what do you call a man-made disaster?

Humanitarian situation in Gaza worst since 1967 say aid groups
Agencies
London: The humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip is at its worst since the occupation began in 1967, according to British aid groups. The coalition of groups including Amnesty International, Save the Children and Christian Aid have all criticized Israel’s blockade on Gaza, branding it as illegal collective punishment.
They also called on the international community to resume dialogue with Hamas, as the "international policy of isolating Hamas has not reaped any benefits."
The report entitled Gaza Strip: A Humanitarian Implosion says that almost 75 per cent of people in the private sector have lost their jobs and 1.1 million Gazans are dependent on food aid. The groups have also called on Israel to ensure people in Gaza are able to get basic necessities such as clean water, food and electricity.
The report added: "The situation for 1.5 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip is worse now than at any time since the beginning of the Israeli military occupation in 1967." Amnesty UK Director Kate Allen said: "The current situation is man-made and must be reversed."

feeding and fasting ?

I really liked this article because it doesn't come right out and say it's impossible to feed a baby and fast in Ramadhaan at the same time.

Religious Fasting and Breastfeeding
By Kelly Bonyata, IBCLC

Breastfeeding research tells us that short-term fasting (not eating) will not decrease milk supply, but that severe dehydration can decrease milk supply.
There have been a few studies on short-term fasting and breastfeeding (see the references below). Prentice et. al. studied women in West Africa who were fasting for Ramadan (no food or fluids between 5:00 am and 7:30 pm) and found that milk volume was not affected but milk composition did change to a certain extent. The researchers noted that the women appeared to superhydrate themselves overnight when fluids were allowed to lessen daytime dehydration.

Studies in the United States by Neville et. al., Neville & Oliva-Rasbach and Tigas et. al. likewise showed no significant decrease in milk supply after a short fast (the women in these studies did drink water during the fast). The breastfeeding woman's body appears to make several metabolic adaptations during short-term fasting to ensure that milk production is not affected.

Mothers may want to err on the safe side, and drink water even if they are not eating. There are two risks to not drinking all day: (1) mom gets dehydrated, and (2) if the dehydration is severe enough milk supply can decrease. Mom's dehydration is comparatively easy to deal with -- if she feels thirsty (or urine gets very yellow, or she feels dizzy or ill) she needs to drink. The decrease in milk supply related to dehydration may be a bigger issue for some fasting mothers - some mothers have a hard time getting supply back up (this is often seen in mothers who don't eat or drink due to illness). When a mother does not drink fluids for a day, baby generally nurses as usual the day of the fast, but often needs to nurse more often the next day or two.

Some mothers have found that drinking water on fast days is more of a need during the first six months when baby is exclusively breastfed (not taking any food or drink other than breastmilk); once baby is older and taking other foods, it may be feasible to neither eat nor drink during the fast.

Keep in mind that mothers who have sugar metabolism problems (diabetes or hypoglycemia) or other health problems, fasting could be risky (for mom). Consult both your doctor and your religious advisor if you feel that you might have health issues that preclude fasting.

Specific guidelines
Jewish law exempts from fasting anyone whose health might be even a little harmed by it - this would include pregnant and nursing women whose health (or the health of her baby or fetus) might suffer from fasting. There may be ways of eating and drinking small increments that are still compatible with fasting. However, a local competent Orthodox rabbinic authority should be consulted so that the method and amounts of eating and drinking will be done within the correct guidelines.

Muslim women who are pregnant or breastfeeding may be exempt from fasting if they feel that their health or the baby's health would be negatively affected by the fasting. The mother may be expected to compensate for the missed fasting at a later time or pay some expiation for not fasting. Consult a scholar or a book of fiqh to determine the appropriate guidelines

study says kids should learn their p's and q's before abc

DON'T START CHILDREN AT SCHOOL TILL THEY'RE SIX
By Bob Roberts Deputy Political Editor Bob.Roberts@Mirror.Co.Uk

02/08/2007

Children go to school far too early and should not start until they are six, a teachers' leader said yesterday.
Deborah Lawson, from the Professional Association of Teachers, said many youngsters who begin primary school at four are not ready.
She said they need to have more freedom to play in nurseries without being told what to do by adults.

Ms Lawson, the union's former chairman, said: "We are focusing too much on the academic achievement of children at a much earlier stage and not giving them the opportunity to learn other things."
She said across Europe youngsters do not start school before the age of seven. And she suggested the legal age when children must be in school in the UK should be raised from five to "six or seven".

Speaking at the union's annual conference in Harrogate she added: "There is evidence that by starting school earlier our children are not better off than those children who are starting later.
"Toddlers develop social and language skills by playing in a way that is natural to them. We are not giving children sufficient time and space to learn for themselves."
Her comments follow remarks last month from Children's Secretary Ed Balls who said youngsters should be able to play and not be "wrapped in cotton wool".
His department is also said to be unhappy at under-sixes being forced to read and write before they learn how to behave properly.

----

my 2 halalas: I'm quite the middle-of-the-roader on this...I honestly think six is too late for children to start school...in my experience children start showing a readiness to learn and can handle structured study sessions long before that...ideally around age 3 +.

On the other hand I find it disconcerting when homeschooling mothers or pre-school teachers insist on young children "getting on with the programme" (whatever that might be) and show an appalling lack of patience/understanding at any little glitch that could prevent a child from being the 'superkid' they want them to be.

just SAY it!

Just say NO

No. One of the shortest, easiest, most used words in the English language. It can also be one of the hardest to utter in any meaningful way – particularly if you are a modern parent. Those who work with children believe that a generation of parents have forgotten how to say no, with the result that as their children grow up they lack the self-control needed to negotiate adult life successfully.

“Children need to have the experience of an adult saying no,” says Jane Cassidy of the Association of Child Psychotherapists and joint chair of the Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist Division of the Tavistock Society. “If you always give in, they don’t learn that somebody can stay firm, so when they become young teenagers and adults they don’t have the capability to say no to themselves when they are under peer pressure in terms of drugs, delinquency or sex.”

The problem, teachers, psychologists and parents agree, is that when it comes to discipline, parents are hopelessly ill-disciplined. They tell their children that they should not do something or cannot have something that they want, but cave in to the child’s protests.

Dr Tanya Byron, clinical psychologist and Times2 columnist, says that dealing with this issue has become “the spine of my clinic. The majority of people I see really can’t say no to their children or can’t set boundaries. They can’t follow through to a consequence after saying ‘no’. Children don’t have a sense of who is in charge so they take charge themselves.”

