Qatari Amir Buying up Greece
Ah . . . It’s great to be an Amir. And how wonderful, to buy your own wonderland, and help the locals while you are at it, LOL. No plans for development, just use by his wives and children . . . (Thank you again, John Mueller!)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/04/qatar-emir-buys-six-greek-islands
Qatari emir buys six Greek islands for a song
Helena Smith in Athens
The Guardian, Monday 4 March 2013 20.23 GMT
The Greek island of Oxia, was the Qatari emir’s first purchase, which cost €5m.
The suitor is one of the world’s wealthiest men; the location happens to be the eurozone’s poorest country. But in an unlikely coming together of economic circumstances, the emir of Qatar, Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, has opted to splash out €8.5m (£7.35m) on six idyllic isles in the Ionian sea.
Closure of the deal – the latest in a global shopping spree that has seen the sheikh’s property portfolio spread from London to Beijing – has been met with glee in Greece, the west’s most bankrupt state, and Doha, where the royal household experienced 18 months of excruciating drama to take possession of the outcrops.
“Greece is that kind of place,” said Ioannis Kassianos, Ithaca’s straight-talking Greek-American mayor. “Even when you buy an island, even if you are the emir of Qatar, it takes a year and a half for all the paperwork to go through.”
The isles, known as the Echinades, caught the oil-rich monarch’s fancy when he moored his super-yacht in the turquoise waters off Ithaca, took in the view and liked what he saw. That was four summers ago.
Qatar’s Emir and his wife. Photograph: Yves Herman/Reuters
When the royal eventually got off the yacht, he inquired about the pine-covered chain as he strolled about Ithaca in sandals and shorts. “They have a fund with a couple of hundred million in it,” enthused Kassianos, a former US economics professor who assumed the mayorship of Homer’s fabled isle three years ago. “And as far as I know they want to buy all 18 of the islands, the whole lot.”
The purchase, the biggest private investment in Greece, appears to have been a windfall for the emir, who drove a hard bargain in a market where investors are few and far between. The first island, Oxia, initially came with a price tag of €7m before its Greek-Australian owners agreed to let it go for just under €5m. Last week, Denis Grivas, whose family has owned the title deeds to the other five almost since the foundation of modern Greece, also settled on a price.
“The islands have been in my family for over 150 years but we are not rich enough to be able to keep such valuable properties any longer,” he said, ruing the soaring taxes the crisis-hit Greek state has slapped on real estate. “We are very, very happy to see them go. They have been on the market for nearly 40 years.”
With their pristine beaches, ancient olive orchards and natural coves, the uninhabited isles are “an ideal opportunity for a solid business investment with unlimited possibilities”, says the high-end “private island online” site, describing the properties as Mediterranean pearls. “The potential for development is very big … from developing tourist-style Club Meds or hotel facilities, to villas to sell or rent.”
But the Gulf royal does not appear in any mood to create tourist resorts on the retreats. Instead, said Kassianos, his aim is to build palaces for the exclusive pleasure of his 24 children and three wives. The architects have already moved in, drawing up plans to create a private idyll, although he has run into trouble with Greek law.
“There is a stupid law because in Greece we do everything upside down,” lamented Kassianos. “That law says that whatever the size of your land, your home can be no bigger than 250 sq m. The emir has reacted to this saying his WC is 250 sq m and his kitchen alone has to be 1,000 sq m, because otherwise how is he going to feed all his guests?”
To appease the locals, the Qatari, who is also being heavily courted by the government to invest in Greece, has promised to come bearing gifts. “His people said ‘what present can we give you?’ and I said the island needs water desperately,” said Kassianos. “A study to lay a pipeline from the mainland is already under way. That’s not bad when we’ve been trying to get a new port here for the past 40 years.”
The emir plans to moor his yacht off his new property this summer. Locals on Ithaca are getting ready. An honorary citizenship beckons along with a feast fit for a very modern Homeric hero.
