I was told we used to have these things in Somalia. They used to be called "qajac". But they had their own communities and to be honest, people left them to their devices and werent part of the wider community. They certainly didnt shove this to people's faces like they do in these parts of the world. I found out one my best friends in college to be bi. I found it very hard to speak to him afterwards.

No. I will say "Aboowe show me your bank balance only and we will take it from there" Edit: Sometimes I forget I am speaking on a forum and not with my girlfriends!

Anigu waxaa igu filan "Walaalo guur ma rabtaa"

When I was 12, I helped a mom deliver her baby in a hospital where the doctor was away. It was scary and probably scarred for life.

Side with the truth Sky. NO shame in it. I am very well known in my family to be the one that is likely to prosecute her clan/family before any other when they are in the wrong. No shame in it. This way youwill become man of principle.

Cheers Lily. I will get it inshallah. I would like to explore this bit more deeply. Many orientalists put the blame squarely on Wahhabism for this level of corruption. I prefer to think that isnt the case.. or at least not the whole story. What do you think?

Australia breaks up Muslim prison gang By Michael Perry SYDNEY (Reuters) - A group of murderers and rapists who converted to Islam in Australia's Super Max prison has been broken up and its leader moved to another jail as officials feared they were using religion as a cover for a possible escape. The 12 prisoners in Australia's highest-security jail were nicknamed the "Super Max Jihadists", authorities told local media, and had placed pictures of al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden on cell walls, shaved their heads and grown long beards. Authorities said murderer Bassam Hamzy, a devotee of bin Laden, paid the men to convert to Islam in order to form a gang of Muslim prisoners inside the Super Max facility at Goulburn jail, southwest of Sydney. Prison authorities had seen some converts kneel before Hamzy and kiss his hand. Hamzy was taken under tight security to another maximum security jail on Sunday, where he will have only non-contact visits and must speak English during visits and telephone calls. New South Wales Corrective Services Commissioner Ron Woodham vowed on Monday to break up the gang and translators were examining the telephone conversations of the group. "These people have never had any contact or interest in religion before and all of a sudden they're converting to Islam, and Hamzy is the powerbroker or the organiser, as if he's forming a gang," Woodham told Australian radio. Woodham said prisoners had received regular payments of about A$100 (42 pounds), a lot of money inside jail. The payments were organised by Hamzy through his outside contacts. Woodham said he thought some of Hamzy's converts would abandon their new religion now that they were out of contact with the ringleader. "It's nothing to do with religion in their minds. But they play the game, Hamzy's game," he said. New South Wales state Justice Minister John Hatzistergos said prison authorities were not targeting Muslims. "A lot of inmates find religion when they come to prison and in many ways we support that because it might assist them in their rehabilitation," Hatzistergos told reporters on Monday. "Where we draw the line is where that conversion or embracement of religion is just a camouflage for other activity which threatens the good order and security of the system." Australian authorities have in the past split up prisoners fearing they were forming gangs based on ethnicity or crime-related links. Hatzistergos said jail officials were concerned the Muslim gang may have believed Hamzy could orchestrate a jail break. "I don't think the potential for escape came from the Super Max, but you can't rule out what they had in their mind long term," he said, adding the real danger was if the gang members were moved to other prisons with less security. http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=622672007

