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The Jeddah offices of a Lebanon-based TV station which broadcast an interview with a Saudi man boasting about his sexual conquests have been closed.

Saudi Arabian authorities said the offices had been shut by order of the country’s deputy prime minister.

The 32-year-old Saudi man’s interview shocked conservative Saudi society, prompting calls for him to be punished.

Mazen Abdul Jawad talked about his sexual conquests and how he picks up women in the kingdom.

A spokesman at the information ministry confirmed the decision to close the offices of the LBC TV station in the kingdom’s commercial capital.

“It was because of the interview with Mazen Abdul Jawad,” Abdul Rahman al-Hazzaa said, according to AFP news agency.

Discreet society

Saudi media say officials are considering whether to charge Mr Abdul Jawad over the interview, which appeared on a programme called Red Lines and challenged Saudi taboos.

The Saudi daily newspaper al-Watan said authorities had also closed other offices of the channel, which is mainly owned by Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal.

Pre-marital sex is illegal in Saudi Arabia and Mr Abdul Jawad could face imprisonment or flogging.

Saudi Arabia is not only the most conservative society in the Arab world, it is also the most discreet.

If people break its strict Islamic code they face punishment – lashes or imprisonment for drinking or non-marital sex.

These rules are flouted by locals as well as expatriates, correspondents say, but almost everyone who breaks the rules keeps quiet about it and hopes they will not be found out.

BBC for more

SHAUN DE WAAL – Jul 31 2009 06:00

Here comes another spoiler warning: if you want to be surprised by what happens in Heaven on Earth, you’ll have to postpone reading this review until after you’ve seen it. The gods forbid (or perhaps that’s heaven forbid) that I suggest you don’t read it at all.

I was certainly surprised by the new film from Indian-Canadian writer-director Deepa Mehta, who is well known for a series of very impactful movies, in particular her “elements trilogy”, composed of Fire, Earth and Water.

These films tackle issues that are seen as taboo in Indian society at large: Fire dealt with lesbian love and Water with the dire situation of widows subjected to ancient traditions.

Earth was probably the least controversial of Mehta’s trilogy in that it dealt merely with the partition of India and Pakistan — and the bloodshed that followed. It seems easier to acknowledge that historic trauma than it is to talk about lesbians or widows.

Perhaps while waiting for inspiration that would provide her with a film titled Air and thus make a quartet of the trilogy, Mehta has somewhat changed tack. Not that Heaven on Earth lacks punch, so to speak, dealing as it does with domestic violence. The English title, by the way, is either highly ironic or a complete misnomer, unless “heaven” simply refers to the supernatural realm. (There have also been a large number of films with that title since the first, in German, in 1927.) The title for release in India, Videsh, certainly sounds better.

I have no idea what it means, despite all the help on offer from the babelfishes of the internet. I can’t even determine if it’s a Hindi word or a Punjabi one, but I did learn a little about what language is spoken where in India, so that’s something. The closest I can come to an explanation is that on a site for Indian baby names it says Videsh means “Foreign”. Perhaps not a terribly good name for your baby boy, unless he really was a bolt from the blue or you were impregnated by an itinerant angel, but it’s okay, I suppose, for a movie.

Mehta’s story is partly inspired by a play called Naga Mandala by Girish Karnad (even I know “naga” or “naag” means “snake”), which in turn is based on an old folktale about a lonely wife comforted by a magical snake. The film starts with a prologue in which bride Chand (Preity Zinta) relates the tale as told by her mother, and that moment might well lead one to believe that this is a social-realist movie in the mode of Mehta’s other films, with some reference to Indian folklore as a sort of thickening textural agent. But it’s much more than that. Here, Mehta takes more chances than she might if the form were straightforward realism — or she takes the chances she must if she is to escape always being the social realist.

