Twnety-four major clothing retailers have now committed to a safety accord for garment factories in Bangladesh.
More than 1,100 garment workers were killed when the Rana Plaza factory collapsed outside of Dhaka last month and hundreds of factories were closed Monday across Bangladesh amid workers’ unrest over safety concerns.
Read more on 24 companies sign on to major safety agreement for Bangladesh clothing factories…
The death toll of the April 24 collapse of a garment factory outside Dhaka, Bangladesh, has passed 1,000 people, making it the worst industrial accident since the 1984 gas leak at a Union Carbide India Limited pesticide plant in Bhopal. The Rana Plaza complex collapsed just one day after an engineer declared it unsafe.
Read more on My $10 T-Shirt: A Conversation about Ethical Fashion…
Jeffrey Wasserstrom and I, co-editors of will be at the legendary Los Angeles Time Festival of Books at USC on Sunday, April 21. Come to roam the festival and find us at 3:30pm in Seeley G. Mudd (SGM 124).
Read more on Chinese Characters at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books…
I’m excited an honored to be speaking next week at UC Irvine at day-long event that is mouth-watering for anyone who loves to write. The Digital Storytelling Symposium features some of the most innovative people in long form writing today including, well, Longform folks themselves. The Atavist, Byliner, Equire, Noir Magazine, Matter and the Los Angeles Review of Books will all be represented. Here’s more information about the roundtable I am on and the whole event.
Read more on Digital Storytelling: A Symposium…
Women’s outcries for safety became more audible in the aftermath of the gang rape and subsequent death of a young woman in Delhi last December. Increasingly, male voices are entering the discussion as well.
Read more on #WorldGender Conversation: What is the Role of Men in the Fight for Women’s Safety?…
Next week in San Diego, I’ll be on a “late breaking” news panel at the Association for Asian Studies’ annual conference. I’ve started to think about how to explain the many ways that connectivity — social media, VOIP, chat clients – have really colored how I think about news and story telling about the region. From telling stories using curation to the essential reading of bloggers on Global Voices, international news has been drawn in a lot closer to audiences in the United States. Journalists can no longer write or produce news with the expectation that the subjects of stories will not be able to see or comment on how they’ve been portrayed. Local feedback is instantaneous. But what does this mean for politics across Asia? How do things change when people in Asia can directly communicate with people anywhere else in the world, and vice versa?
Read more on How has the web changed coverage of Asia?…
If Chinese Characters is about telling the stories of everyday life in China, China Stories is explicitly a way to think about how we tell and hear those stories. Historian Jeffrey Wasserstrom and I teamed up again to curate and edit this e-book volume of reviews and analyses for the Los Angeles Review of Books. The cover art is by Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei, who figures in the collection alongside some others who have shaped how we see China and how people in China see themselves.
At Public Radio International and PRI’s The World, we’ve been covering women’s rights and protests since the rape and murder of a young woman in Delhi in December sparked large and prolonged protest. We don’t have the resources of a wire service or massive media organization, but we still wanted to give prominence to what people around the world are doing and saying about women’s roles and rights in societies. So I’ve been working with our team on a project to look at movements for women’s rights — could this be a Feminist Spring? as Viji Sundaram wrote — and keep a light shined on the subject over time. We’ve used RebelMouse as our platform, incorporating our own reporting, others’ stories, but most importantly the comments and stories of individuals. RebelMouse gives us the ability to be network-neutral; I’ve pulled in tweets and links, videos and images, but also text from emails and quotes that I can customize to tell the story as best I can. We’ve also been able to categorize the story into navigation that makes sense turning a huge list of information into manageable chunks. I would say, the only thing missing is the ability to search all the posts for keywords. Here’s a taste, but to see it completely with navigation etc., you’ll need to go to RebelMouse.
Read more on #worldgender: Women’s Right to Safety…
When the Indian pharmaceutical company Cipla announced last month that it would cut the cost of three drugs used to treat cancers – one used for lung cancer and two for breast cancer – people around the world responded. Some of the most lengthy conversations took place on the news commenting site Reddit, including a thread 420 comments long in response to a news report in The Economic Times (India).
Read more on Reddit Users Debate the Pricing Game Of The Cancer Drug Industry…
Sri Lanka has captured attention recently for a deteriorating situation around human rights. International Crisis Group researcher Alan Keenan explains why the Human Rights Council review is so important, and why the world should care.
Read more on Human rights in Sri Lanka take center stage at the United Nations…