Why I am not a moderate Muslim By Asma Khalid, Mon Apr 23, 4:00 AM ET Cambridge, England - Last month, three Muslim men were arrested in Britain in connection with the London bombings of July 2005. In light of such situations, a number of non-Muslims and Muslims alike yearn for "moderate," peace-loving Muslims to speak out against the violent acts sometimes perpetrated in the name of Islam. And to avoid association with terrorism, some Muslims adopt a "moderate" label to describe themselves. I am a Muslim who embraces peace. But, if we must attach stereotypical tags, I'd rather be considered "orthodox" than "moderate." "Moderate" implies that Muslims who are more orthodox are somehow backward and violent. And in our current cultural climate, progress and peace are restricted to "moderate" Muslims. To be a "moderate" Muslim is to be a "good," malleable Muslim in the eyes of Western society. I recently attended a debate about Western liberalism and Islam at the University of Cambridge where I'm pursuing my master's degree. I expected debaters on one side to present a bigoted laundry list of complaints against Islam and its alleged incompatibility with liberalism, and they did. But what was more disturbing was that those on the other side, in theory supported the harmony of Islam and Western liberalism, but they based their argument on spurious terms. While these debaters – including a former top government official and a Nobel peace prize winner – were well-intentioned, they in fact wrought more harm than good. Through implied references to moderate Muslims, they offered a simplistic, paternalistic discourse that suggested Muslims would one day catch up with Western civilization. In the aftermath of September 11, much has been said about the need for "moderate Muslims." But to be a "moderate" Muslim also implies that Osama bin Laden and Co. must represent the pinnacle of orthodoxy; that a criterion of orthodox Islam somehow inherently entails violence; and, consequently, that if I espouse peace, I am not adhering to my full religious duties. I refuse to live as a "moderate" Muslim if its side effect is an unintentional admission that suicide bombing is a religious obligation for the orthodox faithful. True orthodoxy is simply the attempt to adhere piously to a religion's tenets. The public relations drive for "moderate Islam" is injurious to the entire international community. It may provisionally ease the pain when so-called Islamic extremists strike. But it really creates deeper wounds that will require thicker bandages because it indirectly labels the entire religion of Islam as violent. The term moderate Muslim is actually a redundancy. In the Islamic tradition, the concept of the "middle way" is central. Muslims believe that Islam is a path of intrinsic moderation, wasatiyya. This concept is the namesake of a British Muslim grass-roots organization, the Radical Middle Way. It is an initiative to counter Islam's violent reputation with factual scholarship. This was demonstrated through a day-long conference that the organization sponsored in February. The best speaker of the night was Abdallah bin Bayyah, an elderly Mauritanian sheikh dressed all in traditional white Arab garb, offset by a long gray beard. The words coming out of the sheikh's mouth – all in Arabic – were remarkably progressive. He confronted inaccurate assumptions about Islam, spoke of tolerance, and told fellow Muslims an un­pleasant truth: "Perhaps much of this current crisis springs from us," he said, kindly admonishing them. He chastised Muslims for inadequately explaining their beliefs, thereby letting other, illiberal voices speak for them. I was shocked by his blunt though nuanced analysis, given his traditional, religious appearance. And then I was troubled by my shock. To what extent had I, a hijabi Muslim woman studying Middle Eastern/Islamic studies, internalized the untruthful representations of my own fellow Muslims? For far too long, I had been fed a false snapshot of what Islamic orthodoxy really means. The sheikh continued, challenging Mr. bin Laden's violent interpretation of jihad, citing Koranic verses and prophetic narrations. He referred to jihad as any "good action" and recounted a recent conversation with a non-Muslim lawyer who asked if electing a respectable official would be considered jihad. The sheikh answered "yes" because voting for someone who supports the truth and upholds justice is a good action. The sheikh, not bin Laden, is a depiction of true Islamic orthodoxy. The sheikh, not bin Laden, is the man trained in Islamic jurisprudence. The sheikh, not bin Laden, is the authentic religious scholar. But to call him a moderate Muslim would be a misnomer. • Asma Khalid is pursuing her master's degree in Middle Eastern/Islamic studies at the University of Cambridge in England. http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20070423/cm_csm/ykhalid

Why do you feel compelled Sky?

Is there anywhere dagaal oo ka dhaceyn in Somalia? I do despair for these poor people. Anyone who recalls qaxi would feel for the people.

^^ So you were born there? People who go back love the place cos of its Islamic links. MY uncle whose lived Jeddah for 30years has moved to UK few weeks ago. Now he insists of taking his Home Office letters in his pocket when he is out and about. Every few seconds he checks his back pocket to see if he still has his 'sharci'!

^^ aah How romantic!