Chand is sent from a small town in the Punjab to Canada, where she is the female partner (if that’s not too neutral a word) in an arranged marriage. The celebratory occasion, with singing and dancing, before she leaves India soon gives way to misery in Canada. Her husband Rocky (Vansh Bhardwaj) is cold and abusive; her mother-in-law (Balinder Johal) is possessive of her son to a scary degree. The rest of the extended family, all squashed into a small house in a suburb of Ontario, are a varied bunch, each with a nuance to add to the package as a whole. The central drama, however, is the painful triangle of bride, groom and mother-in-law. Well, it becomes a rectangle of a kind — with the introduction of a cobra.

Mail & Guardian for more

By LiveScience Staff
posted: 03 August 2009 11:39 am ET

For people who are looking for ways to reduce their “carbon footprint,” here’s one radical idea that could have a big long-term impact, some scientists say: Have fewer kids.

A study by statisticians at Oregon State University concluded that in the United States, the carbon legacy and greenhouse gas impact of an extra child is almost 20 times more important than some of the other environment-friendly practices people might employ during their entire lives — things like driving a high mileage car, recycling, or using energy-efficient appliances and light bulbs.

“In discussions about climate change, we tend to focus on the carbon emissions of an individual over his or her lifetime,” said study team member Paul Murtaugh. “Those are important issues and it’s essential that they should be considered. But an added challenge facing us is continuing population growth and increasing global consumption of resources.”

Reproductive choices haven’t gained as much attention in the consideration of human impact to the Earth, Murtaugh said. When an individual produces a child – and that child potentially produces more descendants in the future — the effect on the environment can be many times the impact produced by a person during their lifetime.

A child’s impact

Under current conditions in the United States, for instance, each child ultimately adds about 9,441 metric tons of carbon dioxide to the carbon legacy of an average parent – about 5.7 times the lifetime emissions for which, on average, a person is responsible.

The impact doesn’t only come through increased emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases — larger populations also generate more waste and tax water supplies.

Other offbeat environmental impacts have been in the news recently:
• One 2007 study found that divorce squanders resources, because people who once shared resources such as energy now use twice as much under two roofs.
• The current obesity epidemic may also be hurting the climate, because food production is a major contributor to global warming.

Live Science for more

Aug 06, 2009 By John Pilger

These are extraordinary times. Flag-wrapped coffins of 18-year-old soldiers killed in a failed, illegal and vengeful invasion are paraded along a Wiltshire high street. Victory in Afghanistan is at hand, says the satirical Gordon Brown. On the BBC’s Newsnight, the heroic Afghan MP Malalai Joya, tries, in her limited English, to tell the British public that her people are being blown to bits in their name: 140 villagers, mostly children, in her own Farah Province. No parade for them. No names and faces for them. The suppression of the suffering of Britain’s and America’s colonial victims is an article of media faith, a tradition so ingrained that it requires no instructions.

The difference today is that a majority of the British people are not fooled. The cheerleading newsreaders can say “Britain’s resolve is being put to the test” as if the Luftwaffe is back on the horizon, but their own polls (BBC/ITN) show that popular disgust with the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq is strongest in the very communities where adolescents are recruited to fight them. The problem with the British public, says a retired army major on Channel 4 News, is that they need “to be trained and educated”. Indeed they do, wrote Bertolt Brecht in The Solution, explaining that the people . . .

Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

In their modern classic Manufacturing Consent: the Political Economy of the Mass Media, Edward S Herman and Noam Chomsky describe how war propaganda in free societies is “filtered” by media organisations, not as conscious “crude intervention, but by the selection of right-thinking personnel and by the editors’ and working journalists’ internalisation of [elite] priorities and definitions of newsworthiness”. In the wake of the US invasion of Vietnam, in which at least three million people were killed and their once-bountiful land ruined and poisoned, planners of future bloodfests invented the “Vietnam syndrome”, which they identified perversely as a “crisis of democracy”. The “crisis” was that the “general population threatened to participate in the political system, challenging established privilege and power”. Afghanistan and Iraq now have their syndromes.

With this in mind, I respectfully urge readers to put aside the holiday reading lists in the newspaper review pages, with their clubbable hauteur, and read, or read again, books as fine as Manufacturing Consent, which help make sense of extraordinary times.

