News: honor killing, hijacking

• The Qatari appeals court has just commuted the sentence of a Jordanian teenager who killed his sister in an apparent honor killing. Instead of three years in jail, he now gets a one-year suspended sentence. To my knowledge, Qatar does not officially soften penalties in the case of honor killings, but in practice it seems they are pretty sympathetic to the perpetrator.


• The trial has begun for the apparent attempted hijacking of a Qatar Airways plane last year. I had not previously heard the accused was a former camel jockey, nor that he was at the time applying for asylum in Israel. I hope we hear more in the paper about his asylum request. Since Qatar finally outlawed child jockeys and replaced them with robots shortly after we moved here, I hadn't given much thought to what happened to former jockeys.


• In lighter news: I'm all for imams fighting for the betterment of those in poverty, but must they look so terrifying?

Moving!

I started moving into our new compound last night. The apartments there are nice, and most of the other TAs, CAs and young faculty live there, so though I'll miss our friends in Riviera I'm excited to make the move.

The first carload I moved comprised my religious studies books. When I packed my Qur'an, I carefully ensured that it was at the top of the stack of books in its box, in accordance with Qur'an-handling etiquette. It wasn't until I picked up the box to move it that I realized I had just reverently packed my Qur'an into an Absolut vodka box.

I think I'm going straight to hell.