NEWS FROM THE UAE
SOURCE : THE NATIONAL

Indian artist free to end exile

DUBAI - SEP 11: The controversial Indian painter Maqbool Fida Husain will return home from self-imposed exile in Dubai after India’s Supreme Court acquitted him of insulting the Hindu faith.

The Muslim artist, who turns 93 next Wednesday, fled to Dubai two-and-a-half years ago after an uproar among hardline Hindu groups caused by his painting of a naked woman in the shape of India kneeling.

Several legal cases were filed against him and after attacks on his work, some of which is worth millions of dollars to collectors, he sought safety in the UAE.

“At last, the dignity of the Indian contemporary art has been upheld by the Supreme Court as expected,” said Mr Husain, dubbed the ‘Picasso of India’, whose works command the highest sums among living Indian painters.

On Monday, three Supreme Court judges described his painting as a work of art and rejected a petition by the complainant Dwaipayan Vekateshacharya Varkedkar for his prosecution for offending Hindus.

After the accusations in 2006 he publicly apologised for the Mother India painting and promised to withdraw it from a charity auction.

Right-wing groups have also condemned his depictions of nude Hindu gods.
He told the UK’s Guardian newspaper last month 3,000 legal cases had been lodged against him in the last eight years.

His son, the Dubai restaurater Mustafa Husain, said his father intended to gauge the reaction of his countrymen before returning to India.

“He is very keen and he was trying to go back but we have to wait and see the reaction,” Mr Husain said. “We are very happy about the judgment. It is a victory for Indian contemporary art, so we are definitely very happy. The only thing is the common man is more worrisome,” he said. “The judgment is excellent though, and with that he might even think of going back very soon.”

He said his father had enjoyed Dubai, despite missing India. “There are no restrictions here, he loves this place. After India, this is the place he could do so much in and he was very happy to be here. He has missed the normality of India, meeting people, going to small tea shops.

“He loved going to small tea shops. People said he was too big for that but he was more comfortable there,” Mr Husain said. “The whole of the country is the same for him – it’s one for him. There are no differences between the cities he loves, as such. He loves the whole country,” he added.

The artist, a self-confessed fan of the Indian actress Madhuri Dixit, has made two Bollywood movies – Gaja Gamini, which starred his muse, and Meenaxi: A Tale of Three Cities. The industry considered both flops.

MF Husain is currently working on projects in Qatar, Dubai and London. He plans to reveal one of his latest paintings on his birthday at a show in the Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank building.

A Hindu expatriate at the Dubai-based Indian Association welcomed his return to the country. “He is the number one painter in India,” she said.

School teachers will be retrained

UAE - SEP 11:Ten thousand teachers are to be re-trained as part of an attempt to raise standards in failing public schools, with those who fail or refuse to take part left with “no place” in the system.

Sheikh Nahyan bin Mubarak, the Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research, said yesterday that the programme would span five years and that every public school teacher in the Northern Emirates would be retrained.

“The role of teachers cannot be over-emphasised for the future of the nation,” Sheikh Nahyan said. “Unless we have good teachers who want to make a difference, who want to give students the tools to carry on in life, we have a problem.”

In introducing the re-training measure, Sheikh Nahyan drew parallels with education reforms introduced in the US, and referred to a 1983 study on the country’s public school system entitled A Nation at Risk. At the time, the US was “not at risk over nuclear power or terrorist attacks, it was over teachers”, he said.

The study kick-started public school reform in the country and led to the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act that requires schools to perform or face tough sanctions.
At present, public school teachers in the UAE are not required to hold a licence. Some have only a high school diploma, and while most have completed university, they do not have degrees in education.

“In most countries, to be licensed, a prospective teacher will study the subject they are going to teach, like maths or chemistry, at a university, but then they study education,” said Dr Peggy Blackwell, dean of the College of Education at Zayed University. “Many people think that anyone can teach – until they go into a first-grade classroom, or into a 12th-grade chemistry class, and try it. “Teaching is a very difficult profession. So to be licensed, a teacher would study their content area and education.”

The Government has long discussed the need to certify teachers: “In 1986, before I was even a minister, there was a resolution from the Cabinet to implement a licensing programme,” Sheikh Nahyan said. He added that it had taken a quarter of a century to implement something that should have happened in the 80s.

The ministry is now due to release plans for a licensing programme for all public school teachers.

The teacher-training initiative, called Teachers for the 21st Century, is a partnership between the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research, Zayed University and the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development – Middle East.

It is intended to improve pupils’ preparation for university. Currently, a third of state university budgets go towards foundation courses that teach students things they should have learned in secondary school, and it takes some students up to six years to graduate.

“The most important variable in a child’s education is a high-quality teacher,” said Elizabeth Ross, a policy and planning consultant for the Ministry of Education. “We can have the best standards for curriculum, the best standards for assessment, we can have the best university preparation programmes, but the critical link is how we impact teacher professional practice in the classroom.”

A 2007 report from the consultancy firm McKinsey and Company found that top-performing schools all over the world had one thing in common: good teachers.

According to the report, “the only way to improve outcomes is to improve instruction”. The quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers, it added.

The news that teachers will have to undergo intensive professional development comes shortly after the announcement of a new national curriculum for public schools.

Developed by the Abu Dhabi Education Council in 2006, it is standards-driven and focuses on the skills and knowledge children should be expected to have learned at the end of each year.