The effect of parental ineffectiveness is all too obvious in society – nowhere more so than in schools. Earlier this year I spent a week at Banbury School, a comprehensive in Oxfordshire, shadowing the head teacher, Dr Fiona Hammans, a dynamic and nationally respected teacher who has been responsible for the education and wellbeing of thousands of children. She had no doubts about where many of the school’s discipline problems originated.
“You’ve got a generation of parents that does not believe in punishing their kids. They say ‘you’re grounded for a year’. And the kid cries and then they say ‘Oh all right, then!’ A whole lot of parents don’t know how to control their kids. The kids are in charge.”

Hammans certainly does know how to say no, and back it up. But her point was that what she said was far less important than what parents said and did. Hammans even described the extraordinary situation where parents were not attending parent-teacher evenings because “kids don’t want their parents coming up here”.

Jane Cassidy says that much of the rot set in relatively recently with “the whole idea of positive affirmation: trying to say yes, trying to avoid saying “no” to children because of the negativity”. Byron concurs, saying that our collective failure with the no word is a “huge change” from the situation when she first started working in the field 18 years ago. One of the chief reasons for this change, she believes, is that in the hurly-burly of the modern world we don’t want to spend what precious time we have with our children acting tough.

“We are very busy. In a lot of families where there are two parents, both work and they don’t want to come home at night and have to tell the children what to do. Or they are too bloody knackered to follow through with the discipline and so say ‘fine, do that, eat that’.” Food is one of the key battlegrounds. “Children have the most restricted diets because parents seem incapable of not giving in to what children want.” But according to Andrea Clifford-Poston, author of When Harry Hit Sally, by saying no to your children you are helping them to learn “not only that there are boundaries between you and them, but also how to put boundaries around themselves and other people”. Saying no, she explains, helps children to learn who we can say no to, when we can say no, why to say no and when we can stop saying no.

“If your children are going to have a good life, then they need to understand some of the rules about human beings being together,” she writes.
“If your child has learnt in the early years that you are someone who has clear and firm ideas about how you expect them to behave, and mean what you say and say what you mean, but don’t withdraw your love when your child has made a mistake, then you have built a solid foundation for the more complex years to come.”

Byron believes that the increasing isolation of parents is a crucial factor in how control over children has eroded. “Extended families don’t exist in the way that they used to and so many parents lack the wisdom and support of the older generation.” She also believes that parents feel under pressure to be seen to be raising well-behaved kids. “Parents are anxious not to be seen with unhappy children, so they negotiate and cajole in any way possible to avoid tantrums.

“We have forgotten what it is to be children. It is acceptable to have temper tantrums. Young children are supposed to be defiant. It’s in the job description. They are learning the rules of the game. Let them have a tantrum. Eventually they will learn that when you say ‘no’ it means ‘no’.”

Then there is the modern, highly risky need to be friends with our children. I recently received the following e-mail lament from a friend, a mother of two. “Parents have this warped view of parenting,” she wrote. “They don’t really want to be parents. They want to be down with their kids, to be popular with them. That’s why you have these scenarios of parents picking fights with teachers and encouraging children to do the same: the teachers are the enemy, the boring/repressive authority figures. That’s also why you see parents dressing the same as kids. I am forever seeing families in Wagamama, boy and dad in boardshorts, Converse and logo T-shirts, mum and girl in combats, Crocs and logo T-shirts. The thinking has to be: ‘We are too young and with it to be bossy authority figures, aren’t we? Better to be MATES with the kids and listen to the same music and watch Doctor Who together or fight over the PlayStation.’ I am surrounded by people who seem to treat parenting as a popularity contest. The thought of their child disliking them, however briefly, is very frightening.”

Cassidy agrees: “A lot of parents just want their children to like them. There’s nothing wrong with that but a lot of parents seem to think that you can negotiate with children. You can’t negotiate with a two-year-old. They don’t have the cognitive skills we have. Sometimes you have to get to the point where you say ‘because I told you so and I’m daddy and that’s just the way it is’. You can take time to explain but they have to understand that when you say no, you mean no. They need rules and consequences. They have to learn that if dad says no to something and they still do it, something will happen that they won’t like.”

Or as a friend who is a child psychologist likes to put it: “No negotiation with terrorists.” Cassidy says that parents’ behaviour is often confused by their own childhood experiences. “For example, if they hated school and a child expresses concerns about going to school, the parents’ feelings become muddled up in the child’s feelings.” Her basic strategy for parents who have lost control is to focus on what aspect of the behaviour they want most to change. “If they think that everything is going wrong, they need to start with the worst problem. So you might say ‘we are going to stop the hitting’ and state what the consequences will be for the child if they continue. They get a warning, they know what is going to happen and then if it continues, you remove a toy. But it is important that the consequence is something the child cares about.

Parents say ‘I can’t stop him going to football because that’s what he really loves’, but that’s the whole point. It has to make sense, and then you can have a lot of fun with children once you know what the rules are. Children like knowing what the rules are.”
Byron suggests that where many parents go wrong is in their attitude to dealing with unruly behaviour: “It’s not about discipline, it’s about respect. Parents don’t want their kids to hit but they smack them, which I think is bonkers. They don’t want them to shout or scream, but they shout or scream at them. We should be role models.”

Cassidy agrees that actions speak louder than words: “Children don’t necessarily listen to words. You can say ten times ‘I love you’ but if you are not there they don’t feel they are important.”
It may sound funny coming from professionals, but both Byron and Cassidy believe that one of the burdens for parents is that they are presented with too much information. Byron feels this so strongly that her next book on children will be her last. “A lot of parents feel overloaded by information and disempowered,” she says. “We have got to get to a situation where parents feel empowered to do what they want to do. That may be something that an expert says, but you can do whatever you want as long as it works for you.”
Cassidy says that it is unhelpful for parents to think that there is a right or a wrong way of doing things. “I try to talk to parents about what their instinctive sense of parenting is. They need to have a confidence in themselves and their own sense of authority. If there was a totally right way, there would only be one book, there wouldn’t be hundreds and hundreds of books. We are all different.”
These are encouraging words for parents. The ‘yes’ generation should be able to learn to say ‘no’ again. But as any parent knows, it’s not what you say, but the way that you say it. And say it. And say it. And say it .

does your child have an electronic babysitter?

excerpts from a study in The Guardian: TVs and computers breeding generation of 'screen kids'

