OFFBEAT MAIL

“Shit!" That’s my reaction today after I opened my e-mail inbox at yahoo. Sometimes, you just can’t help it as what I did. But there are occasions when you just couldn't’t hold back your fuse from being busted. In short, I was bombed at a certain point when some people think that you’re really foolish that you don’t have the proper intellect to decipher things as they come your way. Though, I still believe that majority of the world’s population are illiterates. Meaning, they have difficulty writing and reading. Others simply don’t understand what they are reading, even those written in layman’s terms as what we journalists are doing. I couldn’t imagine a world that is still populated by people whose objectives are nothing but to take advantage of other people’s weaknesses. Perhaps, I thought that Internet cons are in good in cyber-psychology. For how could they know that their target victims are really that foolish enough not to know in advance that they being gypped of their...

The Iraqi parliament is close to sealing a consensus that would somehow give each Iraqi citizen a share of the revenues generated from the exports of the country's rich oil resources. Contrary to recent reports that appeared in various media outlets, most of those who will benefit from this new development are the population in the regions of Iraq, where most of the big crude oil reserves are being extracted for domestic consumption and exports. In a CNN broadcast today, Hamid al-Bayati, Iraqi permanent representative to U.N., says the parliament is expected to decide within a week's time on the oil sharing agreement that will give the regional government a good share of the oil revenues. This is contrary to reports that the big oil companies will have a say in the extraction of the crude reserves in Iraq. In this way, the people in the region can make use of the revenues from the sale of crude oil, he said. Recently, a law was proposed to give at least five major oil companies...

For many decades now, the People's Republic of China is notorious when it comes to human rights violations and tortures. In most cases, complaints for these human rights abuses have reportedly not been addressed properly in accordance with the accepted norms set by the United Nations. International political analysts viewed these abuses, normally perpetrated by the Chinese police, as a reflection of China's concentration of power in the communist party where legal decisions are made, rather in the local legal system. Flaws in the legal system are a common complaint among the victims who have to suffer the brunts of enduring it first in prison before any legal remedies are introduced. In 2005, The China Daily reported the case of She Xianglin, 39, from the Central Hubei Province, who was arrested and tortured into confessing by the local police after he was suspected of killing his wife Zhang Zaiyu whose badly decomposed body was found near his home. For this, he was sentenced t...