Group items tagged

One of the great moral stains on the United States is that the richest and most powerful country in history has accepted staggering levels of child poverty. With final legislative approval of President Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan on Wednesday, the United States has decided to scrub at that stain.

But then the government and civic organizations promoted education, including for girls. Today, 98 percent of children in Bangladesh complete elementary school. Still more astonishing for a country with a history of gender gaps, there are now more girls in high school in Bangladesh than boys.

I was right that Bangladesh faces huge challenges, not least climate change. But over all my pessimism was dead wrong, for Bangladesh has since enjoyed three decades of extraordinary progress.

One of the great moral stains on the United States is that the richest and most powerful country in history has accepted staggering levels of child poverty. With final legislative approval of President Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan on Wednesday, the United States has decided to scrub at that stain.

Most historic in the package are provisions that should sharply reduce child poverty. If these measures are made permanent, a Columbia University study suggests, child poverty could fall by half. By half! Biden will have done for children something analogous to what Franklin Roosevelt did for senior citizens with Social Security.

Bangladesh was born 50 years ago this month amid genocide, squalor and starvation.

As Bangladesh prepared for general elections on Sunday, a truck driver named Nur Islam was trying to haul a load of potatoes to Dhaka, the capital, along a route he knew would be targeted by protesters allied with the opposition.

He took precautions, strapping on a helmet and leaving in the dead of night, but was still terrified after his truck was surrounded — not once, but twice — by young men hurling bricks.

Street protests often accompany elections in Bangladesh, but political violence intensified in 2013, resulting in around 150 deaths, according to Human Rights Watch.

And on the second anniversary of the genocide, it fell upon Ullah to tell his fellow Rohingya that they were fast running out of options.

he spoke into a microphone, telling the assembled spectators that they had two choices: to resign themselves to life here—by some measures the world’s densest refugee camp—and rely on global compassion that was eroding, or demand that their rights be upheld in Myanmar (by a government whose army has sought to slaughter them) and then return home.

These are now the only real possibilities on offer for the Rohingya, a community that is, by and large, on its own, with dwindling numbers of supporters on the international stage

Bangladesh LGBT editor hacked to death

Bangladesh police say a top gay rights activist and editor at the country's only LGBT magazine is one of two people who have been hacked to death.

Another person was also injured when the attackers entered a Dhaka flat.

The autocratic, pro-Western military government that took power in 1975 instigated limited economic liberalization. This enabled Bangladeshi entrepreneurs to take advantage of the Multifiber Arrangement, an international trade agreement on textiles and garments that placed export quotas on the emerging economies of East Asia in order to shield Western economies from competition. Very poor countries were exempt from the restrictions, and in the 1980s the new military elite of Bangladesh, hoping to capitalize on the cheap local labor, opened garment factories with the help of South Korean investors. Know-how soon spread, attracting more investment. Bangladesh is now the world’s second-largest exporter of apparel after China.

because Bangladesh’s banking sector and stock market are “not very much exposed to the world,” Muhith explained, the country has weathered global financial crises well, holding a G.D.P. growth rate at an average of 5 percent since 1990.

Globalization has arguably created a two-tier society in India: one worldly and plugged in, the other mired in medieval poverty. But it gave Bangladesh, which knew it was on the sidelines of modernity, a reason to develop the old-fashioned way: by industrializing to create low-level jobs for the masses

There, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) estimates that at least 1,200 have died and more than 41 million people have been affected by monsoon rains and severe flooding as of June this year. The rains are now moving northwest towards Pakistan, where more devastation is expected.

In Bangladesh alone, floods have so far claimed the lives of 142 people, and impacted over 8.5 million.

entire homes have been washed away, and crops and food supplies -- including livestock -- all but wiped out

Crowded camps, depleted clinics and scarce soap and water make social distancing and even hand-washing impossible for millions of refugees.

In an embattled enclave in Syria, doctors have seen patients die from what looks like the coronavirus but are unable to treat them because they lack beds, protective gear and medical professionals. A refugee camp in Bangladesh is so cramped that its population density is nearly four times that of New York City, making social distancing impossible. Clinics in a refugee camp in Kenya struggle in normal times with only eight doctors for nearly 200,000 people.

As wealthy countries like the United States and Italy struggle with mass outbreaks of the coronavirus, international health experts and aid workers are increasingly worried that the virus could ravage the world’s most vulnerable people: the tens of millions forced from their homes by violent conflict.

They fired shots in the air, and then, the villagers say, turned their guns on fleeing residents, who fell dead or wounded in the monsoon-green rice paddies. The military’s retribution for a Rohingya militant attack on police posts earlier that day had begun.

The Burmese military’s “clearance operation” in the hamlet of Maung Nu and dozens of other villages populated by Burma’s ethnic Rohingya minority has triggered an exodus of an estimated 400,000 refugees into Bangladesh, an episode the United Nations human rights chief has called “ethnic cleansing.

Rights groups say it will take months or years to fully chronicle the devastation the refugees are fleeing. Satellite photos show widespread burning, witnesses recount soldiers killing civilians, and the Burmese government has said that 176 Rohingya villages stand empty. No total death toll is yet available because the area remains sealed by the military.

the secrets of Dubai are slowly seeping out. This is a city built from nothing in just a few wild decades on credit and ecocide, suppression and slavery. Dubai is a living metal metaphor for the neo-liberal globalised world that may be crashing – at last – into history.

There are three different Dubais, all swirling around each other. There are the expats, like Karen; there are the Emiratis, headed by Sheikh Mohammed; and then there is the foreign underclass who built the city, and are trapped here. They are hidden in plain view. You see them everywhere, in dirt-caked blue uniforms, being shouted at by their superiors, like a chain gang – but you are trained not to look. It is like a mantra: the Sheikh built the city. The Sheikh built the city. Workers? What workers?