TVs and computers are the "electronic babysitters" for a generation of children who are losing out on family life and becoming more materialistic, a report says today. The study paints a picture of a breed of "screen kids" who are spending more and more time watching TV and surfing the net in their bedrooms, unsupervised by adults.
[...]

materialistic children were more likely than others to argue with their family, have a lower opinion of their parents and suffer from low self-esteem.
NCC chief executive Ed Mayo said: "Today's children are now 'screen kids'. In some streets, every bedroom has a television for children and many have a computer.
"With many children watching or surfing when they wake up, at breakfast, after school, during dinner and in bed before sleep, we need to ask whether the electronic screen has now become the electronic babysitter."
Children in more deprived areas were most likely to watch commercial television and TV shows made for an older audience. Twice as many children in this group said they "believed" adverts as those in more affluent areas. Youngsters in disadvantaged areas also had greater levels of unsupervised access to television and the internet.
The research also shows that children's TV appears to be losing its appeal to youngsters, who say they are not watching programmes targeted at a younger age group. Fewer than half of all the 12- to 13-year-olds questioned listed any children's programmes in their three favourite shows. And children as young as nine picked out soaps, reality and horror shows among their favourites.

Dr Nairn, a researcher on children and marketing and affiliate professor of marketing at EM-Lyon Business School, told the Guardian: "The effect of so much television viewing and computer usage is that things are replacing people and family relationships are suffering. This is a bad cycle."

***

The Third Parent , a khutbah by Muhammad Al-Shareef also deals with the same issue:

"Abdullah ibn 'Umar radi Allahu anhu once passed by some people killing time by playing chess. He was shocked at this and angrily said to them, quoting the verse of the Qur’an:
'What are these IDOLS that you are standing in vigilance over?'
What would he think if he saw the television set and the welcoming hug it receives in most Muslim homes?

When a Muslim nation plays in the World Cup, over three million Muslims from that one country tune in to television to watch the game. Multiply that by the duration of the match, and you have almost five million hours of the ummah’s time wasted on a football game, in one sweeping night. If Karl Marx said in 1844 that "Religion is the opium of people," then what about TV?

[...]

"Let’s ask ourselves, if we allowed our sons or daughters to put up a poster of their hero, the one whom they think is the 'coolest,' would their hero be their father or mother? Would it be the Prophet or his companions? Or would it be a basketball player that he saw on TV? Or an actor (even a cartoon character) that he saw on TV? Or a model that she saw on TV? Or a musician that he/she saw on TV? Who would it be?

Dear brothers and sisters, we are not here on earth to entertain ourselves to death. We are an ummah with a risaalah (message)!

When Rib’ee ibn 'Aamir radi Allahu anhu stood at the hands of the king of Persia, he announced the message as proudly and as clearly as every Muslim should. "Allah sent us to rescue humanity from slavery to slaves - to the slavery of the Lord of all slaves; and to rescue them from the choke of the material life to the expanse of this life and the next, and from the corruption of the cults to the justice of Islam!"

Allah subhaanahu wa ta ‘aala states in the Qur’an:
Verily! Hearing, sight, and the heart, all will be questioned (by Allah) (Al-Israa 17/36).
And RasulAllah sal Allahu alayhi wa sallam informed us that on the Day of Repayment, no one will move until they are asked about three things, one of which will be their youth and how they spent it.
How are we spending our time? Why do we waste it watching TV? What do our eyes see, what do our ears hear on TV and how is our heart affected by this?

fascinating with a capital N

found this really cool essay 'How the West really lost God' that relates a shrinkage in the size of the family with a corresponding shrinkage in 'religiosity' in the West...*very* interesting...courtesy: Austrolabe

''Why does it matter whether the decay of the natural family has been an unappreciated factor in the decay of religion itself? Because if the argument of this essay is correct — i.e., if people come to religious practice much of the time, or even just some of the time, because of their experience of the natural family rather than vice versa — then a very different verdict about the fate of religiosity in the advanced West suggests itself from the one that has been written by the conventional secularization script.

For there is nothing fixed or inevitable about today’s low birth rates or (bearing in mind that fertility is just one of several measures for the vitality of the family) low marriage rates or, for that matter, notions about the desirability of the natural family itself — in Europe or anywhere else. All these measures of family vitality have fluctuated throughout history, sometimes radically so. Both the low birth rate and the waning of marriage among Roman patricians, for example, were of sufficient concern under the emperor Augustus as to result in the imposition of the family-friendly “Julian laws” (incidentally, pronounced a failure by Tacitus a hundred years later).

During the modern Depression, to take a very different example of flux, the birth rate in the United States was roughly two children per woman; only a historical blink later, in the years of the Baby Boom, it was four. Moreover, even the nations of Western Europe – now home to some of the lowest birth rates on earth — all experienced a baby boom recently enough to be within the living memory of those who are in late middle-age today.

Similarly, one can imagine the personal decisions that go into the social and demographic data changing under any number of scenarios. One potential catalyst is economic. Every advanced Western country faces a coming fiscal and political crisis in its social security system. Default or collapse, somewhere, seems inevitable, with possibly catastrophic reverberations. If and when that happens — if the state can no longer be counted on to help support the elderly — then young men and women might make radically different choices about whom they might prefer to rely on in old age, including the traditional solution of more children. In fact, the intellectual foundations of such a reversal would already appear to be laid in the counter-literature lately issuing from thinkers who have examined the population “bomb” and found it a dud.33

There is also another less tangible but nonetheless real reason why one can imagine a turnaround both in marriage rates and family size.34 The world has not experienced these historically low rates of natural family formation for long — or their attendant problems. Single motherhood, for example, though cheered by feminists a generation ago in the name of “liberation,” is now widely seen for what it really is: an inhumanly difficult task for almost any woman to execute, let alone the poorer and more vulnerable women among whom it has become common. Similarly — though it is politically charged to say so at a time when gay marriage, polygamous marriage, surrogate births and other novel family arrangements are being championed — a generation of social science has established that children do best when they grow up with married, biological parents in the home and that children who do not enjoy that advantage are at higher risk for a large number of problems.35

It is interesting that both marriage rates and childbearing among relatively affluent educated American women now seem to be on the uptick for reasons that have set sociologists quarreling. Maybe learning from the recent past, in particular from the problems that have arisen from other kinds of family structures, is one reason for that change.

