Lack of freedom of expression and basic human rights

Human Rights violations in Islamic countries is not a new thing. However, the United Arab Emirates(especially Dubai, one of the seven Emirates which make up the UAE) projects itself as a forward thinking country. Regardless, through my personal experiences of having lived in that place, I can safely say that all the gloss is commercial and farcical. One of the most common,taken-for-granted practices is the confiscation of one's passport by the 'sponsor'(your employer). Even people working in prestigious institutions in high posts are not spared this indignation. Equal opportunity (for the sexes) employers is a rarity, if ever there is. There are a myriad other ways in which foreigners are subject to subtle violations of their basic human rights.

This article by Human Rights Information is very enlightening about some of the issues there but it is by no means exhaustive.

The country would well do to remember that a place is not all about tall buildings,all year long indoor ski resorts,imported Louvre museum branches, underwater restaurants and other such exotic stuff. A disgruntled populace is not the foundation that it should be building its commercial hub on.

Payday Loans

These days most people live paycheck to paycheck. But sometimes, due to unforeseen circumstances, we may need a short infusion of cash to tide over a certain adhoc requirement when our current paycheck gets exhausted and the fresh one is yet to roll in.

A payday loan comes in handy during such emergencies and is a small, short term one that is intended to offset our temporary expenses. Loan amounts are in the range of $100 and $1500 for a period that can range from 4 to 30 days.

Cash advance 1500 is one such service which provides us with payday loans. Its transactions are all online.

Benefits of this service are plenty:

Easy to process unlike personal loans.

Time taken for approval is fast.

No credit checks are done. However certain minimum criteria like employment status, threshold monthly income and an active checking or savings account are looked into.

Loans are unsecured. So, there is no question of giving up of assets as collateral.

Completion of application in the privacy of your own home.

Avoid sticky situations like bouncing of checks due to low balance, borrowing from family and friends or selling hard funded equity.

Secure and anonymous.

Option of “rolling over” a loan,which means that the loan can be extended to the next payday.

Access to several other websites that cater to payday loans for specific groups and their needs.

The website also educates you on the steps to be taken in choosing an online payday lender.

Dirty Hotel Secrets

Hotels are not the best places to live in. But one generally is under the impression that the big star hotels might put in a lot of care into the cleanliness aspect of their rooms. So, its quite shocking to see this undercover video which shows the scant regard shown by hotel cleaners in the upkeep of hotel glasses. I am very sure that sheets and towels also go through the same pedestrian treatment.

Is India under threat from the Chinese?

The Chinese are long since the aggressors where India is concerned. For some time now, China has been eyeing the North-East border state of Arunachal Pradesh and not even issuing visas to Indian tourists from that state of India to its country as it considers the residents of Arunachal Pradesh to be Chinese! India, it seems, is still to wake up from the all too real threat! Even after 146 incursions in 2006! Isnt that strange!

Ugliest man!

He doesnt look ugly to me. But the poor rich man has lost faith in his looks garnering a wife for him! And to date, he has had 5000 marriage proposals turned down! That must be a downer for him! But he hasnt given up hope yet!

He seems to have gone grey and lost most of his hair in his quest.
Maybe if he stopped trying so hard, he may find success!

More

Chinese recycling!

Do we ever stop and wonder how China makes goods so cheaply? It cant be cheap labor alone.

As per this report used condoms are being recycled into hair bands in southern China, threatening to spread sexually-transmittable diseases they were originally meant to prevent.People could be infected with AIDS, (genital) warts or other diseases if they hold the rubber bands or strings in their mouths while waving their hair into plaits or buns.

Leave it to the Chinese to recycle stuff!

Taser death

Cops in the North American continent routinely taser people for subduing them momentarily. Though tasers, usually, are not lethal, they can cause derivative deaths due to certain frailities in the humans involved. After all, 50000 volts of electricity being zapped on one's person is not a small jolt.

In the video shown below,Canadian mounties taser an agitated international passenger who arrived at Vancouver airport who died minutes after that.Hm,this is defenitely overkill.