“The next time he comes we hope to get him and his family off his yacht and into our restaurants,” said Ithaca’s mayor.
Emir’s Grecian passion
This is not the first time the 56-year-old emir of Qatar has shown interest in Greece. Three years ago, when the country’s economic crisis erupted, the Gulf kingdom pledged to invest as much as €5bn in real estate, tourism, transport and infrastructure, including habours and airports. But perennial delays and the perils of Greece’s Byzantine bureaucracy were such that Qatar pulled out of the projects.
Last month, following a visit to Doha by the Greek prime minister, Antonis Samaras, interest was rekindled when Qatar signed up to take part in an international tender to develop Athens’ former international airport at Elliniko, one of the most sought after slices of real estate in Europe. The Gulf state has also shown interest in purchasing the famous beachfront Astir Palace hotel, once a stomping ground for celebrities outside the capital.
The emir may be rich but he is business savvy. He had wanted to buy the Ionian isle of Skorpios, where Jackie Kennedy married Aris Onassis. The deal fell through when the late shipowner’s granddaughter, Athina Onassis, refused to come down in price. She is selling for €200m.
• This article was amended on 5 March 2013. The original referred to one of the most sort after, rather than sought after, slices of real estate in Europe. This has been corrected.
Strangers in America; No American Friends
This article is so sad, and I have also seen it the other way around, hoardes of American students abroad, hanging out with other Americans, then other ex-pats, and lastly, the local inhabitants. It IS hard. The differences can seem overwhelming. (That is my very first blog entry, and it had to do with the risks you expose yourself to when you open yourself to a cross cultural relationship 🙂 ) Overcoming those differences makes life so much richer.
Thank you, Professor John Mueller, for forwarding this fascinating article:
Strangers in a Strange Land
March 4, 2013 – 3:00am
By
Elizabeth Redden
In interviews with 40 international students at four research universities, Chris R. Glass was struck by the relative absence of Americans from his subjects’ stories. The interviewees, half undergraduate and half graduate students, described close relationships with their international peers, including those coming from countries other than their own. But while they frequently characterized their American classmates as friendly or helpful, only rarely did they seem to play a significant role in their lives.
“Only one student has described a significant relationship with a U.S. peer and that student was from Western Europe and that peer was her boyfriend,” said Glass, an assistant professor of educational foundations and leadership at Old Dominion University. “That to me is a striking omission from the stories that they’re telling.”
As the number of international students at U.S. colleges continues to rise — and as the mix of international students has shifted in favor of undergraduates — there are increasing concerns as to how well they’re being integrated into campus life. There have been periodic reports of racist incidents and – overt discrimination aside – there is the question of disconnection raised by Glass’s research. Another study authored by Elisabeth Gareis, a communication studies scholar at Baruch College, found that nearly 40 percent of international students reported having no close American friends. In explanation, many of the students cited “internal factors” such as limited language proficiency or shyness, but they also described a perceived lack of interest on the part of American students.
At the recent Association of International Education Administrators annual conference, a roundtable session on the integration of international students (co-moderated by this Inside Higher Edreporter) drew a standing-room only crowd, as attendees discussed the difficulties they’ve encountered in encouraging and equipping American and international students to (productively) interact. Domestic students are not necessarily cross-culturally competent – a point made lucidly when one audience member described the tendency of American study abroad students to request compatriots as roommates. At the same time, international students may not always be interested in initiating contact. An audience member from a Midwestern institution shared his observation that a fair number of students from China – a rapidly growing and by far the biggest group of international undergraduates on U.S. campuses – seem to be more interested in interacting with one another than with their American classmates.
