The Gulf Times leads with a story on Sheikh Abdullah Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Minister of Foreign Affairs, speaking at the UN General Assembly about nuclear power.

“The UAE’s commitment not to enrich uranium and reprocess fuels locally is among the most salient features of this model. This is a model supported by enhanced international transparency and cooperation mechanisms,” he said.

The National also led with this, adding that the GCC may have a major role to play in “attempting to settle mounting concerns over Iran’s atomic programme.”

Arabian Business has a cracking story (even if we do say so ourselves) about some UAE construction firms charging workers recruitment costs. Bound to be a hot topic.

Khaleej Times reports that swine flu fears are falling as more pupils return to school for the start of term. Most schools recorded a 95 percent attendance rate on Sunday, the paper said, but then you would hope that seeing as they started on Wednesday the previous week.

Meanwhile, 7days has spoken to Rita Dutt, the sister of Ruma Ghose-Puri, who was killed by stalker Rashid Daabaz.

“She was my sister and my best friend. I am begging the people of Dubai to help. We need new laws and new police procedures for dealing with stalker cases. It could happen to anyone and you feel so powerless,” she told the paper.

Have you got a story? Let us know, email elsa_baxter@itp.com

A different kind of wildfire is fast spreading in Australia at the moment, that of hatred and discontent amid the Indian student population studying there.

What may have been previously held as appalling criminal acts are now being read with tinted glasses of a different colour (pun intended). The new ‘R’ word making the headlines in India and Australia at the moment is ‘racism’.

Of course, the reason for the students’ anguish is justified – more than 60 Indian students in Australia have been reportedly attacked or mugged in the past six months – some had been left comatose – and six of the incidents have occurred in the past 24 days. [click here] According to Australian police records, a total of 1,083 cases of robbery and assault were reported against Indians in 2007-08 and that figure jumped to 1,447 this year, news channel CNN-IBN reported.

And so, the incidents have now snowballed into a diplomatic crisis, straining the love-hate relationship that Indians and Australians share (part of that has started from the cricket field, mind you). Film stars, educational institutions and political dignitaries have stepped in to cool down the tempers, but in the process, perhaps fuelling them. So every single incident will be reported, like all stray incidents of swineflu – and the focus will eventually drift away and find new labels - a fight between ‘browns and whites’, ‘Asians and Australians’, ‘first-world and third-world’ countries and so on.

But is it really about race and nationality? Do drunk muggers or perverted criminals really bother about the ethnic profile of their victims?

After all, in their own backyard, the Australian government is still chasing the “mass-murderers”, as PM Kevin Rudd called them - arsonists who brutally ‘set some of the wildfires’ that devastated life and homes in Victoria early this year. Likewise, a report published a couple of years back revealed that were 19,348 female-molestation cases reported in India in 2006, compared with 15,847 in 2005, an increase of 22 per cent.

It’s important to quickly break the Indo-Aussie rally of claims and counter-claims; it’ll only breed more hatred, heighten prejudices and hurt both the countries.

It’s no secret that countries like India and China pump in millions of dollars into American, European and Australian universities. But it’s a mutually fructuous relationship. In return, the students receive top-quality education and infrastructure, and better prospects of realising their dream of an enhanced social (and eventually, financial) status in their home countries or rewarded with a permanent job or resident visa abroad.

Point made, let the Aussie law quickly take its own course and a strict one at that. And students, focus on what you first-landed on foreign shores for – “education”. Study and focus on activities ‘on campus’ – there’s lot’s to do there: make international friends, try different cuisines, and explore the library for books, music archives and films on varied subjects. You’ve already paid a huge fortune for the fees – it makes more sense then, to utilise absolutely every penny’s worth.

Whaddaya say, mate?

Every time the UAE government tries to fix prices with centrally imposed targets, it ends up falling foul of the laws of unintended consequences.

In the past few years, we have seen ministries trying to engineer prices of groceries in supermarkets, home and office rents, and now school fees.

For a capitalist government - and it is passionately free market at heart - these price controls appear out of character.

Meddling with prices is done with the best intentions, but conflicting interests always lead to the wrong solution emerging.

Take the question of Dubai rents, and the much-ridiculed RERA Rental Index. The real estate authority is trying to protect both tenants and landlords at the same time, leading to the farcical situation where they are recommending increases in rents for vast swathes of the population at a time when supply of accommodation is increasing, demand is decreasing, and tenants are fearful for their futures.

Even the rental cap, which aimed to prevent hikes of above 7 percent during the 2005-08 boom, backfired. Landlords were motivated to kick out loyal tenants and find new ones, while moving house through choice became punitively expensive, driving a spanner into what ought to have been an effective free market machine.