'Islamic' Products

The flavour of the month is to bring about products which are Islamic-friendly.While Sharia-compliant stocks and bonds are being touted by the Indian stock houses and the UK Treasury respectively, Malaysia's carmaker Proton has gone a step ahead and is teaming up with Iran and Turkey to jointly develop an 'Islamic car',with Moslem-only features like a compass to determine the direction of Mecca for prayers and a Koran and headscarf keeping compartment!

Meanwhile, the disconnect in the Islamic world continues merrily with Saudi Prince Walid Bin Talal placing his order for a luxury Airbus 380 personalised to his requirements.

iPhone makes its debut in the UK

Apple has finally unveiled its wondrous iPhone in Britain where according to the Guardian, Apple 'worshippers' stood in line in the chilling cold for more than a day to get the gadget which comes with a price tag of £269, and a compulsory 18-month contract with the service provider!
In September, Apple slashed its price here, from $599 to $399 for the uber-hyped 8-gigabyte iPhone prompting a woman in NY to sue Apple for $1m over issues of her profit!

How to handle loud cellphone talkers

A number of times I have experienced this annoying habit in people not only making a racket and a nuisance of themselves talking on cellphones without and with bluetooth handsfree devices tucked away in their ears. I found this appropriate video for sharing my angst. Watch the fun unfold here.
These day cellphone jammers are being used by private individuals (though it is illegal)who effectively jam out the signals of loud talkers around them. Cellphone etiquette has still not quite caught on if people are desparate enough to use private jammers!

Marine Dumping

What does dumping several hundred tons of industrially-produced synthetic urea in the sea or ocean do? The as-yet untested geoengineering experiment is supposed to promote phytoplankton,which is CO2 absorbent,sequester carbon in the ocean depths. This is apparently,in a bid,to reduce global warming and consequent climatic changes. However, its effects on marine life and other plant life residing on the ocean bed has not been studied up until now. International scientific bodies, including the International Panel on Climate Change(IPCC)have warned that toxic tides and lifeless oceans might instead result from such activities.

The government of Philippines has recently approved an Australian company's plan to absorb excess CO2 by dumping massive amounts of urea in the Sulu Sea which is situated to the south-west of the Philippines.The global south is slowly becoming a dumping ground for such risky technologies by the for-profit organisations. Such a trend disguised as a humanitarian one could do more damage than good and is turning the fight of global warming into a commerical enterprise.

Fatwa creating chaos!

LOL.The fatwa rulings seem to be creating one hell of a confusion for moslems. According to this article, Cairo's Al-Azhar university fatwa department issues about 1000 edicts a day! What with contradictory and infinitely confusing fatwas and a countless number of them,it would be impossible to compile them all and make a "Fatwas for Dummies" book! Heh!Heh!

Online Casino Review Website

When we gamble online, we need resources to help us select and review and sort out through the maze of online gambling sites that are there. We can be guided by intelligent feedbacks to make our decisions as to which sites are good to gamble in and which casinos have our desired games because it is our money that we are playing with and we need to play responsibly and securely.

Pro360.com is an online casino review website that gives absolutely detailed reviews of the many casinos that are there in the cyberworld and has a rating system based on customer and editor feedbacks which are collected from actual players who have experienced the casino's experience. They have reviews on all aspects of casino gaming like trust score, game experience, bonuses offered and payout percentage offered by the listed casinos. Also given are reviews which are game-based on games like black jack, slots, video, poker, roulette, craps, bingo, backgammon and more.

Pro360 immensely helps those - who like gambling online - in selecting the casino which offers them the best benefit and services. Pro360 also provides a quick list of the top 80 casinos everyday on their website which can be very useful in making the choice for the time-challenged ones.The site is also extremely simple to navigate and all we have to do is select the game you are interested in and a list of casinos/online game providers will be shown to you. For each entry you will find a detailed review, the casino certificate, the available bonus, the editor and player rating.

