Latest news with #Hejira
Morocco World
13-05-2025
- Automotive
- Morocco World
Morocco Eyes Major Export Boost to Egypt, Targets $500 Million by 2027
Rabat – Morocco is set to dramatically increase its exports to Egypt, with officials projecting a jump from MAD 755 million ($75 million) to MAD 5 billion ($500 million) within the next three years. The ambitious goal comes after a high-stakes trade mission and signals a new phase in economic ties between the two North African nations. Omar Hejira, the Secretary of State in charge of Foreign Trade, revealed the forecast during a parliamentary session on Monday. He fielded a question from the National Rally of Independents (RNI) party, which sought updates on efforts to strengthen Morocco's export presence in Egypt. The push follows a recent visit by a 40-strong Moroccan trade delegation to Cairo, where executives and exporters held over 200 meetings with Egyptian counterparts. Hejira initiated the mission himself, with Moroccan Confederation of Exporters (ASMEX) President Hassan Sentissi El Idrissi at the helm of the delegation, whose sole goal to promote the 'Made in Morocco' label. The talks led to preliminary deals, with the two sides now working to finalize agreements in key sectors. The visit builds on recent talks with Egyptian officials. In April, the Egyptian ambassador visited ASMEX headquarters, followed by a successful 'Egypt Country Zoom' event where participants learned about market opportunities and how to dip their toes into the Egyptian market. During the parliamentary talks, Hejira also pointed to the automotive industry as a standout success story. Moroccan car exports to Egypt have already soared from just 400 units to 3,000, a figure that could climb to 5,000 by year's end and reach 8,000 by 2026. Calling Morocco-Egypt trade 'a model of Arab cooperation,' Hajira stressed the countries' historical bonds and mutual economic interests. The fivefold export expansion, if achieved, would mark a major milestone in Morocco's strategy to grow its African and Arab trade networks, and solidify its role as a key economic bridge between continents. Tags: economyMorocco exportsMorocco tradeMorocco-Egypttradetrade ties
Morocco World
06-05-2025
- Business
- Morocco World
Morocco's 2025-2027 Foreign Trade Roadmap to Generate 76,000 Jobs
Doha – The Moroccan government has unveiled an ambitious foreign trade roadmap for 2025-2027, aiming to boost national exports and create thousands of jobs. Head of Government Aziz Akhannouch chaired a meeting in Rabat on Tuesday to review this strategic plan presented by Secretary of State for Foreign Trade, Omar Hejira. The roadmap centers around three key strategic objectives: creating 76,000 new jobs, expanding the export base by establishing 400 new export companies annually, and generating an additional MAD 84 billion (approximately $8.4 billion) in export revenues. During the meeting, Akhannouch stated that the government has worked to strengthen foreign trade and promote national exports as drivers of growth and development, in accordance with royal directives. He pointed out the importance of supporting and encouraging Moroccan small and medium enterprises interested in entering the export sector. The 2025-2027 foreign trade roadmap encompasses six reform projects, including accelerating the digitalization of foreign trade, creating regional offices to support this digitalization, and promoting exports from the handicraft and social and solidarity economy sectors. This new strategy comes after months of preparation. In January, Hejira revealed that the development of this action plan involved an extensive regional tour that identified numerous export barriers and collected 524 proposals, with 80% coming from Morocco's regions and 20% from the ministry. These proposals, backed by 1,200 elected officials and economic operators, aim to improve competitiveness, simplify procedures, support SMEs, diversify export markets, and balance the export landscape currently dominated by just three regions accounting for 85% of exports. The strategy also included the creation of 12 regional offices dedicated to foreign trade development across Morocco by the end of January, designed to capitalize on underexploited potential. A chatbot for foreign trade will also be launched to facilitate interaction between stakeholders and the ministry regarding their expectations. The plan tackles serious trade imbalances. In 2023, Moroccan exports reached MAD 430 billion ($43 billion), compared to MAD 716 billion ($71.6 billion) in imports, resulting in a substantial trade deficit of MAD 286 billion ($28.6 billion). A ministerial study updated in 2023 identified a potential MAD 120 billion ($12 billion) in untapped export opportunities, with 10% related to African markets. Boosting African trade According to Hejira, the new 2025-2027 strategy will include announcements covering all of Morocco's foreign markets, including countries with which Morocco has signed free trade agreements (USA, Turkey, European Union, AfCFTA, Mercosur). Several corrective measures will soon be announced to strengthen export shares to countries where Morocco's trade deficit is significant. Currently, 92% of Moroccan exports are concentrated in six key sectors: automotive (34.4%), agriculture and food industries (19.3%), phosphates and derivatives (17.8%), leather products (10.7%), aviation (5.3%), and electronics (4.3%). Despite Morocco's export growth in recent years, exports to Africa have increased at a slower pace compared to other regions. According to data from the Office des Changes, over the past decade (2015-2024), exports to Africa rose by 47.82% to MAD 31.62 billion ($3.16 billion). During the same period, exports increased by nearly 84% to Asia, more than doubled to America and Europe, and increased nearly fivefold to Australia. To address this issue, a new complementary public export insurance scheme will be launched in early June. Developed in consultation with all public and private stakeholders in the export insurance ecosystem, this program will initially cover commercial and political risks for public and private buyers from 15 strategic African countries. The new foreign trade roadmap represents a comprehensive approach to strengthening Morocco's export position globally, with particular attention to untapped potential in African markets. Read also: Allianz Trade Outlook: Morocco Emerging as Top Global Trade Hub Tags: Foreign TradeMorocco trade
The Guardian
03-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Chaka Khan on Prince, poetry and wild, wonderful nights: ‘No one's done anything but craziness at 4am'
Can you remember the precise moment you realised you had a gift as a vocalist? SalfordRed64I was doing a talent show at the Burning Spear in Chicago. My group, the Crystallettes, graced many a nightclub stage in competitions, and every time either us or [fellow Chicago girl group] the Emotions would win. But I remember singing some Aretha Franklin songs and people in the audience were throwing money on the stage, and they started calling me 'little Aretha'. That's when I connected the dots: 'Oh, I see what this is all about.' I realised I didn't have to become a teacher or a whatever I wanted to be when I grew up back then – I could be a singer! You have so much confidence and you just knew you and [the band] Rufus were going to make it big. Where does that confidence come from? stifwhiffWhen I was with Rufus, I knew I loved what we were doing, and I could only hope and pray everyone else loved it like I did. That's all you can ask for. And that's still how I am about the music I make. I have confidence in everything I do – all the time. And that is a necessary thing to have if you want success – if you've created something and you want everyone to love it, you have to love it first. And that's applicable to everything in life, not just music. Your cover of Joni Mitchell's Hejira was unbelievable. I've read about your planned Mitchell album for a long time. Are you still planning to release it? Jroel72I love Joni – she's helped me out of a lot of rough spots, just with her music. We're great friends, and have been for many, many years. I first met her when I did a little ad-lib on her song Dreamland. She knows how to get a good collaboration going, and she always has a great rhythm section – my all-time favourite songs of hers are the ones where Jaco [Pastorius] is playing bass, God bless his soul. I am indeed working on a CD of some of my favourite songs by her, and it'll be out … soon. I saw you in [stage musical] Mama, I Want To Sing! many years ago (which you were very good in). Do you have any ambitions to return to the stage? jaelliottNo. I'm glad you saw it and enjoyed it, but I got zonked out from doing that. [Acting on stage] is just too much hard work; I don't need to do it and it's just not my favourite thing to do – music is. I never get bored with songs and music and melody. I'm lucky to be doing something that feeds me and nurtures me and makes me feel good. How often do you play the drums now? KnobtwidllerI love playing drums. I just don't often get the chance to play, unless I'm jamming at the club with somebody – and I don't go out clubbing much these days. I love any drummer who's in the pocket. Buddy Miles was my favourite, growing up, and my dad turned me on to Max Roach when I was a kid. My dad inspired me to play drums; he used to play congas. When I was a little girl, my sister and I used to go with him to the park, where they'd have a drum circle going, and we'd join in and have a great time. I can also play a little bass, and I took flute and violin in school for hot minutes. But I'm really a drummer. I'm going to just start doing some drums, some beats, on my recordings. Like Sugar [from 2019] is an absolute banger. Any plans to release more music soon? snak3spanI'm working on it right now! Sia and I are working on an amazing project, and I hope the first single will come out some time this summer. I'm always working on music. And Sia is amazing – she's my goddaughter! This is something we've been working on for a year now, and it's killing us, because we keep coming up with more great music to do! We can't finish, because we've got so much to give. It's beautiful. I once heard you write poetry in your spare time. Have you given thought to compiling it and releasing a poetry book? JulesTheDreamerI've talked about doing a poetry book; I just can't find all the scrap paper I've been writing my poems on! When I'm in creative mode, I need somebody to snatch those papers up before I go on to the next sheet! But I've got to start putting all that junk together and see if it inspires anybody, because sometimes the most disorganised stuff can be the best you've written. Life