Six In The Morning

In Gaza, lives shaped by drones

 

By Scott Wilson, Sunday, December 4

GAZA CITY – The buzz began near midnight on a cool evening last month, a dull distant purr that within moments swelled into the rattling sound of an outboard motor common on the fishing boats working just offshore.

At a busy downtown traffic circle not far from the dormant port, a pickup truck full of police pulled up abruptly. The half-dozen men spilled into the streets.

“Inside, inside,” the officers, all of them bearded in the style favored by the Hamas movement that runs Gaza, urged passersby. Then, pointing to the sky, one muttered, “Zenana, zenana.”

Revealed: true cost of the Christmas toys we buy from China’s factories

Undercover investigation alleges hours of overtime, late wages and fines for using the toilet without permission

 Gethin Chamberlain

The Observer, Sunday 4 December 2011

With Christmas three weeks away, an undercover investigation has revealed the bleak realities of life in Chinese toy factories serving a market worth £2.8bn a year in the UK alone.

Big brands such as Disney, Lego and Marks & Spencer pay only a fraction of the shop price of products to the factories that make their toys. Last summer – as factories geared up to cope with demand for the Christmas period – investigators spent three weeks in the industrial cities of Shenzhen and Dongguan. In some cases, they found that employees:

■ worked up to 140 hours overtime a month;

■ were paid up to a month late;

■ claimed they were expected to work with dangerous tools and machines without training or safety measures;

■ had to work in silence and were fined up to £5 for going to the toilet without permission.

Inside the shell of Gaddafi’s gleaming city

Six weeks after she saw Sirte shelled almost to oblivion, Portia Walker revisits its ruined streets

PORTIA WALKER  SIRTE  SUNDAY 04 DECEMBER 2011

In this showpiece city, with its wide boulevards and ornamental hedges, there were scores to be settled. Sirte was once Gaddafi’s dream in the desert, the gleaming city he built next to the place of his humble birth. Today it lies in ruins, testament to the folly of the fallen leader and the vengeance of men at war.

The silken carpets and cool marble of the hotels and conference centres where he made his rambling bombastic speeches, pontificating on pan-African unity and other pet projects, are destroyed or defaced.

Contemporary art world ‘can’t tell good from bad’

Mark Brown

December 4, 2011

LONDON: Charles Saatchi, the most important British art collector of his generation, has launched an incendiary attack on the buyers, dealers and curators who populate the contemporary art world and concluded that many of them have little feeling for art, and cannot tell a good artist from a bad one.

Writing in The Guardian, Saatchi paints a scathing picture of the contemporary art world and says being a buyer these days ”is comprehensively and indisputably vulgar”.

Russians vote in nationwide parliamentary poll

Russians are voting in polls that will decide the shape of the lower house, or Duma, for the next five years.

The BBC   4 December 2011

There have been allegations of violations of election law, with Russia’s only independent monitoring group, Golos, logging 5,300 complaints.

Its head was held at a Moscow airport after refusing to hand over her laptop.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who leads the ruling United Russia party, has accused foreign powers of meddling in election preparations.

The Golos monitors, who are not affiliated with any party, are funded largely by the US and EU.

Mexico drug war casualty: Citizenry suffers post-traumatic stress

Outwardly, life seems normal; but as drug war kidnappings, extortion, and violence brush closer to the average citizen, experts say, the mental terrain looks like post-traumatic stress.

By Sara Miller Lana, Staff writer, Photos by Alfredo Sosa, Staff photographer

It was not a stifling evening, so Carolina Gomez, a pretty and petite kindergarten teacher in this Gulf coast city, turned off her air-conditioning unit and slid open the window over her bed. The tropical breeze lulled her to sleep by 11 p.m.

But not three hours later, she was jolted awake by a rumbling, like rocks being dumped on asphalt. As her head cleared, alarm dawned: The air of her neat middle-class neighborhood was thick with automatic weapons fire and explosions.

Wishing she could hide under her bed, she lay immobile, partly due to a sprained ankle she was nursing and partly assessing her fears: How close was the shooting?