DEWA - Consumer Award

In an unusual turn of events, DEWA chose my father to be one of its 'Best Consumers'.

Along with a lot of goodies like power saving bulbs, water filters, t-shirts, chocolates, stress balls, soft toys and calenders, he was awarded with this :


and this :

and this :


It was totally random, he got a call a month or 2 ago informing him he had 'won'. No one really paid attention, until he got an sms last week asking to appear at the DWTC with a recent DEWA Bill. I also recall someone from DEWA stopping by once asking a lot of questions like, when was the last time we were on vacation, size of the apartment, number of people staying and the relations between them.

Basically, they were keeping a watch on a number of customers whose electricity and water consumption has been decreasing over the past few years and we turned out to be one of them!

A very surprising gesture from the government of Dubai! Although I somehow feel they went a little overboard with the 'prize' and freebies, I have noticed DEWA making a lot of efforts on creating awareness. Sometime last year they were handing out pamphlets on ways and means to minimise unnecessary water and electricity usage.

Are you doing your share at home and work?

Ozzy man dash

I met a realtor from a new land
Who said: Two thousand vast and windowless lumps of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visa card lies, whose front
And wrinkled strip sneers of cold payment demand
Tell that its sucker well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless bills,
That hand that shopped them and the bank that fed.
And on the windscreen those words appear:
“my name is Ozzy Man me arse, kingpin of booms:
Look at my books, ye Investors, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundary wall-less and bare,
The lone already levelled sands stretch far away.

Grace period for cancelled visa holders may be extended

According to an Emirates Business report, people made redundant during the current crisis can get more time to stay and look for another job:

"The new policy, which may be announced in the first half of this year, is expected to address the potential cases of job cuts due to the financial crisis. Currently, the UAE labour and immigration laws require expats who have lost their jobs to find work within a month – or leave."

Idiot Hour

'Seven Days' or is it 'Five Days' now?) reports -

“[Dubai], Abu Dhabi and Sharjah were plunged into darkness yesterday as the UAE showed its commitment to fighting climate change by joining cities across the globe to observe Earth Hour. More buildings and homes than ever before marked the hour in Dubai by switching off non-essential lighting to make a stand on reducing global warming and carbon emissions.Lights were switched off or dimmed at landmarks across the emirate between 8.30pm and 9.30pm including the Burj Al Arab, Emirates Towers and Madinat Jumeirah, and at The Walk in Jumeirah Beach Residence hundreds of people gathered to stage a candlelit vigil.[…]"

Between 8:30 and 9:30pm on Saturday night another commitment was made over at Nad Al Sheba racecourse: the extraordinary commitment to illuminate the World’s richest horse race with an approximate 5 to 10million of Watts producing some 600milllion + lumens from sodium vapour floodlights above the race track. Now here is what I call commitment to “Earth Hour”!

The race meet started in the late afternoon and lasted well into the night. The same night hundreds of well meaning morons gathered at Jumeirah Beach Residence to hold candles into the rainy night with self-congratulatory grins on their faces. This warm feeling of being amongst like-minded folk in sandals….Doesn’t it always feel so…, like, right, to remonstrate with those who agree with you?

There is nothing wrong with the intention of saving energy, nor with actually doing it. Turn out the lights when you leave a room (unless there is someone else still in it). Don’t waste electricity, or water, or fuel - or anything, for that matter. But do not, please, pretend that your little futile gesture once a year at 8pm makes even a iota of a difference.

The CEO of the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA) is quoted in the article as saying that he “hoped that this year’s event would double the amount of energy saved last year”.
Mind you, that’s double of a relative saving made during one hour of 1/364th part of a year. If we measure success in millimetres then we are indeed making giant leaps!

Well, may I put forward a little suggestion here to the CEO of DEWA of how to save even more energy in a country that produces more carbon dioxide and uses more water per capita than any other country in the world:
Start by scrapping utility subsidies for the 10% of the population who consume nearly 40% of resources. Mr. DEWA, free water and discounted power for the local population is not likely to encourage conscientious use of energy. Duh. Imposing higher rates for everyone does. Levying a tax on fuel or simply increasing prices does. Fuel costs about 4 to 5 times less in the UAE than in Europe. People will drive smaller, more efficient cars if fuel prices go up.

