Ordered to Learn English
This is from BBC News: Americas. If I were living in the USA, I might think that is a good thing. Living here in Kuwait, speaking some Arabic, pretty laughably, I shudder to think what could happen here. . .. guess I’ll have to stay out of the Kuwait courts, insh’allah.
Judge orders men to learn English
A judge in the US state of Pennsylvania has ordered three Spanish-speaking men to learn English or go to jail.
The trio, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit robbery, were told they could remain on parole if they studied English and got full-time jobs.
Judge Peter Olszewski said the unusual sentence was supposed to help the men. They will serve their full jail terms if they fail an English test in a year.
Lawyers for the three said they had not yet decided whether they would appeal.
You can read the rest of the news article HERE.
So I am curious. If you are Kuwaiti, what do you think about the fact that about 50% of your population (the not Kuwaiti part) doesn’t speak Arabic, the native tongue in Kuwait.
If you are an expat, if you had to learn Arabic, would you continue to work here?
Peacekeeping in Dharfur
From the New York Times
Peacekeeping in Darfur Hits More Obstacles
By LYDIA POLGREEN
Published: March 24, 2008
ABU SUROUJ, Sudan — As Darfur smolders in the aftermath of a new government offensive, a long-sought peacekeeping force, expected to be the world’s largest, is in danger of failing even as it begins its mission because of bureaucratic delays, stonewalling by Sudan’s government and reluctance from troop-contributing countries to send peacekeeping forces into an active conflict.
The force, a joint mission of the African Union and the United Nations, officially took over from an overstretched and exhausted African Union force in Darfur on Jan. 1. It now has just over 9,000 of an expected 26,000 soldiers and police officers and will not fully deploy until the end of the year, United Nations officials said.
Even the troops that are in place, the old African Union force and two new battalions, lack essential equipment, like sufficient armored personnel carriers and helicopters, to carry out even the most rudimentary of peacekeeping tasks. Some even had to buy their own paint to turn their green helmets United Nations blue, peacekeepers here said.
The peacekeepers’ work is more essential than ever. At least 30,000 people were displaced last month as the government and its allied militias fought to retake territory held by rebel groups fighting in the region, according to United Nations human rights officials.
For weeks after the attacks, many of the displaced were hiding in the bush nearby or living in the open along the volatile border between Sudan and Chad, inaccessible to aid workers. Most wanted to return to their scorched villages and rebuild but did not feel safe from roaming bandits and militias.
A week spent this month with the peacekeeping troops based here at the headquarters of Sector West, a wind-blown outpost at the heart of the recent violence, revealed a force struggling mightily to do better than its much-maligned predecessor, but with little new manpower or equipment.
Despite this, the force is managing to project a greater sense of security for the tens of thousands of vulnerable civilians in the vast territory it covers, mounting night patrols in displaced people’s camps and sending long-range patrols to the areas hardest hit by fighting. But these small gains are fragile, and if more troops do not arrive soon, the force will be written off as being as ineffective and compromised as the one before.
You can read the rest of the article HERE
Qatteri Cat Good for My Health
BBC Health News this morning tells me the Qatteri Cat is good for my health!
He doesn’t look at all surprised by the news, does he?
Or, the article states further down, it may be that people who choose to adopt cats may have other behaviors which help lower health risks 😉
‘Healthier hearts’ for cat owners
Cat owners appear to have a much lower risk of dying from a heart attack than their feline-spurning counterparts, a study suggests.
Researchers looked at nearly 4,500 adults and found that cat ownership was related to a 40% lower risk of suffering a fatal heart attack.
The team speculated that having a cat may reduce stress and anxiety, and so protect against cardiovascular disease.
The findings of the study were unveiled at the International Stroke Conference.
The study, led by Professor Adnan Qureshi at the University of Minnesota, suggested that even those who no longer owned a cat benefited from these protective effects
You can read the rest of this study HERE
Pirates!
BBC has been running a radio series on pirates, how we came to see pirates mostly deriving from Treasure Island, and romantic literature. Here is a recent article, however, on modern day piracy, which is alive and well, particular off the Horn of Africa / Somalia. Scary stuff. Did you know that 90% of the world’s cargo is moved by sea? And I recently heard that for Kuwait, the percentage of goods delivered by sea was 99%. This article begins a three part series on modern day piracy:
No vessel is safe from modern pirates
By Nick Rankin
BBC World Service
Pirates are not just mythological characters with peg legs, parrots and pistols. They now carry AK-47s and use speedboats to rule the high seas of the world.
Robbery of the high seas is not confined to 18th-Century history and literature or Hollywood films – it is still very much alive today.
Ninety percent of the world’s trade is still moved by sea, so it is not surprising that piracy against cargo vessels remains a significant issue.
