Saudi court sentences 75-year-old woman to lashes
TheStar.com - World - Saudi court sentences 75-year-old woman to lashes
March 09, 2009
Maggie Michael
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
CAIRO–A 75-year-old widow in Saudi Arabia has been sentenced to 40 lashes and four months in jail for mingling with two young men who are not close relatives, drawing new criticism for the kingdom's ultraconservative religious police and judiciary.
The woman's lawyer told The Associated Press on Monday that he would appeal the verdict against Khamisa Sawadi, who is Syrian but was married to a Saudi. The lawyer, Abdel Rahman al-Lahem, said the verdict issued March 3 also demands that Sawadi be deported after serving her sentence.
He said his client, who is not serving her sentence yet, was not speaking with the media, and he declined to provide more details about the case.
The newspaper Al-Watan said the woman met with the two 24-year-old men last April after she asked them to bring her five loaves of bread at her home in al-Chamil, a city north of the capital, Riyadh.
Al-Watan identified one man as Fahd al-Anzi, the nephew of Sawadi's late husband, and the other as his friend and business partner Hadiyan bin Zein. It said they were arrested by the religious police after delivering the bread. The men also were convicted and sentenced to lashes and prison.
The court said it based its ruling on "citizen information" and testimony from al-Anzi's father, who accused Sawadi of corruption.
"Because she said she doesn't have a husband and because she is not a Saudi, conviction of the defendants of illegal mingling has been confirmed," the court verdict read.
Saudi Arabia's strict interpretation of Islam prohibits men and women who are not immediate relatives from mingling. It also bars women from driving, and the playing of music, dancing and many movies also are a concern for hardliners who believe they violate religious and moral values.
Complaints from Saudis have been growing that the religious police and courts are overstepping their broad mandate and interfering in people's lives, and critics lambasted the handling of Sawadi's case.
"How can a verdict be issued based on suspicion?" Laila Ahmed al-Ahdab, a physician who also is a columnist for Al-Watan, wrote Monday. "A group of people are misusing religion to serve their own interests."
Sawadi told the court she considered al-Anzi as her son, because she breast-fed him when he was a baby. But the court denied her claim, saying she didn't provide evidence. In Islamic tradition, breast-feeding establishes a degree of maternal relation, even if a woman nurses a child who is not biologically hers.
Sawadi commonly asked her neighbours for help after her husband died, said journalist Bandar al-Ammar, who reported the story for Al-Watan. In a recent article, he wrote that he felt the need to report the case "so everybody knows to what degree we have reached."
The woman's conviction came a few weeks after King Abdullah fired the chief of the religious police and a cleric who condoned killing owners of TV networks that broadcast "immoral content." The move was seen as part of an effort to weaken the hardline Sunni Muslim establishment.
A German mathematician who died 450 years ago has been sent a letter demanding that he pay long-overdue television licence fees, residents at his former address said on Wednesday.
Germany's GEZ broadcast fee collection office sent the bill to the last home address of Adam Ries, an algebra expert who bought the house in 1525.
A club in his honour was set up at the property four centuries later.
"We received a letter saying 'To Mr. Adam Ries' on it, with the request to pay his television and radio fees," said Annegret Muench, who now heads the club.
Muench returned the letter to the GEZ with a note explaining the request had come too late because Ries had died in 1559, centuries before the invention of television and radio.
She nonetheless received a reminder a few weeks later.
This was not the first time the GEZ had sent a bill to those in the afterlife.
Last year, a school named after poet Friedrich Schiller received a reminder asking him to declare all radios and televisions in his home and pay the corresponding fees.
A British man fed up with his wife's complaints advertised her for sale -- and got a number of offers.
"Nagging Wife. No Tax, Very high maintenance --some rust,"wrote Gary Bates, 38, in a small ad in Trade-It, more usually used to buy and sell cars, furniture or other or household goods.
Bates, a self-employed builder from Gloucestershire, southwest England, said he just snapped after his wife Donna on got on his nerves while she was watching television, and decided to place the ad as a joke.
"She was nagging me for doing something small, while she was watching some rubbish on TV. So I just thought I'd put an ad in to get rid of her.
"I didn't think anyone would ring up, but I've had at least nine or 10 people calling about her," Bates said.
