But does all this openness on the part of the authorities come at a price? We get the story from Delhi in this week’s episode. My favorite quote: “I don’t know about traffic offenders, but I’m quite sure that Delhi policemen need a bit of Big Brother watching.”

Also in this episode, we take an in-depth look at the proposed BlackBerry bans in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. And we hear about two projects in Finland that hope to harvest the heat generated by data centers, and use it to heat local water supplies. And we’ll end with news from Birmingham, England, where some schools are turning to software called The Talking Tutor to help teach their multi-lingual classes. Speaking of language, I (along with Science podcast goddess Rhitu Chatterjee) recently made an appearance on Patrick Cox’s World in Words language podcast. Be sure to check it out!

Here are some helpful links for WTP 298:

• BBC: Saudi gives BlackBerry reprieve
• BBC: Untangling the BlackBerry ban
• The Guardian: Helsinki data centre to heat homes
• More on Talking Tutor

Remember, you can follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

DAVID BARON: Business people in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia are big fans of the BlackBerry. But the governments in those countries don’t like the popular smart phone. They say the BlackBerry is a “threat to national security,” and both countries have announced plans to start blocking some of its key features. The World’s Technology Correspondent Clark Boyd has more.

CLARK BOYD:  Afficionados often refer to it as the CrackBerry. The BlackBerry does email, instant messaging, and web browsing. Oh yeah, it’s a phone too. People doing business in the Gulf like it for all those reasons and more.

FEVZI TURKALP:  BlackBerries are probably the most secure smart phones of their kind.

BOYD: Fevzi Turkalp is the editor of the website GadgetDetective.com.

TURKALP: They’re secure because of the way in which they work. They not only use encryption, but they send the information abroad, typically to servers in Canada where the manufacturers are based, and then the messages are sent back into the inbox of BlackBerry users in UAE and Saudi Arabia are encrypted.

BOYD: That security is what has authorities in the United Arab Emirates worried, says Dubai-based tech analyst Simon Simonian.

SIMON SIMONIAN: They want to be able to monitor data messages just for security reasons. And because, this is the irony, that the BlackBerry is the preferred tool of the business community and because it’s one of the most robust and secure. But the governments want to have access to the information, and they cannot.

BOYD: Saudi Arabia has said it will shut down the messenger service on BlackBerries by the end of this month. The UAE is going further. The government there says as of October 11^th, it will ban email and web browsing on the devices as well. And that applies to foreign visitors who bring in their BlackBerries. Adrian Mars writes on technology for ZDNet in Britain.

ADRIAN MARS: If the United Arab Emirates want to ban the blackberry, block their communications, how the heck can you do that if you also want to promote Dubai as a business hub? Businessmen and women are welded to their blackberries. The two are just entirely incompatible.

BOYD: But are there legitimate security concerns? Jim Krane is the author of a book on Dubai. He says that from the UAE leaderships’ point of view, there are certain groups that might take advantage of the BlackBerry’s security features.

JIM KRANE:  There’s the jihadist threat that these ruling families that have been in power for so long view as an enemy. You’ve got spy agency assassins like the hit squad that probably took out the Hamas leader back in January in Dubai.

LARRY MAGID: It’s hard to know whether this is national security or whether this is spying on your own citizens to suppress political dissent.

BOYD: Larry Magid is a technology analyst for CBS news.

MAGID: Clearly there has to be some way that legitimate authorities can get access to information if they have a legitimate reason to do it, but, again, a company based in Canada, or the US or the UK may have a very different set of standards as to what type of information to turn over and to whom and I think that that could be a real kind of cultural war. I can see some issues being very delicate and probably being negotiated on a government level.

BOYD: In a statement today, Research in Motion, the BlackBerry’s manufacturer, said it wouldn’t compromise the security of its smart phone. But it’s not just Middle Eastern countries that have made noise about the BlackBerry. Indian officials have also called for a ban on the device. The Mumbai bombers used BlackBerries to coordinate their attacks in 2008. Negotiations between Research in Motion and the Indian government are ongoing. For The World, this is Clark Boyd.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: Around the Middle East, Islamic financiers stood by and watched as the Western financial system imploded last year.  They thought that what’s known as Sharia-compliant investing would keep their money safe.  Then came word last week of the collapse of Dubai World.   It revealed that some Islamic financing wasn’t quite as safe as it was cracked up to be.  The World’s Aaron Schachter reports.

AARON SCHACHTER: Put simply, Sharia-compliant financing is any kind of monetary transaction in accordance with the laws of the Koran.  The most basic of those laws forbids people to buy, sell or invest in products that are haram, forbidden like alcohol, gambling or pornography.  But the biggest financial sin in Islam is usury, or  charging interest.  So Islamic financiers had to come up with something else.  John Foster is former editor of Islamic Banking and Finance magazine.

JOHN FOSTER: And so, instead of just giving money to somebody, okay, to go away and then charging interest, what Islamic finance tries to do is, it tries to go into joint ventures with people. So the risk is shared between the person who is borrowing the money and the person who is providing the capital, and they both share in the profit.  Today it’s called private equity, or even venture capital.

