The former Kuwaiti information minister said on the 9/11 anniversary that Muslims should condemn terrorist Osama bin Laden with the same energy they expended on the fatwa against Salman Rushdie:

Tefla said much damage has been caused to Muslims because the world is contrasting Muslims’ tepid approach to bin Laden to their overwhelming response in the 1980s to British author Salman Rushdie and his controversial book “The Satanic Verses.”

Against Rushdie, Tefla wrote, “We rattled and sharpened all of our rhetorical sabers, our religious legal rulings [fatwa], [alerted] our guards, our ports, our airports and our border crossings in order to prevent his entering [our countries] and the distribution of his book, since it does damage to Islam.”…

“Have we earmarked a reward for anyone who kills bin Laden as we did for anyone who kills Rushdie on account of his book?

Around a year ago, it seems that Sukhmani Singh Khalsa, a student and conservative columnist at the University of Tennessee, wrote a column criticising University Issues Committee for being liberal and one sided. (The Issues Committee is the body that invites speakers on to campus)

Upon reading Sukhmani’s column, one of the committee members, Justin Rubenstein, emailed some of the others, saying:

if you see one of those ragheads, shoot him right in the fucking face. [Sukhmani deserves] torture that would put the Spanish Inquisition to shame.

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according to a report on “Population and Development” from India’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, indian adolescents are having sex. often. without birth control.

wait–which indian kids are they talking about? surely not MY virginal cousins who’ve been shoved spitefully in my face for my entire life as paradigms of modest perfection. i kid. okay, i don’t. bitter! party of one!

my shock and scorn aside, i present most of the brief article below:

In the chapter on Adolescent Reproductive Health and Development, the report says: “Sexual relations among adolescents tend to start early, involve multiple partners and often are casual. They are also characterized by lack of contraception or condom use, and occasionally involve coercion and non-consensual experiences.”

The report further says that misconceptions aside, a large number of teenagers don’t even know the correct way of using a condom. “Young people between the ages of 10 and 25 years make up for 50 per cent of new HIV infections,” it concludes chillingly.

Only 59 per cent adolescents know about condoms and 49 per cent about contraceptive pills, the report says. “Instead of asking adolescents not to have sex, we have to give them information on how to protect themselves,” says Anjali Gopalan, director, Naz Foundation India. “Children are not stupid, they will protect themselves if they know how.”

and to think, vinod and i posted within minutes of each other…if young people in india are behaving this way, it’s quite possible that “India is already in first place”. sigh.

I have no way of intelligently commenting about this one –

NEW DELHI (AP) – India has the world’s largest number of HIV-infected people, the head of a top international AIDS-fighting fund said Wednesday, dismissing official figures. “I don’t believe in the official statistics. India is already in first place,” said Richard G.A. Feachem, executive director of the Geneva-based Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Latest U.N. data show the HIV virus has infected 5.6 million people in South Africa and 5.1 million in India. But Feachem said he and many other experts believe India’s actual figure is much higher, surpassing South Africa’s.

Delhi extends its shopping hours from 7 to 11pm to please its consumption-conscious citizens. But no government should restrict shopping hours in the first place. It smacks of the labor protectionism of France and Germany, where shopping hours are inconvenient.

Separately, Delhi has a late-night crime problem:

[T]here are others who think extending shopping hours in a city which remains extremely unsafe for women is an unwise move… “We have decided that women will work till 2000 hours and then the men will take over. We will not force our women to work late… But if we can make arrangements for them to travel late, and they want to work late, we’ll welcome it.”

i’ve often stated (usually for no obvious reason) that little boys in patkas are the most adorable thing ever…but little girls in pigtails are precious too. or are they?

New Delhi, Sep 12.(PTI): The Sikh community has the lowest sex ratio of 893 females per 1000 males well below the national average of 933.

…As regards the disparity of the absolute and relative number of males and female population in the society, expressed in terms of sex ratio or number of females per thousand males, the Hindus recorded 931 and were slightly below the national average whereas sex ratio among Muslim was 936.

my only consolation after such sadness? “my” team is doing just fine:

The sex ratio among the Christian population grew handsomely from 994 in 1991 to 1009 in 2001, it said adding, for the Buddhist and the Jains, the sex ratio remained almost the same as 953 and 950 respectively.

gujarat’s most literate citizens are Jains:

The largely business-oriented community, which has a population of around 5.25 lakh in Gujarat, has a staggering 87.08 per cent literacy. This is much above the total literacy figure of 58.86 per cent in the state.

Among the Jains, 88.59 per cent men and 85.52 per cent women are literate. In comparison, there is 58.16 per cent literacy among Hindus, 61.89 per cent among Muslims, 67.70 per cent among Christians, 74.27 per cent among Sikhs, 55.30 per cent among Buddhists and 61.04 per cent among other faiths

as for hindus, those pesky scheduled castes blew it for ya:

The literacy figure among Hindus is higher than only that of Buddhists, who are largely converts from Dalits. Literacy rate of Hindus is bogged down by the low level of literacy among Scheduled Tribes, who constitute nearly 15 per cent of the Hindu population in the state. For example, the figure in largely tribal Dahod district is barely 36 per cent.

what on earth is wrong with our intelligence? this is disturbing, to type the least:

The US military in Afghanistan has apologised for detaining a BBC World Service reporter and interrogating him at its Bagram air base near Kabul. Kamal Sadat, an Afghan who also worked for Reuters, was taken from his home in eastern Afghanistan by US soldiers late on Wednesday.

…Mr Sadat is a well-known reporter in Afghanistan for the BBC’s Pashto and Dari language services.

Based in the province of Khost near the Afghan-Pakistan border, he has worked for the corporation for almost two years.

…Speaking after his release, the reporter said he was never told where he was.

He said he was kept in a small, windowless cell, blindfolded most of the time and interrogated by an American official about his work.

if this is a “well-known” reporter, why are we behaving like this? oh, right. it’s because we probably don’t have any pashto or dari speakers paying attention to such figures. i’m no expert, (have a field day with that admission in comments, why don’t you) but that seems like poor “strategery”, to me.

if indeed that WAS the case, then honestly, is it THAT hard to ring up the beeb and ask, “yo, is this terrorist a reporter like he says he is? oh, word? all right-y then…our bad.”

it’s fine to be vigilant, but please, do your homework. breaking down someone’s door, displaying menacing behaviour towards their innocent family members and confiscating the tools of their trade…that’s a fine way to treat a journalist who works for the largest press-outfit of our most beleaguered “ally”.