Sahinal Monir, a slim 24-year-old from the deltas of Bangladesh. "To get you here, they tell you Dubai is heaven. Then you get here and realise it is hell," he says. Four years ago, an employment agent arrived in Sahinal's village in Southern Bangladesh. He told the men of the village that there was a place where they could earn 40,000 takka a month (£400) just for working nine-to-five on construction projects. It was a place where they would be given great accommodation, great food, and treated well. All they had to do was pay an up-front fee of 220,000 takka (£2,300) for the work visa – a fee they'd pay off in the first six months, easy. So Sahinal sold his family land, and took out a loan from the local lender, to head to this paradise. As soon as he arrived at Dubai airport, his passport was taken from him by his construction company. He has not seen it since. He was told brusquely that from now on he would be working 14-hour days in the desert heat – where western tourists are advised not to stay outside for even five minutes in summer, when it hits 55 degrees – for 500 dirhams a month (£90), less than a quarter of the wage he was promised. If you don't like it, the company told him, go home. "But how can I go home? You have my passport, and I have no money for the ticket," he said. "Well, then you'd better get to work," they replied.

More than 20 people - including secular writers and bloggers, professors, members of religious minorities and two foreigners - have been killed in attacks blamed on Islamist militants since 2013.

In many of the attacks, victims have been hacked to death with machetes, and in some cases beheaded.

Initially, secular and atheist bloggers and writers were targeted. But now the militants seem to be widening their list of targets.

A Bangladeshi island regularly submerged by monsoon rains is ready to house 100,000 Rohingya refugees, but no date has been announced to relocate people from the crowded and squalid camps where they’ve lived for years, officials said Thursday.

The island is built to accommodate 100,000 people, just a fraction of the million Rohingya Muslims who have fled waves of violent persecution in their native Myanmar.

International aid agencies and the United Nations have vehemently opposed the relocation plan since it was first proposed in 2015, expressing fear that a big storm could overwhelm the island and endanger thousands of lives.

Two US-based groups, the Center for Global Workers’ Rights (CGWR) and the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), used previously unpublished import databases to calculate that garment factories and suppliers from across the world lost at least $16.2bn in revenue between April and June this year as brands cancelled orders or refused to pay for clothing orders they had placed before the coronavirus outbreak.

This has left suppliers in countries such as Bangladesh, Cambodia and Myanmar with little choice but to slim down their operations or close altogether, leaving millions of workers facing reduced hours and unemployment, according to the report.

“In the Covid-19 crisis, this skewed payment system allowed western brands to shore up their financial position by essentially robbing their developing country suppliers,

In the year since the Charlie Hebdo terror attack, free speech and political correctness, particularly in the West, have been presented as antithetical.

As a few of the panelists noted, the Constitution enshrined the right to offend as a bedrock of free speech, but in recent years, the right not to be offended has taken precedent.

However, the segregation and self-censorship among liberals, shaped partly by the desire not to offend, has been just as devastating, in part because it has undermined what many progressives have hailed as a pillar of liberalism: the ability to debate ideas and confront difficult issues.

The Great Game — also known as Bolshaya Igra — was an intense rivalry between the British and Russian Empires in Central Asia,

Britain sought to influence or control much of Central Asia to buffer the "crown jewel" of its empire: British India.

Russia, meanwhile, sought to expand its territory and sphere of influence, in order to create one of history's largest land-based empires.

A new category of the dispossessed now exists—“climate refugees.” Which countries are particularly at risk—and should the rest of the world be held financially accountable for them?

The countries that are most vulnerable are places like Bangladesh, India or West Africa. Globally, 145 million people live 3 feet or less above high tide. Small island states, like the Marshall Islands, may not only have to move to escape the rising seas, they’re going to lose their entire cultures as their nations are literally going to be under water. The central paradox is that the people who are going to suffer most, like the Marshall Islanders or people in Bangladesh, are those who have done the least to contribute to this problem. These are not the people who are driving around in SUVs and dumping CO2 into the atmosphere!

The last time the CO2 levels in the atmosphere were as high as they are today, sea levels were 20-30 feet higher. But even if we all turn in our cars and ride skateboards to work, because of the heat that’s already in the ocean, sea levels are going to continue to rise.

The lifting of a wide range of coronavirus rules Monday coincided with a small but worrying spike in cases of a variant, first identified in India, that threatens a lockdown-lifting road map frequently described by Prime Minister Boris Johnson as “cautious but irreversible.”

In recent days the authorities have scrambled to ramp up testing and inoculation in parts of the country seeing a sharp rise in cases of the more transmissible variant.

The opposition Labour Party has accused Mr. Johnson of bringing on the trouble by delaying a decision to close borders to flights from India last month, while government scientific advisers have expressed their concerns about moving too fast to remove curbs.

1. Floods and disease

As life becomes less tolerable for humans, animals and plants, things will get easier for disease-causing organisms. More than half of all known diseases have been made worse by the climate crisis

A warming world makes outbreaks of water-borne diseases such as cholera, dysentery, hepatitis A, typhoid and polio more likely.

From 1969 to 1977, Mr. Kissinger established himself as one of the most powerful functionaries in history. For a portion of that time, he was the only person ever to serve concurrently as national security adviser and secretary of state, two very different jobs that simultaneously made him responsible for shaping and carrying out American foreign policy.

the ease with which he wielded power made him a natural avatar for an American national security state that grew and gained momentum through the 20th century, like an organism that survives by enlarging itself.

In the White House, you’re atop an establishment that includes the world’s most powerful military and economy while holding the rights to a radical story: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”