Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
You don’t know me; I know you, I know what’s being said about you. I’m the
‘whisperer’. I am socially mobile: Arab, Brit, Indian, Pakistani, American and the rest, they all invite me and share their world with me. Not much gets past me but if you think it may have done, email me on . . .
The Whisperer likes a straight talker. Manama Municipality means business with its crackdown on litter louts ruining the capital’s environment.
In an official document the campaign objective includes: “Reducing litter and waste thrown in the streets, roads, beaches and public places by fining ‘tossers’ who are caught littering.”
I’ve heard environmental hooligans called many things over the years but nothing more fitting. Well said.
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BAHRAIN’S business executives and busy mums having to drive their children through the traffic jams and roundabout hold-ups between schools in Saar and Awali will look enviously at the US and particularly the perks of one telecoms boss.
He has secured a special deal allowing his step-daughter to commute to school … on a corporate jet.
Qwest Communications has added a clause to the employment contract of its chief executive, Edward Mueller, permitting his wife and stepdaughter to use its aircraft to hop across the Rocky Mountains between Colorado and California.
Mr Mueller, who was appointed last month, is moving from his west coast home to Qwest’s base in Denver. The clause allows his stepdaughter to avoid changing schools. The decision to grant family use of its plane is fairly common among American companies. A study of 215 chief executives by director pay analysts Corporate Library has found that 54 per cent were allowed personal use of corporate aircraft.
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The latest buzzword in the offices of the housing department in Bahrain is demographic engineering. It’s all to do with moving populations to ease difficulties in society. Recent announcements regarding bachelors, for example, may ring a bell? It seems that these wickedly debauched bachelors have been affecting the sensibilities of families so much that they simply have to be moved to an area where they have less impact. The next group on the list, it seems, although this is quite confidential, comes under the heading of ‘families’ who are to be kept out of town and moved to the outlying, less city-like areas.
It appears that children are affecting business in areas such as Exhibitions Avenue and certain parts of Adliya ... then all those single ladies can be shifted in to these areas. The intention, it seems, is to have demographic zones, where certain categories of people are permitted to live and thus eliminate irritation by one group or another. This was, of course, tried in Poland in the late 1930s, in places like Warsaw – they called it a ghetto then – now it’s a ‘demographically preferred zone’ or DPZ.
