The Washington Post has an amusing piece on the evolution of Starbucks’ siren—What? You thought it was a mermaid?!
The article discusses how the logo has changed over time, becoming less sexualized than the original. It incorrectly states that Starbucks in Saudi Arabia doesn’t use the siren symbol. That was the case for a number of years: the siren was replaced by a seahorse. But in the course of my last few visits, I’ve noted that the siren is back, in a modest form and perhaps unrecognizable as the siren she started out being.
The links in the article are likely to go beyond what many Saudis would consider acceptable, so don’t go clicking them if you happen to be sitting in a Saudi Starbucks!
We are on the phone with Starbucks public relations and trying hard to sound like a hard-nosed investigative reporter. We want to ask about their newly brown logo and the mermaid –
“She is a siren,” spokeswoman Bridget Baker corrects.
“A siren has a split tail and a mermaid has a single tail.”
She pauses.
“This is my job.”Well, we had to ask. And that’s because the logo unveiled this month to celebrate the new Starbucks’ Pike Place Roast reveals the saucy siren in all her glory — flowing hair, the outline of her ample chest, exposed midriff and a tail in each hand.
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This report from Italian news agency AKI is actually positive, in an interesting way. There is a serious argument going on about whether video games have a negative affect on children (or adults, for that matter). The science is mixed, but governments (particularly local governments) and various religious and child-oriented groups are sure that they are harmful. Distinctions between video games in general and a subset of them which are particularly violent or sexualized are not always made. Those who seek to ban games have not fared well in the US courts, running afoul of laws governing free speech and expression.
What’s positive in this piece is that instead of banning the games—as was the case with Pokemon games and cards—this time around, religious authorities are calling for parents to play the role of, well, parents. Parents should be aware of what their kids are doing, that should be a given. And parents certainly have the right and duty to protect their children from things they think might harm them. My son can testify to the fact that certain video games—as well as certain music, certain books, certain websites—were off limits to him at various points in his growing up.
I think the case is not yet resolved whether these games are clearly damaging, whether they might be damaging but also promoting useful skills and thinking, or whether they’re pure entertainment with no consequence. Until it is resolved, then parents should be parenting.
Saudi Arabia: Religious leaders attack video games
Riyadh, 25 April (AKI) – Saudi religious leaders have attacked a popular video game, used mainly by children.
According to the Arab TV network al-Arabiya, Saudi Arabia’s minister of Islamic affairs has sent a newsletter to all imams in the country, warning about the ‘dangers’ that could result from using the popular Playstation video game.
“They are dangerous games, because they teach the wrong thing to children,” read the newsletter.
“They have a negative influence on the personality of children, and thus from an Islamic point of view, it is not acceptable to waste time in this manner.”
Imams will have to ask parents to be more attentive with regard to their children’s education and urged them to supervise them, so they do not become “victims” of these games.
“These games cause mental problems in children,” said Badel Muhsin ibn Uthman Bin Baz, a professor from the Imam Saud university, according to Saudi daily al-Riyadh.
This article from Arab News focuses on how police mishandled a case that led to the execution of a young Saudi for a crime he committed at age 13. What’s not here, though, is where else the system failed. Police do not hold the power to conduct executions. Elsewhere along the trail of this case, there were other failures of the Saudi judicial system, perhaps at every step along the way.
Al-Hakami Case Hearing Put Off
Samir Al-Saadi, Arab NewsJEDDAH, 26 April 2008 — The lawyer representing the father of Mueed, a boy who was executed at the age of 16 in Jizan last year after being found guilty of a brutal crime he committed when he was 13, says the report filed by the local Department of Public Security amounts to an admission of guilt that they did not follow proper procedures in the handling of case.
The execution of a minor also violates a UN charter on the protection of children that Saudi Arabia voluntarily signed 12 years ago.
The Court of Grievances has postponed the next hearing in the case by six weeks from April 6. Hussein Al-Hakami has filed a complaint with the court alleging that Jizan police mishandled the case of his son, who was a minor when he allegedly abducted, raped and killed a child, who was reportedly three years old.