Yet, even those students who are interested may find social structures on campus to be exclusionary or mystifying or both. On American campuses dominated by fraternity and sorority life, or obsession over intercollegiate athletics, or where everyone seems to have gone to the same high school, international students may feel foreign in ways that go beyond their nationality. “The lack of interaction is as much due to individual attributes as it is to social context,” said Glass, who is conducting his qualitative research in collaboration with Rachawan Wongtrirat, the assistant director of Old Dominion’s international initiatives office. Given the natural tendency of people to gravitate toward others who are like them (what social psychologists call the “similarity-attraction effect”), “are universities creating contexts where these interactions can happen?” he asked.
In interviews with Inside Higher Ed, researchers and professionals in international education spoke about the challenges in this regard and their efforts to create opportunities for meaningful interactions between domestic and international students through programming. It seems that many universities have a long way to go in living up to the promise presented by increasing numbers of international undergraduates – the promise being increased opportunities for sustained and meaningful cross-cultural interactions in classrooms, dorm rooms, and so forth.
‘Encounters With Difference That Make a Difference’
“It’s a combination of factors that have made this issue so salient,” said Larry A. Braskamp, the president of the Global Perspective Institute and a professor emeritus at Loyola University Chicago. “One is there are just a lot more international students on campus now, particularly at institutions that have not historically had a lot. The second is that everybody is interested in global learning: we know we need to prepare students to be more globally competent. And the third is that these students represent on some campuses a fairly significant contribution to the bottom line. Most of these students pay full tuition and as a result a lot of institutions see them as one way to balance the budget. So they have to make sure that the retention rate is high; they have to develop a good reputation so that other students will come.”
In Braskamp’s research, he’s found that entering American freshmen do not tend to think complexly, are not comfortable amidst difference and do not typically have friends who are unlike them. “We’ve said, O.K., the implication of all this is we need to create ‘encounters with difference that make a difference,’ ” he said. “I’ve thought of it as students being on a journey: they start with rather simplistic views of themselves, of their social interactions and the ways in which they understand the world around them. So in some ways what we need to do in college is increasingly provide them opportunities for encounters to get them to rethink who they are, how they think, and how they relate to others. In many ways, international students coming on campus is an opportunity for students, faculty members, and international administrators to take advantage of that difference and that diversity. But it’s really hard work.”
Such encounters can be curricular, co-curricular or informal: in fact, Braskamp’s research suggests that informal encounters such as discussion of current events with other students may be the most impactful. Still, he emphasized that there’s much more that can be done in the classroom to facilitate such encounters. In a sample of about 48,000 undergraduates at more than 140 four-year colleges, he found that about one-third report never having taken a course that “focuses on significant global/international issues or problems” or that “included opportunities for intensive dialogue among students with different backgrounds and beliefs.”
As one audience member at the AIEA conference said, unless faculty members are on board, all the student services programs in the world won’t be enough: “Students really look to their professors to give them direction and advice and deepen their conversations, so if faculty were taught to embrace these conversations about ‘difference’ and ‘other’ and ‘cross-cultural competencies’ and international challenges in engineering, then those conversations would take on meaning for the students,” she said. Participants in the session described the value of professional development programs such as Duke University’s Intercultural Skills Development Program for faculty and staff.
Case Western Reserve University is another institution that has begun to offer training designed to help professors better serve international students and integrate them into the classroom: according to Molly Watkins, the university’s director of international affairs, the first two trainings focused on Chinese students and attracted 60 to 70 faculty members each. “There’s obviously a need,” Watkins said.
Opportunities for Meaningful Interaction
At the AIEA session, audience members discussed co-curricular strategies such as peer mentoring or “buddy” programs, living-learning communities and other residence life initiatives, and more robust orientations for international students. Many universities have some iteration of one or all of the above: Mount Holyoke College, for example, has a new “Global Partners” program that pairs returning study abroad students with new international students and holds “re-orientation” events for international students during the academic year. The University of Iowa is launching a new required online orientation program that will begin in the summer before the students arrive and continue with five to eight small-group sessions throughout the fall semester.
