Saudi professor to be lashed for meeting woman alone

Read this article, and was revolted by what I read. You do read from time to time that people have different cultures and social norms, but there must be some amount of humanity to all norms. Saudi Arabia has strict interpretations of what a female can do and cannot do (more controls on what she cannot do), but the bottom line is that freedoms that others take for granted are not available to her. In this case, a professor in Saudi Arabia is going to be in prison for 8 months and be lashed 150 times for the big crime of meeting a woman alone:

A Saudi Arabian man is to get 150 lashes and spend eight months in prison after he was caught meeting a woman without a chaperone in a coffee shop.
Muhammad Ali Abu Raziza, a psychology professor in Mecca, was arrested by the Kingdom’s feared religious police, the Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. He was accused of breaking the Islamic injunctions under the Khilwa code, which restricts the independence of women. It stipulates that women must not meet men alone, other than relatives.

Now, there are many people who would say that this is the way that the society over there is governed and this is the choice that people have made, but that is nonsense. Just because some societies had the policy of apartheid does not mean that the world let that continue; and further, Saudi Arabia is not a democratic country where people have made this choice - this is a decision by the rulers to have such laws so that they get the support of the religious clergy.

Father forced daughter to have 7 incestuous children

In a news that is shaking people to the core, it was revealed that a man in Austria, a father had a forced incestuous relationship with his daughter for a period of 24 years and had 7 children with her. This man, 73-year-old Josef Fritzl in the city of AMSTETTEN, Austria had built up a whole underground cellar system in his house in which he had forced his daughter into when she was 18 years old, and then kept her there for 24 years; during this period they had 7 children out of which 1 died, 3 of them the man adopted along with his wife (who lived with him in the same house but who did not know about this under-ground cellars), and the other 3 had never seen the light of day:

Three children freed from a cellar in which their mother had been imprisoned and raped by her own father for 24 years had never seen daylight, police in Austria have confirmed. The main question reverberating from the small Austrian town: How could a man keep his daughter locked in his basement for 24 years, where she gave birth to seven of his children while her mother and three of those children lived upstairs without an inkling of the horrors in the cellar?
Fritzl explained Elisabeth's disappearance by saying she had run away from home, a story backed up by letters he forced Elisabeth to write, including one that begged her parents not to look for her. Other letters made it seem the missing daughter had left the three children on the parents' doorstep -- when in fact they had been born in captivity in the family's basement.

This is horrific news; one wonders as to the depravity of the human soul that can do things like this - doing this with a stranger is bad enough, but doing this with your own daughter is like a scene out of hell.