"It's gone mad. There was no one I knew--just people asking, 'Is she still available?' "
The couple only married last year, and Bates said his 40-year-old wife--whom he advertised in the magazine's Free to Collect section, along with some of his old fishing tackle--initially gave him "a bit of an ear-bashing."
But, he added: "She's seen the funny side of it now though!"
'Sex monster' faces life in jail for newborn's murder
Canwest News ServiceMarch 16, 2009
A 73-year-old Austrian man who fathered seven children with a daughter he imprisoned in a cellar for 24 years goes on trial today for the murder of a newborn boy who died underground.
Josef Fritzl also faces other charges ranging from rape to enslavement for the incarceration of his daughter Elisabeth and three of the children he had with her --- acts that sent a wave of revulsion through Austria and the world.
"He shut (Elisabeth) away in the cellar and made her totally dependent on him, forcing her into sexual acts and treating her as if she was his own property," his charge sheet reads.
Fritzl, who built the soundproofed cellar with a reinforced door under his home in the town of Amstetten, could face life behind bars.
Fritzl's lawyer argues that a charge of enslavement is inappropriate, but says he will plead guilty to deprivation of liberty, coercion, rape and incest. He will, however, contest the most serious charge, murder.
His lawyer says his client is not a "sex monster," but expects to spend the rest of his life behind bars. A verdict is expected on Friday.
Josef Fritzl, the Austrian who kept his daughter captive in a dungeon for 24 years, was given a life sentence Thursday after being convicted of slavery, rape and murder.
Transsexual to give birth to twins, become their dad
Canwest News ServiceMarch 22, 2009 8:01 AM
A "man" is set to become the first in the world to give birth to twins after becoming pregnant following the start of the sex change process.
Ruben Noe Coronado, 25, from Spain, postponed the process of becoming a man so that he could keep his female reproductive organs and give birth.
"He" fell pregnant after undergoing fertility treatment when doctors told his girlfriend, the mother of two children from a previous relationship, she couldn't have any more children.
He is the first Spanish transsexual to fall pregnant and it is thought he will become the world's first transsexual father of twins if everything goes to plan.
He will bring the twins up with his partner, Esperanza Ruiz, 43. They plan to marry before they become parents.
Once he becomes a parent he will resume his sex-change surgery and become a father rather than mother.
He plans to give birth at a hospital in Barcelona after moving to the area from Malaga two months ago with his girlfriend because of family problems.
Coronado, an epileptic who was adopted as a child, said: "It's like being born with three hands.
"You take advantage of them while you have them and you get rid of one of them when they get in the way."
When James Brewer suffered a stroke and thought he was dying, the churchgoing Oklahoma factory worker decided it was time for an extraordinary deathbed confession.
He wanted to unburden himself of the sin he had carried with him for three decades and so his wife summoned police to the hospital.
Detectives said Brewer, 58, told them he wanted to "cleanse his soul" and said he shot dead a man he believed was trying to seduce his wife more than 30 years ago.
But Brewer survived the illness and now faces trial charged with the murder of Jimmy Carroll in Tennessee-- where the death penalty may await him.
Last week, Brewer and his wife, Dorothy, sold all their possessions in a garage sale and left their modest home in Shawnee, Okla., where they had been living under the assumed names of Michael and Dorothy Anderson.
They then drove to Hohenwald, Tenn., where he surrendered to the authorities.
Brewer was arrested shortly after the shooting of Carroll, a neighbour, but was released on bail. He told police that he and his wife fled to Oklahoma, where they started a new life.
The Doctor's World
A Quandary in Sweden: Criminals in Med School
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN, M.D.
A year ago, Sweden’s most prestigious medical school found itself in an international uproar after it unknowingly admitted a student who was a Nazi sympathizer and a convicted murderer, then scrambled to find a way to expel him.
It is hard to imagine how the case could get any more bizarre. But it has.
The 33-year-old student, Karl Helge Hampus Svensson, having been banished from the medical school of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm on the ground that he falsified his high school records, has now been admitted to a second well-known medical school — Uppsala, Sweden’s oldest university.
New twists in his and another case highlight the difficulties that three of the country’s six medical schools have had in admitting and dismissing students with serious criminal offenses in just the past two years. The cases resonate far beyond Sweden, raising fundamental questions about who is fit to become a doctor.
