March 2012
8 posts
1 tag
Prabhakaran's Last Throw
By Nandini Krishnan
Note: This important article about India’s role in tolerating Sri Lanka’s violent repression of its postwar Tamil population was initially published on The India Site, until that site was shut down by a Denial Of Service attack clearly related to the article. With the permission of the site’s editor Patrick French, I am crossposting the article here so it can...
1 tag
In France, an Election About Immigrants, Without...
Marseilles
Samia Ghali has spent her whole political career waiting for a French election to turn its attention to the lives of her 100,000 poor, mainly Arab constituents. Now, as the presidential election descends into a debate about immigrants and Islam, she is wishing the topic hadn’t come up.
“There is an obsession with immigrants in this election,” said Ms. Ghali, one of only three Arab...
1 tag
Trapped Between Neighbours and Politics: The...
Marseilles
“It’s hard to be a Jew.” Michèle Teboul tells me this with a self-effacing smile, because she knows that hers is not the face of hardship: Her clothing business is doing well, her children have good lives and she’s happy living in the dense cultural mosaic that is Marseilles.
But the truth of her words is beyond doubt this week. It’s evident in the very necessary X-ray scan, the bag...
1 tag
Why Every Loan Ought To Be a Microloan
The idea of making high-interest loans to people who earn a dollar a day has been controversial from the beginning. But it proved to be a very profitable industry, so people stopped asking questions.
Suddenly they’ve started asking questions again. One person they asked was the young daughter of Dhake Lakshmi Rajyam, a woman in a dirt-poor corner of Andhra Pradesh, India, who had borrowed $2,400...
1 tag
The Post-Fordist Dream of James Dyson
Tetbury Hill, England
You have to drive far out into the West Country, through forested hills and ancient villages, if you want to find the last of the mad British inventors. His wide glass desk perches amid a clutter of aluminum tubes, DC-pulse motors, lithium-polymer batteries and whirring prototypes in a distant corner of a sleek, silver building that contains 1,450 engineers, accountants,...
1 tag
The Horror and the Hashtag
It is almost touching that millions of North Americans developed a sudden interest in northern Ugandan affairs at some point Wednesday afternoon and decided, as their finger slid between Fruit Ninja and the hockey scores, to hire someone to take care of Joseph Kony.
Did you click? You’re hardly alone. Who could resist retweeting, Like-ing, or +1-ing a salvo of memes against the most guilty living...
1 tag
"It is the book that has touched me most in recent...
The mayor of Hamburg, one of my favourite European cities, talks about his reading choices:
Original Article
1 tag
Stuck In The Middle with Putin
Vladimir Putin will win the Russian presidential election on Sunday. That is one of the safer predictions I could make. He has guaranteed that outcome not just by crushing the opposition and gagging the media, but also by doing things that should make people happy.
He has increased pension payments by 9.4 per cent, boosted welfare payments, cut the cost of housing by 30 per cent, paid to freeze...
