Globe Trot: Saudi Arabia mulls paralysis as criminal punishment

April is the Month of Microfinance and today is the day every gift to Five Talents, one of many groups majoring in microfinance projects, gets doubled. Microfinance projects put financial services in the hands of small groups of business owners and crafts people who otherwise would not have access to the infusions of cash needed to launch business expansion and enterprise.

We’ve reported on great examples of microfinance at work in Africa, Haiti, and elsewhere. And it’s a good time to recommend some good organizations, by no means all, you may not be familiar with that are champions in the field:

President Obama may be taking a pay cut, but he’s no president of Uruguay.

Saudi Arabia may sentence a man to paralysis (yes, paralysis) if he cannot pay compensation to a man he stabbed and left paralyzed. Ali al-Khawahir was 14 when he stabbed a friend in the back in the town of al-Ahsa, and has been in prison 10 years already. Now state authorities could use an injection to paralyze al-Khawahir from the waist down as permanent punishment for the crime.

Since the Nigerian militant group Boko Haram launched its first attack in northern Nigeria in September 2010, it has carried out more than 700 attacks that have killed more than 3,000 people. For Nigeria and elsewhere, here is a great new compendium of global terrorist attacks.

Are the Kurds aligning with Syrian rebel groups in the fight against the Assad government in Syria? Interesting chess play: “Their cooperation would free the Turkish government’s hands by allowing it to increase its support for the rebels in Syria without fear that the Assad regime could stoke the Kurdish insurgency inside Turkey in response.”

How long before a drone of your own?