^^ Better ask him..how many sheesha joints are there Northner..I have never been to Saudi and yet I am so fascinated by them. I'd hate to generalise but Saudis I met werent very nice and they thought they had more right to Islam than an African or a convert. Long story!

Ngonge Arabs never run a show in the west. See France and America, most muslims are Arabs. They are pretty much toothless. They easily assimilate to the indegenious, Wether they are accepted or not, it is another story. Compare this to the Asians in the UK.

^^ I wish you'd come out and say it instead of hiding behind words. In your mind, does Arab culture=Islam?

He mentiond Hiz-Tahrir alot - and seems to suggest they were responsible for 7/7. He also seems to link H-T and Wahabism. How does he know they were responsible for 7/7 if that is what he is implying? Im curious - I didn't know about that. Does he know their motives and rules?? Im confused as to he mentions them so much when he seems to have no proof or offer no explanation Its quite misleading. I'd be interested to know more about this author.

How a British jihadi saw the light From The Sunday TimesApril 21, 2007 Ed Hussain, once a proponent of radical Islam in London, tells how his time as a teacher in Saudi Arabia led him to turn against extremism During our first two months in Jeddah, Faye and I relished our new and luxurious lifestyle: a shiny jeep, two swimming pools, domestic help, and a tax-free salary. The luxury of living in a modern city with a developed infrastructure cocooned me from the frightful reality of life in Saudi Arabia. My goatee beard and good Arabic ensured that I could pass for an Arab. But looking like a young Saudi was not enough: I had to act Saudi, be Saudi. And here I failed. My first clash with Saudi culture came when, being driven around in a bulletproof jeep, I saw African women in black abayas tending to the rubbish bins outside restaurants, residences and other busy places. “Why are there so many black cleaners on the streets?” I asked the driver. The driver laughed. “They’re not cleaners. They are scavengers; women who collect cardboard from all across Jeddah and then sell it. They also collect bottles, drink cans, bags.” “You don’t find it objectionable that poor immigrant women work in such undignified and unhygienic conditions on the streets?” “Believe me, there are worse jobs women can do.” Though it grieves me to admit it, the driver was right. In Saudi Arabia women indeed did do worse jobs. Many of the African women lived in an area of Jeddah known as Karantina, a slum full of poverty, prostitution and disease. A visit to Karantina, a perversion of the term “quarantine”, was one of the worst of my life. Thousands of people who had been living in Saudi Arabia for decades, but without passports, had been deemed “illegal” by the government and, quite literally, abandoned under a flyover. A non-Saudi black student I had met at the British Council accompanied me. “Last week a woman gave birth here,” he said, pointing to a ramshackle cardboard shanty. Disturbed, I now realised that the materials I had seen those women carrying were not always for sale but for shelter. I had never expected to see such naked poverty in Saudi Arabia. At that moment it dawned on me that Britain, my home, had given refuge to thousands of black Africans from Somalia and Sudan: I had seen them in their droves in Whitechapel. They prayed, had their own mosques, were free and were given government housing. Many Muslims enjoyed a better lifestyle in non-Muslim Britain than they did in Muslim Saudi Arabia. At that moment I longed to be home again. All my talk of ummah seemed so juvenile now. It was only in the comfort of Britain that Islamists could come out with such radical utopian slogans as one government, one ever expanding country, for one Muslim nation. The racist reality of the Arab psyche would never accept black and white people as equal. Standing in Karantina that day, I reminisced and marvelled over what I previously considered as wrong: mixed-race, mixed-religion marriages. The students to whom I described life in modern multi-ethnic Britain could not comprehend that such a world of freedom, away from “normal” Saudi racism, could exist. Racism was an integral part of Saudi society. My students often used the word “nigger” to describe black people. Even dark-skinned Arabs were considered inferior to their lighter-skinned cousins. I was living in the world’s most avowedly Muslim country, yet I found it anything but. I was appalled by the imposition of Wahhabism in the public realm, something I had implicitly sought as an Islamist. Part of this local culture consisted of public institutions being segregated and women banned from driving on the grounds that it would give rise to “licentiousness”. I was repeatedly astounded at the stares Faye got from Saudi men and I from Saudi women. Faye was not immodest in her dress. Out of respect for local custom, she wore the long black abaya and covered her hair in a black scarf. In all the years I had known my wife, never had I seen her appear so dull. Yet on two occasions she was accosted by passing Saudi youths from their cars. On another occasion a man pulled up beside our car and offered her his phone number. In supermarkets I only had to be away from Faye for five minutes and Saudi men would hiss or whisper obscenities as they walked past. When Faye discussed her experiences with local women at the British Council they said: “Welcome to Saudi Arabia.” After a month in