Musharraf declares Martial Law

So, it had to happen - it was just a matter of time before Pervez Mussharraf proved that he is desparate to cling on to every conceivable means to remain in power. The Supreme Court ruling on the constitutional validity of his last month's clearly contrived elections was due to come up and probably go against his favor.
Benazir Bhutto too left the country in a hurry and has come back again after hearing the news of the clamping down of emergency!
Musharraf defends his action of declaring emergency rule by saying that he could not allow the country to commit suicide with the spreading of lawlessness.Sure,Pakistan has been lawless from its inception 60 years back and more so in the recent past. No surprises there! The country and its various leaders have been duplicitous and Musharraf is cut from the same cloth. What a pitiable state of affairs!

For related entries:
Is Musharraf going to declare emergency?

Medical and Pharma facts

Some facts to ponder over :

Antidepressants boost diabetes risk by 200%-300%.

Medical advertisers and doctors tell us that an aspirin a day will keep heart attack away. Science proves otherwise. Aspirin is only an anti-coagulant and keeps the blood from clotting. It does not prevent heart attacks.

Calcium intake causes kidney stones:
Kidney stones are caused by a mix of genetic and external factors like fluid intake, diet and so on. They are not caused by ingesting calcium.

Drinking eight glasses of water keeps us from dehydrating:
Its a misconception that the average person has to have 8 glasses of water to be not dehydrated. To remain healthy, we just need to replenish the amount of fluid we lose through perspiration, excretion and other bodily fluid losses.

Drug Companies are charging exorbitant rates for our medicines as they have to spend this amount on their R&D:
Drug companies offset the cost of their R&D by pricing their drugs exorbitantly and give us false figures of what they are spending on their research in actuality. The actual cash outlay for each new drug approximately just one-fifth of the figures touted by PhRMA (Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America). The Pharma lobby is one of the most powerful lobbies here in the US.

Aussie hunger!

The blond guy eating his ear boogers is Kevin Rudd,leader of the opposition party and tipped to be the next Prime Minister of Australia!

Saintly Revelations

Roman Catholic Papacy's fetish with bestowing sainthood and trying to prove unsupported miracles might just be coming unstuck with people growing more aware of the real doings of the so-called 'saints'. More muck is being raked out of Mother Theresa, aka Agnes Bojaxhiu's can of charity missions whose fast tracking to sainthood is encountering some hiccups.

According to Michael Parenti

What usually went unreported were the vast sums she received from wealthy contributors, including a million dollars from convicted savings & loan swindler Charles Keating, on whose behalf she sent a personal plea for clemency to the presiding judge. She was asked by the prosecutor in that case to return Keating’s gift because it was money he had stolen. She never did. She also accepted substantial sums given by the brutal Duvalier dictatorship that regularly stole from the Haitian public treasury.

When tending to her own ailments, however, Teresa checked into some of the costliest hospitals and recovery care units in the world for state-of-the-art treatment.

Teresa journeyed the globe to wage campaigns against divorce, abortion, and birth control. At her Nobel award ceremony, she announced that “the greatest destroyer of peace is abortion.” And she once suggested that AIDS might be a just retribution for improper sexual conduct.

Teresa emitted a continual flow of promotional misinformation about herself. She claimed that her mission in Calcutta fed over a thousand people daily. On other occasions she jumped the number to 4000, 7000, and 9000. Actually her soup kitchens fed not more than 150 people (six days a week), and this included her retinue of nuns, novices, and brothers. She claimed that her school in the Calcutta slum contained five thousand children when it actually enrolled less than one hundred.

She herself lived lavishly well, enjoying luxurious accommodations in her travels abroad. It seems to have gone unnoticed that as a world celebrity she spent most of her time away from Calcutta, with protracted stays at opulent residences in Europe and the United States, jetting from Rome to London to New York in private planes.