The University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, which had 611 international undergraduates last fall, has a host of programs with alliterative names like Campus Cousins, Friendship Families and Global Greeks, which pair international students with American students, local families and fraternity or sorority members, respectively. Wesleyan University is “trying to capitalize on the idea of roommates,” hosting a dinner for first-year international students and their roommates at the beginning of the fall semester, according to Alice Hadler, the associate dean for international student affairs and an instructor of English. St. Norbert College, a Roman Catholic institution in Wisconsin, has a living-learning community with 25 international and domestic students (international students are the resident advisers) and a 10-member interfaith group consisting of Muslim students from Saudi Arabia and domestic Christian students. Initiatives such as these reach only a small number of students, concedes Marcy O’Malley, St. Norbert’s director of international programming, but, she said, “What I’ve seen work is one-on-one.”
“Instead of superficial contact with a lot of people, do more meaningful contact with a smaller number, and let them be your ambassadors to the larger student body,” she said.
Christopher J. Viers, the associate vice president for international services at Indiana University at Bloomington, has used theInternational Student Barometer to survey students about their experiences, and cited the surprising finding that international students rate their relationships with American students as those that are most important to them (as compared to relationships with other students from their home country or international students in general). “In looking at the feedback that came in we thought very critically about what we could do to help facilitate opportunities for international and domestic students to interact in meaningful ways to hopefully have conversations and potentially build relationships,” Viers said.
In talking with colleagues across the country, Viers said he’s come to the conclusion that “too often our programming is limited to the one-time, big, annual event.” This event, which often takes the form of an international student fair or show, can be good in celebrating international students’ contributions to campus and perhaps can help a domestic student learn a bit about another culture or cultures, but, he said, “opportunities for meaningful transformative learning are pretty limited.” As such, he continued, “We work hard to provide the big annual event that helps to showcase the contributions of our students and the diversity of the population with the excitement and food and entertainment, but not a week goes by when we’re not putting together, hand-in-hand with students, small, highly interactive opportunities for domestic and international students to get together. We run a weekly noon concert series, for example, where students from our Jacobs School of Music perform classical music or folk music from their home country and then there’s a free lunch that’s provided. That regularly gets people who have an interest in music together.”
“It’s absolutely essential as colleges are putting in place plans to actively grow international enrollment that appropriate levels of service and support are put in place, and then the students have responsibilities as well,” Viers said. “So much of just about anything in life in terms of what you gain from an experience has much to do with what you put into it yourself. This is where at times perhaps those of us in the field of international education are not vocal about some of the very real, very significant additional hurdles and challenges that students from other countries face while they’re here: the enormous pressures that they’re under to succeed academically and to move as quickly as possible though a program. It’s very expensive to come to the U.S. to pursue an undergraduate degree. There are often major expectations from family members and others; there’s a lot of pressure to succeed and do well.” And then there are the extra academic challenges inherent in pursuing a degree in a non-native language. Is it any wonder that not every student will want to come out for mixers and “cultural coffee hours”?
“I think that sometimes we underestimate that pressure, and apply a different kind of meaning to the experience that we perceive a student is having,” Viers said.
Wealth and Inequality in America
Horrifying
START with Sea of Poppies, by Amitav Ghosh
I recently wrote a book review on River of Smoke, by Amitav Ghosh, which held me spellbound, so riveting that I had to order Sea of Poppies, which is actually the first volume of the trilogy. I had heard a review of River of Smoke on NPR and although it was written as the second volume in a trilogy, it can be read as a stand-alond.
Yes. Yes, it can be read as a stand-alone, but it is so much easier, I can state with authority, if you read them in order. Once I started Sea of Poppies, I also discovered an extensive glossary in the back, several pages, a list of the words, annotated with suggested origins, and it adds so much color to an already brilliantly colored novel. Much of both novels uses words from many cultures, and words that have been formed by another culture’s understanding of the words (some hilarious). If you like Captain Jack Sparrow, you’re going to love the polyglot language spoken by ship’s crews from many nations trying to communicate with one another. It can be intimidating, but if you sort of say the words out loud the way they are written at the beginning, you begin to find the rhythm and the gist of the communication, just as if you were a new recruit to the sea-going vessels of the early 1800’s. I loved it because it captured the difficulties encountered trying to say the simplest things, and the clever ways people in all cultures manage to get around it, and make themselves understood.