Jeddah I heard from an Asian taxi driver about a Filipino worker who had brought his new bride to live with him in Jeddah. After visiting the Balad shopping district the couple caught a taxi home. Some way through their journey the Saudi driver complained that the car was not working properly and perhaps the man could help push it. The passenger obliged. Within seconds the Saudi driver had sped off with the man’s wife in his car and, months later, there was still no clue as to her whereabouts. We had heard stories of the abduction of women from taxis by sex-deprived Saudi youths. At a Saudi friend’s wedding at a luxurious hotel in Jeddah, women dared not step out of their hotel rooms and walk to the banqueting hall for fear of abduction by the bodyguards of a Saudi prince who also happened to be staying there. Why had the veil and segregation not prevented such behaviour? My Saudi acquaintances, many of them university graduates, argued strongly that, on the contrary, it was the veil and other social norms that were responsible for such widespread sexual frustration among Saudi youth. At work the British Council introduced free internet access for educational purposes. Within days the students had downloaded the most obscene pornography from sites banned in Saudi Arabia, but easily accessed via the British Council’s satellite connection. Segregation of the sexes, made worse by the veil, had spawned a culture of pent-up sexual frustration that expressed itself in the unhealthiest ways. Using Bluetooth technology on mobile phones, strangers sent pornographic clips to one another. Many of the clips were recordings of homosexual acts between Saudis and many featured young Saudis in orgies in Lebanon and Egypt. The obsession with sex in Saudi Arabia had reached worrying levels: rape and abuse of both sexes occurred frequently, some cases even reaching the usually censored national press. My students told me about the day in March 2002 when the Muttawa [the religious police] had forbidden firefighters in Mecca from entering a blazing school building because the girls inside were not wearing veils. Consequently 15 young women burnt to death, but Wahhabism held its head high, claiming that God’s law had been maintained. As a young Islamist, I organised events at college and in the local community that were strictly segregated and I believed in it. Living in Saudi Arabia, I could see the logical outcome of such segregation. In my Islamist days we relished stating that Aids and other sexually transmitted diseases were the result of the moral degeneracy of the West. Large numbers of Islamists in Britain hounded prostitutes in Brick Lane and flippantly quoted divorce and abortion rates in Britain. The implication was that Muslim morality was superior. Now, more than ever, I was convinced that this too was Islamist propaganda, designed to undermine the West and inject false confidence in Muslim minds. I worried whether my observations were idiosyncratic, the musings of a wandering mind. I discussed my troubles with other British Muslims working at the British Council. Jamal, who was of a Wahhabi bent, fully agreed with what I observed and went further. “Ed, my wife wore the veil back home in Britain and even there she did not get as many stares as she gets when we go out here.” Another British Muslim had gone as far as tinting his car windows black in order to prevent young Saudis gaping at his wife. The problems of Saudi Arabia were not limited to racism and sexual frustration. In contemporary Wahhabism there are two broad factions. One is publicly supportive of the House of Saud, and will endorse any policy decision reached by the Saudi government and provide scriptural justification for it. The second believes that the House of Saud should be forcibly removed and the Wahhabi clerics take charge. Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda are from the second school. In Mecca, Medina and Jeddah I met young men with angry faces from Europe, students at various Wahhabi seminaries. They reminded me of my extremist days. They were candid in discussing their frustrations with Saudi Arabia. The country was not sufficiently Islamic; it had strayed from the teachings of Wahhabism. They were firmly on the side of the monarchy and the clerics who supported it. Soon they were to return to the West, well versed in Arabic, fully indoctrinated by Wahhabism, to become imams in British mosques. By the summer of 2005 Faye and I had only eight weeks left in Saudi Arabia before we would return home to London. Thursday, July 7, was the beginning of the Saudi weekend. Faye and I were due to lunch with Sultan, a Saudi banker who was financial adviser to four government ministers. I wanted to gauge what he and his wife, Faye’s student, thought about life inside the land of their birth. On television that morning we watched the developing story of a power cut on the London Underground. As the cameras focused on King’s Cross, Edgware Road, Aldgate and Russell Square, I looked on with a mixture of interest and homesickness. Soon the power-cut story turned into shell-shocked reportage of a series of terrorist bombings. My initial suspicion was that the perpetrators were Saudis. My experience of them, their virulence towards my non-Muslim friends, their hate-filled textbooks, made me think that Bin Laden’s Saudi soldiers had now targeted my home town. It never crossed my mind that the rhetoric of jihad introduced to Britain by Hizb ut-Tahrir could have anything to do with such horror. My