Posted: Tue Mar 31, 2009 9:50 am Post subject: Re: AMAZING STORIES
Fast of Nepal's 'Buddha Boy' tough for officials to swallow:; [Final Edition]
Thomas Bell. The Ottawa Citizen. Ottawa, Ont.: Dec 3, 2005. pg. G.7
Abstract (Summary)
Every pilgrim spoken to by The Daily Telegraph said they believed the claim that Ram has not eaten or drunk for six months. The scene's popularity is partly due to its resemblance to an episode in the life of the Buddha, born nearby about 543 BC.
The Buddha achieved enlightenment after meditating under a sacred pipal tree for 49 days, a feat of endurance already surpassed by Ram. The boy is sitting in the same pose as the Buddha, also under a pipal.
Photo: Reuters / Ram Bomjon, 15, meditates under the same type of tree the Buddha sat under, and reportedly for longer.
(Copyright The Ottawa Citizen 2005)
Backers claim he has gone six months without food or drink
RATANPURI, Nepal - Nepal's "Buddha boy" is under investigation by the authorities, who question his claim not to have eaten anything for six months and are examining his followers' finances.
The government believes that Ram Bomjon, 15, may be breaking his fast to eat at night when his shrine is closed to visitors.
Buddhism experts, the interior ministry and Nepal's top scientific agency have all been called in to investigate the phenomenon, which has attracted thousands of pilgrims and excitement worldwide.
"We told the shrine management committee, 'Either we need to see everything that's going on or, if this is a fraud, you need to close it down,"' said Hari Har Dahal, a local official. "This has got into the media all over the world. If it's not true, it will be bad for the country."
Concerns have also been raised over the spending of donations to the organizing committee.
Hundreds of pilgrims were still entering the jungle near the village of Ratanpuri to see Ram this week, despite the authorities' attempts to discourage the faithful from visiting the site.
"We stop from village to village and people are really keen to come," said Amit Bartola, a bus driver, who had 80 people crammed onto his 36-seat bus.
Every pilgrim spoken to by The Daily Telegraph said they believed the claim that Ram has not eaten or drunk for six months. The scene's popularity is partly due to its resemblance to an episode in the life of the Buddha, born nearby about 543 BC.
The Buddha achieved enlightenment after meditating under a sacred pipal tree for 49 days, a feat of endurance already surpassed by Ram. The boy is sitting in the same pose as the Buddha, also under a pipal.
Ganga Jeet Bomjon, Ram's elder brother, strongly rejected accusations of cheating. "The investigators say that you guys are doing something, feeding him batteries to give him energy or something," he joked. "But you try sitting with your legs crossed for three hours, never mind six months."
The management committee, mainly composed of young men and teenagers from Ram's village, stands by its claim that he has fasted for six months. But it has resisted intensive scrutiny.
"I don't mind people coming to check," said Ram Krishna Tamang, a committee member. "But they can't touch him and break his meditation."
Local officials have demanded to see the committee's accounts and have been told it has received the equivalent of $13,000, a vast sum in Nepal, where the average income is around $250 a year.
The authorities say they must proceed with care because the issue is religiously sensitive.
The policeman on guard outside the office where Ram's file is kept gave a clue to the mood at the administrative headquarters.
"He has to eat. He has to drink water," he said. "If we find out that he's lying, he and the rest of them are going to jail."
[Illustration]
Photo: Reuters / Ram Bomjon, 15, meditates under the same type of tree the Buddha sat under, and reportedly for longer.
Indexing (document details)
Author(s): Thomas Bell
Document types: News
Dateline: RATANPURI, Nepal
Section: News
Publication title: The Ottawa Citizen. Ottawa, Ont.: Dec 3, 2005. pg. G.7
Source type: Newspaper
ISSN: 08393222
ProQuest document ID: 936803731
Text Word Count 520
Document URL: http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=936803731&sid=3&Fmt=3&clientId=20373&RQT=309&VName=PQD
AU. S. judge has agreed to drop murder charges against a woman accused of starving her one-year-old son to death if the little boy is resurrected, a lawyer for the accused said Tuesday.
Ria Ramkissoon, now 22, was accused with four other members of a cult, One Mind Ministries of starving her infant son Javon Thompson to death in 2007.
According to prosecutors, the leader of the sect, a Baltimore woman who goes by the name Queen Antoinette, ordered Ramkissoon and other sect members to stop feeding Javon after he didn't say "amen" at breakfast.
In a hearing Monday be-fore the Baltimore Circuit Court, Judge Timothy Doory accepted Ramkissoon's guilty plea and agreed to let her testify against Queen Antoinette and the other defendants.
