municipal portion of the tax bill included a 4.48 per cent hike in the proposed budget.
In a report, director of finance Joe Milicia proposed two options for the reductions.
Council agreed to the first option, which cuts $100,000 in annual contributions to capital as well as deferring the first phase of a road crack and seal program, defers some vehicle and equipment maintenance, as well as LED street light savings, and reduces funding for strategic planning initiatives and the Essex Region Conservation Authority.
The second option would have cut $190,000 from capital contributions.
He said if savings are found in the police services budget, council can then decide where that money will be re-allocated.
Antaya also put forth a notice of motion for the next council meeting requesting the LaSalle Police Services Board give a costing estimate for shared services to the Town of Amherstburg.
JERUSALEM (Reuters): Millions of Palestinian refugees “cannot simply be wished away”, the head of a UN support agency said on Monday, hitting back at a US aid cutoff and allegations its work only perpetuates their plight. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) provides services to about 5 million Palestinian refugees across Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the West Bank and Gaza. Most are descendants of some 700,000 Palestinians who were driven out of their homes or fled fighting in the 1948 war that led to Israel’s creation.
The growing refugee count was cited by Washington, UNRWA’s biggest donor, in its decision last week to withhold funding, and has potential ramifications for the Palestinians’ pursuit of a right of return to land now in Israel. Successive Israeli governments have ruled out such an influx, fearing the country would lose its Jewish majority.
“I express deep regret and disappointment at the nature of the US decision,” UNRWA Commissioner-General Pierre Krahenbuhl said in an open letter to Palestinian refugees and the agency’s staff in which he pledged its operations would continue. Appearing to echo Israel’s view that descendants of the 1948 refugees should not share that status, State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert criticized UNRWA on Friday over its “endlessly and exponentially expanding community of entitled beneficiaries”.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described UNRWA on Sunday as “the refugee perpetuation agency” whose money “should be taken and be used to really help rehabilitate the refugees, whose real number is a sliver of that reported by UNRWA”. But Krahenbuhl said “the protracted nature of the Palestine refugee crisis” was not unique. He said the children and grandchildren of long-displaced refugees in Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia, Congo and elsewhere are also recognized as refugees and assisted by the United Nations. “No matter how often attempts are made to minimize or delegitimize the individual and collective experiences of Palestine refugees, the undeniable fact remains that they have rights under international law and represent a community of 5.4 million men, women and children who cannot simply be wished away,” he said. The United States paid out $60 million to UNRWA in January, withholding another $65 million, from a promised $365 million for the year. Krahenbuhl said Gulf states had injected funds but UNRWA still needed more than $200 million.
In Lebanon on Monday, UNRWA opened its school year as scheduled. Studies in UNRWA-run schools in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip got under way on Wednesday. Claudio Cordone, director of UNRWA Affairs in Lebanon, told Reuters that funds would last only until the end of the month but the agency would continue to raise money to ensure the schools remain open.
Washington’s move against UNRWA was the latest in a series of US and Israeli policy decisions that have angered Palestinians and raised international concern. They include Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in December, the moving of the US Embassy to the contested city in May and Israel’s adoption of a “nation-state” law in July that says only Jews have the right of self-determination in the country.
Although many organizations are using more than one type of cloud service, the key to strong security is to act as if there is one cloud, according to Sai Balabhadrapatruni, a senior security manager at Palo Alto Networks.
Companies should do this, he said, by developing a consistent security policy framework that follows data and applications across private data centers, public clouds and software-as-a-service hosting environments.
Indeed, when organizations migrate to the cloud, move data from cloud to cloud or participate in a cloud federation, “it becomes crucial to be able to port settings and configurations consistently and rapidly into the new environment or service,” said Daniele Catteddu, chief technology officer at the Cloud Security Alliance, a member organization that runs working groups and certification programs.
But Balabhadrapatruni, who focuses on private cloud security at Palo Alto Networks, said many companies haven’t put the one-cloud approach into practice.
Companies can change, however, and raise their cloud-security game. Experts recommend these three steps as a starting point.
1. Cover all the basics. When creating a policy framework for data in the cloud, an organization should first conduct a self-assessment that includes defining a governance model and evaluating the current level of cloud maturity. Companies must also identify the key stakeholders who will be part of the team that creates the policy. Common stakeholders include leaders in IT, finance, legal, engineering and governance.
Given that cloud environments are dynamic, security policy must remain consistent and in sync with changes.
