If people outside the United States are looking for answers why Americans often seem so clueless about the world outside their borders, they could start with what the three major U.S. television networks offered their viewers in the way of news during 2013.
An internal World Bank investigation says the bank’s private lending arm violated its own social and environmental rules in approving a $30m loan to a Honduran palm oil magnate allegedly tied to the forced eviction and deaths of dozens of land activists.
The months-long investigation found the bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC) failed to properly vet Honduran powerbroker Miguel Facusse’s Corporacion Dinant, a palm oil and food giant embroiled in one of Honduras’ deadliest land conflicts in recent history.
Source: The Nation
The author’s half-forgotten masterpiece, Benito Cereno, provides fascinating insight into issues of slavery, freedom, individualism—and Islamophobia.
Herman Melville didn’t know that the West African slaves who inspired him to write his other, half-forgotten masterpiece, Benito Cereno, were Muslim. And when I first learned that they were, I didn’t think it more than a curiosity. I was, after all, planning to use the true incident behind the Melville story to open onto a larger history of freedom and slavery during the Age of Revolution, to which Islam seemed incidental.
Source: In These Times
Even in the ivory tower, work is often solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.
“She was a professor?” That’s the question an incredulous caseworker asked when confronted with the predicament of Margaret Mary Vojtko, an 83-year-old French teacher who spent the final months of her life destitute and nearly homeless before dying on September 1. The story of her death has become the symbol of a surprising economic reality: “Adjunct professors are the new working poor,” as one CNN headline proclaimed.
Source: In These Times
Soccer is not meant to be played in 122-degree heat. That’s the potential labor issue FIFA heads have been dealing with in the lead-up to the 2022 World Cup. The games are scheduled to be held in Qatar, a small Gulf state with a suffocating summer climate in which the average daily high in July is 106°F.
Officials have a solution to that problem: air-conditioned stadiums and, possibly, moving the event to the winter. What’s been less discussed is who exactly is going to be building those stadiums and under what conditions. Like most Gulf states, Qatar is reliant on a hyper-exploited base ofworkers, most of whom are migrants from South Asia. These laborers don’t just spend 90 minutes on a sweltering pitch—they work 12-hour shifts, every day of the week.
A worst case scenario is unfolding in Syria, and Palestinian refugees, particularly in the Yarmouk refugee camp, are paying a heavy price for Syria’s cruelest war. They are starving, although there can be no justification, nor logistical explanation for why they are dying from hunger.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019