Share this story!            

Dubai ruler sets up $10 billion Arab education fund

DEAD SEA: Ruler of Dubai and Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum launched on Saturday a $10-billion fund to promote human development and education in the Arab world. He said the fund will provide grants to students, researchers, academics and experts to write, research and help translate books into Arabic. A UNESCO report published in 2002, said that 40 percent of adults in the Arab region were illiterate, and that projections show that if current efforts to eliminate it continue, 28 percent of the region’s population will still be illiterate in 2015. Sheikh Mohammed, who was speaking at an international economic conference in Jordan, said he is investing money in education and “the development of knowledge” in the region to eliminate illiteracy and to create an educated generation in an attempt to curb high unemployment rates. “Our region needs at this moment 15 million job opportunities, and our Arab world will need in the next 20 years between 74 to 85 million job opportunities,” he said. reuters

Holocaust denier expelled from Warsaw book fair

WARSAW: British historian David Irving, a convicted holocaust denier, was escorted out of an international book fair in Warsaw where he was planning to display his books, Polish organisers said on Saturday. Irving, who was arrested in Austria after his arrival on a visit in November 2005, spent more than a year in an Austrian jail for denying the Nazis organised mass murder of six million Jews during World War Two. “We asked him to leave,” said Grzegorz Guzowski, the book fair organiser. “Our employees helped him pack up his things, and our car drove him to the address he specified.” He said Irving’s publishers did not send materials detailing his work to the fair until a few hours before the deadline, giving organisers too little time to prevent the self-taught historian from setting up a table at the exhibition. Unlike many European countries, Polish law does not expressly forbid Holocaust denial, Warsaw University law professor Piotr Kruszynski told Reuters. “Polish laws prohibiting the promotion of fascism and defamation of people on racial and religious grounds could conceivably be extended to include Irving’s writings,” he added. reuters

Chavez demands Pope apologise for Indian comments

CARACAS: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez demanded Pope Benedict apologise to Indians in Latin America for saying this month in Brazil that the Roman Catholic Church purified them. Chavez, who regularly clashes with the Catholic Church in Venezuela but had not directly criticized the Pope before, accused the Pontiff on Friday of ignoring the “holocaust” that followed Christopher Columbus’s 1492 landing in the Americas. “With all due respect your Holiness, apologize because there was a real genocide here and, if we were to deny it, we would be denying our very selves,” Chavez said at an event on freedom of expression. In a speech to Latin American and Caribbean bishops at the end of a visit to Venezuela’s neighbor Brazil, the Pope said the Church had not imposed itself on the indigenous peoples of the Americas. reuters

Home | Foreign

Share this story!