Archive for
July 11th, 2006
Stories
Outsourcing the war in Iraq and Afghanistan
The Philippines is a top choice of United States-based companies for business process outsourcing or BPO.
A call center job is preferred employment of many young Filipino graduates since it offers good financial incentives. The BPO industry in the Philippines generated $1.12 billion in revenues and employed more than 112,000 people last year.
Because of lower labor costs in the country, US-based companies relocate business functions such as customer care, medical transcription, software development and animation.
Now, another job that is “outsourced” in the Philippines is private security operator or independent contractor ( read: mercenaries) in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A Manila broadsheet reported that more than 300 Filipinos have been employed by a private company to guard US State department and military personnel, facilities and base camps in Iraq.
Triple Canopy, Dynacorp and Blackwater were named as the companies that hired the Filipino mercenaries.
A Filipino journalist revealed that Blackwater acquired 25 acres in a former US military base in the Philippines to conduct survival military training.
Filipino journalist and blogger Ellen Tordesillas was able to interview a Filipino mercenary about the difficulties and even rewards of being an armed worker in Iraq securing US military facilities.
Filipino mercenaries must first travel to Dubai, Jordan or Kuwait since the Philippines has banned the deployment of workers in Iraq after a Filipino worker was kidnapped in a US military camp by Iraqi insurgents in 2004.
Senator Aquilino Pimentel warned of security backlash over the deployment of Filipino mercenaries fighting on the side of US troops. He said:
“The additional problem is that these mercenaries might make the country and our embassies and trade missions vulnerable to counter-attack by those being attacked by the mercenaries in Iraq.”
Many Filipinos are eager to work in war-torn Iraq since they can earn at least $1,700 a month. A minimum wage worker in the Philippines receives only $116 a month.
India: Bloggers react to the bomb blasts in Mumbai
Mumbai was hit by serial blasts today. Commuters in trains on one of the railway lines (Western Railway) were killed by bombs that went off in seven different trains. The blasts occured around 1825 hrs, which is the peak hour for commute in Mumbai, as office goers leave South Mumbai to go back home to the suburbs. Estimates suggest that the body count is around 180 as of now.
Within minutes, the Mumbai Help blog came alive with messages, comments and offers to help. The blog started last year to cope with the floods, and started to fill the information and communiation gap. This particular post asks readers to provide phone numbers of people they want to check on, or inform. Metroblogging Mumbai has been doing updates on the issue. This is an open thread on the blog.
Amit at India Uncut has a post with frequent updates as the situation changes. With the mainstream media reporting with the trademark cluelessness, More on Mumbai by Jayesh. Blogpourri comments on the smugness of a particular mainstream media news channel. NowPublic features images taken by a citizen journalist, Dharmesh Thakkar. Pajamas Media collates links from mainsteam media and blogs. At Indian Writing there is this dedication to the particular intimacy that can be formed on public transport:
To “train friendship”. To every kind of friendship. To remember those whom the city has lost, and to honour their memories by holding together and never letting the violence win.
Gaurav Sabnis grieves for the city and its people.
It's been a tough day for the city, and the tragedy has a slightly personal note for me too. I am fortunate that neither me nor any of my acquaintances were victims today. But Western Line is “my” line. I have regularly travelled on those very tracks. The idea that almost 200 people were killed along the very familiar landscape which is a part of my life chills me, angers me and saddens me.
Contrapuntal asks why Bombay? and looks forward, hoping that there is no backlash.
Ukraine: Seeking Mayor's Help
“Dear Mayor!!! The building is falling!!! Save us!!!”
Downtown Kyiv, Ukraine, July 2006
By Maidan International's New Project for Democracy
This desperate attempt by residents to draw attention of Leonid Chernovetsky, the Ukrainian capital's new mayor, to their building's condition has been photographed by Maidan International's New Project for Democracy - whose mission “is to inform about the state of democracy, promote freedom, market open society, provide context for news from the region to global audiences, and contribute to peace in UKRAINE, BELARUS, MOLDOVA, as well as in other areas of the world such as Central Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, the Middle East, and Central Asia.”
China: Wu Hao released
Following nearly five months in prison, blogger, documentary maker and American permanent resident Wu Hao has been released, as noted in a July 11 post on his sister Nina's blog:
刚刚得到家里电话, 被告知皓子出来了.谢谢大家的关心,但他需要清静一阵子.
如果还有什么消息,将更新在这个BLOG.
Set up soon after her little brother's arrest by Chinese authorities, Nina's blog has served as the centerpoint in the campaign to have Hao released. English translations of each of her posts recounted the hostility Nina received in repeated unsuccesful attempts to gain any information on her brother's whereabouts. Frustrated and fearing how the news would affect her parents' health, in late May she wrote that her brother had been denied access to a lawyer.
