Underpaid and underfed all year, Asian workers in Dubai, as in the rest of the United Arab Emirates, get a chance to eat their fill--and for free--during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
As the call to prayer goes out at dusk from a mosque in an up market district to signal the end of the fast, hundreds of mostly south Asian men gather nearby to savour a meal offered by charities or philanthropists, Au.news.yahoo.com. reported.
Seated on the ground in makeshift tents, construction laborers in blue jumpsuits, gardeners, cab drivers and even technicians plunge into platters of chicken and rice after first breaking the daily fast with the traditional dates and milk.
Mineral water or juice, and an orange or an apple, round up the “iftar“ served on carpets strewn across the tents.
“It’s a full meal and I’m happy for it. Otherwise I would have had to do with a snack after fasting all day,“ said Mazhar, a 31-year-old native of Bombay after a day of hard work for his maintenance company in temperatures reaching 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit).
Shafik, a frail and weary-looking gardener, has also been making it daily to the tent with a group of fellow Pakistanis since Ramadan, the month when Muslims abstain from food and drink from dawn to dusk, began on September 13.
Like most expatriate manual workers, Shafik earns too little to be able to bring his family to the bustling Persian Gulf emirate, where tens of thousands of mainly south Asian workers on scores of construction sites make no more than an average 200 dollars a month.

A pioneering project that takes education by boat to thousands in a remote part of Bangladesh has won a major UN environmental award, a statement said.
The 200,000 dollar United Nations Environment Program Sasakawa prize was jointly won by Bangladesh sustainable development organization Shidhulai Swanirvar Sangstha and the founder of Food and Trees for Africa, the UN statement said.
The Bangladesh project, which has already won a string of other international awards, runs school and library boats in the northwestern Chalanbeel region where extreme poverty and annual flooding often conspire to rob children of their education, Gulf-times.com reported.
In addition to taking education to children in their villages, the project also supplies villagers with solar-powered lights and trains adults in sustainable agriculture.
The lights mean families can avoid spending money on kerosene.
Children can study after dark and their parents can continue income-generating activities such as fishing and sewing.
Executive director A.H.M. Rezwan said the prize money would help his organization to expand its work by educating thousands more.
The annual award recognizes individuals or institutions that have made a substantial contribution to protecting and managing the environment.

Life in the spotlight for the cream of the world’s sportsmen and women may take a toll in itself but once the stars retire to the shadows their existence can become even more difficult with drugs and divorce only two of the risks they may face, according to Spanish psychiatrists.
A report by the XI national congress of Spanish psychiatrists suggested that it is difficult for sports stars to make the transition from the top of their trade to blending in with ’normal’ life once they retire.
Participating psychiatrists said they had detected a statistically clear risk of “consumption of toxic substances such as hashish or cocaine.“
In addition, “the incidence of divorce and separation the year following retirement rises spectacularly,“ the psychiatrists said at their congress in the northwestern city of Santiago de Compostela.
“When someone ceases high-level competition and falls out of the media eye“ they enter a difficult period of transition, “retirement syndrome,“ they added.
Dr Juan Carlos Dias del Valle told AFP it was difficult to come up with concrete evidence on the extent to which former stars turned to drugs following retirement.
“But according to epidemiological statistics which we have seen we estimate that 30 percent of sportsmen abuse alcohol or drugs when they end their career,“ said Dr Dias de Valle, who between 1996 and 2002 was head of the Spanish cycling federation’s medical services.
No definite link has been shown between sports stars taking doping products and later abuse of drugs following retirement, Dr Dias del Valle said.
He added that certain doping products, including amphetamines, are addictive, whereas others including erythropoietine, better known as EPO, do not.
The doctor called for action to halt the spread of doping “for ethical and medical reasons“ while noting that in former times cheating was frowned upon--and punished severely.
“To those who criticize (what they see as the) exaggerated surveillance of the (doping) phenomenon once might remember that one Roman emperor prescribed crucifixion for athletes caught in the act of cheating.“

An old woman gets a free loaf of bread. On the occasion of birth anniversary of Imam Hassan Mojtaba (AS)--the second infallible Imam of Shiite Muslims (on Sept. 27)--bakeries, as a token of respect for the Imams, offer free bread in the Iranian city of Mashhad, Khorasan Razavi province.

Russian and French cyber-crime experts have pledged to strengthen joint efforts to crackdown on organized crime networks targeting the Internet.
Investigators, police and representatives from big business, including the French Banking Federation, have spent last week in Moscow locked in talks with their opposite numbers to hammer out an agreement on fighting Internet fraud.
The head of the French delegation, Christian Aghroun, told AFP the purpose of the four day conference was to “personalize the increased cooperation“ between the two countries.
The discussions centered on online fraud, but fighting child pornography networks was also on the agenda, he added.
Aghroun, who runs the Central Office Against Technology, Information and Communication Crime (OCLCTIC), said the biggest push between the two countries would be against so-called ’phishing’--the phenomena whereby spam emails, apparently from bona fide institution such as banks trick Internet users into revealing their personal details.
These networks are a “one way street between Russia and France“ he added. “The victims are French and the perpetrators are Russian, and they are very highly organised.“ “It’s time to put an end to the myth of cyber-crime. It’s not about some spotty student sat in his bedroom planting viruses in company HQs,“ Aghroun said.
“In reality it is a massive organized crime network, complete with everything from computer-boffins and technical support staff to money laundering and distribution networks“ he added.