SCHACHTER: To ensure that financial transactions or products are halal, the Muslim equivalent of kosher, financial institutions hire religious authorities to review and approve each product.  One of those authorities is Sheikh Zaher Nsouli, with the Lebanese Islamic Bank in Beirut.  Nsouli says sharing risk is intended keep financiers honest.  He says Islamic finance isn’t against making money, on the contrary.  But it is against taking risk with someone else’s money.

SHEIKH ZAHER NSOULI: You’ll not invest in anything except if you know the business risk is good, it’s healthy for the economy, it’s [INDISCERNIBLE].  You’re much more involved in the real economy.

SCHACHTER: Nsouli says Islamic banks have on average outperformed conventional ones   because when people deposit money, they’re buying shares of real projects that are Sharia-compliant.   But Islamic financing as a whole isn’t immune from Western troubles.

MOHAMMED SAID RAHMAN: If you put a chimpanzee behind a Rolls Royce, is Rolls Royce still a good car or is chimpanzee still a bad driver?

SCHACHTER: Mohammed Said Rahman is Chairman of the Institute of Halal Investing, based in Portland, Oregon.  He says in Dubai, greed got the better of  some  Islamic  financial institutions,  the chimpanzees .

RAHMAN: So what happened is that the chimpanzees that were loaning the money out to the people, their eyes were focused towards quick flip over of profits.  So Dubai was a casino.

SCHACHTER: The problem was something called a “sukuk,”  or an Islamic bond.   In theory, a sukuk should equal the cost of a project, so assets equal liability.   But in Dubai, that wasn’t the case.  They was just as much speculation there as anywhere else.  But John Foster, formerly of Islamic Banking and Finance Magazine, says the Islamic finance industry has lost its way.

FOSTER: What a lot of the modern Islamic banks have done is they’ve tried to recreate conventional finance, except with an Islamic wrapper.  So a lot of the banks would find a sheikh for hire.  But the problem which Islamic finance has got at the moment, it needs to have a good look at itself; it needs to address where it is and what it’s trying to achieve.  It shouldn’t try to be Wall Street, it should be Main Street, and it should be for the good for the whole of humanity.

SCHACHTER: Islamic banker Zaher Nsouli says that’s why the crisis in Dubai may actually be a good thing, at least for Islamic financing.

NSOULI: Dubai World’s crisis will lead to a shift in the way of structuring the sukuk, the way of imitating conventional models.   You need corrections from time to time.

SCHACHTER: Nsouli and others says modern Islamic finance is in its infancy.  Give it a few years to catch on, and for the mainstream to realize that  their form of ethical finance is not just something for the world’s billion Muslims.  For The World, I’m Aaron Schachter, Beirut.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

• BBC coverage
• Global Economy podcast
• Alex Gallafent on the Dubai crisis

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman, and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH Boston.  The Persian Gulf emirate of Dubai today tried to reassure investors about the health of its finances, but investors didn’t buy it.  Stock markets in both Dubai and neighboring Abu Dhabi fell sharply today.  The problem, as investors see it, is Dubai World.  That’s the main investment arm of the government of Dubai.  It’s having trouble repaying billions of dollars of debt, and the emirate’s government has announced that it won’t guarantee repayment of that debt, which, no surprise, makes investors nervous.  The World’s Jason Margolis explains the global implications of this Dubai mess.

JASON MARGOLIS: In terms of major world companies, Dubai World isn’t that big a deal.  When General Motors filed for bankruptcy this year, GM’s debt was nearly three times larger than Dubai World’s.   But Dubai World is different from GM.  The emirate of Dubai owns Dubai World.  So, if Dubai World, or by extension, the emirate of Dubai, can’t meet its debt obligations, that spells wider troubles, says Christopher Davidson, a Dubai credit expert from Durham University.

CHRISTOPHER DAVIDSON: Dubai’s disaster, as it unfolds, is certainly tarnishing the rest of the region.  The rest of the region by reputation will find it difficult to refinance debt too because the cost of insuring that debt increases drastically.

MARGOLIS: Davidson says banks might also think twice before loaning money to emerging economies in other parts of the world.

DAVIDSON: Dubai has tarnished the reputations of emerging markets around the world, especially Asia.

MARGOLIS: Not that there’s anything new happening in Asian markets. In fact, Dubai’s excess could also potentially tarnish other nations that have even less to do with the emirate.

DESMOND LACHMAN: A bunch of countries like Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, together with Ukraine, and Bulgaria, and Hungary.

MARGOLIS: That’s economist Desmond Lachman at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.  And Lachman says it’s not only emerging economies that might have trouble getting access to credit.

LACHMAN: If Dubai is reminding people there’s a lot of risk outstanding and if people begin to become a lot more risk averse, lenders become wary about lending to a country that has got very large imbalances.

MARGOLIS: Lachman says some western European countries like Greece, Ireland, Spain and Portugal could have trouble getting loans at reasonable rates.  The problems in Dubai pose another kind of risk to the world economy, to the world’s stock markets.  Banks in the United Kingdom are the most exposed with an estimated $50 billion in outstanding loans to the United Arab Emirates.  American, French, and German banks are all on the hook for about $10 billion each.  These loans sent investors scrambling this week, dumping shares, guessing which western banks are most exposed to risk.  Right now, and this might be sounding familiar, nobody is certain which banks are holding which bad loans.   But maybe it’s not all that bad. Of course, markets often overreact.