Abdullah Al-Zmami, an attorney from Al-Zmami Law Firm who is representing Al-Hakami, said that police admitted to handling the case completely without involving the Prosecution and Investigation Board (the country’s equivalent of a district attorney) or ordering a forensic investigation to find physical evidence for the crime.
“The fact is police arrested, investigated, interrogated and detained the minor,” said Al-Zmami. “Forced a confession out of him and deprived him of his legal rights.”
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The Arab News‘s weekly supplement, ‘Review’, has started a series of article by Siraj Wahab reporting on a two-week visit to the US he made at the paper’s request. The first installment runs from his quest for a visa at the US Embassy in Riyadh to his stay in Washington. Wahab (whom I had the pleasure of meeting in the KSA when I attended the KAUST groundbreaking, but alas too briefly) is inquisitive and wide-ranging. From the election to Hamas to the future of newspapers, he’s out asking questions and analyzing the answers. This is a very interesting column. I look forward to next week’s report on his stay in California.
Journey Into America
Siraj Wahab, Arab NewsThese are certainly not the best of times between the Muslim world and the United States. The world’s only superpower is seen by an overwhelming majority of Muslims as a brute and arrogant force on earth. Here, in the Muslim world, the US is seen as the source of all corruption; it is blamed for all the ills in the world. Muslims tend to identify George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld with some of the world’s worst dictators.
Just switch on your television and take a look at any footage of any demonstration in the Muslim world. There you will come across people holding placards bearing caricatures of Bush, Cheney and Rice drawn in the least favorable way. Take a look at political cartoons in newspapers in the Middle East, and you’ll get a sense of the depth of Muslim anger. Discuss America in any Muslim household these days, and you will invariably hear the choicest invectives hurled at Uncle Sam. Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib are immediately mentioned to make the root of such anger even clearer. The death and destruction in Afghanistan and Iraq and its blind support to Israel are pointed out as proof of America’s colonial ambitions and lust for oil.
To cut a long story short, a large majority of Muslims see America as their Public Enemy No. 1. It was perhaps or rather for this reason that a colleague of mine remarked casually, “So you are going to America? Is the FBI funding the trip?” According to this person, no Muslim with “Abdul Wahab” as his family name would take the risk of undertaking a journey into America at this point in history unless it was funded by the FBI! That remark haunted me for much of the two weeks that I spent in the United States last month.
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Economist offers a terrific discussion of the economic development of the Arab Gulf States and the problems they are (and will) face. While the article is on the entire GCC, the situation of Saudi Arabia and the hopes being put into the new Economic Cities, is a prime focus. The different strategies and challenges of each of the states is well-covered. Strongly recommended.
How to spend it
A region awash with oil money has one or two clouds on the horizonTHE Gulf is full of loud architectural statements—towers that reach over 600 metres into the sky, hotels that will be suspended under the sea. It is easy, then, to miss the quiet resonance of Imperial College London’s gleaming diabetes centre in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The building is decorated with tessellated plates of aluminium, a pattern inspired by the geometry of an insulin crystal and the musharabiya latticework of the region’s past.
Opened in 2006, the hospital now cares for 6,000 patients, who pass through its chain of tests and treatments in a single visit. Almost a fifth of the UAE’s native population suffers from diabetes, a rate second only to Nauru’s. Next come three fellow members of the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC)—Saudi Arabia (16.7%), Bahrain (15.2%) and Kuwait (14.4%).
The ailment is one unhappy consequence of the region’s economic transformation. Before 1961, Abu Dhabi lacked even a paved road. Since then, it has enjoyed a startling transition from pearling to petroleum, from souk to mall and from sand to glass. This prosperity has bought a sedentary lifestyle and a sugary diet, which may have triggered a genetic predisposition to diabetes among Arabs. In the neighbouring emirate of Dubai shoppers are invited to enrol in “Mall Walkers”, a power-walking club that promises to give more than your credit card a workout.
