But Zarqa, a gritty industrial city with a high unemployment rate, is one of toughest places in Jordan, and perhaps even in the region, for women trying to tear down barriers. Even when she was off the clock, she carried a few tools in her gray purse, in case a neighbour or relative needed a bit of plumbing "first aid". She can’t charge much in her low-income neighbourhood and is expected to give discounts to relatives. And Lara excitedly unpacks Mutlaq’s graduation prize — a 40-piece professional plumbers’ tool kit — in the family living room.Only about a quarter of women in the Arab world work outside the home, the lowest percentage in the world. The family, struggling from month to month, could also use a second income.The first stop for the day is Lara’s school, where Mutlaq begins to remove an old faucet in the girls’ toilets. Plumbing is "suitable only for men, not for women," he says.

The coming months will determine if, against the odds, she can turn her bold dream into a real-life business.Back home, Mutlaq flips through her work book — a white notepad listing her recent assignments — to underscore the point. Sami, 19, is glad his mother can contribute to the family finances."Sheikh formed a cooperative of 18 female plumbers last year to help women with difficulties like launching their own business with no car or start-up funds. She can do 70 per cent of the tasks expected of a plumber, he says."This was the chance of a lifetime," she says.She still wants to open a business one day, but says the journey has already been worthwhile. She pulls a baseball cap over her headscarf and the green vest over a loose, long-sleeved T-shirt and pants. Fatmeh, 22, even joins the community outreach programme for a few months.At the local mosque down the street from Mutlaq’s house, preacher Akram al-Boureini says roles are clear in Islam: Men provide for the family and women raise children at home. Unemployment is a separate measure, with higher rates for women than men in most of the region.But by early July, she has bounced back."., a US government aid agency, to save water by preventing leakage.It has been a challenge just to come this far in an ultra-conservative community where many women don’t work at all outside the home. Mutlaq is starting to worry about the future. Mutlaq gets nothing. Her oldest brother is a hold-out, telling her women have no business being plumbers.

"The only ones were my husband and my family.The International Labour Organisation calculates that with more job equality, Jordan’s economy would grow by 5 per cent, or almost $2 billion. "We are far from seeing women in non-traditional jobs like plumbers or truck drivers.Small jobs for relatives and neighbours don’t pay off. The way I look at myself has changed, too. "The way I look at life has changed. If women take over jobs intended for men, "we face unemployment and moral corruption. She wants to work in Mutlaq’s shop and take a salary. She is angry and dejected, and even thinks of selling her tool kit."We will break down the barriers that have been put up, that say we aren’t capable of doing things as women," she says. For now, she is brimming with optimism. Under strict rules of gender separation, it’s easier for female plumbers to conduct home visits, because male plumbers cannot enter homes where housewives are alone. She has pinned all her hopes on getting a grant. She plans to open a plumbing store and sell pipes and spare parts."It was a big dream, but it’s been destroyed," she says."I’m scared that I will end up sitting at home," she says. She’s charged between five and 10 dinars ($7 to $14) per home visit, barely worth her time.It is graduation day, and Maryam Mutlaq is celebrating her transformation from stay-at-home mom to licensed plumber. Five years ago, the Arab Spring brought the hope of more opportunities for women.But Mutlaq still faces plenty of criticism. Her fellow plumber, Ibrahim Asmar, says she does well on everything that doesn’t require heavy lifting. In the meantime, she’s renting out some of her tools, doing small plumbing jobs and going on assignments with one of her brothers, also a plumber.Mutlaq, 41, describes her business plan in a clear, strong voice to the other graduates, all veiled women."By the end of March, the plumbing project is winding down.Mutlaq’s choice is rare for the Arab world, where traditional gender roles make men the main breadwinners and confine many women to jobs such as teaching and nursing. She needs a grant.Mutlaq was initially sceptical, but her husband Samir, who works in a flower shop, thought it was worth a try."So Wholesale CNC spring coiling machine Manufacturers many people did not support me," she says.

The women go on house calls in pairs, for safety. She has the extra cost of taking taxis to assignments because she doesn’t drive, and her husband needs the family car for his job.Lara is eager to see her mother in full work gear and embraces her in the hallway. After a few months, she started going on house calls as assistant to a contractor.Female CEOs and entrepreneurs have emerged across the region, but they still constitute a small group.Two weeks later, Mutlaq is getting ready for work. She says she now likes everything about her mother’s job, and especially the tools.Her four children fiercely opposed the idea. The youngest, Lara, 12, was so embarrassed that she begged her mother to take off her green plumber’s work vest during a parent-teacher meeting.In late May, Mutlaq is anxious."Mutlaq got involved in 2014 in the plumbers’ project, funded by the Millennium Challenge Corp.Mutlaq discovered during training that she loved handling tools and fixing things. Yet that promise has not panned out, analysts and activists say.Jordan in turn scores far below the regional average of female labour force participation, with just over 14 per cent.Such obstacles are familiar to Jordan’s first female plumber, 53-year-old Khawla Sheikh, who earned her license in 2006. She’s even picked out a name, Challenge, and a location in an up-and-coming neighbourhood."Society is very conservative and is getting more and more conservative," says Zarqa mayor Emad Momani.By graduation day in March, Mutlaq’s children have come around. Mutlaq kept it on to show her daughter that she’s proud of herself. She applies for a grant from USAID, a US government agency, and expects to hear by the fall.At a meeting hosted by an international aid group, 12 other women are handed checks of 300 dinars ($425) each.

