Beirut or Broadgate?

That’s according to telegraph.co.uk’s Jonathan Russell’s opinion on the state of crime in London:

An article in the greatly undervalued and generously over-punctuated Badge – billed as “the voice of the London cab driver’s club” – reports that traffic wardens, sorry civil enforcement officers, are now too scared to patrol certain City streets after 7pm.

In Beirut, they do patrol the city but don’t really seem to get much done:

From *: Beirut Street Scenes: Chillin'

A LLB certificate is on the way.

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No Power to the People

I came across a dispatch on the GlobalPost titled, Snoop Dog, Paris Hilton … Beirut’s Back. The jest of the article revolves around the idea that Lebanon is the place to be because people get wasted on rooftops. That’s all great and fair though the last few paragraphs really caught my attention:

Two million extra people in Lebanon is equivalent to a 50 percent increase in the country’s population; Lebanon already suffers from serious public infrastructure problems.

How true. Though the paragraph that follows lists these problems but it seems to imply the problems are recent (due to the influx of tourists):

The country’s roads are now clogged with cars, leading to traffic jams that can last hours. Prices for taxis have increased, while water shortages and power outages have become more frequent, with some areas losing power for six to 12 hours in the hottest days of summer.

When weren’t the roads clogged? Taxi prices increase every time the price of fuel skyrockets. Power and water shortages? Ah they’ve existed since 1991. But here is my favorite part – can you guess which of these issues is the most concerning to our government?

“What we should consider first is how to make solutions for the traffic,” [director of Lebanon's Tourism Ministry, Nada Sardouk].

So I guess the rationale behind it is that people at home who don’t have power will now be able to get to Skybar in 20 minutes instead of the usual 45?

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How Lebanese

I have a personal motto: if it talks like a Lebanese and drives likes a Lebanese, its a Lebanese:

Omar Budib, a Lebanese businessman currently residing in The Gambia, was, last week, fined by The Gambia Police Force, for allegedly insulting a female traffic police officer in the course of executing her official duty.
…
[...] the Lebanese man wanted to use the road despite being told about the closure of traffic at the time. This, apparently, did not go down well with Budibu, who went to the extent of insulting and threatening to drive his vehicle on the police officer who escaped unhurt by running to the other side of the road. [...] After attempting to drive onto the police officer, Budibu demanded to know her name on the ground that he would ensure her sacking, because, … “he knew and dealt with almost all the big officials in the country.”

Well, apparently he needed more contacts than he had.

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A New “Little Beirut”

From Portland,Oregon to across the Atlantic at Sandy Cove, Kinmel Bay, we have a new “Little Beirut“:

The roads around Sandy Cove, Kinmel Bay, are so bad that pensioner Bob Ashcroft, 89, has been tipped off his motorized scooter three times.
…
Mr Ashcroft said: “The roads are absolutely disgusting. It is making most of the people’s lives here a misery. When I first came here I called it Little Beirut because of the roads, and it hasn’t changed a great deal.

Now who would want boring roads like these…

…when you can have adventurous roads like these:

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Driving and Expecting with Unexpected Results

A very sad story is making the rounds in the UAE press:

A woman who lost her unborn baby in a Dubai road crash has been convicted of manslaughter and ordered to pay blood money, in the first such ruling in the UAE, local newspapers reported on Monday. The court found the 27-year-old Lebanese woman had failed to exercise due diligence when driving and caused her car to collide with another vehicle in October when she was nine months pregnant, the Arabic-language Al-Emarat Al-Youm said.

So, besides losing her child, she was to give birth in a few days, the unnamed Lebanese woman has been charged with murder.

In an unprecedented ruling, a court on Sunday convicted a mother of accidentally killing her fetus in a traffic accident, prompting a prosecutor to stress that the law preserves the right of fetuses to live.

The woman was fined AED2,000 (US$544) and ordered to pay AED20,000 (US$5,435) in blood money to the child’s “successor”.

A person has to pay 10 per cent of blood money for accidentally killing a foetus, according to Sharia. In the UAE, blood money amounts to Dh200,000.

What exactly does that mean? Who’s the successor? It doesn’t make any sense. Tragic story with a tragic ending.

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