Related article:

Doubting Theresa

The benefits of a Vegetarian Diet

Vegetarianism has long since promoted good health. One-third of all cancers is related to a diet of meat eating. The risk of having cardio-vascular diseases and/or stopping the progression of coronary artery diseases is greatly reduced with a lean vegetarian diet.
Vegetarian food has more fiber in it and has very little animal fat. This helps in keeping a person's weight down. The average animal product can clog arteries with fat and make the person sluggish and slow down his immune system. Meat eaters also undergo accelerated cognitive and sexual dysfunction at a younger age and their life span is reduced remarkably.

Recent reports have indicated that there is a large amount of mercury in sea produce.High levels of mercury can lead to a wide range of physical ills, including kidney and neurological damage, and can cause fatigue, vision problems and tremors. According to the National Wildlife Federation,nearly every aspect of our food web has been contaminated with mercury and its difficult to find an ecosystem that's not contaminated, whether it's ocean or forest or coastal waters or wetlands.The primary sources of mercury in the water system include coal-burning power plants, wastewater treatment plants and waste incinerators.

The fiber in vegetarian meal cleanses the internal system and makes our digestive and excretary organs work more efficiently in disposing off the waste. People who eat lower on the food chain tend to have fewer instances of constipation and hemorrhoids.

Billion of animals are slaughtered for human consumption each year.Animals are mostly factory farmed. This means cramming them into tightly spaced cages where they can barely move and fed with a diet tainted with pesticides and antibiotics to fatten them up and keep them off from infection.It is inhuman to help propagate the miseries of these animals which are forced to spend their entire lives in crates and stalls so small that they can't even turn around.Many animals get so fattened up due to the fatty diet that they are fed and the lack of exercise and free movement that their legs cannot support their weight due to their abnormally heavy bodies and are in constant pain and susceptible to infectious diseases and cancer till they are mercifully killed.

Chicken in hatcheries suffer untold agonies and are made,artificially, to lay more eggs.Each chicken is given less than half a square foot of space. Shortly after hatching, chickens have the ends of their beaks cut off. These mutilations are performed without anesthesia, ostensibly to reduce injuries that result when stressed birds are driven to fighting.Today's "broiler"(meat)chickens have been genetically altered to grow twice as fast than before and being pushed beyond their biological limits, hundreds of millions of chickens die every year before reaching slaughter weight at 6 weeks of age. Laying more than their share of eggs,the hens' bodies are severely taxed. They suffer from "fatty liver syndrome" when their liver cells, which work overtime to produce the fat and protein for egg yolks, accumulate extra fat. After one year in egg production, the birds are sent off to slaughter and end up usually in soups,or similar low-grade chicken meat products in which their bodies can be shredded to hide the bruises.In many cases, these 'spent hens' are ground up alive in huge grinders to be used as animal feed! Is there no end to human cruelty?

Lastly,it takes a lot of grain to feed animals raised for slaughter. Also,chemical and animal waste runoff from factory farms is responsible for miles of polluted rivers and streams which greatly threaten water quality.It may seem puerile, but cows belch and burp and an incredible amount of methane is let out every day, and when added to the flatulent excesses of other farm animals, they represent the single largest source of methane in the atmosphere.Belching and farting adds up to a massive 26 per cent of all emissions.A UN report found that raising animals for food generates more greenhouse gases than all the cars and trucks in the world combined. This is due to the manure the animals produce, and the synthetic fertilisers for farming and growing the animals for slaughter.

With all these negatives, isnt it time we shifted to a vegetarian diet which is healthy for us and the environment? Check out the video(which is bit long)here to see the inhuman suffering of animals brought in for slaughter.

Oink lighter!

I had a good laugh seeing this cute piggy on Gizmodo. You push his hat and flames come out of his nostrils for lighting up your ciggy and when he is out of gas, stick the butane filler up his backside! He!He! Crazy gadgets which bring out the funnier side of life. Nevertheless, they wont find any takers from the one billion plus moslems of the world ;))

Kleptocrat Benazir

Jemima Khan Goldsmith(ex-wife of Pakistan skipper,Imran Khan)has no love lost with Benazir Bhutto,ex-PM of Pakistan, who has, with a flourish now returned-after her self imposed exile- to take up cudgels from where she left off.
Jemima has written a nice piece worth reading about Benazir knowing her probably better than others as her ex-husband's rival.