sister avoided the suicide attack on Aldgate station by four minutes. On the previous day London had won the Olympic bid. At the British Council we had celebrated along with the nation that was now in mourning. The G8 summit in Scotland had also been derailed by events further south. The summit, thanks largely to the combined efforts of Tony Blair and Bob Geldof, had been set to tackle poverty in Africa. Now it was forced to address Islamist terrorism; Arab grievances had hijacked the agenda again. The fact that hundreds of children die in Africa every day would be of no relevance to a committed Islamist. In the extremist mind the plight of the tiny Palestinian nation is more important than the deaths of millions of black Africans. Let them die, they’re not Muslims, would be the unspoken line of argument. As an Islamist it was only the suffering of Muslims that had moved me. Now human suffering mattered to me, regardless of religion. Faye and I were glued to the television for hours. Watching fellow Londoners come out of Tube stations injured and mortified, but facing the world with a defiant sense of dignity, made me feel proud to be British. We met Sultan and his wife at an Indian restaurant near the British Council. Sultan was in his early thirties and his wife in her late twenties. They had travelled widely and seemed much more liberal than most Saudis I had met. Behind a makeshift partition, the restaurant surroundings were considered private and his wife, to my amazement, removed her veil. We discussed our travels. Sultan spoke fondly of his time in London, particularly his placement at Coutts as a trainee banker. We then moved on to the subject uppermost in my mind, the terrorist attacks on London. My host did not really seem to care. He expressed no real sympathy or shock, despite speaking so warmly of his time in London. “I suppose they will say Bin Laden was behind the attacks. They blamed us for 9/11,” he said. Keen to take him up on his comment, I asked him: “Based on your education in Saudi Arabian schools, do you think there is a connection between the form of Islam children are taught here and the action of 15 Saudi men on September 11?” Without thinking, his immediate response was, ‘No. No, because Saudis were not behind 9/11. The plane hijackers were not Saudi men. One thousand two hundred and forty-six Jews were absent from work on that day and there is the proof that they, the Jews, were behind the killings. Not Saudis.” It was the first time I heard so precise a number of Jewish absentees. I sat there pondering on the pan-Arab denial of the truth, a refusal to accept that the Wahhabi jihadi terrorism festering in their midst had inflicted calamities on the entire world. In my class the following Sunday, the beginning of the Saudi working week, were nearly 60 Saudis. Only one mentioned the London bombings. “Was your family harmed?” he asked. “My sister missed an explosion by four minutes but otherwise they’re all fine, thank you.” The student, before a full class, sighed and said: “There are no benefits in terrorism. Why do people kill innocents?” Two others quickly gave him his answer in Arabic: “There are benefits. They will feel how we feel.” I was livid. “Excuse me?” I said. “Who will know how it feels?” “We don’t mean you, teacher,” said one. “We are talking about people in England. You are here. They need to know how Iraqis and Palestinians feel.” “The British people have been bombed by the IRA for years,” I retorted. “Londoners were bombed by Hitler during the blitz. The largest demonstrations against the war in Iraq were in London. People in Britain don’t need to be taught what it feels like to be bombed.” Several students nodded in agreement. The argumentative ones became quiet. Were they convinced by what I had said? It was difficult to tell. Two weeks after the terrorist attacks in London another Saudi student raised his hand and asked: “Teacher, how can I go to London?” “Much depends on your reason for going to Britain. Do you want to study or just be a tourist?” “Teacher, I want to go London next month. I want bomb, big bomb in London, again. I want make jihad!” “What?” I exclaimed. Another student raised both hands and shouted: “Me too! Me too!” Other students applauded those who had just articulated what many of them were thinking. I was incandescent. In protest I walked out of the classroom to a chorus of jeering and catcalls. My time in Saudi Arabia bolstered my conviction that an austere form of Islam (Wahhabism) married to a politicised Islam (Islamism) is wreaking havoc in the world. This anger-ridden ideology, an ideology I once advocated, is not only a threat to Islam and Muslims, but to the entire civilised world. I vowed, in my own limited way, to fight those who had hijacked my faith, defamed my prophet and killed thousands of my own people: the human race. I was encouraged when Tony Blair announced on August 5, 2005, plans to proscribe an array of Islamist organisations that operated in Britain, foremost among them Hizb ut-Tahrir. At the time I was impressed by Blair’s resolve. The Hizb should have been outlawed a decade ago and so spared many of us so much misery. Sadly the legislation was shelved last year amid fears that a ban would only add to the group’s attraction, so it remains both legal and active today. But it is not too late. © Ed Husain 2007 Extracted from The Islamist, to be published by Penguin on May 3. http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/book_extracts/article1685726.ece

