A good week for Shi’inanegans “A marriage of convenience”, “a marriage for pleasure”, “legal prostitution” - these are just some of the phrases used to describe Shi’ite marriage arrangements that allow a men and woman to marry for a limited amount of time: one hour to 99 years. The arrangement, legally recognised in Iran, was promoted as “a means to help women who have difficulty getting married for various reasons” by a former president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. The law was rejected by parliament in 2008, essentially ending the controversy, until now. President Ahmed Ahmadinejad has again revived the law. His assumption was that many of its opponents were no longer active - some were in jail and others had left the country - and that the Parliament is controlled by a conservative majority. He underestimated the strength of opposition, not only among women’s organisations and human rights groups, but also within the Parliament. Parliament rejected paragraph 21 of the law, which allows for registering temporary marriages. Inconvenient. - Ha’aretz
A bad week for The children More than a half-million children and adolescents in the U.S. now take antipsychotic medicines, only one of which has been approved (though heavily restricted) for kids. “Even the most reluctant prescribers encounter a marketing juggernaut that has made antipsychotics the nation’s top-selling class of drugs by revenue, $US14.6 billion last year, with prominent promotions aimed at treating children. In the waiting room of a child psychiatrist children played with Legos stamped with the word Risperdal, made by Johnson & Johnson. (It has since lost its patent on the drug and stopped handing out the toys.)” - The New York Times
The earthquake came in the dark at 4.35, just before dawn. Its magnitude was 7.1, was 10km deep, and it was centred 40km west of Christchurch and 10km southeast of Darfield, a town on the western edges of the Canterbury Plains, on the road to the West Coast. The quake revealed a new faultline in a territory not known for seismic activity, surprising scientists (Isaac Davidson, The New Zealand Herald). “Aerial surveys revealed a dark, 24km-long scar across paddocks and roads where the shallow tremor offset the land. The faultline cut roads 4m apart, dug up mounds of earth, and in some places formed a waist-high step in the land,” Davidson reported. “The earthquake was among the 10 strongest recorded in New Zealand. It was similar in strength to the one that killed an estimated 200,000 in Haiti in January,” The Dominion Post (Wellington) said in an editorial. More than 100,000 buildings throughout Canterbury – houses, not just the old stone-and-brick historic buildings in central Christchurch featured on the TV news – are estimated to have suffered damage. Water mains and sewerage has also been damaged. Hundreds of people were essentially homeless, thousands more faced with huge challenges in getting through the day-to-day, The Nelson Mail said. Businesses and daily commerce had been up-ended in ways that would have far-reaching consequences. “Many of those consequences have yet to fully emerge – the disruption to grocery supply systems throughout the island is surely just the first example.”
What the editorials said
New Zealanders were well used to experiencing earthquakes, but it was not often that one [such as] Saturday’s occurred and even rarer for it to happen near a major city, The Press, Christchurch’s morning newspaper, said. “The terrifying strength of Saturday’s quake, and the destruction it wreaked on the city and surrounding areas, showed, if any demonstration were needed, how vital it is that no matter how familiar quakes may be in the Shaky Isles, we cannot afford to become blasé about them,” it said. “Beyond Canterbury, New Zealanders have been jolted back into a realisation that their country is known as the Shaky Isles for a reason,” The New Zealand Herald said. “Earthquake experts have repeated their predictions of a major shake in Wellington and probably something bigger still along the Alpine Fault of the South Island. The message from Civil Defence to be prepared as a household, community or business for the ‘big one’ no longer seems like so much over-caution.”
And …
“There is now no excuse for being unprepared,” The Timaru Herald said. “The instructions are in the front of the phone book. Hopefully schools will take the opportunity to remind pupils about what to do and to nag their mums and dads about getting emergency kits together. Mother nature has given us a warning about what the potential for disaster is. Supermarkets and camping stores have reported that torches and emergency supplies are flying off the shelves. That’s a good sign. There can now be no excuses for failing to be prepared.” “ … it is also clear there was little structural damage to modern buildings, surely a tribute to construction codes designed to resist the consequences of such events,” the Otago Daily Times said. The Marlborough Express (Blenheim) added its praise: “A great deal of credit for the outcome, though, can go to the authorities which have written building codes over the years. Knowing the country sits astride a big fault system, building codes have been set to ensure buildings are strong enough to cope with major earthquakes.” The Dominion Post said some had cavilled at the earthquake standards imposed on buildings, “claiming they are bureaucratic, that the standards are being set too high, and that they can force unnecessary expense and demolition, particularly in areas not known for earthquakes”. “Saturday’s events should silence them. Rigorous building codes have undoubtedly paid off in lives saved.” The Herald on Sunday found people to blame: Civil Defence and the police for not being on the ball fast enough, TVNZ for playing scheduled Paul Henry reruns, and politicians for being slow when quake news was already being spread by Twitter within minutes and radio talkback had already cut away from their usual programming.
What next
A tickertape-like stream of aftershocks since Saturday morning have rocked and rippled across Canterbury. These could continue for a long time. They might be ‘normal’ to scientists, but a caller to Danny Watson’s NewstalkZB radio talkback programme said they weren’t ‘normal’ to ‘ordinary people’. People telephone talkback radio, blog, and tell the mainstream media of being tired and frightened. Some of the many ramifications of the quake were beginning to emerge, the Otago Daily Times said yesterday. “The Government has rightly earned plaudits for its prompt response to the disaster, and for its hastily unveiled support plans, mapped out at Cabinet on Monday,” it said. These included: $5 million to the mayoral fund set up for hardship cases; $94m for road repairs; appointing Cabinet minister Gerry Brownlee as minister in charge of earthquake recovery, based in Christchurch, and as chair of a new Cabinet committee on Canterbury reconstruction. The Treasury doubled its estimate of the earthquake’s cost to $4 billion on Wednesday. The first job losses because of the quake were announced yesterday. Eighty-six workers at Kaiapoi’s New World supermarket will be laid off with two months pay because the quake-damaged store will have to be demolished.
