Tuesday, November 22, 2016

Six In The Morning Tuesday November 22

Trump: US to quit TPP trade deal on first day in office


President-elect Donald Trump says the US will quit the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal on his first day in the White House.
He made the announcement in a video message outlining what he intends to do first when he takes office in January.
The TPP trade deal was signed by 12 countries which together cover 40% of the world's economy.
Mr Trump also pledged to reduce "job-killing restrictions" on coal production and stop visa abuses.
But there was no mention of repealing Obamacare or building a wall on the southern border with Mexico, two actions he said during the campaign he would do as soon as he assumed power.







$40bn to save Jakarta: the story of the Great Garuda

Forget Venice. The fastest-sinking city is the Indonesian capital, parts of which are dropping at 25cm a year. Can an outlandish plan for a giant seawall and luxury waterworld city in the shape of a mythical bird save Jakarta from drowning?
by Philip Sherwell

Tuesday 22 November 2016 

With her hand stretched upward, the elderly storekeeper in batik dress and white headscarf indicates the height of the waters that poured into her home in Jakarta’s great flood of 2007. Sukaesih is a diminutive figure, but she points to a ridge on the doorframe about two metres above the threshold.
The 60-year-old grandmother, who like many Indonesians goes by only one name, lives in the down-at-heel waterfront neighbourhood of Maura Baru. Her front room-turned-store, where she sells soft drinks and the clove kretekcigarettes beloved of locals, looks unassuming, but is at ground zero for the city’s battle for survival.
Just across the alleyway is the stone seawall that was reinforced and heightened after 2007, but is already cracking, buckling and leaking. The fortification is all that stands between these homes and the waters of Jakarta Bay, which lap just beneath the rim on the other side. Filthy water already seeps through the cracks continuously, leaving streams of muddy run-off flowing in front of Sukaesih’s shop. When tides are high, the water pours over.

My friend James Foley was murdered by Isis reporting the truth. Too few are left to shed such light on the Middle East


There are no journalists from the outside world in opposition-held Syria to record these momentous days. Jim would have hated this state of affairs

It was a relief that the documentary about Jim Foley did not show his murder, dressed in an orange jumpsuit, forced to kneel on the desert sand before being beheaded by a masked terrorist; the scene from the grotesque Isis video which has been shown repeatedly across the world.
Those of us who are his friends had often thought about what he was going through in those terrible last moments. But we would rather have memories of his life rather than his death: working alongside him covering conflicts; remembering someone who, as well as being a great photojournalist, was also brave and modest, and always retained sympathy for those whose suffering he chronicled.

Turkey withdraws child rape amnesty bill

Turkey's ruling party has said it will withdraw a marriage bill that the United Nations warned could legitimize child rape. The age of consent in Turkey is 18, though many younger girls are married in Islamic ceremonies.

Turkey's ruling AK Party is shelving a proposed bill on underage marriage for further consultations, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim told reporters Tuesday, after opposition and rights groups said it could allow men accused of sexually abusing girls to avoid punishment.
The proposed law - scheduled to undergo a final vote on Tuesday despite a public outcry - would have deferred sentencing or punishment for pending sexual assault in cases where there was no physical force and where the victim and perpetrator were married. The law would have been in force retroactively from November 16.
Rights groups and United Nations agencies criticized the legislation, which they said was akin to an amnesty for child abusers and could expose victims to further suffering at the hands of their abusers. "Any forms of sexual violence against children are crimes which should be punished as such," the UN children's agency UNICEF and four other UN agencies in Turkey said in a joint statement on Monday.

'I was a believer': Face-to-face with ISIS inside an Iraqi prison

Updated 0824 GMT (1624 HKT) November 22, 2016 


For Abdelrahman al-Azy the task was brutal but the justifications were simple. As a member of ISIS, he must follow the instructions of his local emir or commander. The order: to help kill a man in cold blood.
As directed, al-Azy drove a fellow ISIS militant to the home of a SWAT member, an elite unit of the Iraqi Counter-Terrorism Service.
    The 23-year-old sat in the car as his co-conspirator stepped out of the vehicle, then shot and killed their victim.

    Is Nigeria's Brazilian heritage under threat?


    Established by former slaves, residents of the Brazilian quarter of Lagos face a battle against the bulldozers.


    Lagos, Nigeria - Though he grew up in one of Africa's largest English-speaking cities, Alexander De Souza remembers a childhood when Portuguese was spoken in the streets, Brazilian dishes were served in the kitchen and friends and family lived in houses styled in the architecture of Sao Paulo.
    De Souza spent the early years of his childhood in the "Brazilian quarter" of Nigeria's largest city, Lagos, a part of town so named because former slaves from Brazil settled there to restart their lives in the 19th century.












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