Maldives vows wedding crackdown

Maldivian High Commissioner to UK, Dr Farahanaz Faisal: "The whole country is shocked"

The Maldives' leader has promised strict new guidelines on conducting wedding ceremonies for tourists, after a couple renewing vows were abused.

All tourist hotels will be required to follow the rules to be issued shortly, President Mohamed Nasheed said in his weekly radio address.

He described the behaviour of those involved as "absolutely disgraceful".

Police have detained a celebrant who allegedly called the foreign couple "infidels" during a luxury ceremony.

'French' couple

The president's office told the BBC that the man was among two hotel employees detained.

Footage of the ceremony, which took place earlier this month, has gone viral since being posted on YouTube days ago.

With police refusing to confirm the couple's nationality, their identity remains a mystery, although a Maldives tourism official told AFP news agency they were French.

President Nasheed urged all those working in the Indian Ocean island's holiday resorts to be "vigilantly professional".

He noted that "bad behaviour, such as that depicted in the YouTube video, can cause enormous damage to the country's tourism industry".

The government has launched an investigation into the incident at the Vilu Reef resort.

Amateur film on YouTube shows a celebrant explaining the ceremony in English before everyone stands and holds their hands up to pray.

'Fornication'

He uses the intonating style of prayers to unleash a torrent of abuse in the Dhivehi tongue on the couple, who smile shyly, unaware of what is being said.

"Your marriage is not a valid one," he says. "You are not the kind of people who can have a valid marriage. One of you is an infidel.

"The other, too, is an infidel - and we have reason to believe - an atheist, who does not even believe in an infidel religion.

"You fornicate and make a lot of children. You drink and you eat pork.

"Most of the children that you have are marked with spots and blemishes. These children that you have are bastards."

The camera focuses on the paperwork in front of him, which local media say was not a marriage document but employment contracts - he then begins to read from these.

The celebrant also makes references to bestiality, sexual diseases and "frequent fornication by homosexuals".

After the ceremony, the couple are taken to plant a coconut tree together, during which various comments are made about the bride's breasts.

Vilu Reef hotel, run by Sun Hotels and Resorts, charges $1,300 (£820) for the ceremony, which it says offers couples the chance to "mark a milestone in your amazing journey together".

The hotel has apologised for the conduct of its staff.

Manager Mohamed Rasheed told AFP on Thursday: "The man had used filthy language. Otherwise the ceremony was OK."

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk

Tourists conned by Maldives marriage officiator

Two Swiss tourists who chose the Maldives' white-sand beaches as the setting to renew their marriage vows were instead mocked by the officiator, who chanted abuse and curses in the local language at the unsuspecting couple.

The ceremony, posted on YouTube with English subtitles translating the abuse, has embarrassed the Maldives, and President Mohammed Nasheed condemned it as "absolutely disgraceful." Police arrested the celebrant and a helper — an apparent damage-control bid for the country whose economy is driven by tourism.

Police spokesman Ahmed Shiyam told The Associated Press on Friday that the two men under arrest were hotel employees.

The government identified the couple as Swiss nationals but did not name them.

The video, posted Sunday, shows the woman in a white dress and the man wearing a white shirt and khaki trousers, standing with their palms facing upward around a table with two rings in coconut shells. Two witnesses and the celebrant are also present, all of them in a palm-leaf enclosure.

The officiator begins chanting in the Dhivehi language that "under penal code clause seven, forbidden fornication is now legal," and goes on to insult the couple, including calling them "swine." The whole time he maintains a prayer-like, chanting tone, bowing his head and gently rocking forward and back.

"Most of the children you get will have spots on their skin. Because of these spots your children will be considered illegitimate children," he says.

Maldives Foreign Minister Ahmed Shaheed apologized to the couple and said diplomats have been asked to meet them.

"The Maldives is grateful that the couple in question chose to renew their vows in one of our resorts. ... Because of the disrespectful and unacceptable actions of a few individuals, we have let them down," Shaheed said in his statement.

The ministry will write to the Swiss government to express its regret as well, Shaheed said.

The country's Tourism Ministry said in a statement that it is working with the resort to compensate the couple for the distress caused by the incident. It also promised tough action against the offenders.