Being Gay was illegal just 30 years ago in the UK, now let us imagine what is illegal now which could be legal for another 30yrs? Incest? Peadophilia? Where is the limit?

Does that include the religion peacenow? DOyou see at as arab-exported religion who shouldnt have its place with our people? Somali gay do exist, I admit that. But it is sin..regardless of what way you look at it. Everyone should be free to do what they like but it doesnt a sin halaal. Besides it is very unnatural and I dont think God made these people gay. It is their lifestyle choice.

U.S. market is losing its appeal for China By Keith Bradsher Published: April 17, 2007 GUANGZHOU, China: At booth after booth at China's main trade fair this week, the refrain from Chinese business executives is the same: the American market is still important, but not as crucial as it used to be. Chinese producers of everything from socket wrenches to sport utility vehicles say that their fastest growth these days lies in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, South America and elsewhere in Asia. In other words, practically anywhere other than the United States. Chinese business representatives attending the Canton Fair here are discouraged by the steady decline of the dollar against China's currency, which makes it more expensive for U.S. consumers to buy Chinese products. They also point to weaker growth in the U.S. economy and rising U.S. protectionism. "The U.S. government is still trying to protect its own markets, unlike Europe, which is very free," said Huang Yasong, the international sales manager for the Hubao Group, a manufacturer of men's shirts that is rapidly expanding sales to Eastern Europe, Russia and Brazil. The strength of the euro propelled China's exports to the European Union market past its exports to the United States for the first time in February. Hangzhou Jilin Machinery, which makes screwdrivers and other tools, has seen its American sales stay flat, while sales to Africa, Europe, the Middle East and especially Australia are rising. Zhao Wei, the company's sales manager, puts much of the blame on the fall of the dollar; the Chinese government raised the value of the yuan by 2.1 percent against the dollar in July 2005, and has let it drift up by an additional 5 percent since then. "It's a big problem," Zhao said. To be sure, China's exports to the United States are extremely large. They are also still growing and becoming more and more the focus of attention for many Democrats in the U.S. Congress, making it likely that Chinese-American trade friction will persist and possibly worsen in the months ahead. China surpassed Canada in the first two months of this year as the largest exporter to the United States. According to statistics released by the World Trade Organization last Thursday, China also overtook the United States in the second half of last year to become the world's second-largest exporter over all, after Germany. China is still nearly 25 times as dependent on exports to the United States for its overall economic output as the United States is on exports to China. Given that the Chinese economy is less than a quarter of the size of the U.S. economy, it is all the more striking that Chinese exports to the United States are worth more than six times as much as American exports to China. But the government and companies across China increasingly see the danger of becoming too dependent on a single market. So they are stepping up their efforts to sell to other countries as well, particularly those outside the industrialized world. Great Wall Motor, a maker of sport utility vehicles and sedans, has more than quintupled exports in two years, to 27,505 last year. Much of that growth has come from fast-growing, oil-rich markets like Russia and the Middle East. "Europe and North America are not our primary markets," said Wei Jianjun, the company's chairman. Frank Lavin, the U.S. under secretary of commerce for international trade, said, "China has been making more of an effort in recent years to diversify its export markets." He noted that China's share of all American imports is still climbing, but at a slowing rate. China also has moved beyond just making huge volumes of T-shirts and toys for affluent Western consumers. It now makes a huge range of industrial goods and transportation gear, from industrial weaving machines to heavy-duty trucks. It exports them in rapidly