It is estimated that seaborne piracy amounts to worldwide losses of between $13bn and $16bn a year.
Piracy peaked in 2003 with 445 attacks around the world and since then, they have more or less steadily come down.
In 2006, there were 239 attacks. Last year, the number increased slightly to 249.
Although attacks have decreased from the early 1990s, Rupert Herbert-Burns, a maritime security expert at Lloyd’s Intelligence Unit, says piracy is still a worrying problem.
“Attacks rose by 14% towards the end of last year, largely due to attacks off the Horn of Africa, specifically in Somali waters or in the territorial waters off Somalia,” he said.
You can read the rest of the article HERE.
Corruption at the Morgue
Where is the Kuwaiti detective novel? I follow Guido Brunetti in Donna Leon’s series on Venice, Dave Robicheaux, the James Lee Burke detective in a small town just outside New Orleans, and now, Investigator Chen, who is a chief investigator in China, but where, oh where is the Kuwait detective / mystery? It is just waiting to be written.
In yesterday’s Kuwait Times is an article I would love to link you to, but it isn’t there, not even when I search “female coroner” from the headline on page 3. Did you know Kuwait had a female coroner, a la Kathy Reich’s Temperance Brennan and Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpatta? As you read the article, it makes sense, as the bodies are kept semi-segregated in the morgue, and women work on women (some of the time) and men on men.
I’m impressed. Any time a woman takes on a traditionally men’s job, it takes a whole lot of courage. I imagine the requirements to be a coroner here are similar to other countries – you have to have a medical degree (be a doctor) and then have advanced training in forensics. So when Nawal Boshehri speaks out, I listen. She’s got my attention.
Nawal Boshehri says conditions in the morgue are awful. From a personal point of view, she has been sexually molested by her superior and frozen in her position over false accusations that she has not been going to work or signing in or out. She has asked the minister of interior to look into her complaints.
As an institution, she reports serious issues – labs that lack necessary equipment, to do tests, such as those that measure drugs and alcohol in the bloodstream, outdated machinery, rusty machinery, lack of ventilation (in a morgue! horrors!) and she states they are constantly in fear of getting infections.
She claims that reports have sometimes been manipulated and twisted to give prosecutors the wrong technical information that would sometimes end up setting a guilty person free, and that one time they certified a murder had been insane without him ever having been examined by any mental health professionals. She was once asked to provide a report that made one citizen swap places with the assaulted expatriate, so that the assaulted expatriate would appear to be the guilty party.
She adds that she fears for her life. She says “a senior coroner at the department falsified reports, namely those related to detainees, who underwent police brutality during interrogations. He usually did this as favors to his colleagues to help them get promoted instead of being punished for their brutality.” She added that because she has reported these things, she fears for her own life.
Every nation has corruption. Corruption is chaotic, and when you get serious about rule of law, you still have corruption, but you do your best to root it out. You report it when it happens. I think that Nawal Boshehri has enough confidence in Kuwait’s institutions to go public with her allegations. While it may appear dirty laundry, that she CAN go public is a very positive sign. I can imagine she fears for her life, and yet, she seems to be fighting to retain her job. That’s very brave.
That the Kuwait Times will publish the article on page three, in three columns, that is also very brave, and speaks well of the increasing confidence in a free press.
Wouldn’t this make a great detective novel?
Cell Phone or Drunk?
From AOL News:
Using Cell Phone While Driving Akin to Driving Drunk, Say Researchers
Posted Mar 7th 2008 11:24AM by Evan Shamoon
According to a new study, talking on your cell phone while driving could be as dangerous as being under the influence of alcohol. Carnegie-Mellon University researchers used brain imaging to show how mobile phone use alone reduces 37 percent of brain activity engaged in driving. The findings were published in the latest gotta-have-it issue of the journal ‘Brain Research,’ and also suggest that using a hands-free headset doesn’t make much of a difference.
Basically, the study found that drivers who spoke on their phones while driving tended to make many of the same driving mistakes as those who just got finished speaking to the bottle.
So to speak.
Comment: I always thought using a headset solved the problem – guess I was wrong. 😦 The Kuwait Ministry of Traffic is currently considering a law against using cell phones while driving in Kuwait. If enforced, it’s going to make a big difference in the lives of a lot of people in Kuwait. I wonder if it will mean fewer pedestrians killed?
Muslim Bioethics
I love Wired because it gives me science news in a language I can understand:
A Beginner’s Guide to Muslim Bioethics
By Brandon Keim March 04, 2008 | 1:26:15 PMCategories: Bioethics, Biotechnology, Religion
When Sunni and Shiite scholars disagreed over the ethics of cloning animals, I wondered whether there were other bioethical conflicts in the Muslim world.
