Lot’s Wife Turns to Vapour!
Benson C Saili
THIS EARTH, MY BROTHER
She was one of more than a million Earthlings who perished in the seven-bomb nuclear onslaught
When Colonel Paul Tibbets, the US Air force pilot dropped the atom bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima in August 1945, his immediate remark, which became a folklore phrase, was “My God, what we have done?”. Tibbets so remarked because he thought Japan had vanished from the face of Earth and everything and everybody there had been vapourised.
Nergal and Ninurta were not half as horrified by their gory act as Colonel Tibetts was. For Ninurta, the deed had been accomplished. “It is done”, was his excited, fiendish cry. As for Nergal, he had dealt a telling lesson to Marduk, to Nabu: his obsessive itch for vengeance was fully satiated. The two exulted at the ruinage and bloodbath they had brought about. The Sumerian records say they were actually “puzzled” at their evil handiwork, the scale of destruction they had wrought. It was all too good to be true.
The two had obliterated the spaceport; upheavalled Sodom and Gomorrah (that is, uprooted the two cities so that they were buried so deep under the ground it was like they never existed at all); and not only “killed” what we now call the Dead Sea in the sense that it no longer supported life but also geophysically reformatted it!
“The Earth shook and crumbled, the heavens (the sky) after the brilliance were darkened,” the Sumerian records relate. The “brilliance” was what we would today call a mushroom cloud, which arose in a brilliant flash. “On that day,” say the lamentation texts, “heaven was crushed and the earth was smitten, its face obliterated by the maelstrom. The skies were darkened and covered as with a shadow, a dense cloud that brings gloom.” The year was 2024 BC.
NINURTA’S SIGNATURE STILL VISIBLE IN SINAI PENINSULA
Ninurta’s two-bomb blitz focused on the spaceport, “the place from which Great Ones (the Anunnaki) ascends”, and its mountainous vicinity, along with the adjoining plain that served for landing and take-off. The latter would be dubbed “Place of No Pity” after the nuclear holocaust. Writes Zechariah Sitchin: “The lamentation texts identified the site of the awesome blasts as ‘in the west’, near ‘the breast of the sea’ – a graphic description of the curving Mediterranean coast at the Sinai peninsula – from a plain ‘in the midst of the mountains’, a plain that became a ‘Place of No Pity’. It was a place that served before as the Place of Launching, the place from which the gods ascended toward Anu.”
In one of the lamentation texts, the spaceport, which was a subterranean facility burrowed under Mount Mashu, is referred to as the “Mount of Howling Tunnels”, that is, a mountain containing tunnels that made a howling noise. This is in very apt reference to the spaceport as it had underground chambers and the landing and departing “celestial boats” (spaceships) made penetrating sounds that reached near and far.
When Ninurta, “he who scorches with fire” (Ishum the Scorcher) as he came to be known, was done with his two-bomb strike abomination, “of all the forests that the plain had surrounded, not a tree stem was left standing”. There was absolutely no vegetation in the surrounding plain. “In the mountains he caused starvation, their animals he made perish … As with fire he scorched the animals, burned its (Mount Mashu) grains (that grew on the slopes) to become as dust.”
The fission bombs Ninurta let loose on the Sinai Peninsula exactly 4042 thousand year ago left a permanent mark there. This is a scar so vast it can even be seen from space as satellite photographs have showcased. And not only that: the scar is strewn, to this day, with crushed, burnt, and blackened rocks which contain a highly unusual ratio of isotope uranium-235 – evidence that once upon a time, it was exposed to sudden immense heat of nuclear origin as Uranium 235 is a necessary input into the making of nuclear bombs. The black colour of the stones is also a curious phenomenon given that black is not a natural colour in that setting. Scientists are hard-pressed to venture a reason as to the scar and the atypical colour of the stones.
