Raising Sunken Ferry the Next Major Undertaking for Korean Officials
As the search for survivors of the sunken South Korean ferry winds down, officials must turn their attention to the monumental task of salvaging the ship. It’s a delicate operation that experts tell NBC News could take several months — if not longer — to complete.
“This is going to be a big project,” said Kerry Walsh, marine casualty project manager for Seattle’s Global Diving & Salvage, which worked in the recovery of the Princess of the Stars passenger ferry when it capsized off the Philippines in 2008.
“Part of what’s going on right now on the backburner is [officials] are scrambling to come up with the plan,” Walsh said. “The challenge will be figuring out the engineering involved and coordinating that plan … which will involve a lot of people who need to work together.”
The Sewol ferry, at 480 feet long and 6,835 tons, toppled upside down after it capsized one week ago following a sharp turn at a high rate of speed, according to investigators.
North Korean health system crumbling as shortages and sanctions bite
Patients said to be taking methamphetamine as medicine because drugs are too expensive despite promise of universal healthcareOur new North Korea network: follow the Guardian and our partners for unique reporting and analysis
Touring a new hospital in Pyongyang recently, North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, boasted that it would “let the people live in luxury and comfort under socialism in good health”.
But North Koreans interviewed in China paint a grimmer picture of medical conditions across their country: citing broken equipment, declining treatment standards and widespread self-medication.
“A lot of people who are sick use ‘ice’ [methamphetamine] as a medicine. There are plenty of drugs, but all come from China and are more expensive,” said one woman.
Universal healthcare was one of the country’s founding commitments; citizens see hospitals and schools as the last remaining benefits of the former command economy.Violence in Brazil after man’s alleged killing by police
Tourist zone of Rio de Janeiro slum erupts after popular TV show dancer found dead
A Rio de Janeiro slum has erupted in violence following the killing of a popular local figure, with residents starting fires and hurling home-made explosives and bottles in the city’s main tourist zone.
The body of Douglas Rafael da Silva Pereira (25), a dancer on a TV show for Brazil’s Globo network, the nation’s largest channel, was discovered in the slum yesterday. The circumstances of his death were not clear, but residents blame police.
Intense exchanges of gunfire were heard when members of an elite police moved into the Pavao-Pavaozinho slum, a few hundred yards from where Olympic swimming events are expected to take place in 2016.
Greste trial proceedings approach peak farce
April 23, 2014 - 6:50PMRuth Pollard
Middle East Correspondent
Cairo: In the game of high-stakes absurdity that Egypt is playing in the trial of three al-Jazeera journalists, including Australian Peter Greste, Tuesday’s proceedings must surely represent 'peak farce'.
Distorted audio recordings even Judge Mohamed Nagy Shehata could not decipher, footage and photographs taken well before the Canadian-Egyptian bureau chief, Mohamed Fahmy, was working at al-Jazeera English and crucial evidence viewed without the presence of defence lawyers were just some of the low points of the sixth day of the trial.
Footage of a story from Greste, which featured an interview with a sheep farmer, prompted a sarcastic response from one of the lawyers, who asked the judge: “Can we put the sheep to one side and bring forward what is relevant to the case? This is a waste of time.”
Ugandan fishing town crippled by AIDS
When you risk your life fishing on dangerous seas, a drink in the bars back on shore seem a welcome relief, but in Uganda, it has created a culture with staggering rates of HIV.
Exhausted from a night of hard fishing on the vast inland sea of Uganda's Lake Victoria, fishermen come off the boats as the first rays of light glimmer at dawn.
Once the fish is sold and the nets untangled, some go home to their families, but most head straight for the bars of the town and the sex workers who hang out there, despite HIV rates soaring to at least six times the national average.
Here, 43 percent of the population live with HIV compared to seven percent nationally: for a man seeking a sex worker, the rates and risks are likely to be far higher.
Arab entrepreneurs face digital divide in Israel's start-up tech scene
A new office park in Nazareth for Arab tech companies is a symbol of thwarted ambitions. Less than 1 percent of government research grants for tech firms go to Arab entrepreneurs.
Amid much fanfare nearly a year ago, Israeli President Shimon Peres inaugurated a technology office park at the edge of Nazareth with the vision of luring technology companies and hundreds of software engineers to Israel’s largest Arab city.
But today, save for a handful of tenants, the office suites are still mostly vacant, underscoring the yawning digital business gap between Jews and Arabs, who are largely excluded from Israel’s start-up success. This is not simply a matter of access to capital and networks, but also cultural omissions, both within the Arab community and in Israeli society.
"We are trying to bridge the entrepreneurship gap. In the Arab sector, we don’t have any investors or success stories," says Fadi Swidan, who runs Nazareth’s government-backed business incubator and a technology accelerator dubbed nazTech. "We have entrepreneurs that have technology skills but we don’t have the experience.’’
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