A video from Russia Today on waste handling in Moscow.
MOSCOW — On Sunday I suggested to my 13-year-old son that he join me on a bike ride. I am an obsessive, possibly excessive, cyclist, and I wanted to take Vova on a respectable 18-mile trip to show him some of the beautiful paths around our country house.
The dacha where we spend weekends and summers is about 12 miles outside of Moscow, on the border of a protected nature reserve and a short distance away from a chain of reservoirs that feed the city’s water supply. Not only construction but even unauthorized foot traffic are banned in the area.
I was planning to take Vova as far as we could go and turn around when we encountered a roadblock. We started out on a dirt road, did a short stretch on heavily pot-holed asphalt and then turned into the woods, where our bikes would get a real workout on pits and tree roots. To my surprise, the road was also open at the last in chain of reservoirs, where I would have expected to have to stop. Read more…
A roundup of opinion and commentary from international media.
According to preliminary results for the first round of presidential elections in Egypt, the runoff in June will oppose Mohamed Morsi, of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Ahmed Shafik, the last prime minister of ousted President Hosni Mubarak.
For some this result is nothing short of a nightmare scenario.
A roundup of opinion and commentary from international media.
NATO member countries this week formally ratified a way to wind down their involvement in Afghanistan next year. That’s progress of sorts, but with little talk of the hardest issues raised by the protracted war, some analysts are saying the meeting also exposed NATO’s shortcomings.
Bikas Das/Associated PressAhead of an event in January in Kolkata, India, marking Mohandas K. Gandhi’s death, children donned costumes to look like the renowned leader.
VARANASI, India — I recently stumbled upon a small war being waged over a piece of Mohandas K. Gandhi’s legacy.
It’s a battle between earnest socialists and a faction reportedly tied to India’s leading Hindu nationalist organization, with decades of social science research and some pricey real estate in the middle.
Like all inheritance battles, the fight for control of the Gandhian Institute of Studies is messy, complete with allegations of bribery and profiteering. (One side says it’s defending Gandhism from fascists; the other says it’s rescuing Gandhi from Communists.) It’s also another example of how Gandhi’s patrimony is misused. Beyond nationalism and nonviolence, most people simply don’t know what Gandhi stood for, and his words are open to misinterpretation. Sixty-four years after the Mahatma’s assassination, anyone can claim to be a Gandhian. Read more…
It’s a lot of protesting, really, considering that the proposal suggests bringing tuition costs to $4,700 a year by 2016 — closer to the Canadian norm (about $5,300) and still less than in-state tuition at public universities in the United States.
But that, of course, is the point. The protests are about more than how to finance higher education: a whole vision of society is at stake. Will Quebec become more like the rest of Canada and (gasp) the United States, and require students to pay for a larger share of their education? Or will it hew closer to the European social democratic model of free (or near-free) higher education funded from general taxation? Read more…
Sergei Ilnitsky/European Pressphoto AgencyThe Crystal Hall arena, the venue for the Eurovision Song Contest, in Baku, Azerbaijan, on May 22.
BAKU, Azerbaijan — From my seat in the back of the sparkling purple-lit stadium at Eurovision Song Contest, it was hard sometimes this week to distinguish the pageantry of Europe’s largest international pop music competition from the pageantry of Azerbaijan’s self-promotion.
For example, each of the 18 acts in the first semi-final on Tuesday night began and ended with a 30-second promotional spot depicting this small, oil-rich South Caucasus nation as the ultimate tourist destination. “Azerbaijan: Land of sun!” the advertisements read. “Land of water!” “Land of horsemen!”
Azerbaijan’s government has gone all out to prepare for the Eurovision song contest, and rights groups have seized the chance to spotlight the country’s record of abuses.
Even outside Baku’s brand new Crystal Hall — the 23,000-seat space age auditorium specially built for this five-day event — loudspeakers, billboards and posters treated visitors to a relentless catalog of Azerbaijan’s fabulousness. “Land of poetry!” “Land of flames!”
They didn’t say, of course, that Azerbaijan is also a land of repression. And a land of censorship and K.G.B.-style surveillance, where young activists are routinely jailed for criticizing the government in blogs or on their Facebook pages. When the dry ice clears after this week, the estimated 125 million people who’ll have tuned in to watch Eurovision this year should not lose sight of the human rights abuses unfolding just behind Azerbaijan’s shiny new facade. Read more…
This WildlifeDirect video about protecting lions in Kenya starts at the 2:01 point with a section about the lighting array created by Richard Turere, a Kenyan boy who made the device when he was 11 years old.
NAIROBI — Earlier this month, I met Richard Turere at a TED talk in Nairobi, Kenya. His story electrified the audience: using LED lights, an old battery and motorcycle parts, he’d created a lighting array to protect his family’s cattle from lions prowling on the outskirts of Nairobi. The invention so effectively mimicked a human with a flashlight that it was being used by several neighboring households.
The kicker? Richard is 13 years old, and he invented the device at 11, on his own.
Richard was made responsible for his family’s herd — and primary source of income — at the age of 9. Oprah-watchers will be familiar with the story of William Kamkwamba, the Malawian boy who “harnessed the wind” by building a windmill from junkyard scraps to power his family’s farm. And these two precocious boys, who overcame significant adversities to do incredible things, are not exactly exceptional. Read more…
ISTANBUL — If patience is a virtue, then Turkey’s place among the angels is secure. The country’s efforts to become a member of the European Union has been dragging on for some 50 years, and while Ankara has not always been free from blame, since 2005 — when negotiations began in earnest — it has been trying hard to climb over the wall of Europe’s prejudices.
Yet now there is hope at last that the process may accelerate. Voter disenchantment in the euro zone recently claimed the head of President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, the leader of the die-hard Turko-skeptics. France had been refusing to even discuss with Turkey important provisions of the accession document known as the acquis communautaire, including those about budgetary affairs and agriculture. Along with his ally German Chancellor Angela Merkel — who has also been answering to constituencies that regard Turkey as not European enough to join the European club — Sarkozy favored granting Turkey a form of association that would stop well short of full membership. Read more…
Banaras Khan/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesA man in Quetta, Pakistan, tried to access Twitter on Sunday.
LONDON — The Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (P.T.A.) banned Twitter across the country for eight hours on Sunday, sparking both outrage and derision among many Pakistanis, myself included. Twitter, which has over six million account holders in Pakistan and started an Urdu-language version of its home page in March, is one of the country’s most popular social networking sites.
According to Pakistan’s Ministry for Information and Technology, the ban was implemented after Twitter failed to respond to an official complaint against supposedly blasphemous tweets about a competition on Facebook involving caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. Yet the ministry didn’t explain why it lifted the ban a few hours later even though Twitter hadn’t removed the offending content. In the meantime, most net-savvy twitterati were able to circumvent the ban by using proxy servers. Read more…
A roundup of opinion and commentary from international media.
Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the only person convicted in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, died Sunday. Megrahi had been released from prison almost three years ago on humanitarian grounds, for suffering from prostate cancer.
Latitude offers incisive commentary on issues of local and international concern – dispatches on the most significant and intriguing issues, interpreted for a global audience. Read more »
Different sentences carry different weight, and we can craft them not just to get an idea across, but also to convey attitude or elicit emotion. Continue reading →
The worst single part of the Constitution is surely Article V, which has made it among the most difficult to amend of any in the world. Continue reading →