"Episodes such as that captured on video have no place in the Maldives and are not in any way representative of the holiday experience enjoyed by thousands of visitors each year," the ministry said.

The Maldives is an Indian Ocean archipelago of 350,000 people chosen by many tourists for weddings and honeymoons.

Source: AP

Celebrant insults couple in native language

A luxury resort in the Maldives is under fire after employees used their native language to viciously insult an oblivious couple during a wedding ceremony.

Video uploaded to the internet shows the couple renewing their wedding vows with a celebrant speaking in the Dhivehi language at the Vilu Reef Beach and Spa resort.

But while the Islamic-style ceremony sounds legitimate to an English ear, a translation of the marriage vows reveals the celebrant, an employee named Hussein Didi, had other intentions.

"You are swine. The children that you bear from this marriage will all be bastard swine," Didi says, according to the Daily Mail.

"Your marriage is not a valid one. You are not the kind of people who can have a valid marriage.

"One of you is an infidel. The other too is an infidel and, we have reason to believe, an atheist who does not even believe in an infidel religion."

He is holding a document in his hand that shows text referring to "staff employment", suggesting it has nothing to do with marriage laws in the Maldives.

The couple are surrounded by close to 15 employees from the resort, none of whom attempt to stop the ceremony.

Didi reportedly continues insulting the English-speaking couple, who have not been identified, for nearly 15 minutes.

At one point the bride bends down to plant a coconut tree and a man is heard saying "can see her breasts".

Didi replies: "She is wearing something ... because my beard has gone grey watching those things. I have seen so many of them now that I don’t even want to look any more when I see them".

Police in the Maldives are investigating the incident, which has reportedly horrified the country's tourism authorities.

Employees at the resort, where room rates start from $1335 per person per night, have reportedly been sacked after the video emerged online.

In a statement, the resort's management expressed "deep concern and regret" over the insulting ceremony.

Source: http://news.ninemsn.com.au

Beating the White House to the Solar Punch

An island nation races ahead of the U.S. to capture the solar limelight

The Obama administration plans for the White House to go solar by next spring, but the U.S. first residence will be beaten to the renewable energy punch by the presidential home of an island nation in the Indian Ocean at the front line of climate change risk.

Workers on Thursday finished installation of 48 solar photovoltaic modules on the rooftop of the Mulee Aage, the official residence of the president of the Maldives—a system engineered by satellite technology from halfway around the world in California.

It is the latest gambit by Maldivian President Mohamed Nasheed to draw attention to the problem of global warming, a ladder-high follow-up to an underwater cabinet meeting he staged one year ago.

The Maldives, a tropical archipelago of 1,190 coral islands spread out over 500 miles (860 kilometers), averages only about 5 feet (1.5 meters) above sea level, making it vulnerable to sea level rise and typhoons.

Nasheed says 16 of the islands already face serious erosion problems, and on 60 islands important freshwater sources have been contaminated by saltwater intrusion. The nation also worries that the depletion troubling its fishing industry, its second-largest economic sector next to tourism, is due to changes in the global climate.

“For the Maldives, climate change . . . is not a problem in the future,” Nasheed said in a conference call Tuesday from his nation’s capital, Male. “It is a problem that we are facing every day.”

The Maldives: Not a Big Polluter

The 11.5-kilowatt system that’s being installed is designed to generate 15,000 kilowatt-hours per year for the next 25 years, saving 200 tons of carbon dioxide. It’s meant to highlight Nasheed’s pledge to make the country 100 percent carbon-neutral by 2020, the most aggressive goal among the carbon-reduction plans submitted to the United Nations in the wake of the Copenhagen Accord.

For the Maldives to go zero carbon, however, hardly registers as a blip in worldwide greenhouse gas reduction.

The nation, with a total land area not even double the size of Washington, D.C., has little area for the kind of manufacturing or agriculture that would generate large emissions.

The Maldives ranks 168 out of 186 countries in carbon output, according to the World Resources Institute’s Climate Analysis Indicators Tool.

But for the nation’s 400,000 people, there’s a short-term renewable energy benefit—saving money. Like many island states, the Maldives relies mainly on oil to power its electricity—an expensive option that also leaves the nation vulnerable to wild swings in the global price of oil.