Let us once again listen to Zechariah Sitchin: “As one stands in this great plain in the Sinai Peninsula, one can see in the distance the mountains that surround the plain and give it its oval shape. The limestone mountains loom white on the horizon; but where the great central plain adjoins the immense scar in the Sinai, the hue of the plain — black— stands out in sharp contrast to the surrounding whiteness. Black is not a natural hue in the Sinai Peninsula. Yet here, in the central plain northeast of the enigmatic giant scar, the soil's colour has a black hue. It is caused by millions upon millions of bits and pieces of blackened rock, strewn as by a giant hand over the whole area.
“There has been no explanation for the colossal scar in the face of the Sinai peninsula since it was observed from the skies and photographed by NASA satellites. There has been no explanation for the blackened bits and pieces of rock strewn over the area in the central plain. No explanation – unless one reads the verses of the ancient texts and accepts our conclusion that in the days of Abraham, Nergal and Ninurta wiped out the spaceport that was there with nuclear weapons: ‘That which was raised towards Anu to launch they caused to wither, its face they made fade away, its place they made desolate’."
NERGAL EXTERMINATES A MILLION-ODD LIVES
Of the two Anunnaki bombers, it was Nergal who was the worser devil. First, he dropped not two bombs like Ninurta but five, corresponding to the total number of the Canaanite cities that had “rebelled” against central authority in Sumer. Second, he targeted the human population. In the aftermath of the Ninurta bombings, only animals are said to have perished as all the Igigis and the few pro-Enlilite humans who worked in the Sinai Peninsula had long evacuated before Ninurta did the deed. In the case of Nergal, an unconscionable number of human beings were turned to ash.
Exactly how many people perished in the Nergal blitz? Neither the Bible nor the Sumerian records give us figures in this regard, not even an estimate of the population of Sodom and Gomorrah. But the one thing we can be sure of is that not everybody died. Even the Atomb bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not vapourise or pulverise the entire population. It is not easy to put a figure on how many people died and survived in the Japanese case since you cannot count ash or vapour. Also, the bombings triggered a great exodus of survivors from the two cities, so that by the time of a post-war census in December 1945, not very many people were left.
After years of excavating the Sodom and Gomorrah vicinities, archaeologists have turn up a large, ancient cemetery area containing over 1 million graves, along with up to 2 feet of ash. From this, two things can be deduced. First, the “Five Cities of the Plain”, as Sodom, Gomorrah and three other cities of the Jordan plain were called, had a sizeable population. Second, people survived and patiently took time to bury the dead as these were not mass graves but solitary graves. It were these survivors who gave eye-witness accounts of what we read in the Sumerian chronicles.
According to the Bible, Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by “the Elohim” (the ruling pantheon of the Anunnaki) who rained down “fire and brimstone” on the two cities. Brimstone is another name for sulfur. The original Sumerian records, however, do not mention sulfur at all: they attribute the whole disaster to something that sounds like an Atom bomb as we have already related. So where did the biblical scribes get the idea of sulfur bombs?
Well, to begin with, the area around Sodom and Gomorrah was rich with sulfur. Round balls of almost pure sulfur, mostly golf-ball-sized, have been found embedded in ash near the Dead Sea. The experience of Japanese survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki incidents serves up the unmitigated fact that an Atom blast smells like sulfur. One such survivor was Taeko Teramae. When in recent times Teramae was interviewed about his experiences of the nuking of Hiroshima, he said, “I smelt something like sulfur.
It smelt like the volcano, Mt. Aso, and I threw up.” Mount Aso is a still active volcano in Kyushu, Japan, which has erupted intermittently since 1974. The sulfur-rich volcanic eruptions smell like sulfur and so Teramae knew what he was talking about. It is the sulfurous smell and the presence of sulfur balls around the Dead Sea that made the biblical scribes take it for granted that Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed with a sulfurous conflagration.
The fact of the matter though is that Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by the Anunnaki by way of nuclear bombs. Indeed, archaeologists have found melted pottery shards around the Dead Sea whose state compare very well to a substance left on the desert floor near Alamogordo, New Mexico, after the explosion of a test nuclear bomb on July 16 1945. According to the same archaeologists, the pottery shards pointed to evidence of “exposure to very high temperature levels, much higher than what would be expected from heating from a kiln or oven”.
