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...

Do you deserve to die by stoning if you happen to fall in love with someone who belongs to another religious sect? It sounds crazy in the truest sense of the word, but it's true. This is what happened to Du'a Khalil Aswad, a 17-year-old girl belonging to the Yezidi religious minority in Northern Iraq, who was killed by a group of at least eight men in the presence of a large crowd in the town of Bashika, near the city of Mosul, on April 7, 2007. Worse is that some of her relatives had participated in the gruesome killing when they learned that the teenage girl was having a relationship with a Sunni Muslim teenage boy after she failed to go home one night. Reports said she was given shelter in the house of a Yezidi tribal leader in Bashika, but her relatives have forced their way into the leader's house and took her outside and stoned to death. Accordingly, the stoning lasted for half an hour and was recorded on video film, allegedly in the presence of law enforcement author...

Forests serve as the reliable sources of timber and other wood-based products that could generate huge foreign exchange receipts when exported. But nowadays, the forests are also being explored and tapped for growing poppy plants. But the trade-offs are tremendous to the environment because clearing of the forests alone was observed to have exerted undue pressures to the ecological balance of the land. According to a case-study made by the Trade and Environment Database of the American University’s School for International Service, thousands of acres of forests were illegally logged and used instead to plant marijuana and opium, which sell for hundreds of millions of dollars in the United States. The TED is a collection of case studies focusing on environmental issues. Consequently, the land being used for this cash-crop have experienced soil erosion; and indigenous plants and animal species have been noted to be disappearing and the cultural tribe of the Tarhumara Indian tribe is thr...

Whether we like it or not, some countries in Asia will have to deal with their ageing populations. And the negative impacts are seen to blow serious consequences on the developed economies, where most of the ageing populations are observed to have been growing at a fast rate than they can produce children. Aware of this problem, the Asian Development Bank's Institute said that critical reforms are needed soon before the impacts of ageing population take its toll in developing countries in Asia. In a recent seminar, ADB's Institute Dean, Masahiro Kawai, said: “For far too long we have tended to focus on high-income economies in the region like Japan, and the newly-industrialized economies --- Republic of Korea; Hong Kong, China; Taipei,China; and Singapore --- that are far advanced in the ageing curve." “But many of the middle-income developing countries and a few low-income developing countries in the region are on the same demographic path," he added. According to h...

Only a select few of celebrities get out of their comfort zone to extend help to others, especially the hungry who are desperately in need of food to survive. But not famous actress Drew Barrymore, 32, and one of the world's recognized film stars. Recently, the World Food Programme has named her as its Ambassador Against Hunger. WFP Executive Director Josette Sheeran has announced that the actress already returned from a second trip in Kenya where she visited the WFP-supported school feeding projects there. She even joined world marathon record-holder Paul Tergat of Kenya, to drum support for their advocacy programs on hunger prevention. "I can't think of any issue that is more important than working to see that no schoolchild in this world goes hungry," the actress was said in a CNN interview. According to her, "I am honored and humbled to accept this challenging and rewarding assignment...Feeding a child at school is such a simple thing--but it works miracles,...