The new head of the muttawah — the religious police who violently enforce Wahhabi dress and behavior strictures on Muslims and non-Muslims alike — is the auspiciously-named, reputed moderate Abdul Aziz bin Humain. The former head of the Consultative Council Saleh bin Humaid replaces the country’s Supreme Judicial Council head, who just a few months ago declared it permissible for Muslims to kill owners of satellite television channels and in 2004 sanctioned Saudi jihadists to go to Iraq to kill Americans. The Grand Ulema Commission is being reestablished with diverse Sunni leaders that will dilute the influence of the hardcore Wahhabis. The king also replaced the cultural minister with the open-minded former ambassador to Lebanon, reshuffled the human-rights commission leadership, and created a new position of deputy minister of education for female affairs and appointed a woman to the post, making her the most senior woman in the Saudi government. Most significantly, the king replaced the minister of education with his son-in-law Prince Faisal bin Abdullah, a former assistant director of intelligence. The prince reportedly has been working on education reform behind the scenes, and his prior intelligence work certainly well positions him to know how Saudi education has directly fed jihadi ideology. The ousted minister, Abdullah al-Obaid, had come to education in 2005 from the post of secretary general of the Muslim World League, the multibillion dollar Saudi operation created to spread hard-core Wahhabism around the world.
Existing communications and computer architecture are increasingly being limited by the pedestrian speed of electrons moving through wires, and the future of high-speed communication and computing is in optics, experts say. The Holy Grail of results would be "wireless interconnecting," which operates at speeds 100 to 1,000 times faster than current technology. The new discovery, made by researchers at Oregon State University, the University of Iowa and Philipps University in Germany, has identified a way in which nanoscale devices based on gallium arsenide can respond to strong terahertz pulses for an extremely short period, controlling the electrical signal in a semiconductor. The research builds on previous findings for which OSU holds an issued patent.
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