Most Singaporeans don’t buy the whole “smoking is glam“ notion, a study shows.
The survey across 15 countries--which shows only 13 percent of Singaporeans lighting up--also reveals great support for smoking bans, led by Italians, Thais, Taiwanese and Singaporeans. Such bans had an 80-percent endorsement in the survey, reported Channelnewsasia.com.
What was more surprising was that 60 percent of smokers overall also backed smoking bans in public places such as restaurants and buildings.
More than three-quarters of non-smokers felt a ban on smoking in public places was a good way to encourage smokers to stop, while 28 percent of smokers said the ban was a way for governments to interfere in the private lives of their citizens.
The latest ban on smoking in Singapore--at nightspots--started on July 1.
The poll, conducted in June this year by market research firm Synovate, also showed Singaporeans, along with Italians and United Arab Emirates residents, were the least in favor of flying on a smoking-friendly airline.
But 17 percent of all respondents would pay extra to take a smoking-friendly flight--an insight that would be appreciated by Germany’s soon-to-launch Smintair, the world’s first airline promising to “reinstate the liberty of smoking in all seats“, said the report.
Such flights would please Slovakians (52 percent), Taiwanese (28 percent) and South Koreans (20 percent), who would be among the first to fly a smoking-friendly airline. Slovakia has the most smokers, with half of their respondents regular smokers, followed by Bulgaria (47 percent) and Russia (41 percent).
The study polled 8,500 respondents from Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Britain.

Plans to hire staff from China to teach Mandarin in English schools could be scuppered because of their difficulty in coping with unruly pupils, a report for the government suggested.
About 100 Chinese teachers are expected to arrive to teach the subject in English state schools by the start of the new academic year in September 2008, and more are expected to follow, according to Thisisnorthscotland.co.uk.
But Cilt, The National Centre for Languages, said in a report for the Department for Children, which runs education policy, that Chinese nationals already working in English classrooms already found the environment difficult.
“Teachers from China are described as ’lovely’ but their lack of familiarity with the English system of discipline, target setting etc. is a problem,“ its report said.
The British government is currently pushing to increase the teaching of languages such as Urdu and Mandarin, particularly because of China’s evolving status as a world power.

Finnish police said that they had arrested 21 people suspected of taking part in the most important drug network ever uncovered in the history of the Nordic country.
Charged with drug trafficking and money laundering, the suspects face up to six years of jail for the first charge and up to 10 years for the second.
A Dutch citizen was arrested in France as part of the same drug ring, according to a statement released by the Finnish anti-drug squad, AFP reported.
The network is suspected of having brought into Finland three tones of hashish and 20 kilograms (44 pounds) of cocaine between 2000 and 2006 with an estimated Finnish resale market value of 20 million euros (28.3 million dollars). The drugs were hidden in lorries coming from the Netherlands.
Investigators apprehended the primary drug traffickers during a raid on their hideout in Vantaa, near Helsinki. They seized 310,000 euros in cash, 23 kilograms of hashish, 2 kilograms of cocaine, in addition to cars, motorcycles, as well as jewelry and watches valued at 100,000 euros.

The total population of the EU states rose by 37.6 million between 1980 and 2007 for growth of 8.2 percent, a rate which slowed to four percent between 1994 and 2007 and 2.1 percent for 2002-2007.

Europe is losing its youngsters and rapidly aging, according to a report by the Institute for Family Policies released in Spain. The 2007 Report on the Evolution of the Family in Europe found that the number of young people aged below 14 had slumped 23 million across the continent, defined as the 27 EU states, between 1980 and 2005, falling from a 22.1 percent to a 16.2 percent share overall, Expatica.com said.
Lola Velarde, president of the European Network Institute for Family Policies, revealed that whereas in 1980 youngsters outnumbered adults by 36 million the latter were now in the ascendancy.
“Europe is getting old,“ said Velarde, alluding to falling birth rates which she described as “worrying for the future“ with the population of the United States projected to rise above that of the EU by 2060.
The total population of the EU states rose by 37.6 million between 1980 and 2007 for growth of 8.2 percent, a rate which slowed to four percent between 1994 and 2007 and 2.1 percent for 2002-2007.
The report notes that it is immigration which is now sustaining growth “in almost all European countries.“
In the Europe of 25 states as was between 1994 and 2006--before the accession of Bulgaria and Romania--immigrants accounted for 15 million of 19 million population growth, the report states.
The trend is particularly pronounced in Spain with the rate of immigration running 10 times ahead of natural domestic population growth.
The report adds that whereas 5.1 million children were born in the EU last year that was a million down on the figure for 1982--a fall of 16.6 percent.