is inspiration to me – it's like a bag of chips and popcorn, a major mix. I'm never at a loss of stuff to write about. I loved your version of A Night in Tunisia. Would you take such an innovative approach to other jazz standards? And when did you start loving jazz music? User28I've done plenty of jazz standards. I've loved jazz since I was a toddler – my mother and father were jazz fanatics. I heard everything from the Art Ensemble of Chicago – which was, you know, out there – to Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis. And I worked with Miles. He and Prince were very similar – big thinkers. Miles was always looking to grow. Prince was, too. The three of us collaborated on Sticky Wicked, on my CK album in 1988, and it was a beautiful combination. What's your favourite Stevie Wonder song? What was he like to work with? EddieChorepostI Was Made to Love Her. That song just wipes me out. I covered it as well [as I Was Made to Love Him]. Another genius. You performed once at Gay Pride in London in Kennington Park. My first Pride – I was a young lesbian, 19 or 20. The power of your voice blasting across the field was incredible. Firstly, thank you. It felt like the gays were being blessed by you. Do you remember being there? And have you always been a champion of the LGBTQ+ community? FoolishBoyI've always been a champion. I'm so sorry, I don't remember that day; it sounds remarkable. I'm so glad you were able to bathe in that wonderful feeling. I'm a champion of anyone who is having a problem getting their point across, of living their life, their love, the way they want or need to. If they are struggling to be heard, to be loved, to be understood, I'm behind them. What was performing with Prince like? GeeSNZ64It was like working with myself, more than anyone else I've worked with. Sia's bringing up a close third, behind Prince and Miles Davis. Quincy Jones, too: he oozed inspiration and shared it. Prince just grabbed ideas out of the air and left you wondering: 'Where did you get that?' He was a really deep and beautiful thinker. We worked on a lot of songs, and they're all going to be on a CD I'm soon to release – there's a lot of red tape that's been in the way, but we've cleared it. It's him and me and Larry Graham, together. Way back in 1995, you sang with Prince at his Wembley Arena aftershow party at the Astoria. I remember that he came out at around 4am and you and George Benson joined him, and it was a great night. Other than that my memory is hazy. What do you remember of that night? WhistlebumpMy memory is at least as hazy as yours, I bet – probably more. Four o'clock in the morning? No one's doing anything but craziness at four in the morning! So I'm sure it was like a wild, wonderful night. And don't look for the little details; just remember the big feeling you had. That's how I handle my memories. I don't remember a lot of what I did. And thank God! I'm a 'next!' person. Life is about what's happening now, what's coming next. I've done a lot in my life, and over half of it I don't remember. Did I ever keep a diary? Oh, hell no. That takes a special kind of patience. Does the fact that music is a universal language prove we all have a lot more in common than we realise? Twist27Absolutely. Music is the language of the angels – when I sing, I feel oneness with all creation, oneness with God, with everything. It's a remarkable thing. And maybe it sounds a bit cuckoo, but it's the truth. When everything comes together – the instruments, the vocal – that's the sound of angels speaking. Chaka Khan will perform at the Hampton Court Palace festival on 18 June. Her Manifestation Planner and Journal is out now
New York Times
28-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Both Sides Now: Two New Takes on Joni Mitchell
On one of her signature songs, the restless, almost phosphorescent 1976 anthem 'Hejira,' Joni Mitchell sits in some cafe, sketching out a life philosophy: 'We all come and go unknown/Each so deep and superficial/Between the forceps and the stone.' She sounds majestic but weary, like an eagle or an off-duty Valkyrie. Who are we flightless birds to disagree? And yet: Such is the enduring lure of Joni-ology, the secular religion of her fandom, that two new meditations on Mitchell have already landed in this youngish year, just over a month apart. Henry Alford's 'I Dream of Joni' and Paul Lisicky's 'Song So Wild and Blue' are not really traditional works of scholarship or biography; footnotes are wielded gently. Instead, Mitchell mostly serves as a mirror and a muse, a blond godhead on which to pin the authors' respective forms and fascinations. With a title as pun-perfect as 'I Dream of Joni,' you almost can't blame Alford, the puckish longtime New Yorker writer and humorist, for writing an entire book to justify it. The subtitle, 'A Portrait of Joni Mitchell in 53 Snapshots,' provides a structure and format that suits his tone: cheerful anecdotes, trivia and freewheeling commentary, buoyed by interviews. (Among others, Alford spoke to Mitchell's prom date, the woman who makes her dulcimers and a recent mayor of her hometown, the Canadian prairie city Saskatoon.) The Joni portrayed here in droll, chatty interludes, some as short as a page or two, is composed of the usual canonical parts: Saskatchewan rebel, lady of the Canyon, pop-culture eminence covered in glory. There are odes to her wardrobe, her