Published in The Independent, Monday 14th July 2008
A Saudi Arabian biochemist and his female research student face prison and flogging if an appeals court rules today that they conducted an “illicit affair” by telephone. Khalid al-Zahrani, 32, was sentenced to eight months in jail and 600 lashes by a lower court in November 2007. His unnamed student was given four months and 350 lashes.
Human rights groups claim the offence with which the pair were charged does not exist under Saudi law. They say they will treat the two as prisoners of conscience if their convictions are upheld. (more…)
Jeff Black reports that a man was arrested this week after he tore the head off a wax figure of Adolf Hitler at Madame Tussauds in Berlin – prompting some debate about the seriousness of German history..
Broadcast Saturday 12th July 2008 on RTE World Report
Legend has it that the original Madame Tussaud, who inspired the modern day London waxworks museum, could often be found hanging around the gallows in 18th century Paris looking for decapitated heads. She would use them to make death masks that would later be turned into wax models of revolutionary heroes. This week, it was the wax heads’ turn to do the rolling, although the subject was of a different class entirely. In Berlin on Saturday, a wax model of former German dictator Adolf Hitler had its head ripped off moments after a new Tussauds exhibition in the city had opened. The assailant, a forty-one year-old former policeman, known only as Frank L., said later that he’d done it as a dare, and that he regretted it. (more…)
Filed under: all, economy, society | Tags: Food Crisis, Globalisation, Poverty
The food-price crisis of 2008 has ended decades of cheap, subsidised food. Since January, the global price of wheat has shot up by 77%. Rice by double that. Riots and political instability have ensued, and policy makers are at odds about what to do in response. But while the causes of the food crisis are complex, and obscure, there is one clear loser – the urban poor. As Jeff Black reports now from Manila, Philippines, the food crisis is becoming a severe setback in the fight against poverty..
(Broadcast Saturday 21st June 2008, on RTE Radio One’s World Report)
At the food summit in Rome earlier this month, the usual suspects were being blamed for the current startling rises in the price of the things we eat: American subsidies for biofuel or the meat-guzzling new middle classes of India and China. 40 world leaders argued, haggled, and presumably, ate, for 3 days. They ultimately agreed on very little.
In the meantime, the government of the Philippines, like many other developing countries that import large quantities of food to feed their numerous poor, were trying not to buckle under the pressure. The Philippines is a country of 90 million with a third under the poverty line. Rice, which is present on practically every meal table rich or poor, is the major issue. It has risen in price by more than 140 percent since the beginning of the year. (more…)
Filed under: all, economy, society | Tags: Bahrain, finance, Islamic Finance, Saudi Arabia, Shari'a law, Sukuk
Some Islamic debt instruments have been falling foul of Muslim scholars–widening a new debate in finance known as Shari’a risk. Coming up in the next issue of The Middle East…
Consider the following scenario: The international market for a class of new Islamic financial instruments, sukuk, is booming, having reached US$100bn from scratch in just five years. Sukuk, akin to a conventional bond, are the star performer of the trillion-dollar global Islamic financial services industry. In the Muslim world they meet an increasing requirement by companies and governments for Shari’a-compliant borrowing in a credit-tightening world. Elsewhere, sukuk are becoming a regular part of the conventional financier’s arsenal, as bankers use anything they can lay their hands on to get the best spreads possible. Ergo, everybody wins. Until, that is, a leading scholar of Islamic law throws an industrial-sized spanner into the works by saying that most of the sukuk on the world market aren’t properly Islamic. This is Shari’a Risk.