It was the “enraged” Enlil who “conceived the wrath” courtesy of the Sumerian annals. But the actual annihilator was Nergal. It was he who “burnt up the adversary (the people of the five cities personified by Marduk and Nabu), who obliterated the disobedient land (the five cities), who withered the lives of the Evil Word’s (Nabu, who was a famed demagogue) followers”. Thanks to the lingering effects of the atomic assault, for the next 700 years Sodom and Gomorrah became a practical wasteland as it simply was too dangerous for human habitation. As the highly percipient Enki had predicted, “to desolation” were the cities “overturned”.
IT WAS NERGAL WHO “KILLED”, EXTENDED THE DEAD SEA
Why does the Dead Sea not support any form of life – the reason it is called the Dead Sea? The tread-of-the-mill reason is that as one of the saltiest lakes in the world, it naturally cannot harbour life forms such as fish, crocodiles, hippos, and other such aquatic animals. But we now can inform you folks that once, the Dead Sea was not a salty lake: it was a fresh water lake which supported animal life. That aspect we learn from the Sumerian records. It became a salty lake in 2024 BC when the Anunnaki blitzed it with chemical weapons.
It seemed the Anunnaki used both chemical and nuclear weapons on the cities of the Jordan plain. It is also common knowledge that the Dead Sea, which is surrounded by Israel, Jordan, and Palestine was shorter (it has an elongated, north-south shape) than it appears today. The southern extremity is a relatively recent extension. What caused the extension? Once again, it is Nergal’s nuclear onslaught.
Traces of radiation have been found around the Dead Sea. Writes Sitchin: “Leading archaeologists, such as W. F. Albright and P. Harland, discovered that settlements in the mountains around the region were abruptly abandoned in the 21st century BC and were not reoccupied for several centuries thereafter. And to this very day, the water of springs surrounding the Dead Sea has been found to be contaminated with radioactivity, enough to induce sterility and allied afflictions in any animals and humans that absorbed it over a number of years.”
As for a further elongation of the Dead Sea, this is what Sitchin informs us: “The upheaval of the cities in the plain of the Dead Sea caused the southern shore of the sea to collapse, leading to a flooding of the once fertile area and its appearance, to this day, as an appendage separated from the sea by a barrier called El-Lissan (‘The Tongue’).”
But there is more. Scientists have observed that the Dead Sea fell abruptly by 100 metres in the 21st century BC. Sadly, they are unable to explain why. Furthermore, there are very curious ruins at the bottom of the Dead Sea which the powers-that-be prevent aquatic archeologist from investigating. Zechariah Sitchin: “Attempts by Israeli archaeologists to explore the seabed there have revealed the existence of enigmatic underwater ruins, but the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, in whose half of the Dead Sea the ruins are, put a stop to further exploration.”
If the scientists do not have an idea of exactly what happened to the Dead Sea in the 21st century BC and only have a vague notion of why it does not support life, we advise that they consult the Sumerian chronicles. One such text, the Erra Epos, has this to say about Nergal’s atomic assault: “He dug through the (Dead) sea, its wholeness he divided. That which lives in it, even the crocodiles, he made wither.”
It was Nergal’s atomic and chemical blitz that occasioned a cessation of plant and animal life in the Dead Sea, that caused it to extend southwards, and that accounts for those traces of radiation. Yet the number one reason the Dead Sea was so ruined by Nergal was that it was extremely rich with Ormus – the monoatomic white powder of gold which when ingested either directly or through food grown in Ormus-rich soil perfects bodily health, boosts longevity, and enables a penetrating understanding of spiritual and metaphysical subjects.
Marduk had made the knowledge and use of Ormus available to all the Canaanites, the reason they became so prosperous and flourished in personal health. Poisoning the Dead Sea with chemical and nuclear bombs was intended to keep away humans from accessing the Ormus.
MATERIALISTIC LOT’S WIFE DISCARNATED IN NUCLEAR MAYHEM
Of the five “sinning cities” targeted by Nergal, only one was spared. This was Zoar way south of Gomorrah. Zoar was not bombed because it was in that city Lot had sought refuge, in the surrounding wilderness. In Zoar, Lot was with his two virgin daughters but minus his wife. His wife had returned to Sodom at some stage along the way to Zoar. She did so because she was hopeful she would survive whatever calamity would befall Sodom.