The Oakland, California, solar firm that designed the Mulee Aage system, Sungevity, estimates that it will save the Maldives government $300,000 in electricity costs over the life of the system. The panels were donated by the Korean module manufacturer LG Electronics.

“President Nasheed is demonstrating it is a wise, affordable investment for his country, just as President Obama has decided to show the people of America that solar is a wise, affordable investment for them,” said Danny Kennedy, co-founder and president of Sungevity.

Kennedy, a native of Australia was a longtime Greenpeace activist before starting the firm and was involved in the campaign that helped spur the California Solar Initiative. Along with the climate activism group 350.org, he has been one of the driving forces urging Obama and other world leaders to install solar energy systems on their residences.

In addition to the Maldives system and the planned installation at the White House, one other first residence gets power from the sun. In July, India’s presidential estate, Rashtrapati Bhavan, became a green-certified facility after a solar energy system was installed.

‘A Natural Turn of Events’

But for the Put Solar On It campaign there was no greater coup than Tuesday’s announcement that the Obama administration would bring solar power back to the White House after almost 25 years. President Jimmy Carter installed solar panels in the 1970s, but they were taken down during the 1980s by his successor, President Ronald Reagan.

When 350.org founder and writer/activist Bill McKibben led a group of activists to a meeting at the White House to push the solar idea last month, they came away disappointed.

The turnaround this week may have surprised some activists, but Nasheed said he wasn’t among them. “I have always felt President Obama is a believer,” he said. “That’s why in my mind, this was a natural turn of events.”

The Maldives solar system was designed using a remote-engineering system developed by Sungevity. Using photographs from space and other aerial images, the company creates a computerized three-dimensional model of a building that can provide enough detailed data on roof pitch and azimuth—essentially the angle at which the sun hits—to design the system in the company’s California offices. Pointing to a mango tree in a demonstration of the system using the Maldives photographs, Kennedy said, “That’s our chief shade threat right now.”

The two-year-old company has been doing such long-distance designs for homeowners in California, Colorado, and Arizona—allowing customers to get a system design and price quote by e-mail—and hopes to roll out a nationwide program next year. “We’re trying to make it feel like other internet commerce,” says Kennedy, whose company leases the systems so that customers don’t have to pay the entire capital cost of solar up front. He says about 60 percent of the company’s current customers save money on their electric bills right away, and the company pledges that all will save money over the 10-year span of their leases.

“We’re trying to demonstrate that we’ve got a solution, and that has been my view of what the social movements have to do now,” says Kennedy.

The Maldives presidential residence is the longest-distance installation that Sungevity has engineered, and Kennedy hopes to join Nasheed on the roof of the Mulee Aage to install the final panels and switch the system on Thursday. In the face of global inaction on a climate treaty, Nasheed—a former political activist who was imprisoned several times by the former governmental regime before he won election in 2008—said he is just taking the kind of step that’s needed.

“What we have to do, we have to do by direct action,” he said. “Now as a president, it’s very difficult for me to be talking like this. But whatever I have been able to do, I have done it against odds. This has to involve an amount of direct action on the streets.”

Source: http://news.nationalgeographic.com

Maldivian president climbs roof to set up solar panels

Maldivian President Mohamed Nasheed climbed onto the roof of his official residence and installed solar electricity panels Thursday as part of a nationwide green drive, his office said.

Nasheed, 43, known as a stunt man in the fight against climate change, clambered onto the roof in the capital Male to install the solar panels.

It is the latest move by the president to highlight the Maldives' vulnerability to rising sea levels.

In October last year he took his cabinet to the bottom of the Indian Ocean and staged the first underwater cabinet meeting.

He insists that he wants the country to be a showcase for renewable and clean energy and has vowed to make the tiny atoll nation of 1,192 low-lying coral islands carbon neutral by 2020.

"Solar power helps combat climate change, reduces our dependency on imported oil and most importantly cuts out electricity costs," Nasheed's office quoted him as saying after installing the solar panels.

The Maldives, an upmarket tourist destination, is one of the most vulnerable countries to the rising sea levels anticipated as a result of global warming.

Source: AFP