Two young Saudis have been sentenced by the high court here to prison terms and flogging for orchestrating and filming a Nigerian driver sexually assaulting a 17-year-old girl, Al-Watan newspaper reported yesterday.

Judge Muhammad ibn Abdullah Al-Luhaidan sentenced the main defendant, Barjis ibn Faleh, 27, to 12 years imprisonment and 1,200 lashes, while compatriot Abdulrahman ibn Haif, 22, was sentenced to two years and 200 lashes, Al-Watan reported.

“The Nigerian driver who appeared in the film, Youssef Abkar Mohammad Abdullah, was sentenced to a six-year imprisonment and 600 lashes,” the paper said. The scandal, which shocked the conservative Saudi society, broke out after the accused circulated footage of the assault through mobile phones equipped with cameras.

In Bahrain, 83% of women are obese or overweight, according to International Obesity Task Force, a London-based think tank that tries to persuade countries to tackle the problem. In the United Arab Emirates the figure is 74%; in Lebanon it is 75%, the groups says. By comparison, about 62% of American women are overweight or obese. The prevalence of childhood obesity in the Middle East has risen rapidly in recent years and diabetes is spreading across the region, according to WHO.

Even predominantly Arab North African countries without oil wealth are wrestling with the challenge, in part because of a traditional preference for larger women. Half of all women in Tunisia and Morocco are overweight or obese — two standard measures of a person’s weight — according to a 2001 study published in the U.S.-based Journal of Nutrition.

The belief that rotund women are more desirable as wives helps explain why much of the Arab world — which stretches from the Persian Gulf in the east to Mauritania in North Africa — is experiencing an explosion of obesity.

Force-feeding is usually done by girls’ mothers or grandmothers; men play little direct role. The girls’ stomachs are sometimes vigorously massaged in order to loosen the skin and make it easier to consume even greater quantities of food. … Local officials say some women are so fat they can barely move. In [a Mauritanian] survey, 15% of the women said their skin split as a result of overeating. One-fifth of women said one of their toes or fingers were broken to make them eat.

So far the official numbers in Sweden is that 44 are dead, most likely there will be a few hundred dead, perhaps even over 1000. The mainstream media has calculated that 1500 Swedes are missing, but that’s just numbers who went by charter. Now, after calculating travellers who just bought seats, the number is 4000. Naturally these are very broad numbers.

The government has received lots of criticism for not sending out planes etc fast enough. Expert teams have been sent to identify dead people. For Sweden this is seen as bigger than the Estonia (ship) sinking ten years ago. This is pretty much our Sep 11 as everyone seems to know someone who was in the area at the time. Schools and communities are preparing crisis handling for when people arrive home, or are reported to be dead/still missing.