Arab

Howard Community College student Sarah Blake was in Egypt when that nation's turbulent demonstrations began, and she and her friends found themselves being pushed and shoved in Cairo's streets. "It was really scary. That's when the tear gas started coming out more and the water cannon trucks were going through. The police cars would come through, and crowds of people would just scramble," said Blake, who returned from the violence-torn nation last week after a one-month stay. Blake is among several area residents who have come home from the country with harrowing stories that mirror the images depicted on news broadcasts.

The current revolutionary mood sweeping the Middle East is looking very much like another real-life example of philosopher Auguste Comte's observation, "Demography is destiny. " At the turn of the 19th century, Westerners made up roughly 30 percent of the people on this planet. By the middle of this century, extrapolating present trends, Muslims will be about 30 percent of a much more crowded human population and Westerners reduced to less than 10 percent. This has all sorts of implications, laid out thoroughly by Bill Bonner and Addison Wiggin in their book, "Financial Reckoning Day. " But I want to focus on just one: how a population explosion in the Arab world, stretching from Morocco through the Levant, has set the stage for the revolutionary fervor we've seen on the streets of Tunis, Cairo, Amman and elsewhere in the last couple of weeks.

President Barack Obama may have scored a diplomatic win by securing international support for biting sanctions against Iran, but Arab public opinion is moving in a different direction. Polling conducted last month by Zogby and the University of Maryland in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates suggests that views in the region are shifting toward a positive perception of Iran's nuclear program. These views present problems for Washington, which has counted on Arabs seeing Iran as a threat — maybe even a bigger one than Israel.

About three dozen students formed rows in the Duncan Hall lobby of Howard Community College and staged an impromptu demonstration of tai chi, a Chinese martial art known for its slow but precise movements. Some students were clearly novices, yet their cadence showed that, at the very least, they were fast learners. The students are enrolled in an intensive summer language program called STARTALK, a federal government initiative designed to increase the number of Americans learning so-called "critical need" languages.

Though it agreed two weeks ago to return 17 of the a-rab horses it confiscated in November -- without ever establishing that the animals had been mistreated -- it appears that the city has moved closer to erasing one of its important traditions, one of the things that makes Baltimore Baltimore. Unless something is done by a foundation or a new group of preservation- and business-minded volunteers, we may soon see a-rabbing vanish. There are only a couple of a-rabs still in operation -- due to strut in an Easter parade on Pennsylvania Avenue today -- and there could be more again, but getting anything more from the city than a donation of land for new stables seems like a nonstarter.

Seventeen horses, which were seized by the city Health Department in the fall, would be returned to Baltimore's traditional A-rab produce merchants under a deal set to be approved by the city's spending board today. The A-rabs, who contested the department's claims that the stables were not well-maintained, plan to pick up their horses as soon as today from the Howard County horse rescue farm where they have been boarded. The horses will be kept at the farm until "adequate housing" can be found, said Tania Baker, a spokeswoman for the housing department, which submitted the deal to the Board of Estimates for approval.

Seventeen horses that were seized by the city Health Department in the fall will be returned to Baltimore's traditional A-rab produce merchants under a deal approved by the city's spending board Wednesday. The A-rabs, who contested the department's claims that the stables were not well-maintained, plan to pick up their horses as soon as today from the Howard County horse rescue farm where they have been boarded. "I continue to hope that the health of those horses comes first," Mayor Stephanie C. Rawlings-Blake said.

I heard the other day that soon-to-be-former Mayor Sheila Dixon is a big proponent for the rights of the local a-rabs who for decades have sold their goods on the streets of this fine city. I have a suggestion for our Mayor Dixon in reference to a possible new job when she leaves her current office next week. If her job as a greeter at a local Target store does not work out, she could always look into becoming the official spokesperson for the a-rabs of Baltimore. It's an honorable job at a fair rate.

T he mayor of Baltimore tried to reach me on New Year's Eve - not because she needed someone to escort her to a party, but because she heard I was gathering information for a column about the closing of the Safeway supermarket in Mount Clare Junction. There was a mix-up with cell phone numbers - my fault - and we did not connect before deadline. But I could tell from the brief message she left on my newsroom phone that Sheila Dixon was concerned about losing the largest and oldest tenant of the 22-year-old shopping center on the city's southwest side.