8-Year-Old Gets Divorced. Finally.

The ordeal nightmare for the little eight-year-old Onaiza girl is finally over. Wasn't actually the court which intervened and allowed this child a divorce from her pedophile husband, though. The "arranged marriage" of the child "to a 50-year-old man, who has two other wives, has been annulled in an out-of-court-settlement." A new judge mediated the settlement which "was not without lengthy negotiations between the girl's lawyer and the husband who clung on to the legality of the marriage... when he finally agreed to divorce the child wife." [Yeah. You were looking forward to this marriage, weren't you, you pervert!] Of course the 50-year-old man is not named because no one here would want to cause him any embarrassment, right? He needs to feel deep and utter shame, if you ask me. Oh. And so should this child's father who married her off to a friend to settle a debt of his. Kudos for the little girl's mother who has been fighting for her child since the ordeal began. Hopefully the child has not been damaged, psychologically, to badly from this debacle, and will go on to lead a healthy and normal life, continuing to play with dolls and doing whatever it is that normal little eight-year-old girls do which is NOT get married to a man who is FORTY-TWO YEARS OLDER THAN HER!

Another woman's nightmare is reported here. The culprits - six men in the age range of twenty to thirty - will likely never be punished - for gang-raping a Filipina woman who was abducted off the street - in front of her friend who notified the woman's husband who in turn notified the police. [Why didn't you call the police on your mobile and give them the plate number of the vehicle? If you don't have a mobile - the friend - you are the ONLY one in The Sandbox without one.] "Speaking to the police, the woman described her abductors as in their twenties and thirties... Some members of the gang had addressed each other by name..." Well that will narrow it down substantially, right? With half of the men in this country being named Mohammed and a third of them being named Abdullah, the police should have the case solved lickity-split. Good luck with that.

PCRC. Eight killed. Different accidents.

"Time is right for a smoking ban." Um-hmm. Let us know how that is going to work out. You can't do anything to control the driving situation, here [which by the way, gets worse every single day!], and you are going to try to enforce a smoking ban? In a country where a "no smoking" sign means "light-up, here?" The Middle East is probably the only smoker-friendly left area in the entire world. I don't disagree with what you are trying to do - and I am a smoker. But I think banning smoking in public is going to be close to impossible.