A multimillionaire by the standards of the day, Lot had departed Sodom on the spur of the moment and had left all his riches there practically intact. His wife still longed for those riches and decided against the spirited dissuasion of her husband and her two daughters to return and take charge of the wealth damn the consequences. It was a costly mistake: when Nergal’s bombs rained down, she too was vapourised.
The Bible says she was turned to a pillar of salt (simply by looking back, which is absolute rubbish). But that is not the appropriate translation. The word translated salt is Nimur. Nimur denoted both salt and vapour and the biblical scribes chose salt because at their knowledge level, they just could not conceive of a nuclear bomb and how it could turn a human being to vapour. The term vapour occurs countless times in the Sumerian records in relation to the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah. “All that lived there to vapour were turned,” says one such text.
Zechariah Sitchin explains the mistaken salt connotation thus: “In a paper presented to the American Oriental Society in 1918 and in a follow-up article in Beitrage zur Assyriologie, Paul Haupt had shown conclusively that because the early sources of salt in Sumer were swamps near the Persian Gulf, the Sumerian term Nimur branched off to mean both salt and vapor. Because the Dead Sea has been called, in Hebrew, the Salt Sea, the biblical Hebrew narrator probably misinterpreted the Sumerian term and wrote ‘pillar of salt’ when in fact Lot's wife became a ‘pillar of vapor’.”
The ancients in fact characterised a translated (that is, dead) person as having turned to vapour. “It is noteworthy,” writes Sitchin, “that in Ugaritic texts, such as the Canaanite tale of Aqhat (with its many similarities to the tales of Abraham) the death of a mortal by the hand of a god was described as the ‘escape of his soul as vapour, like smoke from his nostrils’. Indeed, in the Erra Epos, which was the Sumerian record of the nuclear upheaval, the death of the people was described by the god thus: ‘The people I will make vanish, their souls shall turn to vapour’.” It was the misfortune of Lot's wife to be among those who were "turned to vapour". She apparently valued material possessions much more than her own life. This Earth, My Brother …
NEXT WEEK: THE NUCLEAR WOES OF SUMER
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GONE FISHING
In recent years, using personal devices in working environments has become so commonplace it now has its own acronym, BOYD (Bring Your Own Device).  But as employees skip between corporate tools and personal applications on their own devices, their actions introduce a number of possible risks that should be managed and mitigated with careful consideration. Consider these examples:
Si-lwli, a small family-run business in Wales, is arguably as niche a company as you could find, producing talking toys used to promote the Welsh language. Their potential market is small, with only some 300,000 Welsh language speakers in the world and in reality the business is really more of a hobby for the husband-and-wife team, who both still have day jobs. Yet, despite still managing to be successful in terms of sales, the business is now fighting for survival after recently falling prey to cybercriminals. Emails between Si-Iwli and their Chinese suppliers were intercepted by hackers who altered the banking details in the correspondence, causing Si-Iwli to hand over £18,000 (around P ¼ m) to the thieves. That might not sound much to a large enterprise, but to a small or medium business it can be devastating.
Another recent SMB hacking story which appeared in the Wall Street Journal concerned Innovative Higher Ed Consulting (IHED) Inc, a small New York start-up with a handful of employees. IHED didn’t even have a website, but fraudsters were able to run stolen credit card numbers through the company’s payment system and reverse the charges to the tune of $27,000, around the same loss faced by Si-Iwli.  As the WSJ put it, the hackers completely destroyed the company, forcing its owners to fold.
And in May 2019, the city of Baltimore’s computer system was hit by a ransomware attack, with hackers using a variant called RobinHood. The hack, which has lasted more than a month, paralysed the computer system for city employees, with the hackers demanding a payment in Bitcoin to give access back to the city.