growing quantities to developing countries, many of which are profiting from soaring world commodity prices and often need the rough-and-ready durability of Chinese products. China also ships a growing proportion of its goods to Southern Europe. Sales are especially strong to Spain and Italy, where buyers are often less affluent than in Northern Europe. The shift in Chinese exports away from the United States has been under way for several years. But the trend has accelerated in the past year and particularly in the first two months of this year as the dollar has weakened against the yuan, along with other major currencies. At the same time, the strength in the euro and other currencies have made Chinese goods less expensive. China sent more than 31 percent of its exports to the United States in 2000, but that dropped below 24 percent in November and hit 22.7 percent in February, according to a tabulation by Goldman Sachs that includes Chinese goods transshipped through Hong Kong. Exports to the rest of Asia have leveled off, while exports to the European Union have risen slightly with a shift in favor of Southern and Eastern Europe. Exports to the rest of the world, notably India, Brazil and Russia, have doubled in the past seven years, to 32 percent this winter. "Right now, the prices we can get from Russia are a lot higher," said Sean Zhu, the vice general manager of Ningbo Guotai Knitwear, which makes knit shirts. Wang Tongsan, a senior Chinese economic forecaster and member of the committee overseeing implementation of the current five-year plan, said that the Chinese government did not have a policy of pushing exporters to focus on markets other than the United States. He attributed the rise in sales to developing countries to the strong entrepreneurial talents of many Chinese. Several Chinese exporters at the fair said they had not been told by China's Ministry of Commerce to reduce their dependence on the U.S. market. But government-run trade associations have become more active in helping companies attend trade fairs in Europe and the developing world, they said. Chinese officials are acutely conscious of the risks of rising U.S. trade barriers. The Bush administration opened the door on March 30 to requests by U.S. industries that contend their Chinese competitors receive subsidies. The administration filed two complaints with the World Trade Organization last week alleging that China tolerates widespread abuses of copyrights and trademarks. Chinese officials are expected to go on another buying trip to the United States before next month's round of meetings in Washington to discuss bilateral economic policy. By wrapping together a lot of separate purchase agreements in a few heavily promoted announcements, Chinese officials could portray the United States as needing the Chinese market. To underline China's desire to increase imports, the legal name of the Canton Fair has been changed starting this week to add imports to the name. It is now officially the China Import and Export Fair, although the organizers and attendees continue to call it the Canton Fair; Canton was the British name for Guangzhou. Still, old habits die hard. Foreign companies were invited to show their wares, but were relegated to the remote top floor of just one of the more than 30 halls that the trade fair fills at the city's two convention halls. Only 18 American companies attended, most of them little-known companies with small booths. One of the few publicly traded companies was Columbus McKinnon of Amherst, New York, selling U.S.-made electric chain hoists. Zhang Qing, the company's China national sales manager, said that even with the weakening dollar, Columbus McKinnon focuses on selling top-quality hoists instead of trying to compete just on price with local manufacturers. But on a more heavily traveled ground-floor corridor, executives like Henry Hu, the general manager of Ningbo Rightool Industrial I/E, said that companies were responding to the dollar's weakness by improving their products. That could make them even more formidable competitors in the long run. "Everyone is worried, but we focus on increasing the quality of our products," said Hu, whose business makes socket wrench sets. "The government is encouraging us not just to manufacture but to do more research and development." http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/17/business/trade.php?page=1