And people do learn that way, after all. Consider the example of smoking and how many decades it took to change the global consensus from benign encouragement to widespread opprobrium. That example is a powerful confirmation of the truth that social norms do change in unexpected ways. All kinds of things might affect any individual’s calculation about whether to marry or any couple’s calculation about whether another child or two might be desirable — from sublime considerations like what that might add to their extended family’s happiness to prosaic factors like how many children can fit legally into most cars.

And of course one of the largest of these parental considerations — access to education — is also susceptible to political change. In the United States, where most urban public schools are seen as substandard and undesirable, parents in such areas often make decisions about family size based on what it costs to send children to school elsewhere. Any number of factors — restoration of public education, meaningful tuition tax credits, innovations in home-schooling networks — could affect that calculation in another direction.

For these reasons among others, it seems possible to imagine a sea-change in how some people of the future regard family formation as the consequences of some current trends — which is to say, the negative consequences — continue to reverberate. Such a change would also square with demographic facts of life in America and the rapidly aging rest of the West. It is one thing to be a healthy childless 40-year-old, say, free for all the travel, nightlife, entertainments, and the rest that are off-limits to most 40-year-olds with children. But it is another to be a sick 80-year-old in a nursing home, perhaps with a middle-aged child living in a different city, facing pain, mortality, and the hardest questions of life with strangers in brightly patterned hospital scrubs. The passing from middle to old age of the Baby Boom generation alone seems guaranteed to put these issues front and center in the next few decades.

For the same reason, it is hard to read of doings on the outposts of family shrinkage without feeling as if something precious has been lost, whether for the tens of thousands of nursing-home residents who died in the heat wave in France a few years ago or other stories from the front lines of the global experiments in life with few relatives. In Japan, at the very demographic cutting edge of the shrunken family, pathos appears hand in hand with the overall prosperity: the “renting” of nonfamily members for ceremonial purposes; the stories of villages emptied of all but the very old; the craze for cuddly automated talking dolls among older women who claim to find the companionship in them that earlier generations got from grandchildren. People of the future may well appreciate better than many of us today the particular human joy not only in one’s own offspring, but in their offspring too.

There is plenty of reason for pessimism about what the future holds for religious belief if by “pessimism” one means further decline. Divorce and illegitimacy — to say nothing of maternal surrogacy, polygamy, polyandry, multiple parenthood, and related political experiments involving children that defy the empirical evidence about what’s best for them — all these and other forces are battering the natural family. The more we modern people experiment with it, retooling it to suit our material desires, our political agendas, our busy lives, the more we would appear to risk losing what it is that makes many people religiously inclined in the first place. Nevertheless, in the religious anthropology proposed here — and contrary to that of secularization theory — there is nothing inevitable about the decline of the natural family and thus, by implication, religion too.

Of course all this is meant as a generalization about groups rather than a description fitting any one individual. It is an account of how many people in many places might arguably find themselves inclined for religion or indifferent to it. Hence the obvious if necessary qualifications: Of course, merely having families and children is no guarantee of religious belief; and plenty of bustling hearths have proven home to every vice and sin in the book. Of course also, as the history of clericalism and monasticism shows, many childless single people seem to hear the voice of God without family bonds of their own formation entering the picture; and conversely, surely there are atheists happy with families of more than a child or two. This argument with Nietzsche is not an attempt to explain all cases, or indeed any individual case whatsoever. It is rather an effort to ask what makes a lot of people religious or a-religious a lot of the time.

In sum, we can leave open the possibility that for some people, such as the childless philosopher Nietzsche, religiosity goes out as he described it: in a top-down process hammered out by a tortured soul sitting in a study and then left for intellectual heirs to disseminate. But for many other people, it seems safe to say, this religious anthropology does not describe why things are what they are — and the recent history of Western Europe, in which declines in fertility and family life preceded or ran alongside declines in religious practice, corroborates the point.

marks of insecurity

an insightful article on desis and their compulsion/obsession with 'topping' and 'toppers', written by someone I once personally knew...wish there were many more people like this in the education 'business'
-----------

What we are witnessing is a kind of decadence. The media is only helping construct this decadence. It has little or no understanding of education, focuses on the most sensational and trivial aspects of school life, and is fetishising learning. Unfortunately, it is not just the media. The government, the examining boards, school managements, teachers, and, yes, parents have combined to bring Indian education to this pass.

We think that Indian schools are world-class institutions in the making, that our science and mathematics are the envy of others, and that Indian students are smarter and harder working than anyone else. None of this is true. Indian schools are in a shambles; our science and mathematics teaching are appalling; and our students, while intelligent and diligent, are of the same genetic material as other human beings and, given the burden of our curriculum, are in danger of losing their creativity and energy by the time they "succeed" in school examinations.

[...]

The question is: how can it possibly be interesting educationally that student X got 95.6 per cent and was at the top of an examination list when it is likely that the next person, who never features in the public adulation, got 95.5 per cent? Does anyone seriously think that there can be any difference intellectually and in terms of life chances and attainments based on these infinitesimal differences? Indeed, is there much difference between someone who scored 95 per cent and 89 per cent? Has anyone bothered to track all these "toppers"? Where do they end up on the scales of life—income, professional satisfaction, social status, personal happiness? What do they contribute to the good of society around them?

This is not to denigrate those who have topped. It is to ask what this frenzy of interest is about. It is not about education, whatever else it is about. It is a circus, without a circus master. Each of us helps make this spectacle, though some are more responsible than others.

[...]Why do parents, most of whom did not do particularly well themselves in the board examination in their own day, and who know that school examination results do not count for much in the game of life, become so drunken over the results, losing all sense of proportion?

best loved, most wanted

British parents apparently love Muhammad
LONDON, June 6 (UPI) --
The name Muhammad, in all of its various spellings, has now become the second most popular name in Britain to bestow a baby boy, a report said.
The Times of London reported Wednesday that in 2006, the parents of 5,991 baby boys decided to give their newborn child a name with religious connotations, second only to Jack.
One Warwick University professor said the name, which beat out third-place finisher Thomas for second, was likely due to Muslim families in Britain honoring their religion.
"Muslim parents like to have something that shows a link with their religion or with the Prophet," professor Muhammad Anwar said.
Yet the popularity of the name remains surprising as Muslims currently only represent 3 percent of the nation's overall population.
The newspaper's study found other top finishers in 2006 were Joshua, Oliver, Harry and James.

---------

sweet...subhaanallaah, I know people who've got one son named Muhammad and named another Ahmad in remembrance of the Prophet, صلىالله عليه وسلم

always read the label...