Diabetes is a useful metaphor for the Gulf’s present problems. The region’s economies are struggling to absorb petrodollars, accumulating like glucose in the bloodstream. The risk they face is the economic equivalent of renal failure: inflation, a hollowing-out of the non-oil sector, and a young, growing workforce in chronic need of outside labour to supplement it.
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Be sure to take a look, too, at the cover story: The rise of the Gulf
Economist takes a look at the Human Rights Watch (HRW) report on Saudi women and finds that it captures the reality. The article notes some of the paradoxes and contradictions created by the narrow views of religion and culture being imposed by some, but also finds some optimism. Simply allowing HRW into the Kingdom is a marked change from what would have happened only a few years ago. Definitely worth reading.
You might also want to take a look at the comments, linked at the bottom of the Economist article!
Our women must be protected
A report that publicises the plight of Saudi womenTHE first and second time her husband shot her, the distressed woman in her 30s rejected advice to file a complaint. To do so, she explained, would require the presence of her obligatory male guardian, who happened to be…her husband. Without him, her testimony would not be legally valid. Besides, the all-male police might accuse her of “mixing” with the opposite sex, a crime in the eyes of most Saudi judges. The third time her husband shot her, she died.
This tale, told by a Saudi social worker in a new report on women’s rights in the kingdom, is particularly harrowing. Yet it dramatises the more mundane plight of millions of Saudi women who are unable by law to study, work, travel, marry, testify in court, legalise a contract or undergo medical treatment without the assent of a close male relative, be he a father, husband or, less commonly, a grandfather, brother or son.
That Saudi women are banned from driving is well-known. But it is the imposition of male guardianship over adult women, affirms the detailed report by Human Rights Watch, a New York-based monitoring group, that is the biggest obstacle to female advancement. As the report points out, half the kingdom’s citizens are treated in effect like children or the mentally ill for the duration of their lives. Worse, the guardianship policy creates a paradox: women may be held legally responsible for a crime, even though they are not deemed to have full legal capacity.
Oddly enough, there appear to be no written statutes mandating male guardianship for women. In the religiously conservative kingdom, where Muslim sharia law is held to override all other rules, the practice stems instead from extremist Wahhabi interpretations of Muslim scripture, particularly from a Koranic passage that describes men as the “protectors and keepers of women”. Sadly for Saudi women, the all-male Saudi judiciary is made up entirely of Wahhabi extremists.
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Regretfully, my web hosting service has been hit by a combination of denial-of-service attacks and server hardware problems. Thus, it was impossible to access Crossroads Arabia for a good portion of today—for me, too! Then there was access, but with error messages popping up on the page.
Most of the functionality is now returned, but there are still a few internal adjustments being made. I do appreciate your patience and apologize for the inconvenience.
Did you know it was an election year in the US? If so, then you’ll understand the motivation behind the latest rant from Democratic Senators in the US Congress. If not, then you’ll surely be baffled at it as it makes no rational sense whatsoever.
The basic fact these Senators seem not to understand is that oil production is not a matter of simply saying, ‘Let’s produce more oil!’ and turn some magic key somewhere. It’s a multi-year project that includes significant economic risk by the producers, not consumers. I don’t see the US Congress offering money to anyone to expand oil production—in fact, there’s a sentiment that Congress needs to take away oil company profits through windfall-profits taxes.
A further factor is that oil producers are uncertain about the future of demand. When Congress—and others—talk about ‘energy independence’ (i.e., not buying foreign oil) and alternative energy, it causes producers to think twice about making the investments that would lead to increased production.
But, for the sake of politics, a sound-bite is as good as a rational policy, it seems.
U.S. arms sales to OPEC at risk over oil: senators
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A group of U.S. senators on Thursday will call on the Bush administration to use its leverage with OPEC to increase oil supplies or risk Congress holding up multimillion dollar arms deals with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other members of the oil producing group.
