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…
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?…
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…
Here’s how classes work: Holakou Rahmanian turns on his computer early in the morning or late at night. He goes to a website whose address is known only to students, faculty and administrators of his university. Sometimes he’s in his pajamas when he logs in. Sometimes, he guesses, his professors are also in their pajamas. In his four years of classes, he has only seen his online teachers’ faces once or twice. The bandwidth is saved for their voices and online whiteboards.
Read more on Global and Underground…
Marwa Atik needs five pieces of trim, the kind embellished with pearls and black jewels. At a store in downtown L.A.’s Fashion District, boxes of trimmings line the walls from floor to ceiling, but Atik scans quickly and zeroes in on what she wants. At her direction, a clerk climbs a tall, wooden ladder and pulls down one of the cardboard boxes. He counts out five pieces and, after 30 seconds of bargaining, Atik makes her purchase.
I’m writing from my last day at THATCamp Prime at George Mason University. THAT stands for “The Humanities and Technology” — it’s really great unconference for digitally-interested scholars who are trying all sorts of great things to share, teach and engage people in their work. I came here looking for ideas for Asia Beat, both to get a sense of scholars’ interest in projects that connect them to general audiences and also for ideas about what tools can make even the shortest pieces have great depth. As a journalist, I love to incorporate some of the rigor of academic work into my own writing and I’m guessing scholars would be more interested in journalistic writing if they had the option of hyperlinking, embedding or DocumentCloud-ing their sources, papers and other longer works.
I proposed a session called “Public Scholars Unite!” which was thankfully merged with Dan Cohen’s “Digital Journalism and Digital Humanities, United.” I don’t have time to write a clean post about what I learned, but here are the notes that came out of the session, including my notes and others’ who contributed. Read more on THATCamp: How scholars can connect with broad audiences…
Alanna Shaikh has spent about ten years working in international development. Originally from Syracuse, New York, she works on global health, aid programs and policy, most currently for an international aid project in Tajikistan.
Shaikh blogs for AidWatch, End the Neglect, UN Dispatch, and her fascinating and candid personal blog, Blood and Milk. She speaks French and Uzbek and, to a lesser extent, Russian, Arabic and Urdu.
But even Shaikh sometimes struggles with translations and translators. In an October post on her blog, she explained some of the pitfalls of translation. Jokes often cause confusion, for example. “They’re just too cultural and based on language and tone nuance,” she wrote. Colloquialisms, such as “hard” and “soft” for estimations, or “drop” or “fall” for decreases, also don’t translate well. Read more on Misplaced metaphors and other things that can wreck health translations…
I haven’t been blogging much lately — hope to return to my own site soon — but in the meantime, I’ve started a Tumblr to share quick things I am reading and seeing around the web. Enjoy!
