I refer to the article Starbucks has to wake up and smell the coffee in India (February 5). I have had Starbucks coffee at international airports as well as in the UAE and the region. The taste is nowhere near the filter coffee or even the coffee at roadside hotels or coffee shops anywhere in south India.
Starbucks will have to rethink its coffee preparations a thousand times before they enter a coffee market like south India. As is stated in the article, the bulk of coffee is consumed within the house and very little outside. These issues are some of the points Starbucks is advised to note.
I may as well mention that international products like Sanyo, Panasonic, Knorr and other brands have bit the dust in India. The market may be huge, but it is a totally different cup of tea. That is India.
Faleye Ebenezer, India
Difficult decisions for spouses
It was interesting to read about the situations of spouses giving up careers to follow their partners, and how that has worked for the couples interviewed in Why the UAE works for our families (January 30).
One wonders how many stories there are in Abu Dhabi of a spouse who has not found enjoyment after following his or her mate to a new life here.
Name withheld upon request
Recycle beverage cans now
It's really shocking to see empty beverage cans lying on the roads, streets, parks and beaches. Why can't people just pick them up and drop them in designated bins?
Most people don't realise that aluminium is a 100 per cent recyclable material. Recycling just one aluminium beverage can will conserve enough energy to watch TV for three hours.
As a student member of the Emirates Environmental Group, I've learnt that recycling is an important part of a sustainable lifestyle. It's important for the future of our planet that we all live sustainably, so we must make the best use of our limited natural resources.
It is estimated that over 500 million beverage cans are sold every year in the UAE but 93 per cent of them are dumped or thrown away in the landfills.
They add up to the average 8,000 tonnes of municipal waste generated daily that affects our environment terribly.
The spectre is clear. We don't need to wait and see the day when our beautiful deserts are filled with rubbish.
So start collecting cans from your nearest groceries, marts, shops or schools and ask your neighbours, friends and classmates to do the same.
Let's spread this wonderful environmental awareness and start recycling now.
Drishya Dinesh, Dubai
Online video triggers debate
The article Gay cure viral video 'paints wrong picture' of UAE (February 3) opens up an enlightening discussion in the UAE, from the very conservative to the liberal views, on homosexuality that would otherwise never be conducted publicly in the mainstream media in the UAE.
Kudos to The National for covering this. This kind of discussion in the UAE is a healthy one because it's so hard to talk about publicly due to the conservative nature of the country which must be respected.
However, it's understandable that videos like this are made. I'd say that Emiratis and expatriates alike generally have a good understanding of the issues around homosexuality and UAE culture.
Jessica Swann, Dubai
I totally agree with the video about the gay cure. I don't mean to come off as being insensitive but I, and many Muslims, see homosexuality in a different light than as an issue of ethnicity, nationality or race.
Irfan Syed, Dubai
Touching story on abandoned baby
I read with tears in my eyes about the baby born with neurological disorders and epilepsy who was temporarily abandoned by his parents (Abandoned baby back with parents, February 7).
We can all sympathise with the fear these parents must feel for the seemingly impossible task of raising a child with special needs, and I was deeply touched by the people at Special Families Support who have offered their support.
There is always hope and I pray that this family will find the strength they need to provide the love and nurturing their son desperately needs.
L Scholz, Abu Dhabi
Iran's dirty tricks to dodge sanctions
There’s increased scrutiny on the tricks being used to keep commodities flowing to and from blacklisted countries. Here’s a description of how some work.
1 Going Dark
A common method to transport Iranian oil with stealth is to turn off the Automatic Identification System, an electronic device that pinpoints a ship’s location. Known as going dark, a vessel flicks the switch before berthing and typically reappears days later, masking the location of its load or discharge port.
2. Ship-to-Ship Transfers
A first vessel will take its clandestine cargo away from the country in question before transferring it to a waiting ship, all of this happening out of sight. The vessels will then sail in different directions. For about a third of Iranian exports, more than one tanker typically handles a load before it’s delivered to its final destination, analysts say.
3. Fake Destinations
Signaling the wrong destination to load or unload is another technique. Ships that intend to take cargo from Iran may indicate their loading ports in sanction-free places like Iraq. Ships can keep changing their destinations and end up not berthing at any of them.
4. Rebranded Barrels
Iranian barrels can also be rebranded as oil from a nation free from sanctions such as Iraq. The countries share fields along their border and the crude has similar characteristics. Oil from these deposits can be trucked out to another port and documents forged to hide Iran as the origin.