“As Americans are paying more than ever to fill up their cars at the gas station, it is clear that oil production by OPEC members is below the capacity at which they could be producing,” the lawmakers said in a joint advisory announcing a press conference in which they will release a letter to President George W. Bush asking him to pressure OPEC for more oil.
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Arab News reports that relatives of the people killed in an auto accident last month—allegedly as the result of an illegal chase by members of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice—are seeking the death penalty. The paper seems a little untoward in its assessing the guilt of the Commission members as that is the matter before the courts. The Commission, understandably, denies any responsibility.
Victims’ Relatives Demand Death for Vice Cops Accused in Madinah Chase
MADINAH, 24 April 2008 — Relatives of four people who died in an accident last month after two members of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice chased their car said they would demand execution of the culprits who caused the accident, according to Al-Madinah daily.
Authorities are questioning the two commission members and a policeman, who was also involved in the pursuit that led to the death of two men, a woman and the woman’s daughter. “I have already lodged a case at the General Court in Madinah demanding punishment of the culprits,” said Muhammad Khoj, whose son Omar was one of the four victims.
The husband of the woman who died in the incident said he would also demand the execution of the culprits. He said his 17-year-old daughter had a mental collapse after learning of the deaths of her mother and sister.
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The Wall St. Journal has an excellent article on the future of Saudi oil production. Unfortunately, the text is behind a pay-wall, for subscribers only. (Hasn’t the WSJ‘s new owner said he was going to change that?)
The article notes that the Kingdom is now beginning to exploit its second major oil field, the Khurais complex, a major field smaller only than the Ghawar. This field is far more difficult to access, largely because it is not a high-pressure field like Ghawar which, once tapped, simply shoots its contents upwards, resulting in some of the lowest pumping costs in the world. Instead, exploitation will require the pumping of filtered sea water—at a volume of two barrels of water in for each barrel of oil out—to help push the oil to the surface. The project involves many multi-national companies taking on parts of the work, and yes, Halliburton is one of them.
The article points out that after Khurais, there’s only one major field left to be developed, the off-shore Manifa field. It’s clear that there there is not an infinite supply of petroleum in the world. New discoveries, as that apparently made off Brazil, may delay the day the oil runs out, but it’s only a delay. Critical decisions need to be taken about how the world wants to use that oil. It’s not just power plants and cars that consume oil. It’s also all the other things created from petroleum: fertilizers, plastics, medicines, paints, etc. For long-term investors, oil is as safe as it comes; there will be a demand for oil until there’s no more oil to demand. But how it’s used in the meantime is a political question that can no longer be avoided.
I hope that you can find the full text of this piece somewhere, if only in your library. It’s worth reading.
Saudis Face Hurdle In New Oil Drilling
Big, Complex Field Seems to Mark End Of Easy Pickings
Neil King Jr.Next year, if all goes well, Saudi Arabia will turn the spigots on the largest oil field to come online anywhere in the world since the late 1970s.
The Khurais complex, sprawling across a swath of red dunes and rocky plains half the size of Connecticut, is expected to add 1.2 million barrels a day to an oil market caught between growing demand and a paucity of significant new discoveries. The twin forces have led to historically high prices for crude oil, which settled at a record $117.48 on Monday.
But the project also illustrates a darker point: Even in Saudi Arabia, home to more than a quarter of the world’s known recoverable reserves, the age of cheap and easily pumped oil is over.
To tap Khurais, Saudi Arabian Oil Co., known as Aramco, has embarked on the most complex earth- and water-moving project in its history. It is spending up to $15 billion on a vast network of pipes, oil-treatment facilities, deep horizontal wells and water-injection systems that it calls “one of the largest industrial projects being executed in the world today.”
Moreover, with the project, Aramco is dipping into one of its last big basins of oil. After Khurais, Saudi Arabia will have only one known mega-field left to fully develop, the even more challenging Manifa field, offshore in the Persian Gulf. Much of the kingdom’s reserves beyond these lie either in aging fields or smaller pockets.
