The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia - At least 17 expatriate teenage girls in eastern Saudi Arabia have been suspended from school for a week for uncovering their faces on a school bus. Malika Al-Duseiri, headmistress of the Eighth high school in Dammam, 400 kilometres northeast of Riyadh, told the newspaper Okaz that the 17 girls had repeatedly removed their head covers on the school bus. Women in Saudi Arabia, local or expatriate, must be covered from head to toe in public, where they are also segregated and in most cases must be accompanied by a male family member. The powerful religious establishment holds that women's faces should not be exposed to unrelated men. New York - A Staten Island ferry slammed into a pier as it was docking Wednesday afternoon, and a police source said at least a dozen people were feared dead. Jiuquan, China - China's first astronaut circled Earth on Wednesday, chatting with Chinese leaders by radio and saying hello to "all the peoples of the world" after blasting into orbit on a mission that made his nation only the third to achieve manned spaceflight. From space, Lt.-Col. Yang Liwei told his family: "It looks extremely splendid around here." The Shenzhou 5 capsule carrying Yang, a 38-year-old fighter pilot, was to orbit Earth for 21 hours