* Bloomberg
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Abid Ali, Fakhar Zaman, Imam-ul-Haq, Shan Masood, Azhar Ali (test captain), Babar Azam (T20 captain), Asad Shafiq, Fawad Alam, Haider Ali, Iftikhar Ahmad, Khushdil Shah, Mohammad Hafeez, Shoaib Malik, Mohammad Rizwan (wicketkeeper), Sarfaraz Ahmed (wicketkeeper), Faheem Ashraf, Haris Rauf, Imran Khan, Mohammad Abbas, Mohammad Hasnain, Naseem Shah, Shaheen Afridi, Sohail Khan, Usman Shinwari, Wahab Riaz, Imad Wasim, Kashif Bhatti, Shadab Khan and Yasir Shah.
Points about the fast fashion industry Celine Hajjar wants everyone to know
- Fast fashion is responsible for up to 10 per cent of global carbon emissions
- Fast fashion is responsible for 24 per cent of the world's insecticides
- Synthetic fibres that make up the average garment can take hundreds of years to biodegrade
- Fast fashion labour workers make 80 per cent less than the required salary to live
- 27 million fast fashion workers worldwide suffer from work-related illnesses and diseases
- Hundreds of thousands of fast fashion labourers work without rights or protection and 80 per cent of them are women
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Children who witnessed blood bath want to help others
Aged just 11, Khulood Al Najjar’s daughter, Nora, bravely attempted to fight off Philip Spence. Her finger was injured when she put her hand in between the claw hammer and her mother’s head.
As a vital witness, she was forced to relive the ordeal by police who needed to identify the attacker and ensure he was found guilty.
Now aged 16, Nora has decided she wants to dedicate her career to helping other victims of crime.
“It was very horrible for her. She saw her mum, dying, just next to her eyes. But now she just wants to go forward,” said Khulood, speaking about how her eldest daughter was dealing with the trauma of the incident five years ago. “She is saying, 'mama, I want to be a lawyer, I want to help people achieve justice'.”
Khulood’s youngest daughter, Fatima, was seven at the time of the attack and attempted to help paramedics responding to the incident.
“Now she wants to be a maxillofacial doctor,” Khulood said. “She said to me ‘it is because a maxillofacial doctor returned your face, mama’. Now she wants to help people see themselves in the mirror again.”
Khulood’s son, Saeed, was nine in 2014 and slept through the attack. While he did not witness the trauma, this made it more difficult for him to understand what had happened. He has ambitions to become an engineer.
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THE TWIN BIO
Their favourite city: Dubai
Their favourite food: Khaleeji
Their favourite past-time : walking on the beach
Their favorite quote: ‘we rise by lifting others’ by Robert Ingersoll
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Cast: Nayanthara, Siddharth, Meera Jasmine, R Madhavan
Star rating: 2/5
Ads on social media can 'normalise' drugs
A UK report on youth social media habits commissioned by advocacy group Volteface found a quarter of young people were exposed to illegal drug dealers on social media.
The poll of 2,006 people aged 16-24 assessed their exposure to drug dealers online in a nationally representative survey.
Of those admitting to seeing drugs for sale online, 56 per cent saw them advertised on Snapchat, 55 per cent on Instagram and 47 per cent on Facebook.
Cannabis was the drug most pushed by online dealers, with 63 per cent of survey respondents claiming to have seen adverts on social media for the drug, followed by cocaine (26 per cent) and MDMA/ecstasy, with 24 per cent of people.
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Earth under attack: Cosmic impacts throughout history
- 4.5 billion years ago: Mars-sized object smashes into the newly-formed Earth, creating debris that coalesces to form the Moon
- 66 million years ago: 10km-wide asteroid crashes into the Gulf of Mexico, wiping out over 70 per cent of living species – including the dinosaurs.
- 50,000 years ago: 50m-wide iron meteor crashes in Arizona with the violence of 10 megatonne hydrogen bomb, creating the famous 1.2km-wide Barringer Crater
- 1490: Meteor storm over Shansi Province, north-east China when large stones “fell like rain”, reportedly leading to thousands of deaths.
- 1908: 100-metre meteor from the Taurid Complex explodes near the Tunguska river in Siberia with the force of 1,000 Hiroshima-type bombs, devastating 2,000 square kilometres of forest.
- 1998: Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 breaks apart and crashes into Jupiter in series of impacts that would have annihilated life on Earth.
-2013: 10,000-tonne meteor burns up over the southern Urals region of Russia, releasing a pressure blast and flash that left over 1600 people injured.
