UK Entrepreneur VISA FAST

But many potential Indian travellers are still discouraged from visiting Europe because of cumbersome visa rules and long waiting times. Now, the European Commission has proposed to change EU visa legislation to make it easier for people to travel to the EU borderless Schengen area.

The main obstacles in the existing system include long waiting times both to get an appointment with consular offices and for the visa to get issued, and the need to prepare and submit complex supporting documents. In a recent survey financed by the European Commission, over 30% of Indian respondents perceived the supporting documents requirement to be problematic.

With the proposals for new EU laws, getting a decision on one's visa application should, in principle, take no longer than 10 calendar days.

Furthermore, it is proposed to ease the rules on which supporting documents are needed; and to make the process similar, no matter which embassy or consulate the application is launched in. Also, minors under the age of 18 should no longer have to pay avisa fee.

Another deterrent for potential visitors to Europe is insufficient consular coverage in certain regions. People sometimes have to travel far to present their visa request. These requirements are even more frustrating for frequent and regular travellers as they cannot obtain a visa for multiple entries.

The commission, therefore, proposes that people who regularly travel to Europe should be granted a multi-entry visa valid for several years, if they have had a visa issued to them twice in the previous 12 months. According to our proposals, in the future, it will not be necessary to lodge an application in person if the applicant is already registered in the system.

In addition, a new type of visa is proposed: the touring visa, with which the holder can stay in the Schengen area of Europe and travel across the continent for up to one year, with the possibility to extend it by another year.

Jamaica waives visa requirements for Chinese visitors

Australia’s Immigration Minister Scott Morrison said his department was working with the airline and Beijing to facilitate visas. Relatives would be given tourist visas with the usual fees waived, he said.

Mr Najib’s announcement opens the way for what will be one of the most costly and difficult air crash Wreckage could hold keyinvestigations ever.Normally, an official investigation can only begin once a crash site has been identified. That would give Malaysia power to co-ordinate and sift evidence.

A government source told Reuters that Malaysia would lead the investigation, but hoped other countries, especially Australia, would play a major role.The United States said it was sending an undersea Navy drone to Australia, in addition to a high-tech black box detector, to help in the search.But the black box detector would not arrive in the search area until April 5, Mr Hishammuddin said, leaving only a few days to pick up locator beacons from the box that stop about a month after a crash due to limited battery life.

The so-called black boxes ― the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder ― record what happens during flight.

Mr Najib said Mr Inmarsat had performed further calculations on data gleaned from faint pings picked up by satellite that initially only narrowed the search area to two massive arcs.

Giving more details on the analysis on Tuesday, Mr Hishammuddin said it showed that at some time after 00.11pm GMT ― about six hours after its last sighting by Malaysian military radar on March 8 ― the aircraft was no longer able to communicate with the ground station.

Wreckage could hold key

"This is a time of extraordinary emotions and we fully understand," said Malaysia Airlines Chairman Mohd Nur Yusof. "In fact, we really feel for the next of kin. In terms of how they react, it’s emotional." Asked whether he would resign over the crisis, the airline’s CE, Ahmad Jauhari Yahya, said that would be a "personal decision" to be made at a later time.

Flight MH370 vanished from civilian radar screens less than an hour after taking off on March 8. No confirmed debris from the plane has been found since.

Investigators believe someone on the flight may have shut off the plane’s communications systems. Partial military radar tracking showed it turning west and re-crossing the Malay Peninsula, apparently under the control of a skilled pilot.

Recovery of wreckage could unlock clues about why the plane had diverted so far off course. Theories range from a hijacking to sabotage or a possible suicide by one of the pilots, but investigators have not ruled out technical problems.

As a result of the new satellite analysis, the international search effort has been narrowed to focus solely on the southern end of the possible route ― a still massive area of 1.2-million sq km ― Malaysian acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein told reporters.

The search site is far from commercial flight paths about 2,500km southwest of Perth, a region of deep, frigid seas known as the Roaring 40s where storm-force winds and huge waves are commonplace.

Malaysia Airlines said in a statement that it would make arrangements to fly relatives to Australia once it had approval from the investigating authorities.