As Herman and Chomsky decode principally the American media, an ideal companion is Newspeak in the 21st Century, by David Edwards and David Cromwell (published next month by Pluto). The founders and editors of the outstanding website www.medialens.org present a fluent dissection of Britain’s liberal media, employing the kind of rigour that shames those who proclaim their impartiality and independence from vested power. Read also A Century of Spin by David Miller and William Dinan, who describe the rise of an “invisible government” invented by Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays. “Propaganda,” said Bernays, “got to be a bad word because of the Germans, so what I did was to try and find some other words.” The other words were “public relations”, which now consumes much of journalism.

The latest achievement of PR is the “Obama phenomenon”. In Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (published in the US by Paradigm), Paul Street peels away the mask in perhaps the only book that tells the truth about the 44th president of the United States.

Not enough laughs? Pack Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, still unmatched in its demolition of the idiocies and lies of the killers who promote wars. Try this:

“Anyone,” says Dr “Doc” Daneeka, “who wants to get out of combat isn’t really crazy, so
I can’t ground him.”
Yossarian: “OK, let me get this straight.
In order to be grounded, I’ve got to be crazy. And I must be crazy to keep flying. But if I ask to be grounded, that means I’m not crazy anymore, and I have to keep flying.”
Dr “Doc” Daneeka: “You got it . . .”

Kurt Vonnegut’s equally black and brave and hilarious Slaughterhouse Five is my other favourite war book.

“How’s the patient? [the colonel] asked.
“Dead to the world.”
“But not actually dead.”
“No.”
“How nice – to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.”

Faber recently published Harold Pinter’s Various Voices: 60 Years of Prose, Poetry, Politics (1948-2008). It is a gem from Pinter on everything from Shakespeare, night cricket and Arthur Miller’s socks to murderous great power:

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless . . . while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

If you have not already read it, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers is a rare treat: a view of humanity so precisely, beautifully, honourably, yet almost incidentally expressed. In the “bantering inconsequence” (F Scott Fitzgerald) of effete modern fiction, no one touches McCullers or, for that matter, Pete Dexter, whose Paris Trout is the great unsung book of the American South, or Richard Ford, whose Rock Springs is a masterly collection, among his others, on the mysteries between men and women. And don’t forget Albert Camus’s The Outsider, about a man who will not pretend: a parable for today. Happy holidays.

John Pilger has been awarded Australia’s human rights prize, the Sydney Peace Prize www.johnpilger.com

John Pilger for more

Written by Jennifer Moore Friday, 31 July 2009

They had been at war twice in the last century, but today they’ve found a common enemy: the governments of Peru and Ecuador have singled out their own citizens who resist extractive industry expansion.

“Something terrible is taking place,” says Father Marco Arana, a member of the executive committee of the Latin American Observatory of Mining Conflicts speaking at the Third Continental Meeting in Quito, “such that the discourse of 21st Century Socialism coincides with the logic and discourse of the most ultra-conservative governments like that of Peru.”

Presidents Alan García and Rafael Correa have been polarizing the internal clash over development vision in their respective countries with that of indigenous peoples, mestizo farmers, environmentalists and human rights activists, raising concern about possible future confrontations.

A leading metal producer with ambitions to exploit agricultural, wood, mineral, and water resources in sensitive regions such as the Amazon, Peru’s most recent stand-off resulted in the deaths of at least twenty three police officers, five indigenous people and five residents from the town of Bagua when state forces cracked down on a 58-day protest by Amazonian peoples on June 5th, according to preliminary figures from the People’s Ombudsman (Defensoría del Pueblo).1

Independent investigators, however, were prevented access to the site by police for five days following the incident and local witnesses have testified that cadavers of indigenous people were dumped into the river indicating that the number killed was much higher.2 At least two hundred more were wounded, the majority civilian, and eighty four face legal investigations of which eighteen are currently imprisoned. Police are subject to an internal police probe and an investigation by the office of the public prosecutor.3 Indigenous and human rights organizations have asked for a truth commission to carry out further investigations instead of the national police. The same month, the People’s Ombudsman registered 128 social-environmental disputes across the country, almost doubled from the same time last year.4