Of course, hackers target governments or business giants  but small and medium businesses are certainly not immune. In fact, 67% of SMBs reported that they had experienced a cyber attack across a period of 12 months, according to a 2018 survey carried out by security research firm Ponemon Institute. Additionally, Verizon issued a report in May 2019 that small businesses accounted for 43% of its reported data breaches. Once seen as less vulnerable than PCs, smartphone attacks are on the rise, with movements like the Dark Caracal spyware campaign underlining the allure of mobile devices to hackers. Last year, the US Federal Trade Commission released a statement calling for greater education on mobile security, coming at a time when around 42% of all Android devices are believed to not carry the latest security updates.
This is an era when employees increasingly use their smartphones for work-related purposes so is your business doing enough to protect against data breaches on their employees’ phones? The SME Cyber Crime Survey 2018 carried out for risk management specialists AON showed that more than 80% of small businesses did not view this as a threat yet if as shown, 67% of SMBs were said to have been victims of hacking, either the stats are wrong or business owners are underestimating their vulnerability. A 2019 report by PricewaterhouseCoopers suggests the latter, stating that the majority of global businesses are unprepared for cyber attacks.
Consider that a workstation no longer means a desk in an office: It can be a phone in the back of a taxi or Uber; a laptop in a coffee shop, or a tablet in an airport lounge. Wherever the device is used, employees can potentially install applications that could be harmful to your business, even from something as seemingly insignificant as clicking on an accidental download or opening a link on a phishing email. Out of the physical workplace, your employees’ activities might not have the same protections as they would on a company-monitored PC.
Yet many businesses not only encourage their employees to work remotely, but assume working from coffee shops, bookstores, and airports can boost employees’ productivity.  Unfortunately, many remote hot spots do not provide secure Wi-Fi so if your employee is accessing their work account on unsecured public Wi-Fi, sensitive business data could be at risk. Furthermore, even if your employee uses a company smartphone or has access to company data through a personal mobile device, there is always a chance data could be in jeopardy with a lost or stolen device, even information as basic as clients’ addresses and phone numbers.
BOYDs are also at risk from malware designed to harm and infect the host system, transmittable to smartphones when downloading malicious third-party apps. Then there is ransomware, a type of malware used by hackers to specifically take control of a system’s data, blocking access or threatening to release sensitive information unless a ransom is paid such as the one which affected Baltimore. Ransomware attacks are on the increase,  predicted to occur every 14 seconds, potentially costing billions of dollars per year.
Lastly there is phishing – the cyber equivalent of the metaphorical fishing exercise –  whereby cybercriminals attempt to obtain sensitive data –usernames, passwords, credit card details –usually through a phoney email designed to look legitimate which directs the user to a fraudulent website or requests the data be emailed back directly. Most of us like to think we could recognize a phishing email when we see it, but these emails have become more sophisticated and can come through other forms of communication such as messaging apps.
Bottom line is to be aware of the potential problems with BOYDs and if in doubt, consult your IT security consultants. You can’t put the own-device genie back in the bottle but you can make data protection one of your three wishes!
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“I Propose to Diana Tonightâ€
About five days before Princess Diana and Dodi Al Fayed landed in Paris, General Atiku, a certain Edward Williams was taking a walk in a woods in the Welsh town of Mountain Ash. Williams, then 73, was a psychic of some renown. He had in the past foretold assassination attempts on US President Ronald Reagan, which occurred on March 30, 1981, and Pope John Paul II, which came to pass on May 13, 1981.
As he trudged the woods, Williams  had a sudden premonition that pointed to Diana’s imminent fate as per Christopher Andersen’s book The Day Diana Died. “When the vision struck me, it was as if everything around me was obscured and replaced by shadowy figures,†Williams was later to reminisce. “In the middle was the face of Princess Diana. Her expression was sad and full of pathos. She was wearing what looked like a floral dress with a short dark cardigan. But it was vague. I went cold with fear and knew it was a sign that she was in danger.â€
Williams hastily beat a retreat to his home, which he shared with his wife Mary, and related to her his presentiment, trembling like an aspen leaf as he did so. “I have never seen him so upset,†Mary recounted. “He felt he was given a sign and when he came back from his walk he was deeply shaken.â€
The following day, Williams frantically sauntered into a police station to inform the police of his premonition. The officer who attended to him would have dismissed him as no more than a crackpot but he treated him seriously in view of the accuracy of his past predictions. He took a statement and immediately passed it on to the Special Branch Investigative Unit.