Sea of Poppies starts in a small Indian village, with one of the very small poppy gardens, planted on an advance from an opium factory representative, thrust upon the small farmer, with the result that most small Indian farmers converted their entire allotment from subsistence foods to poppies. Ghosh walks us through an opium processing factory, which is a little like walking through the circles of hell. We meet many of the characters we will follow in River of Smoke, and learn how this diverse group bonded into one sort of super-family through their adventures – and misadventures – together.
It is an entirely engrossing work. Sea of Poppies was short listed for the Man Booker award, and was listed as a “Best Book of the Year” by the San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post and The Economist. The theme is the opium trade, leading to the Opium Wars, with China, and is a chilling indictment of how business interests manipulate a population’s perceptions of national interests to justify . . . well, just about anything, in the name of profit.
The theme is woven through human stories so interesting, so textured, so compelling, that you hardly realize you are reading history and learning about the trade, cultures, travel, clothing, traditions, religions, food, and motivations as you avidly turn the pages.
I can hardly wait for the third volume. Get started now, so you’ll be ready for it when it comes out!
Kuwait Independence / Kuwait Liberation Congratulations
LOL, I actually congratulated Kuwaitis about a month ago when I thought I had missed the date and . . . I did! I missed it by a month! I was too soon!
So now it is really here – February 25 – 26. Congratulations, and we wish you well. We wish you resolution to your challenges of leadership and infrastructure issues. If you’ve noticed; it’s not like these are challenges unique to Kuwait; the flip-side of democracy can be logjams and stalemates, and then, suddenly, it can all shift and flow. We wish you some shift and flow after years of logjam.
The Church Remembers Absalom Jones
Imagine the difference that diligence and persistence and cheerful good humor made in the life of Absalom Jones, imagine all the lives he touched, imagine the obstacles and brutal life he experienced and overcame on his life’s journey. It is truly humbling to see what this saint achieved:
The Liturgical Calendar: The Church Remembers
Today the church remembers Absalom Jones, Priest, 1818.
Pastor Absalom Jones was reared a domestic slave on a plantation in Delaware. His charm, wit, and sincerity gained for him the affection of all who knew him. He was able to save enough pennies, given to him as tips, to purchase for himself a primer, a spelling book, and a New Testament. This was the beginning of an insatiable quest for knowledge which was to occupy much of his life.
When he was sixteen years old his mother, five brothers, and one sister were sold, and he was taken to Philadelphia with his master. The more stimulating environment of the city, added to a desire to correspond with his mother, resulted in an intensified effort to learn. He went to night school and also studied theology under Bishop William White (see July 17), from whom he eventually received holy orders. He married, bought a house and land, and finally, at age thirty-seven,he was granted his freedom. Finding that Philadelphia’s “white” churches were not truly open to him or his people, he founded the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas.
He was an exemplary pastor and an able student of Holy Scripture and human nature. He had found Our Lord and in his Name had overcome seemingly insurmountable odds. Jones bore witness, with his life, to the truth that all people are bearers of God’s image.
Give us strength to overcome those things that separate us, Lord Christ, that we may see your likeness in all people. Amen.
The Orphanmaster by Jean Zimmerman
The Orphanmaster is another National Public Radio recommendation for people who like historical fiction, which I really do. I remember being a kid, and yawning my way through history, memorizing dates, it all seemed so irrelevant. Discovering historical fiction was like a light going on in a dark room for me – clever authors have found ways to illuminate events otherwise beyond my comprehension or worse – events I have a hard time making myself care about.