Despite strong economic growth in recent years, García is paying a high political cost for favouring big capital investments and aggressive free trade policies over the well-being of his own people, resulting in recent cabinet changes and plummeting popularity ratings.5

Upside Down World for more

August 03, 2009 By David Sirota
Source: Creators.com

David Sirota’s ZSpace Page

For those still clinging to quaint notions of the American ideal, these have been a faith-shaking 10 years. Just as evolutionary science once got in the way of creationists’ catechism, so has politics now undermined patriots’ naive belief that the United States is a functioning democracy.

The 21st century opened with a handful of Supreme Court puppets appointing George W. Bush president after he lost the popular vote – and we all know the costs in blood and treasure that insult wrought. Now the decade closes with another cabal of stooges assaulting the “one person, one vote” principle – and potentially bringing about another disaster.

Here we have a major congressional push to fix a health care system that leaves one-sixth of the country without coverage. Here we have 535 House and Senate delegates elected to give all 300 million of us a voice in the solution. And here we have just 13 of those delegates holding the initiative hostage.

In the Senate, both parties have outsourced health care legislation to six Finance Committee lawmakers: Max Baucus, D-Mont.; Kent Conrad, D-N.D.; Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M.; Mike Enzi, R-Wyo.; Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine. The group recently announced it is rejecting essential provisions like a public insurance option that surveys show the public supports. Meanwhile, seven mostly Southern House Democrats have been threatening to use their Commerce Committee votes to gut any health care bill, regardless of what the American majority wants.

This, however, isn’t about the majority. These lawmakers, hailing mostly from small states and rural areas, together represent only 13 million people, meaning those speaking for just 4 percent of America are maneuvering to impose their health care will on the other 96 percent of us.

Census figures show that the poverty rates are far higher and per-capita incomes far lower in the 13 legislators’ specific districts than in the nation as a whole. Put another way, these politicians represent exactly the kinds of districts whose constituents would most benefit from universal health care. So why are they leading the fight to stop – rather than pass – reform?

Z Mag for more

From the McDonald’s McGriddle to Wendy’s “Baconator” to “baconnaise” to bacon-infused vodka, bacon has become a ubiquitous ingredient in many diets in this era of extreme food combinations. Arun Gupta of The Indypendent writes, “Behind the proliferation of bacon offerings is a confluence of government policy, factory farming, the boom in fast food and manipulation of consumer taste that has turned bacon into a weapon of mass destruction.” [includes rush transcript]

Democracy Now for more

By Sarah Birke
Last Updated: August 01. 2009 12:31AM UAE / July 31. 2009 8:31PM GMT

ALEPPO, SYRIA // In a room off the courtyard of a restored school, tucked away in the winding maze of streets in Aleppo’s old city, girls in hijab and long coats jostle around a table to watch as their teacher explains how to make a Greek salad.
In an adjacent room, more faces focus expectantly on a whiteboard as the teacher takes them through English and Arabic sentence structure.

This is Aleppo’s school for brides-to-be, which has been running in the conservative neighbourhood of Qalat ash-Sharief for just over a year. The young Muslim girls are taught skills that will be useful when they marry – an inevitable eventuality in an economically and educationally poor area of the city where women are expected to take a traditional family role.

The subjects are broad, including literacy, embroidery, cooking, psychological awareness, first aid, child-raising and family health care, including the importance of breast-feeding. “We want to prepare the girls to be good wives and mothers,” said Rasha Arous, the programme’s manager at Aga Khan Cultural Services, part of the Aga Khan Development Network, which runs the school.

“At any age, marriage requires compromise and the emotional maturity to work through problems,” she said. “The younger the girls, the less used they are at doing so, especially when they have often spent a lot of time alone in the house with their family. We teach them how to communicate, such as the right way to approach their husbands and talk to them.”