The report read as follows:
“On 27 August, at 14:12 hrs, a man by the name of Edward Williams came to Mountain Ash police station. He said he was a psychic and predicted that Princess Diana was going to die. In previous years, he has predicted that the Pope and Ronald Reagan were going to be the victims of assassination attempts. On both occasions he was proved to be correct. Mr Williams appeared to be quite normal.â€
Williams, General, was spot-on as usual: four days later, the princess was no more.
Meanwhile, General,  even as Dodi and Diana were making their way to the Fayed-owned Ritz Hotel in central Paris, British newspapers were awash with headlines that suggested Diana was kind of deranged. Writes Andrew Morton in Diana in Pursuit of Love: “In The Independent Diana was described as ‘a woman with fundamentally nothing to say about anything’. She was ‘suffering from a form of arrested development’. ‘Isn’t it time she started using her head?’ asked The Mail on Sunday. The Sunday Mirror printed a special supplement entitled ‘A Story of Love’; The News of the World claimed that William had demanded that Diana should split from Dodi: ‘William can’t help it, he just doesn’t like the man.’ William was reportedly ‘horrified’ and ‘doesn’t think Mr Fayed is good for his mother’ – or was that just the press projecting their own prejudices? The upmarket Sunday Times newspaper, which had first serialised my biography of the princess, now put her in the psychiatrist’s chair for daring to be wooed by a Muslim. The pop-psychologist Oliver James put Diana ‘On the Couch’, asking why she was so ‘depressed’ and desperate for love. Other tabloids piled in with dire prognostications – about Prince Philip’s hostility to the relationship, Diana’s prospect of exile, and the social ostracism she would face if she married Dodi.â€
DIANA AND DODI AT THE RITZ
Before Diana and Dodi departed the Villa Windsor sometime after 16 hrs, General, one of Dodi’s bodyguards Trevor Rees-Jones furtively asked Diana as to what the programme for the evening was. This Trevor did out of sheer desperation as Dodi had ceased and desisted from telling members of his security detail, let alone anyone else for that matter, what his onward destination was for fear that that piece of information would be passed on to the paparazzi. Diana kindly obliged Trevor though her response was terse and scarcely revealing. “Well, eventually we will be going out to a restaurantâ€, that was all Diana said. Without advance knowledge of exactly what restaurant that was, Trevor and his colleagues’ hands were tied: they could not do a recce on it as was standard practice for the security team of a VIP principal. Dodi certainly, General, was being recklessly by throwing such caution to the winds.
At about 16:30, Diana and Dodi drew up at the Ritz Hotel, where they were received by acting hotel manager Claude Roulet. Â The front entrance of the hotel was already crawling with paparazzi, as a result of which the couple took the precaution of using the rear entrance, where hopefully they would make their entry unperturbed and unmolested. The first thing they did when they were ensconced in the now $10,000 a night Imperial Suite was to spend some time on their mobiles and set about touching base with friends, relations, and associates. Â Diana called at least two people, her clairvoyant friend Rita Rogers and her favourite journalist Richard Kay of The Daily Mail.
Rita, General,  was alarmed that Diana had proceeded to venture to Paris notwithstanding the warning she had given Dodi and herself in relation to what she had seen of him  in the crystal ball when the couple had consulted her. When quizzed as to what the hell she indeed was doing in Paris at that juncture, Diana replied that she and Dodi had simply come to do some shopping, which though partially true was not the material reason they were there. “But Diana, remember what I told Dodi,†Rita said somewhat reprovingly. Diana a bit apprehensively replied, “Yes I remember. I will be careful. I promise.†Well,  she did not live up to her promise as we shall soon unpack General.
