News

The Grand Hyatt Doha will have its soft opening by the middle of March with the grand opening to follow right after, a spokesperson said yesterday.

Raising Qatar’s profile as an emerging research hub in the Middle East, the Qatar Cloud Computing Center based in the Education City was officially launched yesterday.

Qatar is set to witness its first-ever women’s mini-marathon next month. Standard Chartered Bank (StanChart) is sponsoring the event, being organised by Woman Today, the first working women’s magazine in Qatar.

Barwa Al Baraha, a subsidiary of Barwa Real Estate Company, yesterday opened the largest truck park in Qatar with a capacity to park 4,200 trucks and said that the contracts to build 53,000 accommodations for single workers will be awarded next month. A client, either an individual or company, will have several options to pay for the services which include payment based per hour or on a daily basis. Alternatively, clients could get a monthly or annual membership. The services, which commenced

QATAR Airways is one step closer to becoming the world’s first airline to fly on gas-to-liquids kerosene oil as its aircraft engines will be certified for GTL use by the year-end.

QATAR ranked 34th out of 179 countries in the Human Development Index (HDI) 2006, according to figures released by the Human Development Office in New York last month. This was one rank higher than the previous year.

BUSINESSES in Qatar need to do more to provide Internet services and e-marketing, according to officials who gathered yesterday to discuss opportunities in the market and talk about the upcoming launch of the ictQatar business directory.

QTEL has officially launched BlackBerry Internet Service (Personal Edition) in the country.

British residents here stand to gain from a tumbling sterling. It was inadvertently reported yesterday that they stand to be hit hard. The error is regretted. Sterling has been losing against the dollar-pegged Qatari riyal (QR). Sterling was available in the local foreign exchange market for QR5.07 on Saturday, as against QR7.5 a few months ago.

The Sidra Medical and Research Center, which is scheduled to open by the end of 2011, would become the first health care facility in Qatar to introduce Evidence Based Health