“Khurais and Manifa are the last two giants in Saudi Arabia,” says Sadad al-Husseini, a former Aramco vice president for oil exploration. “Sure, we will discover dozens of other smaller fields, but after these, we are chasing after smaller and smaller fish.”
The Khurais project is at the heart of an all-out effort by Saudi Arabia to keep abreast of natural declines in older fields while trying to preserve its status as the oil world’s lone safety valve. To do that, Aramco is scrambling to boost its overall production capacity, currently just over 11 million barrels a day, to 12.5 million.
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On the heels of the Human Rights Watch report on gender segregation in Saudi Arabia (Male Guardianship Policies Harm Women), Samar Fatany writes in Arab News about the damage that existing social policies cause not just women, but also the young men being raised in Saudi Arabia.
She argues that Saudis cannot wait until government acts, but instead must start acting themselves, now. Every day that change is delayed Saudi youth is harmed. Instead, they must start demanding change and change their own behavior. An impassioned piece.
Govt Can’t Fix Society Alone
Samar Fatany, samarfatany@hotmail.comMinister of Islamic Affairs, Endowments, Call and Guidance Saleh Al-Asheikh recently gave a lecture on moderation and its impact on the lives of Muslims. He highlighted the importance of spreading knowledge, clarifying facts and understanding the purposes of Islamic Shariah.
Al-Asheikh said we need to behave in a moderate manner and keep away from extremism. He explained that moderation requires correction of some of our ways of thinking and stressed the need to adapt to the great changes in the life of our nation. He also said we should understand our reality and the environment surrounding us and consider the effects of our actions. It is wise counsel from a wise man.
I hope the extremists among us and those who adhere to a rigid interpretation of Islam adopt the advice of the minister and refrain from dictating hard-line policies that are contrary to the merciful rulings of moderate Islam.
I would like to stress to our religious scholars that one of the major obstacles to progress and development is the strict segregation law imposed on society, which makes life difficult for every man, woman and child. It is time we changed this policy. If we continue on this path inevitably we will lag behind the rest of the world, and our society will continue to suffer from the social and economic ills that threaten the future of our younger generation.
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Arab News carries this story about how some residential compound owners are finding it a good deal to evict their Western residents. The evictions, the article states, are illegal and are apparently based on an official document that everyone has heard of, but no one has actually seen. Landlords cite both economic costs and social inconveniences occasioned by enhanced security requirements to protect Westerners who have been selectively targeted by terrorists.
There’s no question that security costs money—taller walls, concertina wire, guard booths, gates, etc. all add up. There’s no doubt, either, that higher levels of security lead to inconveniences, too—waiting in line to have your vehicle scanned, having to identify yourself just to get home, having all your guests identify themselves, etc. Add in the fact that more security means more scrutiny of your behavior, too.
But as the Interior Ministry’s spokesman makes clear, the level of security demanded by the Ministry applies to all residential compounds, not just those housing Westerners.
It will be interesting to see what the Ministry of Interior does about this. Do read the whole article.
Compound Owners in Jeddah Cite False Claims to Evict Westerners
Samir Al-Saadi, Arab NewsJEDDAH, 22 April 2008 — Some residential compounds in Jeddah are ordering North American and European nationals to leave, citing false information they claim has come from the Interior Ministry.
“All Americans and Europeans nationalities less than 10 persons should be transfer (sic) to another compound which have power full (sic) security,†says one eviction notice from a Jeddah compound, acquired on condition that the newspaper withhold the name of the compound. The notice says the order came from the Interior Ministry.
But Gen. Mansour Al-Turki, the Interior Ministry’s spokesperson, vehemently denied there was a 10-person rule as described in the eviction notice obtained by Arab News.
“Residential compounds for foreigners, similar to any terrorist-targeted areas, are subjected to precautionary security measures to protect their residents,†said Al-Turki.
“The Interior Ministry is keen on prevailing to evaluate and develop its security procedures in combating terrorism and crime. Therefore, it issued reconfirmations (sent to compound administrations) on the importance of continuing the implementation of precautionary security measures and procedures — with no exceptions.â€
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