The old curriculum, which remains in place at most schools for at least another year, has been criticised for its reliance on rote learning. “Learning is not a passive activity, it is an active activity,” said Dr Blackwell.

“As we know more about how students learn, we have adapted teaching to make use of that knowledge, to make learning more efficient for students... so that they have a deep understanding rather than just memorising facts.”

The programme is being introduced to raise teaching standards to international levels and, just as importantly, to train teachers how to use the new curriculum and its assessment mechanisms.

The initiative will introduce 10 professional standards for teachers.

“The standards will give our nation a shared vision for what the teaching profession should look like and what the goals should be,” said Ms Ross. “It will provide teachers with an international benchmark of knowledge, skills, attitudes and values toward their work in the profession.”

The programme will be introduced in stages. In the initial stage, which starts this month, 10,000 public school teachers will attend introductory workshops on four standards for professional practice.

Zayed University will then select 3,000 teachers for an intensive four-month training programme.

“Think of this as what a teacher should know and be able to do to teach effectively,” said Dr Blackwell. “What is it that we want every teacher to know and be able to do.”

A smaller group of 570 teachers will then start intensive teacher-training at Zayed University later this year. “There, study will be much more in-depth,” said Dr Blackwell.

Breach of banks' shared network led to warning

ABU DHABI - SEP 11: A breach of the network that allows banks to share customer debit-card information has prompted banks to send warnings to hundreds of thousands of customers this week, banking officials familiar with the incident revealed yesterday.

At least some, if not all, UAE bank accounts may have been vulnerable to fraudulent withdrawals or charges, the officials said.

Customers of some of the country’s main banks queued at automated teller machines yesterday after the insitutions sent text messages warning that their accounts could be compromised if they did not change their personal identification numbers immediately.

Some banks said they moved to change the PINs of customers they determined to be at special risk of having their accounts accessed illegally.

Banks that broadcast text messages to customers included National Bank of Abu Dhabi (NBAD), Citibank, Emirates NBD, and HSBC.

MasterCard and Visa said they warned member banks that their security may have been compromised, and began a joint investigation with financial institutions into the breach.

“We are aware of a possible network intrusion in the United Arab Emirates and are working with all of the banks in the country to make sure that appropriate measures are put in place to prevent any such breaches,” said Jonathan Miller, Visa’s spokesman in London.

He said the company does not know where the problem originated or who was responsible. Even banks that said their customers were not affected took the opportunity to remind cardholders to change their PINs regularly.

“Although our Mashreq ATMs were not affected, there is a possibility that some of our clients have used a compromised ATM. Some people keep the same PIN code for many years, which is not recommended. It should be a habit to change the PIN code regularly,” said Gavin Sanderson, head of distribution at Mashreq Bank.

Banking industry officials said the problem was unlikely to have been the result of “skimming”, in which thieves obtain debit-card and PIN information directly from ATMs or customers as they make withdrawals, because the breach involved far too many accounts.

If it were a simple case of skimming, “you wouldn’t have seen banks issuing mass warning to their customers”, said a senior industry source familiar with the incident.
He said banks had not determined the source of the fraud, but it appeared that it occurred on a system that banks use to share ATM data. “This has to be a pretty specialised operation,” he said.

In August, Visa informed some banks in the country that thousands of cards might have been compromised. The US Embassy also warned residents on Aug 24 that those fraudulent activities had originated in the US. It is not known whether the two incidents are related to this week’s security alerts.

Transit workers guilty of leaking police death video

DUBAI - SEP 11: Two Road Transport Authority (RTA) employees were convicted on Wednesday of leaking closed-circuit footage of a policeman’s death in the Dubai International Airport tunnel last December.

The Dubai Court of First Instance sentenced them to three months’ jail, suspended for three years. The gruesome footage showing the policeman being rammed by a speeding car found its way to YouTube and upset his family.

It was filmed on RTA cameras on Dec 14 and made available to the public within days. The dead man’s brother was shocked to see the ramming incident on a relative’s mobile phone, accompanied by laughter in the background.

According to court documents, sounds recorded on the video included crude and insensitive remarks by the defendants. AM, 50, and AA, 24, who are both Emiratis, worked at the Rashidiya traffic control room in Dubai on the day of the accident. They did not appear in court to hear the verdicts.

AM, the main operator on duty in the control room, was found guilty on a charge of disseminating secret information to the public and violating the trust of his employer by allowing AA to view the footage. He was acquitted on a separate charge of belittling and defaming the deceased. AA photographed the video footage and sent it to a friend, from whom it was circulated to the public.

The dead policeman’s brother, FM, 52, said in testimony to the public prosecution that days after his brother’s death a relative showed him video footage of the accident he had received on his mobile phone. The brother said he heard laughter and mocking comments on the footage.

FM’s relative, SD, 25, who filed a joint complaint with FM, told prosecutors a voice on the video made fun of the policeman just before he was hit by the car.

“One voice said, ‘Look man, he’s walking like he is in a park not on a road and he’s gesturing with his hands as well’,” SD said, adding that this was followed by laughter.

Both RTA staffers went to the house of the brother of the dead policeman and apologised to his family, SD said. He said AA admitted he recorded the video footage on his phone but denied disseminating the video to the public. “He said he only sent it to a friend and that it was that person, not him, who broadcast it,” SD said.

The policeman was killed while investigating another accident in the tunnel. The driver who rammed him, identified only as MK, was convicted of accidental manslaughter and sentenced in February to six months in prison.