News: honor killing, hijacking

[qatarperegrine]

• 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?