Food additives have once again been linked to hyperactivity in children, and a new study says they could damage cell DNA. So which of the E-numbers are causing the most concern?

from: The Guardian

...experts raising awareness of additives agree that if you want to live an additive-free life, the easiest option is to eat food that is freshly prepared. But if you do buy processed food, it can't hurt to know exactly you are feeding your body.

E211 - sodium benzoate
Professor Piper discovered that E211, commonly found in soft drinks, pickles and sauces to prevent mould growing, could damage DNA. This could cause the same sort of liver damage seen in alcoholics, and is linked to neurological disorders such as Parkinson's disease. Professor Piper's original laboratory research was published in 1999, but he is raising the issue again to highlight the need for modern safety tests. "Many of the tests on these chemicals were done 50 years ago when we simply did not know how to measure this kind of damage," he says. A review by the World Health Organisation in 2000 into sodium benzoate reported a vast number of studies showing people suffered from hives, asthma and anaphylactic shock after exposure to this additive.

E621 - monosodium glutamate
A flavour enhancer often associated with Chinese food, it's also found in canned and frozen foods, and snacks like crisps. A study by Hirosaki University in Japan in 2002 discovered eating a diet high in MSG could damage the retina, leading to loss of vision. Researchers said small amounts in the diet were OK but those with existing retina problems should be careful. The Migraine Trusts also lists MSG as a common migraine trigger and says many sufferers eliminate it from their diets. Last year, Professor Howard and a team of researchers from the University of Liverpool found MSG combined with other additives, such as brilliant blue food colouring, stopped nerve cells growing and disrupted brain-signalling systems.

E951 - aspartame
This controversial additive is 180 times sweeter than sugar and found in many sugar-free foods including soft drinks, cakes and dairy products. A number of reports have cast doubt on its safety and, even 20 years ago, there were concerns over its use. Dr Louis Elsas, a professor of genetics and paediatrics, testified before Congress in the US that aspartame could cause neurological damage in children and raised concerns over the additive passing from pregnant mothers to their unborn child, affecting brain development. However last year the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) confirmed it was safe to use.

E102 - tartrazine
This synthetic food dye gives many foods their bright yellow colouring. The FSA agrees that studies show E102 can cause hives, itchy skin or asthma in susceptible people. It is commonly linked to hyperactivity in children - research by the Hyperactive Children's Support Group in 1987 found that 87% of children who had been diagnosed as hyperactive also had adverse reactions to artificial colourings. A study by the University of Southampton in 2004 also found children consuming additives, including tartrazine, had higher levels of hyperactivity.

E104 - quinoline yellow
Another yellow dye, used to colour medicines, some soft drinks, Scotch eggs and smoked fish, this is banned in the US and Australia for its possible cancer-causing properties. Studies by the US National Toxicology Programme in 1997 found rats fed the colouring had higher rates of liver and kidney tumours. Professor Howard's team found that when E104 was combined with aspartame (many common soft drinks contain them both), the effect on nerve cells was up to seven times greater than when the additives were tested alone. The combined additives were not tested in vast quantities, but at concentrations that mimicked the amount in a child's bloodstream after eating foods containing these colourings. The Aspartame Information Service, which represents the sweetener industry, dismissed the research, saying that it "did not provide any meaningful information" because it exposed mouse cells in the laboratory to undigested aspartame. Quinoline yellow is also being studied in the current University of Southampton trials.

E407 - carrageenan
A gelling agent extracted from seaweed by boiling, carrageenan can be found in ice cream and yoghurts, or as a fat substitute in some meat and soy products. Twenty-five years ago the International Agency for Research on Cancer said there was enough evidence from animal tests to class degraded carrageenan (a form of carrageenan that has been heated to very high temperatures and treated with acid to make it easier to use in other substances) as a potential cancer-causing agent to humans. Degraded carrageenan is not permitted for use in food, but a review of studies into carrageenan and cancer by the University of Iowa in 2001 found the un-degraded additive could become degraded in our digestive system, leading to an increased risk of cancers in the gut. Dr Joanne Tobacman, who conducted the review, said, "The widespread use of carrageenan in the western diet should be reconsidered."

E220 - sulphur dioxide
This preservative is commonly used in beer, wine, soft drinks and dried fruits to stop them fermenting. Asthmatics may suffer an attack after inhaling sulphur dioxide and it has also been linked to stomach upsets. An ongoing review by the WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives confirmed sulphur dioxide could destroy vitamin B1, so having a soft drink with your meal could wipe out its vitamin B1 content. The same review found that animal and lab tests revealed that consuming E220 could increase the amount of calcium lost by the body - raising your risk of the bone-thinning condition osteoporosis - and could cause DNA damage.

E124 - ponceau 4R
This red food colouring is often found in soft drinks, sweets and puddings, and is one of the additives currently being investigated for triggering hyperactivity. E124 has been banned in the US and Norway as a cancer-causing chemical. A study published in Toxicological Sciences in 2001 found there was a connection between the colouring and tumours in animals, but called for more conclusive research to be carried out. A review of food additives carried out by the FSA's committee on toxicity last year found ponceau 4R could have an effect on brain development in young children.

tragic...

Fire Kills Girl Left Alone at Home
Arab News

MAKKAH, 18 May 2007 — A three-year-old girl died and a two-year-old boy was injured in a house fire that broke out in Makkah’s Al-Mansoura district, the daily Al-Madinah reported yesterday. Civil Defense rescuers had to break into a locked room where the brother and sister were found. Investigations revealed that the children were at home alone at the time of the blaze. The mother reportedly locked them in the house and went to visit a neighbor. The cause of the fire was attributed to an air conditioner...
---------

innaa lillaahi wa inna ilayhi raaji'oon...may Allaah have mercy on the little girl and her parents, and guide us to fulfill our trusts as parents with hikmah...and may He never take us to account for our little mistakes ...and may He never burden us with that which we cannot bear. Aameen.

saved ...subhaanallaah!

Saved by a Letter From Mom
Arab News

TAIF, 4 May 2007 — Two Egyptian brothers working as construction workers in this southwestern Saudi city were saved from serious injury or even death thanks to a letter from mom, the daily Al-Jazirah reported yesterday. The workers were high up on scaffolding when they were informed that a letter from home had arrived. They descended to the ground and eagerly ripped open the envelope to get news from home. About a minute later the scaffolding collapsed into a pile of iron bars and wooden planks.

did we talk to our kids today?

serious question: is it a good/bad sign when one frequently finds oneself nodding one's head in agreement with India Knight?