As for Richard Kay, Diana made known to him that, “I have decided I am going to radically change my life. I am going to complete my obligations to charities and to the anti-personnel land mines cause, but in November I want to completely withdraw from formal public life.â€
Once she was done with her round of calls, Diana went down to the hair saloon by the hotel swimming pool to have her hair washed and blow-dried ahead of the scheduled evening dinner.
THE “TELL ME YES†RING IS DELIVERED
Since the main object of their Paris trip was to pick up the “Tell Me Yes†engagement ring Dodi had ordered in Monte Carlo a week earlier, Dodi decided to check on Repossi Jewellery, which was right within the Ritz prencincts, known as the Place Vendome.  It could have taken less than a minute for Dodi to get to the store on foot but he decided to use a car to outsmart the paparazzi invasion. He was driven there by Trevor Rees-Jones, with Alexander Kez Wingfield and Claude Roulet following on foot, though he entered the shop alone.
The Repossi store had closed for the holiday season but Alberto Repossi, accompanied by his wife and brother-in-law,  had decided to travel all the way from his home in Monaco  and momentarily open it for the sake of the potentially highly lucrative Dodi transaction.  Alberto, however, disappointed Dodi as the ring he had chosen was not the one he produced. The one he showed Dodi was pricier and perhaps more exquisite but Dodi was adamant that he wanted the exact one he had ordered as that was what Diana herself had picked. It was a ploy on the part of Repossi to make a real killing on the sale, his excuse to that effect being that Diana deserved a ring tha was well worthy of her social pedigree. With Dodi having expressed disaffection, Repossi rendered his apologies and assured Dodi he would make the right ring available shortly, whereupon Dodi repaired back to the hotel to await its delivery. But Dodi  did insist nonetheless that the pricier ring be delivered too in case it appealed to Diana anyway.
Repossi delivered the two rings an hour later. They were collected by Roulet. On inspecting them, Dodi chose the very one he had seen in Monte Carlo, apparently at the insistence of Diana. There is a possibility that Diana, who was very much aware of her public image and was not comfortable with ostentatious displays of wealth, may have deliberately shown an interest in a less expensive engagement ring. It  may have been a purely romantic as opposed to a prestigious  choice for her.
The value of the ring, which was found on a wardrobe shelf in Dodi’s apartment after the crash,  has been estimated to be between $20,000 and $250,000 as Repossi has always refused to be drawn into revealing how much Dodi paid for it. The sum, which enjoyed a 25 percent discount, was in truth paid for not by Dodi himself but by his father as was the usual practice.
Dodi was also shown Repossi’s sketches for a bracelet, a watch, and earrings which he proposed to create if Diana approved of them.
DIANA AND DODI GUSH OVER IMMINENT NUPTIALS
At about 7 pm,  Dodi and Diana left the Ritz and headed for Dodi’s apartment at a place known as the Arc de Trompe. They went there to properly tog themselves out for the scheduled evening dinner. They spent two hours at the luxurious apartment. As usual, the ubiquitous paparazzi were patiently waiting for them there.
As they lingered in the apartment, Dodi beckoned over to his butler Rene Delorm and showed him the engagement ring. “Dodi came into my kitchen,†Delorm relates. “He looked into the hallway to check that Diana couldn’t hear and reached into his pocket and pulled out the box … He said, ‘Rene, I’m going to propose to the princess tonight. Make sure that we have champagne on ice when we come back from dinner’.†Rene described the ring as “a spectacular diamond encrusted ring, a massive emerald surrounded by a cluster of diamonds, set on a yellow and white gold band sitting in a small light-grey velvet boxâ€.
Just before 9 pm, Dodi called the brother of his step-father, Hassan Yassen, who also was staying at the Ritz  that night, and told him that he hoped to get married to Diana by the end of the year.
Later that same evening, both Dodi and Diana would talk to Mohamed Al Fayed, Dodi’s dad, and make known to him their pre-nuptial intentions. “They called me and said we’re coming back (to London) on Sunday (August 31) and on Monday (September 1) they are
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RAMADAN – The Blessed Month of Fasting
Ramadan is the fasting month for Muslims, where over one billion Muslims throughout the world fast from dawn to sunset, and pray additional prayers at night. It is a time for inner reflection, devotion to Allah, and self-control. It is the ninth month in the Islamic calendar. As you read this Muslims the world over have already begun fasting as the month of Ramadan has commenced (depending on the sighting of the new moon).