There is scope to make a difference right HERE in front of our noses. And sorry Mr. DEWA, yes, you too might have to pay full price for your utilities. Then I shall talk to you about energy saving measures.

Let's recap: a minuscule energy saving made during one hour of one day of the year in the most consumerist and wasteful country on Earth (per capita) is being celebrated with candlelight vigils whilst at the same time an extra 5million plus Watts are spent on a nighttime race meet, which – let me stretch my perverted imagination here - couldn’t by any chance have been held during daytime hours? So as to, perhaps, make a difference?

As the saying goes. You can fool some people all the time and all people some time, but you can fool all those at Jumeirah Beach Residence holding candles all the time.

Now guys, stick your “Earth Hour” where it’s always dark and get down to saving energy proper.

ACQUITED on appeal

The story in the story is that Zawya would run this story.

Vertical Farming with Seawater

gismag.com

"The vertical farm features a soaring spire with pod-like ‘sky-gardens’ branching off to give it an organic feel in keeping with designers aims to create a clean, green, sustainable source of food for a more self-sufficient Dubai. The concept makes use of the Seawater Greenhouse process, which uses seawater to cool and humidify the air that ventilates the greenhouse and sunlight to distill fresh water from seawater to enable the year round cultivation of high value crops that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to grow in hot, arid regions such as Dubai. This is in stark contrast to costly and energy intensive desalination plants that rely on boiling and pumping to produce fresh water."

Only at concept stage right now, so in other words, the details of how the thing would actually work have yet to be thought through. I wonder if it also rotates?

Click the above link to read the whole article and see 7 drawings.

Sustainability. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Meh - get the solar power farms working first.

Etisalat Gone Haywire!

Was it just me?? At around 11 a.m. this morning when I was trying to routinely go online and check a few websites, everything was coming up blocked, blocked, blocked... everything! After a while of closing and reopening my browser, trying a different browser and rebooting the router, everything was still coming up with the blocked message.

After several minutes the Abu Dhabi Police website link worked, then the Etisalat link and more and more started to come back online. Did anyone else have this bizarre experience?

Dubai sets its own rules as foreigners flee hard times

AP Report:

"Dubai has been the poster boy for globalisation and the free flow of globalised capital," said Mahdi Mattar, author of the Shuaa Capital report. "It built a reputation as a city run like a company. You see what happens to companies when globalised capitalism begins to fall apart."

At least the article's not touted as being written by a so-called journalist who got to know Dubai by either spending 2 hours in transit at DXB or taking a big bus tour.

UAE citizen's family protects her rapist

BBC:

Fatima contacted the BBC World Service citizen journalism project, Your Story, because she wanted to share her experiences of sexual abuse growing up within a strict Muslim family in Abu Dhabi.

She suffered many years of abuse before she finally told her mother what had been going on.

Fatima is now 26. She lives in the United States of America where she has just been given asylum and citizenship after establishing that she would be in danger if she returned to her home country.

She became a photographer. See an audio slideshow by following the link.

New site: The Substitute Cook©

Just a post about a new food site (done by me :p):

The Substitute Cook©

For more on concept, visit the site.

Enjoy :)

See the FIRST of the Electrical Storms

Electrical storms over the skies in Al Ain last night. And apparently, there will be more! (See video, via EAA)

UAE will not implement VAT for now

From what I'm reading in this report from Embiz 24/7, looks like the silver lining in the recession is no VAT in the UAE for now:

Hisham Abdullah Al Shirawi, Second Vice-Chairman of Dubai Chamber of Commerce and Industry, said he is not sure whether VAT will be implemented, adding that in times like these, the government is rather expected to lower its service fees[...]"I would expect the government to take certain actions to minimise governmental fees and the cost of operating business in the private sector so that it can be more competitive and much more active."

What do you think about VAT in the UAE?