''It's a depressing world when people need to be told to speak with their kids''
Researchers from the London-based Institute of Education studied the way parents interacted with their children and how this affected the way the children grew up. In their report, academics said a home stuffed with toys, books and so on stimulated children up to a point when they were very young, but the effects did not last. Preschool computers and electronic activity boards, which teach toddlers numbers, shapes, colours and language, are among the fastest selling gadgets for young children, but researchers found they were largely unnecessary and said that what children craved above all was personal attention.
(I find these toys weird. Why get a computer to teach your child her alphabet, so that she learns it from a disembodied voice with a US twang?)

Dr Leslie Gutman, the report’s lead author, said: “Toys and books have their place and do help children develop, but what is important is having the parents interact with the child. To have parents read to their children is much more important than having 100 books – that’s great, but if you are not reading to your child, that is not engaging with the child.”

I was reading all of this and thinking, “Well yes, obviously”, but then it occurred to me that it’s not that obvious at all. The middle-class version of parenting was praised in the report, which found that better educated, richer mothers interact better with their children, and called on the government to help less educated, poorer mothers to raise their children “properly”. But I don’t think that this is always true. For a start, middle-class parenting relies heavily on farming the children out, to au pairs or nannies or nurseries, which scores a big fat zero on the parental interaction front.

It also relies, stemming from what is usually a combination of guilt and affluence, on bombarding the child with “educational” toys from those transparently aspirational (and gag-making) Baby Einstein DVDs when they are very small to the aforementioned laptops for toddlers when they are a bit older.

How I wish a toy manufacturer would just produce toys for distinctly average children, which is what most children are, regardless of their parents’ boring, ungrateful ambitions. And how I wish that when you looked around schools, someone would come and club those women who loudly ask what provision there is for “gifted” children, when theirs are not even two yet and from what you can observe are about as “gifted” as my big toe. Still, if you want to get away from them, I can recommend asking loudly about special needs provision; you’ll find they recoil in horror and go and stand as far away from you as they can.

Middle-class mothers tend not to view ordinary life – the shops, the park, the launderette, the cafe – as being sufficiently educational and are likely to raise their children in self-created little ghettos of rarefied so-called excellence, where no day is complete without exposure to Sanskrit, baby yoga or violin (I’m not exaggerating: I know several toddlers who do all three, and then some). They mean well, certainly, but again none of this is particularly impressive on the interaction front, and nor is it likely to help children to develop adequate social skills.

I’d go further and argue that a substantial proportion of middle-class mothers are to all intents and purposes completely detached from their children. There are always a couple of them in the playground near where I live, having given the nanny an hour off, flicking their highlights and chatting on their mobiles from the moment they arrive to the moment they leave, while their child hovers shyly around the edges of the sandpit, or runs around biting other children, or falls off the edge of the tall slide and gets a nosebleed that it takes their mother minutes to notice.

So we should all have a little think before patting ourselves on the back and feeling delighted at being middle-class parents. We may not stuff Turkey Twizzlers down their throats, and I expect it’s true that we read more to our children, which is a good thing, but I have the feeling that it’s also true that we don’t actually hang out with them in the way that non-middle-class parents do, or encourage them to exist in the real world.

We compensate by buying them expensive toys that are pretty much merit-free, or by taking them on expensive holidays when a bit of English beach and a couple of donkeys would probably be much more to their taste. There’s nothing terribly wrong with this – but there’s nothing terribly right about it either. There are all sorts of ways of not talking to your children and of not interacting with them. Talking over them with a fag and a rum and Coke is one way. But sitting them on the sofa with an organic snack and a toddler laptop while you listen to the Today programme is another.

no more baba and baby-log

R-R are discussing something very interesting on 'Sisters in Faith': their most and least favourite domestic duties (I don't want to call it chore b/z it rhymes with the word 'bore').

They were asking me what were my favourite jobs around the house when I was their age, which led to some cringe-inducing confessions...[/censored]

There was a portion of the article that I posted below that really struck me:
''Raising women's self-esteem, as a first step to liberating them from the confines of the home, was one of feminism's earliest and most vital tasks.''

My experience is just the opposite: I've found that one's self-esteem is inextricably linked to how in-control/on top of things one feels around the house... housework constitutes valuable life-skills, it's not just time-wasting techniques ....and I have the research to prove it:

Involving children in household tasks: Is it worth the effort?

Parents of the world, take note: You can make a big difference in your children's future by asking them to take out the trash. And do the laundry, wash the dishes, make the beds, put away the toys
Research by Marty Rossmann, emeritus associate professor of family education, shows that involving children in household tasks at an early age can have a positive impact later in life. By involving children in tasks, parents teach their children a sense of responsibility, competence, self-reliance, and self-worth that stays with them throughout their lives.

What the research shows: Using measures of individual's success such as completion of education, getting started on a career path, IQ, relationships with family and friends, and not using drugs, and examining a child's involvement in household tasks at all three earlier time, Rossmann determined that the best predictor of young adults' success in their mid-20s was that they participated in household tasks when they were three or four. However, if they did not begin participating until they were 15 or 16, the participation backfired and those subjects were less "successful." The assumption is that responsibility learned via household tasks is best when learned young.

How the tasks are presented also influences children's abilities to become well-adjusted adults. The tasks should not be too overwhelming, parents should present the tasks in a way that fits the child's preferred learning style, and children should be involved in determining the tasks they will complete, through family meeting and methods such a weekly chore chart. They should not be made to do the tasks for an allowance. The earlier parents begin getting children to take an active role in the household, the easier it will be to get them involved as teens...

To get back to the topic...my favourite domestic duty is:

because it has a beginning and an end, and at the end one can actually see results.

My least favourite duty is:

because it's never ending...which is why I try and recruit R-R to do it for me!

let them learn!

I liked this article: 'Why a woman's place is in the kitchen'...it traces the history of how the feminist founder-editor of Spare Rib (a woman's magazine) went from insisting women shouldn't waste their time in the kitchen to wondering (now) if they went too far...interesting, anecdotal, insightful read.

excerpts:

Today Britain has the dubious distinction of being the largest consumer of ready meals in Europe - everything from Pot Noodles to sophisticated concoctions such as duck à l'orange and chicken à la king. Not only has home cooking declined, but in many households these pre-assembled dishes are consumed individually, all over the house, when and where family members want. Food - once something that brought adults and children together around the kitchen table - is now yet another way to avoid family life.