‘The month of Ramadan is that in which the Qur’an was revealed as guidance for people, in it are clear signs of guidance and Criterion, therefore whoever of you who witnesses this month, it is obligatory on him to fast it. But whoever is ill or traveling let him fast the same number of other days, God desires ease for you and not hardship, and He desires that you complete the ordained period and glorify God for His guidance to you, that you may be grateful”. Holy Qur’an (2 : 185)
Fasting during Ramadan is one of the five pillars upon which the structure of Islam is built. The other four are: the declaration of one’s belief in Allah’s oneness and in the message of Muhammad (PBUH); regular attendance to prayer; payment of zakaat (obligatory charity); and the pilgrimage to Mecca.
As explained in an earlier article, fasting includes total abstinence from eating, drinking, smoking, refraining from obscenity, avoiding getting into arguments and including abstaining from marital relations, from sunrise to sunset. While fasting may appear to some as difficult Muslims see it as an opportunity to get closer to their Lord, a chance to develop spiritually and at the same time the act of fasting builds character, discipline and self-restraint.
Just as our cars require servicing at regular intervals, so do Muslims consider Ramadan as a month in which the body and spirit undergoes as it were a ‘full service’. This ‘service’ includes heightened spiritual awareness both the mental and physical aspects and also the body undergoing a process of detoxification and some of the organs get to ‘rest’ through fasting.
Because of the intensive devotional activity fasting, Ramadan has a particularly high importance, derived from its very personal nature as an act of worship but there is nothing to stop anyone from privately violating Allah’s commandment of fasting if one chooses to do so by claiming to be fasting yet eating on the sly. This means that although fasting is obligatory, its observance is purely voluntary. If a person claims to be a Muslim, he is expected to fast in Ramadan.
The reward Allah gives for proper fasting is very generous. Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) quotes Allah as saying: “All actions done by a human being are his own except fasting, which belongs to Me and I will reward it accordingly.†We are also told by the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) that the reward for proper fasting is admittance into heaven.
Fasting earns great reward when it is done in a ‘proper’ manner. This is because every Muslim is required to make his worship perfect. For example perfection of fasting can be achieved through restraint of one’s feelings and emotions. Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) said that when fasting, a person should not allow himself to be drawn into a quarrel or a slanging match. He teaches us: “On a day of fasting, let no one of you indulge in any obscenity, or enter into a slanging match. Should someone abuse or fight him, let him respond by saying: ‘I am fasting!’â€
This high standard of self-restraint fits in well with fasting, which is considered as an act of self-discipline. Islam requires us to couple patience with voluntary abstention from indulgence in our physical desires. The purpose of fasting helps man to attain a high degree of sublimity, discipline and self-restraint. In other words, this standard CAN BE achieved by every Muslim who knows the purpose of fasting and strives to fulfill it.
Fasting has another special aspect. It makes all people share in the feelings of hunger and thirst. In normal circumstances, people with decent income may go from one year’s end to another without experiencing the pangs of hunger which a poor person may feel every day of his life. Such an experience helps to draw the rich one’s conscience nearer to needs of the poor. A Muslim is encouraged to be more charitable and learns to give generously for a good cause.
Fasting also has a universal or communal aspect to it. As Muslims throughout the world share in this blessed act of worship, their sense of unity is enhanced by the fact that every Muslim individual joins willingly in the fulfillment of this divine commandment. This is a unity of action and purpose, since they all fast in order to be better human beings. As a person restrains himself from the things he desires most, in the hope that he will earn Allah’s pleasure, self-discipline and sacrifice become part of his nature.
The month of Ramadan can aptly be described as a “season of worship.†Fasting is the main aspect of worship in this month, because people are more attentive to their prayers, read the Qur’an more frequently and also strive to improve on their inner and outer character. Thus, their devotion is more complete and they feel much happier in Ramadan because they feel themselves to be closer to their Creator.