Global Oddities

An Israeli woman mistakenly threw out a mattress with $1 million inside, setting off a frantic search through tons of garbage at a number of landfill sites, Israeli media reported Wednesday.
The woman told Army Radio that she bought her elderly mother a new mattress as a surprise on Monday and threw out the old one, only to discover that her mother had hidden her life savings inside. She was identified only as Anat, a resident of Tel Aviv.

When she went to look for the mattress it had already been taken by garbage men, she said. Subsequent searches at three different landfill sites turned up nothing.

The Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot published a picture of the woman searching through garbage at a dump in southern Israel.

Yitzhak Borba, the dump manager, told the radio station that his staff was helping the woman, saying she appeared “totally desperate.” He said the mattress was hard to find among the 2,500 tons of garbage arriving at the site every day.

He said he increased security at the site to keep would-be treasure hunters at bay.

For her part, Anat said it could be worse. “People have to take everything in proportion and thank God for the good and the bad,” she said.

Source: AP, June 14, 2009

“Let her get fat!” is the slogan women in Saudi Arabia are using to challenge a clampdown on female-only gyms.

Unhappy at the growing number of unlicensed female gyms, the Ministry of Municipal and Rural Affairs recently closed two in the Red Sea city of Jeddah and one in the city of Dammam on the Gulf Arab coast for not having a license.

In response, newspaper columnists and bloggers are promoting the sarcastic line “let her get fat!” as a way of fighting back, though it is likely to be a losing battle.

In Saudi Arabia, where clerics have extensive influence in society, gyms are sexually segregated because of conservative tribal and religious values.

Female participation in sports has long been a controversial issue in the kingdom, with physical education banned from public girls’ schools and clerics issuing religious prohibitions on female participation in sports.

While male gyms get licenses from a government sports body, female gyms have no official authority overseeing them.

“The idea of female fitness is non-existent within our government,” said Fouziah Alouni, a prominent women’s rights campaigner.

“Depriving women of this is yet another way of marginalizing them. Give us a justifiable reason or leave woman alone. This is unbearable.”

The result has been high rates of diabetes and even bone frailty among women, which the Ministry of Health says it wants to combat.

“Football and basketball are sports that require a lot of movement and jumping,” Sheikh Abdullah al-Maneea, member of the official Supreme Council of Religious Scholars, said in a religious opinion published in Okaz newspaper Thursday.

He said such excessive movement may harm girls who are still virgins, possibly causing them to lose their virginity.

“There is a school of thought that unfortunately exists and which has a distorted interpretation of Islam,” said Lina Al-Maeena, who organises basketball training in Jeddah.

Women’s gyms can only exist inside hospitals as “health centres” supervised by the Ministry of Health but prices are so high, at least 1,000 riyals ($266) a month, that only the affluent can afford membership.

Cheaper versions have sprung up under name “beauty salon” or “studio” but now their future is in doubt.

Madawi Al-Hassoun of the Jeddah Chamber of Commerce said the chamber has been trying for three years to find a government body prepared to take on board licensing female gyms.

“Some people don’t like women to go out of their homes. This is a common struggle for female businesses in Saudi,” she said.

Source: Reuters, April 30, 2009

A Saudi man has divorced his wife by text message, a newspaper said on Thursday.

The man was in Iraq when he sent the SMS informing her she was no longer his spouse. He followed up with a telephone call to two of his relatives, the daily Arab News reported.

A court in the Red Sea city of Jeddah finalised the split — the first known divorce in Saudi Arabia by text message — after summoning the two relatives to check they had received word of the husband’s intention, the paper said.

Saudi Arabia practises a strict form of Islamic Sharia law, and clerics preside over Sharia courts as judges. Under the law a man can divorce his wife by saying “I divorce you” three times.

The Saudi man was in Iraq to participate in “what he described as ‘jihad’,” according to the Arab News. Many Saudis have gone to fight with al Qaeda militants against the Iraqi government and U.S. forces.

Source: Reuters, April 9, 2009

An Iraqi soccer fan shot dead a player of the opposing team as he tried to score an equalizing goal in the final minutes of a match, police said on Monday.

The shooting on Saturday in Hilla, 100 km (60 miles) south of Baghdad, during a match between local teams, underscored the country’s propensity to lawlessness even as violence by militant groups falls to lows not seen since mid-2003.

“As soon as Haider Kadhim (the player) was alone in front of the goalkeeper and close to equalizing, a fan in the crowd fired a pistol at him,” a senior police officer in Hilla, who declined to be named, told Reuters.

“We arrested this fan immediately but unfortunately the player died.”

Iraqis love soccer and have often expressed hope the game would help reconcile warring ethnic groups and sects.

Iraq’s surprise victory in the 2007 Asian Cup brought rare joy and unity to the shattered nation, with Shi’ites, Sunni Arabs and Kurds pouring into the streets to celebrate their team’s 1-0 win over Saudi Arabia in the Jakarta final.

Source: Reuters, March 17, 2009

A stillborn Israeli baby who was pronounced dead by doctors “came back to life” on Monday after spending hours in a hospital refrigerator.
The baby, weighing only 600 grams at birth, spent at least five hours inside one of the hospital’s refrigerated storage units, before her parents, who had taken her to be buried, began noticing some movement.
“We unwrapped her and felt she was moving. We didn’t believe it at first. Then she began holding my mother’s hand, and then we saw her open her mouth,” said 26-year-old Faiza Magdoub, the baby’s mother.
The baby was pronounced dead several hours earlier, after doctors at Western Galilee hospital in northern Israel were forced to abort her mother’s pregnancy because of internal bleeding. Magdoub was 23 weeks into her pregnancy.
Source: Reuters, Jerusalem. August 19, 2008