DOUG REDIKER: There’s the reality, then there’s the perception of the reality.

MARGOLIS: Doug Rediker is a former investment banker and is now with the Washington think tank the New America Foundation.

REDIKER: The reality there’s a problem in Dubai, there’s a problem in a specific area of Dubai.  Not area geographically, I mean Dubai World and Dubai World’s holdings, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that there are problems throughout emerging markets or throughout the Gulf.

MARGOLIS: But then there’s the perception of the reality.

REDIKER: From a snapshot of a trading floor mentality, if you see “Dubai Crisis” on your screen, you could, without having a greater understanding of the nuance, assume that this a broader crisis, sell your positions in a panic and as result trigger something that really isn’t warranted.

MARGOLIS: Warranted or not, that’s what we saw investors do last week. Whether their perception of reality changes this week, that’s another story.  For the World, I’m Jason Margolis

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

• BBC coverage
• Global Economy podcast
• The World’s Alex Gallafent reported from Dubai in 2007

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman.  This is The World.  Shoppers are turning out in strong numbers today for the start of the holiday season, but cloudy economic skies hover over this Black Friday.  Unemployment is high, credit is tight, and most investors have less money today than they did yesterday. The Dow Jones industrial average dropped 154 points to close at 10,310.  Wall Street may have been reacting to financial trouble in Dubai.  That’s the semi-autonomous city-state that’s part of the United Arab Emirates.  The World’s Alex Gallafent begins our coverage.

ALEX GALLAFENT: You may have heard about some of the things that made Dubai famous as a kind of Disneyland for grown-ups.  The indoor ski dome in the middle of a desert, the tallest tower in the world, the biggest man-made islands.  These were all part of a program of colossal spending in Dubai, but it wasn’t paid for with oil money.  Dubai’s wells are dry.  Matthew Martin is editor of the Middle East Economic Digest.

MATTHEW MARTIN: A lot of the massive growth that we’ve seen in Dubai over the past few years has all been fueled not directly off the government balance sheet but by taking on debt from the capital markets.

GALLAFENT: The company at the center of the current crisis is facing the consequences of that approach.  That company is Dubai World.  It’s a real estate group backed by Dubai’s government, and it’s one of the prime movers in the city-state’s explosive growth.  But Dubai World has racked up almost 60 billion dollars worth of debt.  This week the company asked creditors if it could postpone repayments on that debt for six months.  Christopher Davidson is the author of Dubai: The Vulnerability of Success. He says Dubai World’s troubles are the result of a broader economic strategy in the emirate.

CHRISTOPHER DAVIDSON: What we’ve seen in Dubai is trying to build an economy that’s been aimed at bringing in foreign direct investment to keep it in a desert creating a sponge like economy to bring in wealth from the region, from Britain, America, anywhere that wants to invest in real estate.  And this really has been tinkering with Dubai’s historical success as a port economy, a place where money passes through and goes somewhere else. But really, the last few years has seen a shift in the focus of the economy, and that’s really what’s been its undoing.

GALLAFENT: The global economic crisis exposed Dubai’s flawed business model. Real estate prices plummeted after years of flying ever higher.  Foreign investment slowed down.  Mahmood Nadi is a Jordanian mechanical engineer who has worked in Dubai for two years.  He says you can see the emirate’s problems in its glittering collection of high-rise buildings.

MAHMOOD NADI: Almost fifty percent not finished yet, thirty percent still not occupied.  You can say twenty percent are occupied, from the new high-rise buildings. The situation is really not stable.

GALLAFENT: Indeed, Dubai has a skyline bought on credit, and Christopher Davidson thinks creditors are unlikely to accept Dubai World’s request to postpone its debt repayments.

DAVIDSON: For the last several months, there have been a number of international companies that have been owed sums for labor and construction work they’ve conducted in Dubai.  They’ve been rather quiet and polite about that hoping the good times will return, but I think now we’ll get to the stage where lawsuits will be pressed on the government of Dubai.

GALLAFENT: Dubai will probably look to its neighbor for help.  That’s Abu Dhabi, another part of the United Arab Emirates.  Unlike Dubai, Abu Dhabi does have oil.  In February, it bought 10 billion dollars worth of bonds from Dubai.  Many saw that deal as a bailout, but it’s not clear when or at what price Abu Dhabi would come to its neighbor’s rescue again. That uncertainty propelled today’s market worries. Another concern of investors is the lack of detail about how Dubai’s proposed debt rescheduling would work.  But British Prime Minister Gordon Brown predicted today that Dubai’s problems will not set off a second global economic meltdown.

GORDON BROWN: If this is a localized problem, then it can be dealt with, and I believe that that is the case. And I believe that this is one of things that we will see over the next few months as the world economy returns to growth, but it is an event that can be dealt with.

GALLAFENT: That’s a hope investors in the United States most likely share.  For The World, I’m Alex Gallafent.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.