... oh man what a fucked up story from a fucked up land, poor woman!

Like mechazin Hadjiboy, I have lived there but I suspect we have vastly different impressions of the country since I was at the time a young blond girl and he is a male - Saudi is to me a land that engages in full fledged apartheid, just as despickable as when South Africa had apartheid, but in "The Kingdom" they treat women as inferior and the rest of the world are quite happily doing business with this land, where guestworkers from neighbouring countries are treated worse than dirt, and people who will defend all humans rights at home will happily forego their own wives rights not to be treated as owned cattle for a few years of making shitloads of money in Saudi. Money really does talk. I better shut up now before the mutaween arrest me.

You also never hear people referring to Sweden this way.

Phuket, Thailand's biggest island, is one of the kingdom's top tourist draws

When I first visited Bangkok, the Kingdom of Thailand, it was in 1966

Economic woes are nothing new to Thailand, where growth was already slowing prior to the global economic crisis. But a new study has shown that the Kingdom's poor, who make up a third of the population, may now be more vulnerable than before.

Mr. Abhisit said he had met a number of foreign businessmen in Thailand who told him that they wished to invest more in the kingdom

Those are all articles from the last two days. Apparently people DO refer to Thailand that way. :)

I don't understand that first story. The so-called morality police weren't related to the old woman, why did they enter her house? they should be punished!

wow, what a miserable world.

I agree with Jello Biafra, respecting different cultures is one thing, but what some branches of Islam due to women really is indefensible.

er, that should have been "do to", 3 hours of sleep has left my brain cottage cheese.

Who's Jello Biafra? Am I missing comments?

He's a musician/activist/whackjob depending on who you ask. But he is usually interesting and can be immensely entertaining. I'm sorry, I was remembering a quote of his but in my sleep-deprived state I guess I just assumed that people would know what and who I was talking about.

I'm tired too, I could've googled. ;)) I suddenly just had some "omg-are mods deleting comments?" metafilter moment here which is all wrong.

Well, unlike Thailand, which has an intermittently functioning civilian government, and Sweden, which has a settled constitutional monarchy, Saudi Arabia is still pretty much an absolute monarchy -- one of the last in the world. The King is head of state, head of government, and the supreme arbiter of the law of the land. There's an advisory council but nothing like a popularly-elected legislature. Almost all the key government posts are held by first, second, or third-degree relatives of the King.

Wow, dabitch, I never knew that about you.

I don't understand that first story. The so-called morality police weren't related to the old woman, why did they enter her house? they should be punished!

The monarchy rules by tenuous alliance with ultra-conservative Islam, so the Saudi religious police have some pretty broad powers. There is probably nothing like a "castle doctrine" there, unless your last name is Sa'ud. Then you can live like a Westerner, have girls in miniskirts in your car, dance to rock music, and drink alcohol to your heart's content.

That fire in the girls' school a few years ago was worse than it needed to be, because a religious policeman would not let the girls escape into the street as they were not dressed properly (in abayas).

Anyway, as fucked-up as this is, I don't want to give the Islamophobes any more reasons to hold up the actions of an allied country as justification for waging war in another, entirely different country.