Support was strong across the blogsphere, with hundreds of fellow bloggers posting on Nina and Hao's story, as well as putting up Free Hao Wu tags. Support was there from some mainstream media, with the Wall Street Journal chipping in just a week ago, and a piece written in The Washington Post by Global Voices Online co-founder Rebecca MacKinnon coinciding with Chinese president Hu Jintao's visit to America:
“Hao turned 34 this week. He personifies a generation of urban Chinese who have flourished thanks to the Communist Party's embrace of market-style capitalism and greater cultural openness. He got his MBA from the University of Michigan and worked for EarthLink before returning to China to pursue his dream of becoming a documentary filmmaker. He and his sister, Nina Wu, who works in finance and lives a comfortable middle-class life in Shanghai, have enjoyed freedoms of expression, travel, lifestyle and career choice that their parents could never have dreamed of. They are proof of how U.S. economic engagement with China has been overwhelmingly good for many Chinese.”
Several members of the U.S. Congress wrote letters of concern on Hao's behalf. We are also grateful for some diplomacy - both quiet and open - conducted elsewhere. Late last week free speech group Reporters Without Borders announced a successful lobbying attempt aimed at the European Parliament, which ratified a resolution on freedom of expression on the internet. Included in the resolution is a list of nine imprisoned bloggers and cyberdissidents, one of which is Hao.
China: Survival tips for female activists: how to get the cops off your tail
When veteran AIDS activist Hu Jia (胡佳) was kidnapped by Chinese police in February this year, his wife, Zeng Jinyan (曾金燕), found closed police station doors at every turn. No answers, explanations or even an admission that her husband was in police custody, Zeng set up a blog [zh] documenting her efforts to get her husband back. Forty-one days later he was dropped off in the outskirts of Beijing. Emaciated and suffering from cirrhosis of the liver, he walked over an hour to get home.
The incident seems to have been Zeng's entry point into the dangerous world of Chinese AIDS victim and female reproductive rights activism. While recent posts mention fundraising for impoverished AIDS orphans with little hope of finishing high school and a call for volunteers to help design one AIDS NGO's monthly publication, the prime focus on Zeng's blog of late has been on the case of Chen Guangcheng (陈光诚), a blind activist abducted by Chinese police earlier this year after launching a lawsuit on behalf of women in his native Shandong province who were forcibly sterilized.
Acting on behalf of Chen's wife Yuan Weijing (袁伟静) in posting information on developments in Chen's case on her blog, Zeng, age 22, soon found herself being followed by state secret police. Below are several of Zeng's recent posts. Of particular note are the posts from late June, in which Zeng writes of successfully standing up to her followers.
Links for Tue, 2006-07
According to (Fr) Le Blog du Congolais: “Bapuwa Mwamba, a noteworthy journalist at “Le Phare”(…) was recently grabbed from his family's affections as well as from freedom fighters in the night of the 7 to the 8th of July by a commando that shot him at close range. (…) Either we let [those who have decided to lead the Congo] soil the country and we let them live or we fight for our freedom, our dignity and our sovereignty and we get killed.”
Says Dijoux.re regarding (Fr) the chikungunya epidemic plaguing Reunion, “the impact study of the effect of the measures taken to fight the virus on the environment showed that large scale treatments did not have harmful consequences on the land and water fauna of the island.”
Synesthetique in Philippines has three requests for the creatures from the beyond who haunt the blogger's office.
Malaysia politician and blogger Lim Kit Siang asks the deputy speaker of Malaysian parliament not to block questions about corroption. The deputy speaker had earlier not given him a chance to follow up on a question by another member of parliament.
The blogger at bruneiresources blogs about a Sunday afternoon he spent at a newly renovated street in the Brunei's capital city. “The other product is our famous 'sotong tutuk' literally hammered squid. My first knowledge of sotong tutuk was many years ago in Pantai Muara. Whenever you go to the beach, you always get sotong tutuk. An old man drying an already dried sotong and hammering it to make it softer and chewy and you eat that with some sambal sauce. Oooh. It's heavenly.”
Oskar Syahbana calls French footballer Zidane a perfect role model.
Teenage blogger DeeDee in Cambodia does a bit of citizen's reporting of a fire in her neighbourhood.
Who are the top foreign investors in Laos? Samakomlao blog has a list of the top 15 investors in Laotian economy.
A popular blogger in Singapore Mr. Miyagi has decided to stop writing for a daily. The paper has earlier suspended a column by another well known local blogger. Blogger Feynman Boson asks “Will it further disconnect the online and offline world into two distinct universes (like the real world and the Matrix)?”
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