She preferred instead to kowtow to the mullahs in order to cling to power, forming an expedient alliance with Pakistan's Religious Coalition Party and leaving Pakistan's women as powerless as she found them.

Make no mistake, Benazir may look the part, but she's as ruthless and conniving as they come--a kleptocrat in a Hermes headscarf.

Benazir is said to have stashed millions of her ill-gotten wealth in Swiss Banks and offshore accounts. Inquiries have so far found that Zardari, Benazir's equally corrupt husband,went on a shopping spree in the mid-1990s, purchasing among other things a $4 million, 355-acre estate south of London.Officials leading the inquiry in Pakistan say that the $100 million they have identified so far is only a small part of a much larger windfall from corrupt activities. They maintain that an inquiry begun in Islamabad immediately after Bhutto's dismissal in 1996 found evidence that her family and associates generated more than $1.5 billion in illicit profits through kickbacks in virtually every sphere of government activity -- from rice deals, to the sell-off of government land, even rake-offs from government welfare schemes.
In the largest single payment investigators have discovered, a gold bullion dealer in the Middle East was shown to have deposited at least $10 million into one of Zardari's accounts after the Bhutto government gave him a monopoly on gold imports that sustained Pakistan's jewelry industry. The money was deposited into a Citibank account in the United Arab Emirate of Dubai.

Among the string of big ticket real estate that she owns are Rockwood, a 355-acre estate south of London, and a $2.5 million country manor in Normandy.

Benazir, in her third run in Pak politics will be a must-watch on power politics and with an enhanced chaotic alliance with Musharraf, a gloom and doom scenario is all set to unfold.

Born again Jindal

Indians back home are gloating over the election of (Piyush)Bobby Jindal as Governor of Louisiana. They would do well to note a few self-centred and power backed moves of the man who is only of Indian origin.
To go up the political ladder, the man chose to convert himself to Roman Catholism from Hinduism which is an unwanted baggage in the ultra conservative Republican right wing party to which he belongs. Not to be outdone, he has also offered testimony before Baptist and Pentecostal congregations since the beginning of the 2007 campaign season. One never knows when one might need the help of people of all denominations!
Jindal is totally against abortion with no exceptions.He supports an abortion ban without exceptions for the life of the woman, the health of the woman, rape, or incest.
He is also an enthusiastic supporter of the war in Iraq.
A true Republican and good to carry the baton that Bush wields!

What's common between Cheney, Bush and Obama?

So what have we here?! Dick Cheney's wife herself admits that her husband,Dick Cheney (vice Prez and co-perpetrator of the beleaguered Iraq debacle)and Barack Obama(Democratic candidate in running for the Presidential elections and part non practising moslem)are infact eighth cousins! Wait! There's even more. Obama and President George Bush are 11th cousins! No kidding!
Check it for yourself at Guardian Unlimited

Can David Copperfield make this disappear?

I would hate this to turn out to be anything more than an illusory investigation. David Copperfield, the man who made the Statue of Liberty disappear is certainly in trouble with his ranch in Las Vegas raided by the FBI in an on-going case of sexual misconduct with a woman in the Bahamas.

How news works

A nice video presentation of how we view only the corporatised version of news.

Israel - Big on Environmental Pollution

Coastal waters of Israel is supposed to be one of the worst polluted water bodies of the world. Heavy metals and pesticides are discharged into the sea under government licenses and the company responsible for the sewage of the area is the biggest polluter in the eastern Mediterranean.

Of the heavy metals and pesticides discharged into the sea under government licenses, are 130 tons of pesticides, 5 tons of arsenic, 1,300 tons of ammonia and a ton of cyanide.

The most recent United Nations report on the Mediterranean ranked the greater Tel Aviv area as one of the 10 most polluting urban centers in the Mediterranean.

Seems like the country is busy only with its security concerns.