Via dubaiwalla: a student in Dubai has been jailed for 3 months after saying in an online chatroom that men having sex with men is a personal matter and the government shouldn't interfere ( Read more... )

Props to Nigel for pointing out a glorious example of Qatari self-censorship in action. Here, side by side, are a Reuters article and its redactions in the Gulf Times and Peninsula, with significant differences in red:

REUTERSGULF TIMESPENINSULA
A long-planned $3 billion bridge linking Bahrain and Qatar has been put on hold and the project team ( Read more... )

Today's New York Times published a rather biting article about the conflict between Qataris and non-Qataris in Qatar: Affluent Qataris Seek What Money Cannot Buy.

Qataris' and non-Qataris' stereotypes of each other is something I've been thinking about a lot this summer, between the Lisa Clayton kerfuffle and the recent arguments over on Mimiz ( Read more... )

Today's Gulf Times has a rather telling juxtaposition of stories in its courtroom news roundupA woman was sentenced to five years in jail after beating, burning and then fatally stabbing her housemaid because she "was unhappy with the Indonesian’s work ( Read more... )

When it was announced on 1 April that Qatar was ending visas on arrival at the end of the month, the first words out of my coworker Trish's mouth were, "How long do you think it'll take before they retract this?"

The answer turns out to be 18 days.

Serious drama has been happening for the last two weeks over at IslamOnline, one of the most visited Muslim websites on the web, which is based here in Doha. I frequently visit IslamOnline when looking up different points of view on a topic in Islam, since it's a fairly pluralistic website that will show you a range of fatwas on a given topic ( Read more... )

On arriving in Doha, one of our math professors got into a waiting taxi and automatically started putting on his seat belt.

"You don't need that here," the driver said.

"Why not?" the math professor asked. "Don't you have physics in Qatar?"

In an attempt to get young, hip Emiratis to wear their seatbelts, the UAE just announced the Fashionable ( Read more... )

The Qatar Animal Welfare Socity, where Justin and I used to volunteer as dog-walkers, burned down to the ground yesterday. Most of the cats and a couple dogs died, but around 50 dogs, 15 cats, and the farm animals survived.

The surviving dogs and cats are being housed at Qatar Veterinary Centre, the Veterinary Surgery, and Pampered Pets, but they ( Read more... )

Mr. Q over at ILoveQatar.net posted an Al Jazeera story on some local workers not getting paid:

Click to view

It's cheering to see Al Jazeera pointing out injustices here in Qatar, and not just in neighboring states (even if they do it in an appalling surfer dude accent).

In more chilling news, the Shura Council just called for more stringent punishment for ( Read more... )

I apologize in advance for the tasteless nature of this post, but the larger issue interested me.

I happened to check BBC News this afternoon three minutes after they posted the story about David Carradine's death. The second paragraph read:
"Thai police told the BBC the 72-year-old was found by a hotel maid sitting in a wardrobe with a rope ( Read more... )