The knock on effect is the paucity of talent we now find in the real estate industry. Since there were no interesting decisions to be made, there was little point in coming up with creative ideas that would create genuine win-win relationships between buyers and sellers; tenants and landlords. Entrepreneurship was engineered out of the system.

The stakes are even higher for the school system, and again the authorities are making a challenging situation worse.

The role of government is to provide opportunities for its citizens. It is therefore natural for a government department to oversee government provision of education. It also has a role in regulating the private sector so that students and parents receive the education they are paying for.

However, regulation should not extend to price-fixing, and the current Knowledge and Human Development Authority (KHDA) initiative to suggest price increases based on inspections of Dubai schools is wrong for all the same reasons that led to RERA’s failure to improve the real estate market.

Private sector schools are run for profit. No parent disputes this fact and, in fact, should welcome it. The best schools will attract the best staff, the best pupils, and will be able to command the highest fees. Profits are underpinned by innovation, creativity, hard work and top-to-bottom commitment to quality.

Governors, administrators, principals, teachers and support staff need no encouragement to do a better job than competing schools. It is the competition that drives up standards, and the delivery of better services that influences prices.

Demand will be highest for the schools that offer the best value for money, a calculation based on myriad factors: price, exam results, stability and continuity for their children, location, and intangibles like trust, relationships and snobbery.

The government is right that market forces will not make all schools operate to the highest standards, but their role should be to define minimum acceptable standards, and regulate schools through a measurement and inspection system to ensure they are met.

A system that all-but cements in a 7 percent annual price increase for schools that are, by KHDA’s own measure, “unsatisfactory”, is not serving schools, pupils, parents or the country and should be scrapped.

Sunny Varkey is chairman of GEMS and the single largest provider of private education in the UAE, with 26 schools under his charge. He’s also hopping mad at the Knowledge and Human Development Authority (KHDA), which has prevented him from hiking fees at one of his schools by 45 percent.
Dubai Modern High School has shifted from Jumeirah to Nad Al Sheba, after GEMS said it was forced to relocate the school due to an increase in rent. To offset the cost of the new facilities, GEMS first tried to inflate fees by around 110 percent, which drew mass protests from parents back in February. Now, the KHDA has blocked Varkey from implementing a 45 percent rise until construction is actually completed on the new site.
“Their actions are a disincentive for the private sector to reinvest in education, especially as there is no clarity on what the KHDA wants from us,” said Varkey. “[The KHDA is] flawed and inconsistent.”
If you ask me, it’s Varkey’s logic that is flawed and inconsistent. GEMS has relocated in order to dodge increased rent charges, and will make back the construction costs of its new facility over a period of years, as it will be paying less rent than it was in Jumeirah. So why should the parents of today’s students pay through the nose?
Varkey is complaining that such decisions will stand in the way of Dubai’s vision of world class education, and that it’s the kids who will lose out. Rubbish. If that was the case, then GEMS would not be trying to claw back as much cash as possible in as short a time frame as possible. How can a child get quality education if the parents are not in the position to send that child to a good school, because of exorbitant fees?
Quite aside from that, it seems to me that if the school is half-finished, then why on earth should parents be asked to pay half again in fees? If anything, fees should be slashed by half until GEMS has bought its facilities up to scratch.
GEMS has moved as a cost-cutting measure; to then demand that parents pay for the move, is ridiculous. If that’s the way it works, then we don’t need no GEMS education.

Mohammed Darwish, chief of Licensing and Customer Relations at Dubai Knowledge and Human Development Authority (KHDA) appears to have harpooned one the city’s silliest policy announcements on the day he unveiled the flagship initiative.

KHDA is going to rank the performance of Dubai’s private and public schools, and limit their ability to increase tuition fees according to how well they do .

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with rating schools, and many parents will welcome a plan that places them on a scale from ‘unsatisfactory’ to ‘outstanding’. But the intrusion of government should stop there.

You only have to test the policy in the real world for a minute to see its flaws. For example, even the worst performing schools are being told to raise their fees every year by 0-7 percent. Can you imagine being a parent receiving the letter that says your children’s school has utterly failed, but they are hiking fees by 7 percent, in line with government guidance?

The details of how schools will be ranked are far from clear and wide open to abuse. KHDA states they will be judged on: “overall performance of the school, attainment, students’ progress, personal and social development, teaching and learning, curriculum and school leadership”. Is it just me, or is that entire list simply repeating itself. What is the difference between “students’ progress”, “overall performance”, and “school leadership”?

Why not simply publish a league table of exam results, and allow parents to judge the more subjective qualities of a school by touring the premises and speaking to staff. Then they can make a decision on whether the fees offer good value for money.

Mr Darwish appears to have already sensed he is on shaky ground. The launch of the initiative was concluded with his assertion that it would be reviewed and fine tuned before the end of this academic year.

Why wait? It is already time to go back to the drawing board with this one.