But the school does more than just teach the girls how to compromise. It has also started a label for their embroidery which is sold in the city. “The very fact that the girls are allowed out of the home is an achievement. Most of the girls leave school by the age of 10 and are confined to the home to wait for a groom,” said Ms Arous.

A study carried out by her team last year put the average age of marriage for women in the area at 17. However, an initial survey in 2006 found it to be 15 – two years under the legal age for women (it is 18 for men) – and well below the average age of 25 calculated by the Central Bureau of Statistics in 2008.

Locals say that when parents and religious leaders decide a couple are to marry, not much can be done to prevent it. In some cases, the marriage is not registered until the legal age is reached, in others documents are forged. According to Unicef Syria’s latest statistics, in 3.4 per cent of marriages the girl is 15 or under and in 17.7 per cent they are under 18. Of the country’s 14 governorates, Aleppo has the third highest rate of marriage for girls under 15.

So instead of trying to fight the practice, organisations are trying to make sure girls are better prepared.

“The girls face social, economic and educational issues,” said Razan Rashidi, a spokeswoman for Unicef in Syria. “For example, they are often not experienced in dealing with the emotions of marriage or sorting out problems.”

Last year’s intake of brides-to-be are now putting those lessons into practice. Qamar, 17, recently got engaged. She speaks shyly about the effect the classes have had on her. “I have learnt how to deal with my future husband and to bring up my children well,” she said. “I feel more confident about getting married.”

Aisha, 35, who accompanies her two daughters to the lessons, said she wished she could have attended such a school before her marriage.

“I have only just realised the importance of educating myself,” she said. “And I would have known how to stand up for myself and demand a bigger dowry!”

Before starting at the school, girls and their mothers were invited to meetings at the homes of local women and asked to draw pictures of themselves. They frequently depicted themselves as small and featureless in comparison to their husbands and brothers. Some drew themselves with speech bubbles proclaiming that they could not speak while one drew a ladder taking her away from her family.

Mothers were asked to writedown what issues they faced in their marriage and would have liked to known about beforehand. “The results varied enormously,” said Ms Arous. “Answers included not knowing how to deal with their husbands’ stubbornness, wanting more education, being worried that their husband no longer found them attractive because they were putting on weight as well as one who was frustrated at not being able to unveil at home because her brother-in-law lived there.”
The curriculum, based on these findings, is taught during three-hour classes spread throughout the week to reduce the number of times the girls need to leave the house.

When the school was founded the girls were eager, albeit nervous. But overcoming resistance in the community was a huge challenge. Ms Arous and her team spent six months getting to know the neighbourhood’s families, convincing community leaders of their plans and employing local teachers. They managed to get 30 girls enrolled in the school, 23 of whom attended regularly. This year a further 17 have joined.

Support for the bride school comes from surprising places. The neighbourhood’s sheikh, a jovial grandfather figure called Ahmed Abu Aaisa, describes the school as “a gift from God”. He said the community has not changed since 1970 when he became the area’s leader. But now, he said, he has noticed a shift in the attitudes of men.

“When it started many fathers and brothers came to me and told me ‘I won’t be letting my daughter or sister go to the bride school’. I told them to let them go. Knowledge is light. This programme is giving girls hope, friends and improving their marriages,” he said.

The girls agree. “It used to be tricky to attend lessons, but now if I am around the house for two consecutive days my parents ask me why I am not at the bride school,” one student, Lama, said.

The National for more

Written by Jamal Juma Saturday, 01 August 2009 19:04

Does South American politics move forward in constructing a new continental and global order based on democracy, human rights and mutual solidarity or will it fall prey to Israeli strategies that undermine the emancipation of Latin America and the Global South?

The Israeli minister of foreign affairs, Avigdor Lieberman, has wrapped up a 10-day tour through South America, the first of its kind for over two decades. His trip was aimed at launching a new direction for Israeli foreign policy, which is to turn more and more to the subcontinent.

The people of Brazil and Argentina have met him with loud street protest, denouncing him as an emblem of Israeli racism, fascism and colonialism. People have refused to play the quiet host to members of a regime that for over sixty years has kept Palestinian refugees from returning to their homes, oppressing the remaining population and developing ever more extreme forms of repression and apartheid.