Are Muslims split over stem cell research and genetically engineered crops? Generally speaking, do they approach biotechnologies in the same way — or variety of ways — as Western cultures?
I posed the question to a handful of Muslim bioethicists. The first to respond was Brown University anthropologist Sherine Hamdy. Wrote Hamdy,
I think it would be easy and reductionist to make this into yet another ‘Shiite vs. Sunni’ issue, but there has always been a wide space of interpretation and widely debate even within the Sunni Muslim world about various biotechnologies including cloning. Most religious sources say that if a given technology, e.g. cloning is for beneficial purposes and the good outweighs the negative (if there is potential for human cures, etc.) then it is permissible, others have cautioned about the potential danger of creating a ‘super race’ of people, animals….so most of the disagreement is actually about the understanding of the technology itself and what impact it might have.
Would it be a bit too easy and reductionist, I asked, to then say that Muslims are less inclined to take an absolutist position and instead base their judgments by weighing the risks and benefits of each case?
You can read the entire article, and related articles, HERE
Google Banned From Military Bases
News from BBC
Google Banned From Military Bases
Last Updated: Friday, 7 March 2008, 05:45 GMT
There are concerns that detailed maps may threaten security
The US defence department has banned the giant internet search engine Google from filming inside and making detailed studies of US military bases.
Close-up, ground-level imagery of US military sites posed a “potential threat” to security, it said.
The move follows the discovery of images of the Fort Sam Houston army base in Texas on Google Maps.
A Google spokesman said that where the US military had expressed concerns, images had been removed.
Google has now been barred from filming and conducting detailed studies of bases, following the discovery of detailed, three-dimensional panoramas online – and in particular, views of the Texan base.
It said such detailed mapping could pose a threat.
Google spokesman Larry Yu said the decision by a Google team to enter the Texas base and undertake a detailed survey, had been “a mistake”.
He told the BBC News website that detailed study of such sensitive sites was not Google policy.
You can read the rest of the story HERE
EcoTerrorists in Seattle?
Hunt is on: Who torched the Street of Dreams?
By Steve Miletich
Seattle Times staff reporter
ELLEN M. BANNER / The Seattle Times
An aerial view of efforts Monday to put out fires in four Street of Dreams homes in Snohomish County. The homes were part of what’s called a “rural cluster development” and were built to higher environmental standards. The home on the left was a Craftsman known as Copper Falls, and the one on the right was the Greenleaf Retreat.
Working with few clues, federal investigators face a daunting task as they try to determine whether a shadowy group of radical environmentalists torched three multimillion-dollar homes along a Street of Dreams in Snohomish County on Monday.
Although a spray-painted banner left at the scene contained the initials of the Earth Liberation Front, it took nearly a decade of groundwork in a previous case before investigators cracked a Pacific Northwest cell of the ELF responsible for more than a dozen arsons beginning in 1996.
The homes gutted in Monday’s inferno had drawn tens of thousands of people last summer who paid to gawk at their architecture, interiors and sheer size.
The fires left law-enforcement officials questioning whether they were timed to coincide with jury deliberations in the federal trial of an alleged ELF member accused of helping set the 2001 fire that gutted the UW Center for Urban Horticulture.
“I guess you could say we’re not surprised,” said Mark Bartlett, a senior federal prosecutor involved in the UW-related trial.
The pre-dawn fires in the Maltby area of Snohomish County destroyed the three homes and damaged a fourth, and investigators were looking into the possibility that an attempt was made to torch a fifth house. None of the homes was occupied, and no one was injured in the three-alarm fire that shot flames 100 feet into the air.
The FBI is investigating the fires as a possible “domestic terrorism act,” said FBI spokesman Fred Gutt in Seattle. The Snohomish County sheriff’s Office and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, Tobacco and Explosives also are participating as part of the Joint Terrorism Task Force.
You can read the entire article HERE
Start With Breakfast, Stay Lean
Today in BBC Health News
Breakfast ‘keeps teenagers lean’
In a five year study of more than 2,000 youngsters, those who skipped breakfast were found to weigh about 5lbs (2.3kg) more than those who ate first thing.
This was despite the fact that the breakfast-eaters consumed more calories in the course of the day.
But the study in Pediatrics found they were likely to be much more active.
The University of Minnesota research adds weight to a growing body of evidence that those who eat breakfast – whether young or old – are leaner than those who do not.
“It may seem counter-intuitive,” said Mark Pereira, who led the research. “But while they ate more calories, they did more to burn those off, and that may be because those who ate breakfast did not feel so lethargic.
“While it’s best to go for a healthy option – a wholegrain cereal for instance – the evidence does seem to suggest that eating anything is better than eating nothing at all.”
Read the entire article HERE
(AdventureMan’s favorite breakfast: biscuits n’ gravy)
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