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Ni Feng, who led the study in Bass’ lab at Cornell and now is a Yale University postdoctoral researcher, said the study, published in the journal Current Biology, involved wild-caught fish kept in rooms where lighting could be controlled.In one of the marvels of nature, males of a fish species called the plainfin midshipman that dwells in Pacific coastal waters from Alaska to Baja California court females during breeding season using a nocturnal "love song" with an otherworldly sound. Its name comes from rows of bioluminescent organs on its underside that reminded early observers of the buttons on a midshipman’s uniform. "The production and hearing of vocal signals plays a central role in their social interactions and reproductive behaviour. A study published on September 22 provides the answer.In constant brightness, a condition that lowers melatonin production, humming was suppressed. When kept in constant light but given a melatonin-like substitute, they continued to hum, though at random times of the day."The plainfin midshipman, up to 15 inches (38 cm) long, generally has an olive-brown colour.Melatonin keeps day-active birds quiet at night and helps humans fall asleep but has the reverse effect in the midshipman fish.People have not always known what to make of the midshipman’s humming.Laboratory experiments showed that the fish’s vocalisation, a low-frequency hum like a foghorn, is controlled by a light-driven internal clock and the hormone melatonin, known to govern sleep and wake cycles, researchers said."

It turned out their houseboats were merely resonating with the ‘love songs’ of male midshipman fish.Scientists have wondered what makes these fish sing only at night. One hum can last almost two hours.Males migrate during the late spring and summer from deep offshore sites into shallow intertidal waters, where they build nests beneath rocky shelters. Neighboring males often hum together in a chorus."In the early 1980s, a mysterious sound caused concern for houseboat residents of Sausalito Bay, California, who suspected the source might be the pumps of a nearby sewage plant, an underwater power line, some secret experiment by the Navy or maybe even extraterrestrials," Bass said.In constant darkness, the fish hummed pretty much on schedule, thanks to their CNC Spring Camless Machine Manufacturers internal clock, or circadian rhythm."They are among the vocal champions of the marine environment along with whales and dolphins," said Cornell University professor of neurobiology and behavior Andrew Bass.".Throughout the night, they produce hums by vibrating a gas-filled bladder within their abdomen to attract females to their nests to spawn.

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The practice has been to keep religion distanced from the formal processes of the State, whilst discreetly extracting political mileage from religious discord.If Haryana has this resolve then bridging the gulf between politics and religion makes eminent sense. Alarm bells rang immediately in the citadels of prickly pseudo-secular vigilantism. Contrast this with the traditional rituals which accompany the sendoff for other departed leaders. But their formal duties thrust them into an artificial bubble, which bars frank recognition of the extent to which religion both deeply divides and elevates India.The "syncretic" culture of India is predominantly Hindu. The modern state needs to explicitly factor in the resilience of religion as a treasured personal belief. The stout bamboo lath (stick) that the archetypal Haryanvi "tau" (great uncle) is caricatured to carry is as useful to balance on a tight wire as it is to subdue dissent.

The overlay, mostly incipient and often explicit, between religion and politics, has been a fact in the subcontinent since Independence.The Indian Constitution clubs Jains, Sikhs and Buddhists under the broader rubric of "Hindus". Holy men from all major religions were allotted time for doing their bit. India is predominantly Hindu. Far reaching because, frankly, it was disturbing, coming from an overwhelmingly Hindu state, ruled by the BJP.But it is a thin line the legislators walk between legitimising naked majoritarianism — Haryana is 95 per cent Hindu — and spring-cleaning their minds as they run through the full gamut of multi-faith religious discourses in the Assembly. But this tradition has waned during the last two decades.Haryana wears its heart and mind on its sleeve. Nagaland and Mizoram are predominantly Christian; the Kashmir Valley is Muslim; Punjab is 60 per cent Sikh; 20 per cent of West Bengal, 18 per cent of Uttar Pradesh and 17 per cent of Bihar is Muslim; 19 per cent of Kerala is Muslim and 25 per cent is Christian; Goa is 26 per cent Christian.Rather than hiding from religion as an identity, dealing with it upfront and sanitising it democratically, could have real value. Last week, the Haryana Assembly listened in rapt attention to a pravachan (teachings of a holy person) by a Jain monk. These states cannot ignore the salience of a plural polity. Clever, because the minority Jain community is being used as a proxy for Hindu thought. But the Haryana experiment will lack credibility as a "positive new beginning", unless it promotes similar interaction with religious leaders of all denominations. This is the essence of a modern, secular state. In earlier days, prayers on public occasions were explicitly secular. Nothing wrong in puncturing the bubble. Secular China Spring forming machine Price fundamentalists cavil that unless the strictest oversight is exercised, in this God-fearing, Hindu dominant country, religion can creep into politics and governance, to the detriment of marginalised communities.In these fractious times, an overt mix of religion and politics is unusual.Haryana has initiated a novel experiment of democratising religion by inviting a never-before direct interaction between a religious leader and elected legislators. Paying lip service to secularism, whilst practising a more partisan strategy, has done little for those away from the mainstream. This is why Communist regimes stand out from other political parties, in that they steadfastly ignore religion. Legislators reflect voter preferences better than intellectuals.

