Yesterday in the news...

Exhausted!Dalek

Since I tried to be noble and give up reading fanfiction for Lent, I decided to try to do something a bit more personally helpful - namely, I wanted to get my head out of the sand and stop being an ostrich in regards to what the heck is going on in the world. My ever-accommodating boyfriend pointed me in the direction of BBC news, which he said might give a less biased picture, and cover more world news faithfully and broadly ... which is what I desperately need because basically I don't know anything (much less where anything is. geography!fail.)

I saved the links to a few of the more interesting articles I browsed yesterday whilst procrastinating, and will now share them with you (yep...still procrastinating... why do you ask?).


The first article, Indian meal starter lasts 50 years, just impressed me. Seven semi-illiterate Indian women started a cooperative business ("Lijjat papads") making poppadoms (a traditional meal starter in India). Their business flourished, and expanded amazingly, and this month they are celebrating their 50th year in business.

I have not often considered just how much the American (middle-class) culture differs from other countries'/classes'. Simply being able to read and write gives me access to so many opportunities I would not otherwise have. These women are doubly impressive to me for their strength and determination to be financially independent. They discuss in the article how much their situation gives them a sense of empowerment - they can make their own decisions (and have the money to back them up), and don't need to depend on the men in their lives to support them and their children.

Indeed the Lijjat women seem to have proved that success does not necessarily need money and infrastructure, as long as there is determination.

To relocate over to Africa for a while, the second article of note that I found discussed what can only be called a present-day witch-hunt in Tanzania. You may or may not know that people have been murdering albinos in that country over the past few years (BBC news tells me that 45 people have been killed since late 2007) - apparently so that witchdoctors can use their body parts in potions. Now, the government is asking people to fill out anonymous surveys in which they note who they suspect to be involved.

Having taken a witch-hunting course in history last semester, I can immediately think of a few things that could go very badly wrong with this plan. Some of them, the government of Tanzania has already thought of - and dismissed. For example, people could use this opportunity to rat out the neighbors they dislike or are currently feuding with. They don't actually offer a solution to this conundrum in the article. I'm not actually sure how one could weed out that kind of corruption of the system without going into each village and doing some serious investigating... which sort of defeats the purpose of having individuals name names in the first place.

But correspondents say it is not clear how effective the exercise will be in a society which believes in witchcraft and where confidence in the legal system is wearing thin.

That's an even scarier prospect. Because now we have all these people riled up and suspecting each other, believing that some of them can do awful things with magic if provoked, and not trusting that their government will solve the problem for them. Bad combination. I foresee truly awful results if people try to take matters into their own hands and disregard the legal system entirely. In Europe, during the height of the witch trials, the worst massacres happened in obscure locations where there was no oversight, no chance for appeal, and where all of the carefully formulated rules about how to find someone guilty just flew out the window (possibly on an imaginary broomstick).

It's a chilling prospect to think that we may revisit those events in this day and age in Tanzania.

The government issued a ban on all traditional healers in January in an effort to stop the killings and several have been arrested since then on suspicion of flouting the order.

Honestly, I'm not really sure that that is going to solve anything. If people are forced to practice in hiding (if they decide to continue working despite the ban), won't it just make everyone more suspicious, thus breeding more problems than it fixes?

The last is something a bit more close to home. I'm highly amused because apparently the point of the article is to discuss the public's reaction to the First Lady's muscles. (oh my!) Well, that's how they lead into the meat of the article anyway. Maybe at some point I'll find out what all the debate is about concerning her choice of dress.

The actual point of the article is the speculation that maybe our new president is doing too much - specifically, too much of the wrong thing. Yes, it is important (says the author) to deal with healthcare, education, our infrastructure, but is it worth it to fix all of these things if our country succumbs to the banking crisis while we've been changing everything else?

Now, I've just recently risen from approximately the intelligence of pond scum to maybe that of a newt about all of these issues. So I can't really comment on what's going on more than I already have. Hopefully in the next few weeks I'll have read enough to give me a better idea of the situation so that I can actually talk about it in an intelligent manner.

- Jess