For Chinese Women, Marriage Depends On Right 'Bride Price' : NPR

For Chinese Women, Marriage Depends On Right 'Bride Price' : NPR

Women hold up half the sky, China's Chairman Mao famously said. But in China, the one-child policy and the traditional preference for boys mean that 117 boys are born for every 100 baby girls. By one estimate, this means there could be 24 million Chinese men unable to find wives by the end of the decade.

As China's economy booms, the marriage market has become just that: a market, with new demands by women for apartments and cars.

But are women really benefiting from their scarcity?

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Hunger Striking at Guantánamo Bay - NYTimes.com

Hunger Striking at Guantánamo Bay - NYTimes.com

ONE man here weighs just 77 pounds. Another, 98. Last thing I knew, I weighed 132, but that was a month ago.

I’ve been on a hunger strike since Feb. 10 and have lost well over 30 pounds. I will not eat until they restore my dignity.

I’ve been detained at Guantánamo for 11 years and three months. I have never been charged with any crime. I have never received a trial.

I could have been home years ago — no one seriously thinks I am a threat — but still I am here. Years ago the military said I was a “guard” for Osama bin Laden, but this was nonsense, like something out of the American movies I used to watch. They don’t even seem to believe it anymore. But they don’t seem to care how long I sit here, either.

When I was at home in Yemen, in 2000, a childhood friend told me that in Afghanistan I could do better than the $50 a month I earned in a factory, and support my family. I’d never really traveled, and knew nothing about Afghanistan, but I gave it a try.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/15/opinion/hunger-striking-at-guantanamo-bay.html?smid=pl-share

Half of Guantanamo inmates on hunger strike: US official - The Times of India

Half of Guantanamo inmates on hunger strike: US official - The Times of India

WASHINGTON: More than half of the 166 detainees held at the US-run Guantanamo military prison have joined a rapidly growing hunger strike to protest their indefinite detention, an official said on Sunday. 

There are 84 inmates who are refusing food, including 16 on feeding tubes, five of whom are hospitalized, Lieutenant Colonel Samuel Housesaid in a statement, adding that none had "life-threatening conditions." 

House said that as recently as Friday there were 63 inmates who were refusing to eat. On Tuesday of last week just 45 were taking part. 

The hunger strikers are protesting their incarceration without charge or trial at Guantanamo in the 11 years since the prison went into use for terror suspects detained in Afghanistan and Pakistan. 

The hunger strikes began February 6, when inmates claimed prison officials searched their Qurans for contraband. Officials have deniedany mishandling of Islam's holy book. 

An inmate detained at Guantanamo for over a decade without charge gave a graphic account of his participation in the hunger strike in a New York Times op-ed earlier this month entitled "Gitmo Is Killing Me." 

The inmate, a 35-year-old Yemeni named Samir Naji al-Hasan Moqbel, said he had lost over 30 pounds since going on hunger strike February 10 and that a fellow inmate weighed just 77 pounds. 

"I will never forget the first time they passed the feeding tube up my nose. I can't describe how painful it is to be force-fed this way," he wrote. 

"There are so many of us on hunger strike now that there aren't enough qualified medical staff members to carry out the force-feedings ... They are feeding people around the clock just to keep up." 

Like most of the striking inmates, Moqbel has never been charged with a crime or put on trial, and is not viewed as a threat to US national security. 

However, he cannot be released because of a moratorium on repatriating Yemenis enacted by President Barack Obama in 2009 after a plot to blow up an airliner on Christmas Day was traced back to al-Qaida's Yemeni franchise.

Bombing suspect’s YouTube account mirrored jihadist conflicts in Caucasus - The Washington Post

Bombing suspect’s YouTube account mirrored jihadist conflicts in Caucasus - The Washington Post

MOSCOW — In a few months, starting last August, the YouTube account in the name of Tamerlan Tsarnaev took on an increasingly puritanical religious tone. It moved from secular militancy to Islamist certainty.

It seemed to mirror the wars in the Caucasus, which shifted from a separatist conflict in Chechnya in the 1990s to a jihadist campaign that continues to this day in neighboringDagestan.


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Beslan Meets Columbine - NYTimes.com

Beslan Meets Columbine - NYTimes.com

I COULD always spot the Chechens in Vienna. They were darker-haired than the Austrians; they dressed more snappily, like 1950s gangsters; they never had anything to do.

There are thousands of Chechen refugees in Austria, and thousands more in Poland, France, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Dubai and elsewhere (as well as scattered communities in the United States). Wherever they are, they stand out, a nation apart.

The word most linked to “Chechen” is “terrorist,” because of the attacks against the audience at Moscow’s Dubrovka Theater in 2002, against children in Beslan, North Ossetia, in 2004, and now the marathon in Boston. But terrorists were only ever a tiny fraction of the population. A more accurate word to link to “Chechen” would be “refugee.” Perhaps 20 percent, perhaps more, of all Chechens have left Chechnya in the last 20 years.

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Beslan Meets Columbine - NYTimes.com

Syria

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Huge survey reveals seven social classes in UK

People in the UK now fit into seven social classes, a major survey conducted by the BBC suggests.

It says the traditional categories of working, middle and upper class are outdated, fitting 39% of people.
It found a new model of seven social classes ranging from the elite at the top to a "precariat" - the poor, precarious proletariat - at the bottom.
More than 161,000 people took part in the Great British Class Survey, the largest study of class in the UK.
Class has traditionally been defined by occupation, wealth and education. But this research argues that this is too simplistic, suggesting that class has three dimensions - economic, social and cultural.

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Algae Bloom in Florida Kills Record Number of Manatees - NYTimes.com

Algae Bloom in Florida Kills Record Number of Manatees - NYTimes.com