The brutal massacre and siege in Gaza at the beginning of this year, and the ongoing construction of the Wall and settlements are but two of the issues which are adding to the gradual perception of Israel as a pariah state by ordinary people across the world.

However, the conflicting interests between South America and Israel go beyond solidarity with Palestine. Israel’s new South America policy forces the continent to make fundamental choices regarding its own aspirations and geopolitical alignments.

Brazzil for more

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia, (AP) — Does Islam frown on nose jobs? Chemical peels? How about breast implants?

One of the clerics with the answers is Sheik Mohammed al-Nujaimi, and Saudi women flock to him for guidance about going under the knife. The results may not see much light of day in a kingdom where women cover up from head to toe, yet cosmetic surgery is booming.

Religion covers every facet of life in Saudi Arabia, including plastic surgery. Al-Nujaimi draws his guidelines from the consensus that was reached three years ago when clergymen and plastic surgeons met in Riyadh to determine whether cosmetic procedures violate the Islamic tenet against tampering God’s creation.

The verdict was that it’s halal (sanctioned) to augment unusually small breasts, fix features that are causing a person grief, or reverse damage from an accident. But undergoing an unsafe procedure or changing the shape of a “perfect nose” just to resemble a singer or actress is haram (forbidden).

“I get calls from many, many women asking about cosmetic procedures,” said al-Nujaimi told The Associated Press in an interview. “The presentations we got from the doctors made me better equipped to give them guidance.”

In recent years, plastic surgery centers with gleaming facades have sprung up on streets in Riyadh, the capital. Their front-page newspaper ads promise laser treatments, hair implants and liposuction.

From rarities only 10 years ago, the centers now number 35 and are “saturating the Saudi market,” Ahmed al-Otaibi, a Saudi skin specialist, was quoted as saying in the Al-Hayat newspaper.

Al-Otaibi cited a study according to which liposuction, breast augmentations and nose jobs are the most popular among women, while men go for hair implants and nose jobs.

Saudi women see nothing unusual about undergoing plastic surgery and then covering it up in robes and veils.

Sarah, an unmarried, 28-year-old professional woman, pointed out in an interview that underneath their robes, women go in for designer clothes and trendy haircuts to be flaunted at women’s gatherings, shown to their husbands and exposed on trips abroad.

“We attend a lot of private occasions, and we also travel,” said Sarah, who declined to give her full name to protect her privacy.

She said she is contemplating having 22 surgeries, including a breast lift, padding her rear and reversing her down-turned lips into a smile.

She also wants the lips of Lebanese singer Haifa Wehbe, and less flare to her nostrils, though so far her plastic surgeon has refused to do the nose because he doesn’t think it needs altering.

Ayman al-Sheikh, a Saudi doctor who spent almost 14 years in the U.S., most of them at Harvard, said demand in Saudi Arabia is in line with increased global demand. But what he sees more of in the Arab world, including Saudi Arabia, is a customers for procedures that enhance the face to the point where it no longer looks natural.

The trend is being set by entertainers whose pouty lips, chiseled midriffs and enhanced breasts are seen on TV across the Arab world.

Not all customers seek religious sanction, and not all surgeons abide by the clerics’ guidelines, so a woman is apt to pick a surgeon depending on how liberal he is.

“People are overdone by design or by mistake,” al-Sheikh, 43, told the AP. “If something is done on a famous figure it becomes iconic in our world even if it doesn’t look esthetically appealing.”

He said when he returned to the kingdom four years ago, patients initially came with requests for one performer’s nose or another’s cheeks, but that stopped after word spread he was a conservative who believes “every face has its own features.”

The boom in surgery prompted Saudi columnist Abdoo Khal to write a piece titled, “We don’t want you to be Cinderella.” “Women’s rush to undergo plastic surgery is an obsession resulting from a woman’s insecurity,” he wrote, “and it consolidates the idea that women are for bed only.”

Aawsat for more
(Submitted by a reader)