But if Ramkissoon's son "is resurrected, as you still hold some hope he will be, you may withdraw the plea and the charges against you will be withdrawn,"Doory said.
"It's a sad, crazy situation," Ramkissoon's lawyer Steven Silverman told AFP, adding she has been brainwashed by a cult and believes the baby will be resurrected.
A Saudi man has divorced his wife by text message, a newspaper said on Thursday.
The man was in Iraq when he sent the SMS informing her she was no longer his spouse. He followed up with a telephone call to two of his relatives, the daily Arab News reported.
A court in the Red Sea city Jeddah finalized the split--the first known divorce in Saudi Arabia by text message-- after summoning the two relatives to check they had received word of the husband's intention, the paper said.
Saudi Arabia practises a strict form of Islamic sharia law, and clerics preside over sharia courts as judges. Under the law, a man can divorce his wife by saying "I divorce you" three times.
The Saudi man was in Iraq to participate in "what he described as 'jihad'," according to the Arab News. Many Saudis have gone to fight with al-Qaeda terrorists against the Iraqi government and U. S. forces.
An Albanian woman went around for 12 years with a bullet lodged below her cheekbone without noticing it, she said on Friday.
Mrike Rrucaj said she was shot in her sleep in 1997 when the Balkan country was plagued by anarchy and chaos amid protests against fraudulent pyramid schemes, but a doctor said the bullet had passed through her. At the time, many Albanians fired bullets into the air in frustration.
"I was covered in blood and I thought I had been killed," Rrucaj said of the incident in 1997. "The doctor at the hospital said the bullet had gone in and come out and he just cleaned the wound. I was 28, and did not feel a thing for 12 years."
But a week ago, she collapsed from pain when she bent her neck and an X-ray revealed the bullet, which was 2.8 centimetres long.
"The unique thing about this case is not the operation, but the fact she kept it unknowingly for 12 years in her head," said Fatos Olldashi, chief neurosurgeon at Albania's military hospital. He did not blame his colleague for not being more attentive in 1997, when an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 people were killed.
"It is easy to judge the doctor now, but it was quite different back in 1997. He thought it had come out. And they were treating seriously injured people, not someone standing up and talking to them," he said.
Transsexual to give birth to twins, become their dad
Canwest News ServiceMarch 22, 2009 8:01 AM
A "man" is set to become the first in the world to give birth to twins after becoming pregnant following the start of the sex change process.
Ruben Noe Coronado, 25, from Spain, postponed the process of becoming a man so that he could keep his female reproductive organs and give birth.
"He" fell pregnant after undergoing fertility treatment when doctors told his girlfriend, the mother of two children from a previous relationship, she couldn't have any more children.
He is the first Spanish transsexual to fall pregnant and it is thought he will become the world's first transsexual father of twins if everything goes to plan.
He will bring the twins up with his partner, Esperanza Ruiz, 43. They plan to marry before they become parents.
Once he becomes a parent he will resume his sex-change surgery and become a father rather than mother.
He plans to give birth at a hospital in Barcelona after moving to the area from Malaga two months ago with his girlfriend because of family problems.
Coronado, an epileptic who was adopted as a child, said: "It's like being born with three hands.
"You take advantage of them while you have them and you get rid of one of them when they get in the way."
A Spanish man is pregnant with twins. This is not a joke. A transsexual, born Estefania, a female but now almost-male, Ruben Noe Coronado Jimenez will give birth to twin boys in September if all goes well.
The twin births will be history-making for the almost, but not quite - yet, male pregnancy.This the second male pregnancy by a woman, turned-almost man, to give birth to a baby. In 2008, Thomas Beattie, born the female Tracy Lagondino, made history with the birth of his daughter Susan Juliette. Beattie is currently pregnant again but will undergo surgery.
brother meherali , the person giving birth to twins was actually a woman !! and not man , she got pregnant and undergone a surgery to change her sex organs and be a man:wink:
High-tech mapping adds 3,851 kilometres to endangered World Heritage site
Agence France-PresseApril 21, 2009
China's Great Wall is much longer than previously estimated, state media reported Monday.
However, the most comprehensive and technologically advanced survey ever conducted on the wall has also shown the World Heritage-listed site is in danger of disappearing in many places due to road construction and other forms of development, as well as extreme weather, the China Daily said.