[...]

My mother was unusual among her peers in her dislike of things domestic, though in 1956, when Constance Spry published her 1,200-page magnum opus of recipes and cooking tips, she noted: "It is strange how low the subject ranks in the estimation of many academically minded people ... There is still a tendency to consider the subject suitable primarily either for girls who cannot make the grade for a university or for those who intend to become teachers."
My mother, university-educated but frustrated by her subsequent life as a housewife, was clearly one of those who ranked cooking as a lowly pursuit, and she passed her lack of interest (and her attitude) on to me. In my turn, I furthered the belief that cooking was a demeaning pursuit for women who wanted to get on in a man's world.
In 1972, when I was 21, I co-founded Spare Rib magazine with an Australian friend called Marsha Rowe. The newly emerging feminist movement wanted to get women out of the typing pools and away from the kitchen sinks and into the boardrooms of the land. I remember being particularly adamant that the way to get ahead was to refuse to learn to type and to spend as little time as possible in the kitchen. As an early subscription offer for the magazine, we printed a purple dish cloth, which, though tattered and a bit torn, is still in use in our home today. Written on it are the words: "First you sink into his arms, then your arms end up in his sink."

[...]

Indeed, the whole area of housework was a fraught area that women were just starting to examine. We felt that the lack of childcare, and women's inequality in the work place, created an enormous pressure on women to be good housewives, to become psychologically dependent on housework. I well remember some of the early letters that told stories of these "kitchen-sink blues". Housework - unpaid, lowly and trivial - was, in those days, a woman's only job, and in the social pecking order it was right down there at the bottom.
Raising women's self-esteem, as a first step to liberating them from the confines of the home, was one of feminism's earliest and most vital tasks. Much of that was achieved through consciousness-raising groups in which women shared their stories and gained confidence from each other. Just by admitting that their lives were frustrating and often downright miserable, women were able to gain confidence. Cooking, which we all knew could be a creative activity, was all too often very different - because husbands and children demanded meals on tap. The very act of shopping, preparing and serving up food was, for many (like my mother, I suspect), another shackle of a dependent life.
To drive home our point, we frequently analysed adverts that depicted women in "household" roles. One, for a can of Heinz toddler food, showed a woman squashed between her laden kitchen sink and the open door of her washing machine, with the words, "The puddings taste so nice you might forget who you bought them for." What was unwritten was that this was woman's natural home, between the washing machine and the cooking utensils. At her feet, her two children are pulling on the skirts of her apron, sending the powerful message that "Children need their mummy and home. She is the only provider of all their nourishment." The children look as if they are about to have a fight, so a further message goes out to say that if mummy wasn't there, those two would be committing fratricide on each other. On the drying rack are four plates - clearly the man of the house, the fourth member of the nuclear family, is on his way. Heinz was giving us the stereotyped pattern - dad at work, mum at home with the kids, and that was how things should stay.

As it was, food preparation was so entwined with the role of the housewife that we consigned it to the bin of history, alongside the short stories that promised you would "live happily ever after" once he had popped the question.

[...]

By the mid-1970s, more than half of all British households were equipped with the first wave of labour-saving electrical appliances: fridge-freezers, Kenwood mixers, non-stick pans and dishwashers. (Ours was an exception: till the end of her life, my mother always refused to have a dishwasher on the grounds that it was a waste of money. She would often start washing up a meal before everyone had finished eating - a habit that, on occasions, I sadly find myself repeating.) Supermarkets such as Sainsbury's had begun to fulfil the demand for convenience frozen foods, peas, pastry, pies and complete packaged meals.
Liberated from domestic slavery by these modern miracles, women were, in theory, no longer required to devote all their time to household chores. My generation of women wholeheartedly embraced the workplace - which was just as well, since two incomes were certainly better than one when it came to paying for the new technology.
By the 1980s - the decade of the superwoman who could work full time, bring up children, run a home and knock up a mid-week dinner party for eight - about a third of households owned microwaves, the ultimate gadget to minimise cooking time. The writing was on the wall for cookery in British homes.
In 2005, the Guardian analysed the contents of some of Britain's most popular ready meals: Sainsbury's Taste the Difference Luxury Shepherd's Pie, "based on the Ivy restaurant's recipe" and sold to the public as a healthy meal that you could have made at home if you'd only had the time, contained 69 separate ingredients, including a large range of chemical flavourings and preservatives. When I make shepherd's pie, I use just six: mince, onions, tomatoes, potatoes, Worcester sauce and beef stock.
Today, cook books dominate the bestseller lists: most of them are destined to lie, unused, on kitchen shelves. Schools no longer teach cooking per se, just variants on subjects such as home technology, in which teachers explain to children how microwaves heat up food. Meanwhile, sales of ready meals continue to climb hand in hand with teenage obesity. It may be fanciful to lay the blame for this at the feet of the early feminists, but, without a doubt, our struggle to free women from the sheer drudgery of housework was a small link in the chain.

sad stats..

45% of Saudi children suffer physical and psychological abuse
Gulf News

Riyadh: About 45 per cent of Saudi children suffer from some kind of abuse, according to a recent official study.
Psychological abuse is the most common the children suffer constituting 36 per cent, followed by physical abuse 26 per cent, the study said.
The study, conducted by the Anti-crime Centre at the Saudi Ministry of Interior, noted that primary school children are the ones mostly subject to psychological abuse, followed by those in secondary schools and then intermediate school students.
"As many as 36.4 per cent of primary school students were subject to psychological abuse, while 36 per cent in secondary school pupils face this type of abuse and 30 per cent of intermediate school pupils encounter psychological abuse," the study pointed out.
The study said that orphans were most likely to be abused, adding that 70 per cent of orphans in Saudi Arabia have faced at least one kind of abuse. As many as 58 per cent of children of divorced couples are also victims of abuse.

not again!