The pseudo-secularist approach, driven by 1950s beliefs in modernity versus tradition as values, rather than processes, relies on insulating politics from religion as the right way to go. If the moral fiber of politicians can be strengthened by religion, without diluting their constitutional commitment to safeguard the marginalised, the benefits of religious teachings far outweigh the costs.Surely, the fact that Pakistan split subsequently, despite a common religion and that Nepal, despite being a predominantly Hindu state, holds its sovereignty dear, sufficiently illustrates that Hinduism is not the primary glue which binds India. It all depends on the intent with which it is wielded. This has been long overdue. Upfront, visible confirmation of this intent by the leadership would be transformative. We are more comfortable with Barelvi Sufi version of Islam than the more strident Wahhabi Deoband type. The available constitutional safeguards need to override religious biases against these communities. Strident, ritualised religion — whether Hinduism, Islam, Christianity or Sikhism, do not align with the benign and neutral constitutional provisions which place citizenship, not religion, as the primary identity of Indians. Nothing could be worse, if the ground realities do not reflect this belief. They have a point. So, the choice of a Jain monk, rather than a Hindu priest, to preach to the Assembly was a clever and far-reaching tactic to formalise the mix of religion with politics. But significant political jurisdictions, where 32 per cent of our people live, are not.The writer is adviser, Observer Research Foundation. After all pragmatic Haryana filters all actions through the "value for money" lens. Harkishan Singh Surjeet, the wily politician and grand old man of the CPI(M), passed on in 2008. This is a healthy development. He was a Sikh. Hindus no longer feel obliged to be subdued, lest they offend minorities. Truth needs to be spoken and recognised before reconciliation can happen.Religion can be inherently divisive, particularly in the highly-contested political environment of democracy. But at his funeral, there were no religious rituals beyond a spirited Lal Salaam. But just as surely, the State needs to enforce constitutional rights across all religions.In particular, the religious marginalisation of minorities, dalits, women and the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community come to mind. And this is true across all religions. Pakistan hived itself off into an Islamic state consisting of physically and culturally separated West Pakistan and Bengali-speaking East Pakistan, now Bangladesh.Far from fading away, across the world, religion as an identity is fighting back. There is a lot of brawn and bravado but little guile here.

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Users must resist the urge to point camera phones at Pikachu popping out in front of the Kuwaiti Emir’s palace, mosques, oil facilities or military bases, Kuwait’s interior ministry said. Egypt’s cabinet spokesman said on the news show 90 minutes on Wednesday that authorities were investigating Pokemon GO and sought to "minimize the dangers of these games". before their release in app stores, using this technology to damage smart phone operating systems or spying on their owners," the statement said.. like drunkards," he told Youm7 newspaper..A main driver of CNC spring coiling machine Price 2011 pro-democracy uprisings in 2011 dubbed the Arab Spring, social media and its widespread use by the region’s growing youth population has vexed traditional Arab authorities, both secular and spiritual..Relatively wealthy and phone-obsessed, Gulf Arabs are no exception but ply their devices under the wary eye of states keen to prevent sectarian or seditious ideas.The UAE’s Telecommu-nications Regulatory Authority said in a statement that waiting for the game’s official launch in the country would save budding Pokemon traders’ from "violation of user privacy".

Abbas Shoman, undersecretary of Cairo’s Al Azhar mosque, the foremost seat of Sunni Muslim learning, despaired.T) Pokemon GO is set to be released to 200 more "relatively soon", according to the company. Now the colourful creatures have been sighted at landmarks such as Egypt’s pyramids and Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque.Officially launched in only five Western countries, Nintendo Co Ltd’s (7974... "It’s the utmost kind of manic harm for the future of those people enamoured with this game, searching for Pokemon through the streets ..Authorities in the Gulf Arab states of Kuwait and United Arab Emirates on Friday warned of security dangers to playing the wildly successful new smartphone app Pokemon GO.."The interior ministry has informed security men to show zero tolerance to anyone approaching such prohibited sites, deliberately or not," Fahd said in a statement.Accessing the app by a VPN connection or foreign app stores, mideast users too have become addicted to Pokemon, which involves walking in search of the "pocket monsters" which emerge superimposed on the phone screen via the camera. smart phones which transfer the pictures of the sites to third parties," Kuwait interior ministry under-secretary Suleiman al-Fahd said."Criminals (can) deploy malicious software posing as these applications ."The danger in dealing with this game is that it involves the user photographing areas nearby with .

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