Around the world

Queen feels the pinch

The Queen of England is beginning to feel the pinch of things. Like everybody else in England the current world recession has caught up with the Queen too. As a result she has to keep a watch on her mounting gas and power bills. And even the phone is used only when really necessary. And her home is badly in need of repair with no signs of immediate attention, and to make matters worse her pension has not been increased in the past ten years.

The only consolation, if that is any, is that she measures her poverty unlike most people who do it in pennies, she does it in millions of pounds. The latest report of Britain's National Audit Office (NAO) reveals Queen Elizabeth has had to adopt stringent cost-cutting measures across all her palaces in the past one year. She balances her budget by leasing more palaces on rent, by cutting back on repairs and holding a 20 per cent cut in the use of her phone. Not bad accounting for a Queen!

But her pleas for appreciation for what she is doing to lower expenses appear to be falling on deaf ears. The Times has reported that despite the royal household's attempts to save money, the NAO and the Commons Public Accounts Committee said that it could do better.

Ban on Kissing

The head of a mixed school in Upper Austria found that kissing among the students was getting out of hand. He did what the head of a school would normally do and tried to put a stop to it. His objection was that instead of simply greeting each other with a light peck on the cheeks between lessons, some 14-year-olds had taken to 'theatrically falling into each other's arms and kissing each other on the mouth, sometimes very intimately and for many minutes.'

So when the teachers drew the attention of the headmaster to this new trend in kissing among school children the headmaster decided to ban kissing after putting it to the vote to the staff and some parents. Immediately there was an outcry from both students and politicians that the ban was 'ridiculous' and 'excessive.' Some critics pointed out that there were more important issues like violence in schools than kissing in schools. One group of students threatened to hold a 'kiss-in' demonstration if the school did not call off the ban within a week.

Love across the border

One thing India and Pakistan have in common is their dislike of homosexuality. It is a punishable offence in both countries with whipping and imprisonment and the guilty may even be killed in Pakistan. But this has not prevented a man from Lahore to set up a website called Pakistan Gays with 600 members participating.

He runs his website from city cafes. The man from Pakistan has fallen in love with a man in India where tolerance for gays is very low in both countries and where the border prevents their getting together.

Speaking to the Boston Globe the man from Pakistan said, "It is difficult to be homosexual in Pakistan... because you always fear that if the people around you knew about your sexuality, what bad feelings they would have about you. We think that we are born this way, but still we feel we are doing wrong."

- Roving Eye