Dispatches: Burka Pervs

Not a happy day for veiled womanhood. Saudi Arabia, our “friend and ally,” in the words of our own oily monarch, has been on a kick to employ some 200,000 women. “We want to make sure that women job-seekers get opportunities,” a minister of one trope or another told Arab News a week ago. A few days later the Saudi monarchy was all hot and publicly unbothered (robes come in handy in puritan societies) by the prospect of schoolgirls getting the physical education they’ve so far been denied. Further glimmers of progress from our pseudo-Taliban “friend and ally”? Not quite. Read the rest...