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saudi woman
Saudi Arabia’s religious police are not popular. Their job, fundamentally, is to ensure that Saudi women behave the way Saudi men think they should behave.

The thinking of Saudi men can be summed up by the fact that they have religious police in the first place.


Recently one woman, aged in her 20s, visited an amusement park with a young man. This is the sort of irresponsible behaviour which young people will get up to without adequate supervision. How, for example, are the religious police to know, just by looking at two young people strolling around an amusement park, if they are married? It is important to know this, of course, because in Saudi Arabia it is a crime for an unmarried couple to be alone together.

The religious police approached the two young people and initiated questioning about the legality of their activity.

In response, the young woman punched a policeman. Then she punched him again. In fact, she landed quite a number of blows, and as a consequence he was taken to hospital to be treated for fairly serious facial injuries.

Now the story worsens. Instead of decrying the violence as an outrageous and irresponsible denial of the customs and traditions of Saudi society, many women in the country are cheering.

One, a women's rights activist named Wajiha Al-Huwaidar, said, “To see resistance from a woman means a lot. People are fed up with these religious police, and now they pay for the humiliation they cause. There will be more resistance.''


Fighting words. Policemen beware.

The names of the young couple and date of the incident have not been made public. The woman faces a lengthy prison term and lashings – not for punching the policeman, but for refusing to confirm her relationship to the man.

Sources: News Corp, The Media Line news agency, Okaz newspaper, Jerusalem Post newspaper.


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Aliens have landed

April 6th 2010 03:58

It is April 1 and people awake to the news, splashed across the front page of the newspaper, that aliens have invaded their city. The aliens are three metres tall. They came in flying saucers which lit up the whole town, interrupted communications and sent fearful residents streaming into the streets.

The mayor of the city says, “Don’t panic”, but the people do panic, many gathering their children and a few belongings and preparing to flee.

The mayor notified security authorities, who started combing the area looking for the aliens.

Emergency services call emergency meetings to plan an emergency evacuation.

Now we all know what happened next, don’t we? This is America, 1938, isn’t it? The voice on the radio was that of Orson Welles reading a Chapter from The War of the Worlds. Wasn’t it?

No, it wasn’t.

The year was 2010, the place was Jafr, a desert town in Jordan about 300km from the capital, Amman, and the date was April 1.

The story in the newspaper was a fairly elaborate April Fool’s Day joke which got out of hand. The people really were panicking; frightened parents kept their children home from school; the emergency services really were planning to evacuate the 13,000 residents of the town.

The main reason the story was so widely believed is that April Fool’s Day is not a big thing in Jordan. Whereas newspapers and other media in the west are forever coming up with new ways to fool us on April 1, Jordanian newspapers have no history of doing so.

And after the mess in Jafr, they are not likely to start.

bbc.co.uk






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Top job

January 5th 2010 22:44
burj khalifa
There are about 24,000 windows in the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building, and the contract to clean them has been won by an Australian company.

The company, named Cox Gomyl, designed and built a US$7.35 million window-washing system for the Dubai megatower. It will take about three months to clean the whole building. The cleaners will rely on three things to do the job: state-of-the-art, 16-tonne cages which travel along tracks fixed to the outside of the building; personal electrolyte packs and custom-made clothing which resembles a space suit; and, for the actual cleaning of the windows, a bucket, a sponge, soap and water.

Cox Gomyl spokesman Dale Harding described the 828-metre, 200-storey building as "wide".

"People focus on the height of the building ... but really the breadth and width of the building is just huge when you're standing next to it," he said, still counting windows.

The company will also wipe down the Hubble Telescope, the orbit of which passes close to the higher levels of the building, and provide a crew for the fly-through spaceship cleaning station on the roof.

abc.net.au, telegraph.co.uk; images: Bloomberg (top), AFP/Getty Images


burj khalifa


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A shoe on the Bush is worth plenty

December 23rd 2008 20:55
muntadhar al-zeidi shoes bush

I am getting tired of Muntadhar al-Zeidi being hailed as a hero of the Arab world for throwing his shoes at George Bush. This is a biased view. He should be hailed as a hero of the western world too.

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Bless my sole - only in Dubai

December 15th 2008 12:27
They are planning to build a refrigerated beach in Dubai. How cool is that?

The beach will be part of the new Palazzo Versace hotel. The temperature in Dubai in summer averages 40 degrees C and can reach 50 degrees. In a travesty which has millionaires everywhere outraged, walking on sand in such temperatures is as uncomfortable for the super-wealthy as it is for anybody else


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