Of Bees, Honey and the Beekeepers of Hadhramout

Bees. Honeybees. Where would we Mankind be without them! It's said that, without us humans - bees would survive and thrive even more; but - without them, the human species would most likely perish and maybe even be completely exterminated from the face of the Earth. It has often been said that bees are responsible for one out of every three bites of food we eat. Most crops grown for their fruits - including vegetables such as squash, cucumber, tomato and eggplant, nuts, seeds, fiber - such as cotton, and hay - alfalfa grown to feed livestock, require pollination by insects. The main insect pollinators, by far, are bees.

Five Days

Except for when she was giving births, my wife rarely gets sick; in fact, since our marriage, she has never, ever been seriously sick. She has always been very busy with house-work and her work. At the end of last month, I could notice that there was some thing wrong with her; she said she was simply tired and needed rest. A few days later, she wasn't any better; she looked tired and worn out. She did simple tests in the hospital she works in, which didn't show any thing wrong with her, but she was given some medication. After about a week, her condition had not improved.

Out of Hadhramout: two different stories

For thousands of years, the people of Hadhramout have traveled far and wide; descendants of Hadhramys can be found in almost every part of the globe. Recently I read two interesting and very absorbing stories about two of these Hadhramy descendants. One is about the Bin Ladens, Osama in particular; and the other about Mohammadali Shihab Thangal, the politician and spiritual leader from Kerala, India. As with tales of most Hadhramy migrants, their stories start from Wady Hadhramout:

To Yahoo is to Bing is to.........

About two years ago, Windows Live Search which was MSN evolved in to Live Search; but that didn't have much impact with users: Microsoft was still lagging behind Yahoo as a search engine and very much behind Google. Redmond had to come up with some thing. Desperate for a break, they came up with 'Kumo' which became 'Bing'.

And, now, unfortunately, Yahoo has teamed up with Microsoft; this is unfortunate in that, Microsoft will take over the technical side of Yahoo's search offering using Bing and AdCenter technology to become the exclusive provider of search on Yahoo for 10 years. This teaming up between the two and this deal, is all because of one and only one reason: Google. For years now, Yahoo and Microsoft have been trying hard to beat or at least - catch up with Google, but they have dismally failed. And now Microsoft has silenced Yahoo and for 10 years the Redmond company will only have Google to think of and focus on; and Yahoo will not offer any competition to neither. Will the strategy work and can Bing catch up with Google?