Vietnam's hidden wonder

Just after sunset during our second week in Vietnam, my husband and I found ourselves wandering through the side streets behind the battle-scarred emperor's palace in Hue, the former imperial capital in the center of the country. Everything about the setting intrigued us: the pockmarked stone walls that encircled the old fortress, the candlelit shrines displayed along the sidewalks, the cries of street food vendors wheeling carts of savory steamed buns. But we would get to those later.

At that moment, we were focused on finding a moped to rent. We thought riding through the city as the locals do would give us the most comprehensive sense of the place we could manage in our short time there – we had only a day and a half on this the shortest stop of our three-week journey through Vietnam and Cambodia. As was the case almost everywhere we went, we would end up with a much deeper experience than we expected. Every inquiry we made ended in hilarity as people on the street ― most unable to speak English and unfamiliar with the sight of tourists away from the city center ― tried to guess what we might want. Taxi? No. Food? No. Beer? No. Moped. And we would gesture as if we were holding handlebars. "Vroom! Vroom!"

We were in the middle of one such absurd pantomime when a slight, smiling woman appeared from a store. "You are American?" she said in practiced English. "I will help you. Wait. I have to buy candy for my children." Before we knew it, we were in the woman's living room, a modest, tiled box that, like most Vietnamese homes, opened like a storefront to a side street. We sat, dazed, at a diminutive table as she and her husband, who spoke only Vietnamese, served us cold cans of light Vietnamese beer, plates of rice with stir-fried cabbage, and one of the buns we had seen earlier – she flagged down the vendor from her living room window.

Soon her father, a mostly toothless man in his 80s, appeared and began regaling us in broken English with stories of his time serving as a driver for American generals during the Vietnam War, when Hue was not far from the no man's land known as the Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ. Her sister arrived with a moped for us to borrow and an invitation to dinner and a dance club the following night. Her 9-year-old son curled up next to my husband and showed off his boyish biceps, then giggled as my husband flexed his own. As the street grew darker, our host changed the plan: She and her father would give us a guided tour that evening. And so we went, still astonished at the turn of events. I rode on the back of her bike as my husband rode with her father – who grew increasingly jovial with each beer he had taken for the road.

There has always been tension between France

Will the economic reforms outlined by Francois Hollande really revive the French economy? Well, they just might. We have had only the barest sketch of the new business-friendly programme and the market response so far has been pretty muted. But the package comes at the right time, for as the measures feed in over the course of the year they will support what already looks like a modest recovery.

There is always tension between the UK and France – socially, culturally and politically, as well as in economic terms. So here, the strong recovery now evident in Britain is being contrasted with the flat performance in France; while there, our deep recession and the reliance on domestic demand to pull us out is contrasted with what was until recently a reasonable recovery.

You can catch some feeling for this in the graph, which shows published GDP figures for the two countries, together with those for the US and Germany. Initially they did much better than we did, but recently we have been closing the gap. On the basis of this, France has had a better overall performance than the UK – though anyone familiar with the data will be aware that the UK official figures are suspect, as they are undercounting the recovery.

However there are two broad strands helping France. One is that the eurozone is at last picking up a little pace. To over-simplify, the fringe economies that have been pulling down the entire edifice are, with one exception, now showing signs of a turnabout. The exception is Italy, where there is really no evidence of growth at all. But Spain, Portugal, Ireland, even Greece, are all increasing their exports, the sign that they have regained some competitiveness. As for Germany – well, it continues to plod forward slowly, pulling along the others with it.

The second strand is that the structure of the French economy is stronger than many outsiders appreciate. There are well-known weaknesses, such as the country's mass car producers, with Peugeot in particularly serious trouble, but less attention has been paid to the country's commercial success stories, which include the luxury sector.

Part of the reason why Paris has been more successful than London at attracting Chinese visitors is the difficult of getting UK visas, whereas a Schengen visa gives the visitors access to nearly all the continental EU, but part is the reputation of up-market French brands. As a result France exports a slightly higher proportion of its total exports to China than the UK, though we are both quite a lot lower than the proportion of exports that go there from the US and Germany.

Indeed, if you look at the overall structure of the French and British economies, they are really very similar. They include a not very big manufacturing sector, massive private sector services, a large public sector, strong overseas investment… and so on. French agriculture is a bit bigger than ours but is still only 3 per cent of GDP. The rhetoric is that we are very different; the reality is that we are much the same.