Explosives found at Irish Airport 5, January 2010
Posted by thegulfblog.com in Terrorism.Tags: Airport security, Dublin airport, Explosives, Explosives test, Ireland, Security test
2 comments
Irish authorities have found 7 items of contraband including explosives in luggage at Dublin airport. The man who arrived from Bratislava, Slovakia, has now been released. It transpires that the illicit items were planted in his luggage by Slovakian authorities as a blind test of airport security. Very proactive…though they could have alerted the Irish authorities before the man was arrested and his house sealed off and searched for explosives.
Al Jazeera’s cheeky Burj Khalifah headline 5, January 2010
Posted by thegulfblog.com in Al-Jazeera.Tags: Abu Dhabi torture, Al-Jazeera, Burj Dubai, Burj Khalifah, Dubai, Middle Eastern press, UAE
4 comments
Al Jazeera’s headline on a lead article discussing the opening of the world’s tallest building in Dubai is, I believe, an example of the type of journalism that angers various people around the region.
دبي تتجاهل الديون وتفتتح برجها
…
Dubai ignores the debt and opens its tower
My translation is, I think it’s fair to say, a kind one. The root of the verb that they use for ignore VI جهل means, according to the universally recognised most authoritative arabic-english dictionary:
to ignore; to refuse to have anything to do; shut one’s eyes, disregard; to affect ignorance, pretend to know nothing
Whilst my arabic is in no way, shape or form good enough to pronounce something to be the case, I really would suggest that this is a really rather cheeky headline. This word has well-known connotations and other meanings that are rather negative. There is, incidentally, no way of knowing what the author really was trying to get at: he could have been meaning to say ‘Dubai pretends to know nothing about its debt and opens its tower’; both are written exactly the same in the Arabic language but mean, of course, different things. This kind of naughty quasi-double entendre is par for the course for many journalists as an interesting headline to attract attention. I doubt, however, whether the powers that be in Dubai would be quite as forgiving.
Update:
Poor form, I forgot the Hat tip: Abstract JK and his tip-top blog http://alajnabi.blogspot.com/
The Gulf blog 