A person of interest moves from US to UAE

Washington Post

In August 2006, Hamdan moved the family to Dubai. At the Los Angeles airport, he was questioned for so long that he missed his flight. When he returned in 2007 for a visit, the FBI surveillance was continuous, associates said.

Things were not going smoothly abroad, either. In early 2008, while waiting for a flight in Beirut, Hamdan was arrested and interrogated for four days by Lebanese authorities. Hamden said a lawyer the family later hired to examine the court file said his detention was at the request of "outside influences."

Last July, FBI agents passed a request to Hamdan to report to the embassy in Abu Dhabi, the UAE capital, then flew there to question him. "What did they want?" his brother recalled asking Hamdan, who he said replied: " 'Whatever they ask at the airport, same thing. You can't imagine how much they know about us. If you ever forget something in your life, a certain spot, call them. They'll tell you.' "

Six weeks later, the security police took him away, then returned to carry away all things electronic.
...
One day last July, Naji Hamdan was summoned to the U.S. Embassy in the United Arab Emirates. He drove two hours through the desert heat from Dubai to answer questions from FBI agents who had arrived from Los Angeles, where Hamdan had gone to school, started a family, built a successful auto-parts business and become a U.S. citizen.

At his apartment six weeks later, he was awakened from a nap by men who bundled him into a black Chevrolet Suburban with tinted windows. Hamdan was told he was a prisoner of the UAE and was held in a cell painted glossy white to reflect the lights that burned round the clock, according to a note he wrote from prison. Between interrogations, he wrote, he was confined in a frigid room overnight, strapped into "an electric chair" and punched in the head until he lost consciousness.

In one session, the blindfolded prisoner recalled hearing a voice that sounded American. The voice said, "Do what they want or these people will [expletive] you up," Hamdan wrote.

The prisoner obliged, signing a confession that he later said meant only that he would do anything to make the pain stop. The case might have ended there but for Hamdan's U.S. citizenship and his American attorney's assertion that he was tortured "at the behest" of his own government.

"This is torture by proxy," said Ahilan Arulanantham, an American Civil Liberties Union staff lawyer representing Hamdan through his brother and wife. Noting that the UAE had shown no interest in Hamdan before arresting him, Arulanantham filed a habeas corpus petition in November in U.S. District Court in Washington. The petition alleges that the federal government used its influence to have Hamdan arrested and insists that it should use that influence to free him.
...
The torture accusations are from Hamdan's accounts to relatives and a handwritten eight-page note carried out of Abu Dhabi's Al Wathba prison by a U.S. diplomat required to check on the suspect's welfare.

After being beaten on the soles of his feet and kicked in the liver, Hamdan said, "I admitted to whatever they asked."

"Sometimes when he talks to me, he's crying," said Mona Mallouk, his wife, by phone from Beirut, where she went after the arrest with their two children, born in Los Angeles.

"When they beat him hard . . . his voice changed. I said 'Naji? Are you okay?' He said, 'No, I'm not okay. They hit me, badly. I don't know why, Mona.' "

R.I.P. - Sheikh Ahmed bin Juma Al Maktoum

Here's the news in Arabic:WAM

And in English: Emirates Business 24/7

flickr block feedback

"DUBAI - A censorship watchdog is encouraging the public to give feedback over the blocking of photo-sharing web site Flickr.
Last week Internet provider du joined rival Etisalat in blocking the web site to thousands of homes across the UAE. A statement by the Telecommunications and Regulatory Authority (TRA) said that “technical difficulties” had prevented du from following the ban two years before.

“Flickr breaches the prohibited content categories of the Internet Access Management (IAM) policy regarding sexual nudity,” the statement said.

“It does not have the technical facility of blocking prohibited contents, and it cannot be partially blocked; where such facility is available on YouTube, Facebook and other similar sites.”

Users of Flickr said the site contained images of ‘artistic nudity’ which could have been construed as pornography. du and Etisalat have been asked by the TRA to allow customers to give their thoughts on whether the level of censorship is appropriate."

more here