Daughters of Pakistan take to the streets for an education
Students at a school torched by religious fanatics are back in lessons – on the pavement outside
In the principal's office the air was still heavy with the reek of burning as workers tried to clean up the debris – wrecked files and crushed educational prizes that bore testament to the school's achievements. In the schoolyard lay the blackened remains of torched computers.
A week ago, a mob besieged Lahore's Farooqi Girls' School and set the classrooms ablaze after a young female teacher was accused of blasphemy. The teacher, who is Muslim, has gone into hiding – and the school's 77-year-old principal and founder has been arrested by police and charged with the same offence, a crime that in Pakistan carries the death penalty.
CHINA
China's elite has a finger in every pie
Nothing much is known about China's political elite, except that those in power and their relatives are extremely rich. They have shared out the economic pie between themselves and are unwilling to give it up.
It's an open secret in China that those in power live in luxury. A taxi driver tells me as he drives past a big coal mine in Shijiazhuang outside of Beijing that it belongs to the relatives of Li Peng, who was prime minister until 1998.
"Who are the rich in China?" asks Li Weisen, a Shanghai-based economist. "Not the small private companies in the country but those in power and those close to them. Power provides the path to money. And that's because the power structures are not balanced."
Nobody has profited more from three decades of economic boom in China than the power elite and its clans. In the 1990s, many public assets were transferred to private hands.
Budget DisarrayUS Set to Restage Greek Tragedy
The US has more in common with heavily indebted southern European countries than it might like to admit. And if the country doesn't reach agreement on deficit reduction measures soon, the similarities could become impossible to ignore. The fiscal cliff looms in the near future, and its not just the US that is under threat.
The US has finally voted and the dark visions of America's future broadcast on television screens across the country -- and most intensively in battleground states -- have come to an end. Supporters of both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney had developed doomsday scenarios for what would happen if their candidate's opponent were to win. Four more years of Obama, the ads warned, would result in pure socialism. A Romney presidency would see the middle and lower classes brutally exploited.
But following Obama's re-election, Americans are now facing a different, much more real horror scenario: In just a few weeks time, thousands of children could be denied vaccinations, federally funded school programs could screech to a halt, adults may be forced to forego HIV tests and subsidized housing vouchers would dry up. Even the work of air-traffic controllers, the FBI, border officials and the military could be drastically curtailed.
Amplats sells out first in Zimbabwe
Zanu-PF hopes the mining company's concession to empowerment will help the party score political points in the country.
As he signed a deal with Anglo American Platinum (Amplats) to sell a majority of its shares to locals last week, Zimbabwe's empowerment minister, Saviour Kasukuwere, had a smug look on his face and hummed along to a cellphone ringtone.
Now that he has made the world's number one platinum mining company bend to Zimbabwe's tough empowerment rules, it should be easy to whip the rest into line. President Robert Mugabe plans to put the empowerment crusade at the centre of his election campaign next year and the Amplats deal is a timely boost.
Land reform has always shored up his rural support and he hopes that he can strengthen his traditional support base by forcing mines to hand over shares to local communities.
On marijuana and the Mexican drug war...
After legalization of recreational marijuana use in two US states, Mexico may rein in interdiction efforts.
Earlier today, I wrote a piece expressing skepticism that legalization of marijuana in Washington and Colorado could deal a major blow to that country's violent drug gangs.
But one point that I failed to consider is the impact of two approved US ballot measures on Mexican policy. It turns out that incoming Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto may adjust his country's approach to tackling marijuana production in his country in response.
The AP reports that the head of President Pena Nieto's transition team Luis Videgaray told Radio Formula that:
... the Mexican administration taking power in three weeks remains opposed to drug legalization. But he said the votes in the two states complicate his country's commitment to quashing the growing and smuggling of a plant now seen by many as legal in part of the U.S.
Displaced and divided in Burma's Rakhine
In recent months, communal violence in Burma's Rakhine state has left about 140 people dead and forced more than 100,000 from their homes. With Buddhist and Muslim communities effectively segregated, divisions seem deeper than ever, the BBC's Jonathan Head reports from Rakhine.
A British colonial official returning to Sittwe, or Aykab as it was known in the days of empire, would surely recognise most of it. Cycle rickshaws still dominate the dusty streets; the decaying buildings seem from another era, well before the prosperity of the Asian century.
Aside from a prominent golden stupa, a rooftop view of the town shows only rusting iron roofs amid a sea of coconut palms, and the shimmering waterways behind that carve up the coastline in this part of Burma, near the Bangladesh border.
Rakhine is the second poorest state in Burma, already one of the least-developed countries in the world. Poverty, neglect and repression have played a big role in fuelling the communal violence, as have bitter historical memories, and the fears felt in rival communities of what might be lost or gained in Burma's new and uncertain political environment.
No comments:
Post a Comment