bowling skills and the black-box mysticism of her songwriting process. A litany of 20th-century luminaries duly make their cameos — names like Warren Beatty (Mitchell called him 'Pussycat'), Georgia O'Keeffe (with whom she developed an odd, prickly rapport) and Prince (a fan and later a friend, he once invited her to join him onstage to sing the chorus of 'Purple Rain'; she demurred, saying she didn't know the words). But the uneasier aspects of Mitchell's history are also probed: her complicated and sometimes combative relationship with the daughter she gave up for adoption at 21, and wouldn't meet again for more than 30 years; a childhood battle with polio and the brain aneurysm she suffered much later, both physically and emotionally devastating; even her bizarre embrace of blackface in the '70s and '80s, and her peculiar, stubborn refusal to view that as problematic in any way to this day. Chronology is not this book's particular concern. The timeline swings blithely from a 2007 interview with Charlie Rose to Mitchell's fondness for designing her own culottes in high school, and then on to a tense confrontation with a Rolling Stone reporter in the midst of Bob Dylan's chaotic, cocaine-soaked Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975. In his attempts to make galaxy-brain connections, Alford sometimes gets lost in the proverbial weeds — lesser vignettes in which he constructs his own fridge-magnet free verse from various Mitchell quotes, catalogs the Facebook posts of her semi-estranged daughter or draws up a list of traits shared with the singer-songwriter Carole King. (Both women have blue eyes, put cats on their album covers and appeared in Gap ads? Spooky.) But he is also a wry, cleareyed chronicler whose obvious affection for his subject doesn't keep him from acknowledging the acutely human flaws and peccadilloes of an artist who has too often been written about with Mach 10 earnestness. (When the warbling-banshee outro on her recording of 'Woodstock' hits at full volume, he winkingly concedes, 'it is possible to clear a room of pets and heterosexual men.') Like Alford, Paul Lisicky is a gay man of a certain age and literary pedigree, though sexuality is often more than subtext in 'Song So Wild and Blue,' a quasi memoir over which Mitchell hangs cool and a little unreachable, like the moon. While the book opens as if it is inside her head many decades ago, deep in the act of puzzling out a song ('The smell of struck nickel came up from the strings. It was already past 4 in the morning …'), within several paragraphs the narrative has shifted to Lisicky in circa-2020s Brooklyn, texting a new friend and potential lover. What if their shared love of Joni, he wonders, diverges too much in the details? Or maybe worse, brings too much closeness too quickly? The man on the other side of the phone doesn't fully know yet what she meant to Lisicky as a lonely boy growing up in Cherry Hill, N.J., in the late 1960s and '70s, tall and awkward and generally terrified of being seen as himself. Access to the family piano and Mitchell's 1972 album 'For the Roses' served as gateway drugs; in high school, Lisicky started to compose his own songs, and when that proved too intimidating, shifted to writing stories without music. But the singer's fluid singularity, her refusal to apologize or conform, made him feel electric and understood. What follows plays out mostly in an intimate, impressionistic 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' mode, interwoven with Mitchell myths and parallels. Lisicky's talents eventually earned him a spot at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and he went on to become a well-respected teacher and author, even the partner of a famous poet, with homes in Provincetown and New York. His devotion to Mitchell ebbed and flowed. ('The late '80s didn't seem to know what to do with Joni, nor she with the late '80s.') Her presence in the pages of 'Song So Wild and Blue' can feel similarly unresolved, tangled up in an unwieldy mix of musical critique, creative speculation — at one point, a whole inner monologue for Mitchell's disapproving mother is conjured as she watches her daughter perform at Carnegie Hall — and tribute. There's a lovely coalescence, though, in the book's finale, a fraught cross-country trip to see Mitchell perform, post-aneurysm, at a spectacular outdoor concert bowl in Washington State in 2023. If Alford is the witty friend leaning in to share good gossip at a dinner party and Lisicky is the ardent, eloquent professor, riffing on quarter notes and the petty politics of academia, they aren't so far apart in the end. In a time when anyone who's heard 'A Case of You' at the drugstore or rewatched 'Love Actually' at Christmas has at least some passing knowledge of Mitchell's existence, to be a hard-core devotee still implies certain qualities: that one is soulful and a little against the grain, a defender of open tunings and difficult truths. (Also, yes, inordinately fond of cloud metaphors.) At 81, Mitchell, though still vital and out in the world, is further from the forceps than the stone. She is stardust, she is golden; uncountable fans and self-styled experts have already tilled that garden. To go all in anyway as these two writers do, to keep trying to make art and sense of such a known, unknowable life, feels like about the most Joni thing you could do.
