Neat news of last week ending June 29, 2013
Posted By jimcwaters on June 30, 2013
Turkey in Africa: The best local weekly in Ouaga (Le Economiste du Faso) gives a real life example, printing a story of four Burkinabe that have arrived to study in the eastern city of Gaziantep Turkey. They began studying in a college that the Turks built in Ouaga. Although Turkey’s engagement in Africa started in 1998, this took off since the AK Party came to power, showing this opening as a result of both Turkey’s domestic transformation and change in the global political economy. Just from 2004 to 2009, Turkish exports tripled to Africa. In Sudan, Turks were everywhere from building roads to cutting hair, including mine in Khartoum.
Going to Varanasi to live? If you’ve ever been to this most thought provoking place, you’ll know that not a small number of residents are new and have come to die there. Widows make up a large number of these, living in small and austere quarters along the Ganges, hoping that they will make it to a better afterlife. But what happens if one becomes a widow early in life? Radio Australia found a promising future with a NGO that has taken up helping widows find a new life. One 37 year-old widow tells her story I was married at 21 and widowed five years later, she says. As soon as my husband was cremated and the death rituals performed, my in-laws threw me out. I had nowhere to go. My life was over.” She then lived hand-to-mouth for 15 years. After getting help from the NGO Sulabh International, she now receives a small monthly stipend, and the widow’s refuge for the first time boasts clean water and a steady electricity supply. She wants now to study to be a teacher.
Cashing in on immigrants, Russian style. The Russian weekly magazine New Times has a biting expose on how others are cashing in on the numerous central Asian migrants who work in Moscow. Anyone who has spent time there will know that the hard manual labor for public services, like street cleaning, is done by migrants in their characteristic orange jackets. The “others” here are government officials who get payoffs from private companies that hire these migrants under their government contracts. Some of these government officials get on payroll for the contractors that should be fined if they are using illegal immigrants.
Anything else other than Armstrong: Le Monde printed an exclusive interview with Lance Armstrong, tiled “Le Tour de France? It’s impossible to win without doping.” Even with the excitement of the 100th run of the Tour, it can’t escape anyone’s mind that this is its first post-devastated-by-doping tour. In the interview, Armstrong in one instance says he’s sorry, but the tone in nearly the entire interview is one of blaming other people and the sport itself: that doping has been and will always be part of the sport.
Coming next week: Can ASEAN catch a COC? In lead up to the ASEAN summit in Brunei starting next week, member countries are hoping to cement a binding code of conduct in the South China Sea with China. Foreign Ministers from Russia, China, and the US will be at part of the meeting.
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