The wall, built over centuries to keep foreigners out of China, stretches for 8,851.8 kilometres, much further than common estimates of 5,000 kilometres, according to the findings of the survey
The additional 3,851 kilometres is about 300 kilometres more than the distance from Ottawa to Vancouver.
The defensive structure includes 6,259.6 kilometres of actual wall, plus 359.7 kilometres of trenches and 2,232.5 kilometres of natural barriers such as hills and rivers.
The two-year mapping project, carried out by the State Administration of Cultural Heritage, involved using global positioning systems and infra-red technology. Previous estimates were mainly based on historical records, rather than physically mapping each section. By tracking thoroughly across mountains and through deserts, unknown parts were uncovered.
The first parts of the Great Wall were built more than 2,000 years ago, then rebuilt and extended during the Ming Dynasty (1368 to 1644 AD) amid the threat of invading northern tribes.
Editor's Note: This story contains graphic material that some may find disturbing.
---
Angela Stieb walked into a department store washroom and saw a horrifying scene -- a tiny, clenched fist sticking out of a toilet, a courtroom heard Monday at the trial of a woman accused of abandoning her newborn baby.
"I seen toilet paper in the toilet and a little hand sticking out,"Stieb testified. "It was purple and the hand was clenched shut, like a fist."
Her story was heard at the trial of April Halkett, 22, who is accused of abandoning a baby at a Wal-Mart in Prince Albert on May 21, 2007.
The child survived and has since been moved to a different community. A publication ban has been placed on his name and his home community.
Stieb's mother Beatrice testified that she and her daughter reported what they had seen to store staff.
Defence lawyer Ajay Krishan thanked Beatrice Stieb for insisting that staff hurry into the bathroom.
"You probably saved that child's life," Krishan said to her.
Earlier, Terry Sparks, a resident of Melfort, Sask., had also stopped to use the washroom.
She testified that she saw clothing and shoes but no feet in one of the stalls. Then, she noticed blood on the floor.
"There was just little bits of blood dropping there,"she testified. "Then it got bigger."
She also heard grunting coming from the stall. "I couldn't identify words or anything," Sparks said.
She also alerted store staff. "I was scared, but I also wanted to help," she testified.
Store manager Chad Fraser testified that when he entered the washroom, he saw the bloody mess but didn't realize a baby was in the toilet until he saw some slight movement.
He found a pair of rubber gloves and a first-aid kit, and grabbed the baby by the legs.
The newborn was headfirst in the toilet and a purplish-blue colour, Fraser testified.
Paramedic Darren Russell said when they responded to the call, the baby was not breathing.
He started breathing after CPR from the paramedics, however, and had a weak pulse on the way to hospital in Saskatoon, where he received medical care for eight days.
Close friends Dwayne Merasty and Fisher Charles each said on the stand that Halkett was feeling sick that day. They waited in a car while she went into Wal-Mart.
When Halkett came back, Merasty testified, "she was pretty much in the same condition as she was when she went in there."
Both men said they did not know Halkett was pregnant.
A Saskatchewan woman thought the baby she had delivered and left in a Wal-Mart toilet was dead, her trial heard Tuesday.
Speaking to police four days after giving birth in a Wal-Mart store washroom in Prince Albert in May 2007, April Halkett said she hadn't known she was pregnant until that day, when she "started to feel a pain."
After the child was born, she said, "He didn't move."
"I thought the baby was dead," she said in a video-recorded police interview played Tuesday at trial in Prince Albert Court of Queen's Bench.
Halkett has pleaded not guilty to child abandonment.
Her newborn was later pulled out of the toilet by a store manager, resuscitated, and survived.
The boy cannot be identified due to a publication ban.
Throughout the interview, which took place after she came forward to police on May 25,2007,Halkett was visibly upset and crying, and, at times, spoke so quietly, she could barely be understood. "I never knew I was pregnant or nothing," she told police.
When she went into the Wal-Mart around 5 p.m. local time that day,"I felt like I really had to use the bathroom. . . . When I went, the baby came out and I was so scared."
She told police she had never had a child before.
"He wasn't moving or nothing. He was so blue and I was so scared,"she said. "I thought the baby was dead.He didn't move. . . . I washed the blood off my hands and then I ran out of there."
In the interview, Halkett said she took three home-pregnancy tests in the month before she delivered the baby, and each of them came back negative.
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