Hijab row resurfaces at Tae Kwon Do event
AP
Montreal: First soccer, then Tae Kwon Do. A team of mainly Muslim girls had to pull out of a Tae Kwon Do tournament on Sunday because members refused to remove their hijabs.
Tournament organisers told team officials the girls could not compete because the head scarves posed a safety risk.
It is the second ban of hijabs in Quebec sports in recent months, part of a larger debate in the province about accommodations for cultural and religious minorities.
International referee Stephane Menard said the decision was made at a referees' meeting earlier in the day.
"The equipment that is allowed under the world Tae Kwon Do federation rules doesn't include the hijab," Menard said on Sunday. "We applied the rules to the letter."
In February, an 11-year-old Muslim girl from Ontario participating in a soccer tournament in Quebec was pulled from the field after she refused the referee's request to remove her head scarf. The move was supported by soccer associations, citing security concerns.
The Tae Kwon Do team, made up of girls between eight and 12 years old, is affiliated with a Muslim community centre in Montreal. Five of the team's six players wear a hijab but have been allowed to participate in similar tournaments around Quebec.
The Muslim centre's boys club pulled out of the tournament in an act of solidarity.
"I'm very upset," said Bissan Mansour, one of the players. "We made so many efforts and practiced harder than usual to be here."

what's the real cost of eating out?

not meaning to sound alarmist or anything, but sometimes tragedies like these force us to focus on issues that we tend to ignore/brush off as unimportant...innaa lillaahi wa innaa ilayhi raaji'oon..

Eating out is pretty much a way of life now ... it's fast, makes a nice change from predictable home-made fare and is so very convenient that we tend to underplay the health hazards, even to ourselves. I personally know of people who've suffered from mild to acute food poisoning (although none as severe as this) from eating out, even at reputed restaurants...the Ministry of Health here had this entire campaign sometime back on the hazards of eating the ever-popular shwarma, because the combination of undercooked meat and the summer heat is deadly...

just something to keep in mind.. please spare a prayer for the little girl who passed away and her family (her father and sister are still in a critical condition)...stay safe!

no waste, no want; know waste, know want

Recently there was this article in the Arab News on how one man's garbage is another man's gain...where garbage collectors talk about finding all sorts of barely used, valuable articles -- from money to wedding dresses -- dumped in the trash.

The callousness/carelessness with which people squander all sorts of ni'aam (favours) is appalling ...barely touched fast-food meals, juices, shakes and fizzy drinks are routinely dumped in bins or on roadsides, dirty clothes are often thrown in the trash rather than in the laundry basket, at meal-times there's food enough for 10 people at a table for four... at the end of the school term *books* are thrown in the wastepaper basket and Abu-RR recently picked up a pamphlet by Sh. 'Aa'idh al-Qarni from the parking lot that was ironically, on israaf (excess).

I battle (and have battles) over waste in my own house too...in a house full of kids with fluctuating and finicky appetites, I have a kitchen and 'fridge brimming with leftovers, half-eaten biscuits and sandwiches, discarded tumblers of milk and juice, pencils and notebooks ...the list seems endless. Alhamdulillaah for the people at the local chapter of Islamic Relief here: they accept old clothes, sort them out and ship them out to places where they're needed around the world, so that's not much of a worry.

But I do worry about wasting perishables...and as Abu RR often reminds me, I'm responsible and answerable to Allaah for the things that go waste around the house ...it's a scary and uncomfortable thought...

(bad) news from the nursery

Nursery may be harming your child, but don't panic
The Guardian

Dropping baby off at nursery has become a standard part of British family life in the past decade. It is now the most popular form of non-parental childcare in this country, providing almost double the number of places offered by childminders. It is estimated that in England more than 800,000 children up to the age of four are in group-based care for at least some of the time - that's nearly a third of the age group.

But over almost exactly the same period, several studies in different countries into the adverse and long-term impact of group-based care on children have reached strikingly similar conclusions. They make uncomfortable reading for parents. Now it's happened again. In the US, the latest tranche of the world's biggest study into the impact of childcare on subsequent development finds that children who have been in group care such as nurseries in their pre-school years are more likely to be aggressive and disruptive once they reach school, and that this persists to the age of 12.

What is most disturbing about this new research is how enduring these negative effects are proving to be.

The more time over 10 hours a week children spend in group care, the more likely teachers are to report that their behaviour is more difficult at school. Even good quality group care has the same impact. The effect is small but significant, and the research team's concern is not that individuals become "axe murderers or rapists", but to discover the cumulative effect of millions of children being slightly more difficult.

[...]
All the research in recent years has pointed in the same direction. These latest findings from the NICHD, which has been tracking 1,300 children since 1991, are in line with research commissioned by the UK government, which has now followed children from three years to seven years and reached similar conclusions. Last year, child expert Penelope Leach published research with Oxford University indicating that yet again there is something about group-based care that makes a child more disruptive later.

Other aspects of the NICHD study are equally demoralising for advocates of quality nursery care as improving children's educational achievements. By age 12, almost all cognitive and academic advantages of daycare evident in the earlier years at school have levelled out, with one exception - good quality daycare is linked to a bigger vocabulary at 12 years.

Intriguingly, the negative effects of other forms of non-parental childcare perceived at earlier ages disappear as the child grows older, but not those of daycare. There is something unique to group-based childcare. But it's not about the quality of care - the researchers eliminated that possibility. Nor is it about the quality of parenting. It could be the scenario of stressed, tired parents picking up children after work, but the study ruled out quality of parenting too.

There are two possible explanations, but they need more research. First, there could be something about the dynamics of peer pressure among small children; a kind of "push and grab" competitiveness which, if not handled correctly, leads to a higher incidence of aggression throughout childhood. Another possibility is that group-based care is inherently stressful and children's cortisol levels are raised.

There's no need for panic responses. There are clearly trade-offs to be made in any circumstances: the benefit a child may experience from no longer living in poverty if his or her single mother is in work may outweigh any risks of group-based care. It's time for a truce in the intermittent so-called "daycare wars" which have raged on both sides of the Atlantic for more than 20 years, so we can clarify what to do, rather than the research being used as a stick to beat women with.

For example, are there ways to mitigate the negative impacts: better staff-children ratios and smaller groups of children perhaps? Are there ways to increase the provision of non-group-based care, such as child-minders? Can't we increase the ability of parents to afford to take more time off work to share the care in the earliest years?

This subject is emotionally inflamed - it tugs at the heartstrings of even the most confident parent - and the research has frequently been hijacked, for example to get at working mothers. Up to now, the government has argued that improving quality of group care would be enough to counter the research - that is no longer tenable.

hmm..interesting

138 Saudi Students Prep for Higher Studies in India
Mohammed Rasooldeen, Arab News

RIYADH, 22 March 2007 — A group of 138 Saudi students set to leave for higher studies in India...[read the rest of the story here]

on their return, will they too be given the equivalent of 1/3 rd the pay of what 'Western' qualified people are given, regardless of their competence, efficiency and skills? just wondering...