Social Slave

Just read this bit of news that Alshaya partnered with Kidzania in April to develop and manage a 5000m² KidZania State at The Avenues. It is supposed to open next year in Phase 3 of the mall. For those who don’t know, KidZania is a Mexican chain of family entertainment centers themed as a child-sized replica of a real city with streets, buildings and even an airport where kids play at being adults and work in branded activities like bottling Coca-Cola, working in a Crest-sponsored dentist office, working at a McDonalds restaurant or manufacturing biscuits at the Britannia factory and earn KidZos currency while performing the tasks, and the money is kept in the KidZania bank for children to spend at the gift shop and on non-free KidZania activities.

Check out the KidZania City Map at the Dubai Mall.

Sounds like fun, too bad it’s only for kids. Why didn’t we have all this when we were little?

Recently my aunt and brother in law had been told by the doctors that they have a Vitamin D deficiency and I was really surprised that in a country like Kuwait with a long and blazing summer, it’s highly ironic for its residents to have an astonishingly high rate of Vitamin D deficiency.

And I just read it in Kuwait Times that during a recent medical conference held in Kuwait they presented research about the Vitamin D and calcium deficiency in Kuwait.

With all this sun and plenty of Calcium and Vitamin D enriched foodstuff widely available in Kuwait, how is this possible?

Read the full article [Here]

Magnolia Bakery will soon be opening stores in Kuwait and Qatar next year. They had opened their first overseas outlet in Bloomingdales Dubai last year and now they’re planning to expand worldwide and open stores in 80 countries within the next five years. Magnolia Bakery is the New York based cupcake maker that was made famous by the Sex and the City TV series.

I read this in the news two days ago and laughed it off but turns out Salwa Al-Mutairi is making the headlines around the world with her outrageous suggestion to legalize sex slavery to “protect the decent, devout and ‘virile’ Kuwaiti men from adultery and fear of being seduced or tempted into immoral behavior by the beauty of their female servants”.

She went all the way to get an Islamic ruling from the Saudi muftis and recommended to buy Russian captives in Chechnya and open sex trade offices just like how recruitment agencies provide housemaids.

This is just outright hilarious. Read it all [Here].

This probably doesn’t come as a big surprise but according to the 11th annual Global Wealth report recently released by the Boston Consulting Group, “three of the six densest millionaire populations in 2010 were in the Middle East – in Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.”

The report also published figures on the countries with the highest number of ultra-high-net-worth (UHNW) households, defined as those with more than $100 million in assets under management. In the Middle East, Saudi Arabia had the highest concentration of UHNW households measured per 100,000 households at 18, followed by Kuwait at 8, Qatar (6) and the UAE (5).

The wealthy households in the gulf countries also controlled a majority of wealth with Saudi households controlling 81% of private wealth in the country followed by Kuwaiti households with 68%, Qatar 65% and the UAE 63%. For the Middle East as a whole, the study observed that women controlled about $500 billion or 22% of the private wealth in the region.

The growth of wealth in the MENA region was somewhat above the global average at 8.6%.

Read the full report [Here].

I was just checking out the Arab Times online and saw pictures of the Amir, Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmed Al-Jaber Al-Sabah, at his Al-Sabahiya Palace in London. I don’t remember ever seeing him dressed in a suit before and I think he looked quite smart. Besides, he recently got discharged from The Lister Hospital in London after going through a successful routine health checkup and will be turning 82 next month.

I just got an email from Aramex that their US address for Shop and Ship has changed. They have already updated all the accounts at Shop and Ship but the worst part is that we will have to change our address at all the websites we use, before 1st July 2011.

Well atleast they will automatically forward the orders anyone has already placed using the old address.

Here is the new US address:

Your Name
SNS Account # (remains the same)
182-21 150th Avenue
Springfield Gardens, NY 11413
Telephone: 718-553-8740

[Link]

May 31st is World No Tobacco Day (WNTD). It was created by the member states of the World Health Organization (WHO) in 1987 and is observed around the world every year on May 31st to encourage a 24-hour abstinence from all forms of tobacco across the globe and draw attention to the negative health effects which leads to deaths worldwide.

Here is a look at Kuwait’s ‘smoking’ figures according to the Ministry of Health:

• 3% of Kuwait’s population are smokers
• An average of 2,330 cigarettes are consumed by a regular smoker each year in Kuwait
• KD 72 million is spent annually on smoking in Kuwait

But as per the Kuwait Society for Preventing Smoking and Cancer (KSSCP), the good news is that around 35% of smokers had quit in 2010 and the MOH is also working hard to combat this habit and its consequences.

In my previous post I had written how Smoke the Iraqi donkey was facing a custody battle and a transportation issue to get him back to retired Col. John Folsom in US whose unit had adopted the animal as its mascot during a deployment to Iraq back in 2008.

Well Smoke finally arrived in the US last week and he is very happy munching away at the green grass and gazing out over the lush hills of Virginia. He will be going on a publicity tour for interview rounds at several national televisions in New York today and then he will be starting his new job in Omaha later in the week providing comfort to veterans at Take Flight Farms.

[Here] is for the official site of Smoke the Donkey where Col. Folsom has written a Tail (shouldn’t it be Tale? or maybe that’s intentional?) of One Donkey’s Journey, which is yet to be continued.

A 23 year old New Yorker, Maurice Harary, saw his business opportunity as soon as he heard that bin Laden was killed by US forces in Pakistan. He immediately created the website Osamadeadtees.com to sell his “Osama’s dead” t-shirts. His site was up and running at 3:30am on Monday and sold 10,000 t-shirts at $12 each by Tuesday night which adds up to $120,000 in less than two days.

That’s not it. He then had a change of heart and decided he wanted to refund the money he made.

“I will now be refunding all orders on Osama dead tees”, Harary says. “Celebrating over the death of someone, whoever it is, is evil in my eyes. I feel it’s not a positive way to be making money. I don’t want my success to come at the expense of anyone else”.

Now there is a big “SOLD-OUT” sign on the site and he’s planning to launch another one to sell a wider range of clothing.

So what do you make of this? 15 minutes of fame or change of conscience? I just don’t get how he managed to print 10,000 t-shirts so fast.