A new points-based system aimed at restricting immigration to the UK to those with skills in demand will start in the new year, it has been confirmed. Immigration minister Liam Byrne unveiled the timetable on a visit to Australia, which uses a similar system. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6566453.stm Only one question for me, how will they implement the policy? It's all very well and good announcing a policy like that but there's a week or two until the actual policy pamphlet is published so I'm going to hedge my bets on how "restricted" it will be. According to my understanding the UK is already tied into a policy on movement of labour within the EU: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3513889.stm Which would mean that you'd be left with a slightly absurd situation where they'd be entitled to work in the UK but not reside, a situation which I'd wager wouldn't stand up to much of a challenge in the courts. So such a policy could only apply to those coming from outside the EU in the longer term. I also wonder how it would effect our people?

EU aims to criminalise Holocaust denial Laws that make denying or trivialising the Holocaust a criminal offence punishable by jail sentences will be introduced across the European Union, according to a proposal expecting to win backing from ministers Thursday. Offenders will face up to three years in jail under the proposed legislation, which will also apply to inciting violence against ethnic, religious or national groups. Diplomats in Brussels voiced confidence on Tuesday that the controversial plan, which has been the subject of heated debate for six years, will be endorsed by member states. However, the Baltic countries and Poland are still holding out for an inclusion of “Stalinist crimes” alongside the Holocaust in the text – a move that is being resisted by the majority of other EU countries. The latest draft, seen by the Financial Times, will make it mandatory for all Union member states to punish public incitement “to violence or hatred directed against a group of persons or a member of such a group defined by reference to race, colour, religion, descent or national or ethnic origin”. They will also have to criminalise “publicly condoning, denying or grossly trivialising crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes” when such statements incite hatred or violence against minorities. Diplomats stressed the provision had been carefully worded to include only denial of the Holocaust – the Nazi mass murder of Jews during the second world war – and the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. They also stressed that the wording was designed to avoid criminalising comical plays or films about the Holocaust such as the Italian comedian Roberto Benigni’s prize-winning Life is Beautiful . The text expressly upholds countries’ constitutional traditions relating to the freedom of expression. Holocaust denial is already a criminal offence in several European countries, including Germany and Austria. It is not a specific crime in Britain, though UK officials said it could already be tackled under existing legislation. In an attempt to assuage Turkish fears, several EU diplomats said the provisions would not penalise the denial of mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman troops in the aftermath of the 1915 collapse of the Ottoman empire. Turkey strongly rejects claims that this episode amounted to genocide. The proposal draws what is likely to be a controversial distinction between inciting violence against racial or ethnic groups and against religious groups. Attacks against Muslims, Jews or other faiths will only be penalised if they go on to incite violence against ethnic or racial groups, the draft text states. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/122134be-ed14-11db-9520-000b5df10621.html

What if Reer Burco decided to self-govern and becomes seprate from the rest of SL just cos they want to? There is a relative peace in Puntland as well but they are still part of Somalia. Personally..for now I would like SL to self-govern whilst the South is sorting itself out. AFter that, Somalia should become united.

Soo dhowoow. Minanka minankaa

Maxaa isku keeni kara? Every elder may want his kinsman to be a leader..the leader wants his cousin to be close by for nice little earner etc etc.. Can 2 somali in a room agree on something?