2. Choose the right partners.To build a solid policy framework for security in the cloud, you need to work closely with service providers, as well as with security technology vendors.
Although many public cloud vendors provide robust security for their infrastructures, customers are responsible for the security of their applications and data within the public cloud. That dynamic underscores the importance of being able to find a vendor partner that offers a next-generation firewall that can protect applications and data in the cloud and control access to them. The firewall must be scalable, both horizontally and vertically, so it supports the growing use of cloud services and the need to address traffic fluctuations.
It’s also important to work with public cloud vendors to develop the appropriate architecture for your needs, said Matt Keil, public cloud security director at Palo Alto Networks. Solutions architects from each company need to work together to ensure the architecture is not only secure, but also reliable and scalable.
3. Build consistent security policy across clouds. Because of the agility and elasticity of the on-demand model of the cloud, the underlying infrastructure has to be abstracted from a policy standpoint.
“If you try to build security policy that has significant hooks directly into the infrastructure itself, you have a challenge from two perspectives,” Balabhadrapatruni said.
First, operationalizing security in a multicloud environment would become unduly complex and time-consuming. Secondly, security policy would not be scalable.
Regardless of how organizations are using cloud services as part of their IT infrastructure, the key is that they need to plan for a comprehensive and consistent approach toward securing all clouds — rather than look at each cloud as a security silo.
Learn more about comprehensive cloud security from Palo Alto Networks here.
Bob Violino is a business and technology freelance writer who covers cloud computing, cybersecurity and big data, among other topics.
This week, Gayle explores Dundee from a new perspective – on a newly launched River Tay boat trip.
Lambing season is in full swing, with thousands of baby sheep being born across the UK. Gayle Ritchie lends a hand at a farm in Fife.
A team of teenagers is heading to Greenland on Tuesday to undertake a 10-day, 100km Arctic expedition with The Polar Academy. Gayle Ritchie joins a gruelling training session in St Andrews.
The art of horse logging, which dates back 10,000 years, nearly died out during the 1980s as machines took over. But Gayle Ritchie discovers it’s alive and kicking in Courier Country.
Apart from the obvious attraction of our own Courier page, one of the few things keeping me on Facebook these days is being able to keep up with some of the great local history groups that use it to share photos and memories.
To see them in captivity is pleasure enough, but there is nothing quite like a wild haggis experience to stir the heart of any Scot.
Three Waynesboro teens were arrested early Sunday morning and charged with crimes related to a burglary in the overnight hours of Jan. 26-27.
The teens were arrested after a stop by a city police officer around 2 a.m. near the intersection of North Poplar Avenue and Ohio Street. The officer at the scene found two stolen GPS units in the backpack of one of the teens and a Glock 9mm pistol in the search of another youth.
The Jan. 26-27 incident was reported in the 200 block of Isle Avenue. In the incident a Glock 9mm pistol was taken in addition to a Wii, iPod, three martial-arts weapons and some change.
Police are investigating possible links between the teens arrested on Sunday and as many as 40-50 outstanding cases dating to November.
This story is sponsored by Utah Dept. of Heritage & Arts. Learn more about Utah Dept. of Heritage & Arts.
Visiting an interactive exhibit with children or going on a date to an art show are enjoyable ways to pass the time and engage with unique ideas. But, beyond being a fun way to spend a weekend, arts and culture provide value to society at large.
In fact, communities that develop cultural and artistic opportunities reap educational, economic and intrinsic benefits.
"People are drawn to places by a desire to engage in communities with authentic character," according to the Utah Department of Heritage & Arts. " ... Committing to infrastructure strategies that embed arts and culture is the key to achieving vibrancy and bringing life and emotion to your community."
Here are four ways investing in arts and culture makes economic sense.
Arts and culture can make deep impacts on the lives of all school-aged children.
"Students who study arts subjects are more employable and more likely to stay in employment," according to the Arts Council of England.
Even better, students in at-risk demographic groups might reap the greatest rewards from exposure to and involvement with the arts.
"Children from low-income families who participate in art activities at school are three times more likely to get a degree," according to the Americ ans for the Arts.
The organization also points out that students involved with arts are "four times more likely to be recognized for academic achievement." Taking learning beyond the classroom has been proven to help students develop and apply skills as they learn how to identify and solve real-world problems.
Towns known for their dedication to the arts attract visitors and, consequently, businesses, which is the perfect storm for economic success.

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