Suddenly, the times are right now and relevant when the right author handles it, and it isn’t always easy to get it right. I have a few very favorite authors – Philippa Gregory, Zoe Oldenberg, Sharon Kay Penman, Jean Plaidy, Edward Rutherford – authors who do a lot of research before they ever sit down to write a novel, and from whom you can learn a lot. They get the nature of the dialogue right, they get the customs, traditions and mind-sets right, and they get it right when a person is born ahead of his or her time in terms of the challenges they face.
I couldn’t put Orphanmaster down. It has to do with an era in American history which barely gets a paragraph in many history books, when the Dutch had a colony on what is now Manhattan Island, and trading posts up what is now the Hudson, into what is now New York. It was New Amsterdam, and many of the street names in modern day New York reflect their Dutch origins.
The Orphanmaster‘s main character is not the Orphanmaster. He is a supporting character to the main character to a girl orphaned at 15, daughter of a Dutch man and wife who were not rich, but who did all right. They had a business, they traded, Blandine learned many things before they died, leaving her an orphan. She was determined to be what would now be an “emancipated minor,” but until she turned 16, she was semi-legally under the responsibility of the Orphanmaster, who sort of kept hands off and sort of watched out for Blandine. She lives on her own and is a successful trader, in her early twenties. She is also a very clean housekeeper, and has plans to grow her trading business, and has a serious suitor she intends to marry.
Orphans start disappearing, and we discover a monster, a witiga, is on the loose. Blandine, and her new friend Drummond, are intrigued and disturbed by the disappearance of orphans, and the bloody, ritualistic mutilations of the orphans by the legendary Witiga.
It’s well written. You want to keep reading and keep reading because you want to know how it ends and how they are able to solve the problem.
It’s not one of the best books I’ve ever read for one reason – the author had the main characters talk as if they were modern people, using modern language, like ‘stuff.’ There was great openness between Blandine and her male friends. Blandine made all her own decisions, made her own arrangements and had full freedom, going where she wanted, doing what she wanted. The author explains it as part of the Dutch system, where some women had a lot of freedom, but I have a really hard time believing in a Dutch colony in the late 1600’s that any woman had the freedom Blandine had. There are parts of the novel where I am reading fast because I want to know what happens next and I get stopped up because Blandine says or does – or even THINKS – in a way that is very modern, and I just can’t buy it.
We are who we are. There are many smart women. Most women through the centuries have had to learn to maneuver in whatever societal constrictions they have been allowed. I suspect there were a lot of societal restrictions in New Amsterdam, and Blandine’s freedom to take off with only her male servant, to run off and live with a man not her husband (even though they are both escaping death sentences), to live an unescorted life . . . I just have a hard time buying it. I know how restricted women are even to day. Four hundred years ago, women were more restricted, and worse, we bought into it. We didn’t have a lot of choices.
So I like this book, and I think there is a lot of information that is true of the settlement of New Amsterdam, I loved the geography and the physical descriptions, I loved the maps included, I loved the descriptions of food and living conditions. I do not buy the heroine, not for one minute. I do not believe, in that historical context, she would have been possible.
The Death of Bees by Lisa O’Donnell
Death of Bees was another powerful recommendation by National Public Radio.
I believe in a greater power, in a God who sends things my way and that I am meant to be paying attention. Several books have been recommended to me lately which I didn’t choose, or might have avoided had I known how painfully they dealt with poor parenting and children in the depths of horrific poverty.
Here is what the lead into the book says:
Today Is Christmas Eve,
Today is my birthday,
Today I am fifteen,
Today I buried my parents
in the back yard.
Neither of them were beloved.
Oh my goodness! I am sucked in immediately. And immediately I am overcome by the grinding nature of poverty, the enormous amount of energy it takes just to be fed, to have a roof over your head, to function in the bureaucracy that seeks to ameliorate the burdens of poverty.
I am horrified by the lives of innocent children in the hands of people who should never have responsibility for anyone, even themselves, their decision making skills are so non-existent. There are parents who have no idea what self-sacrifice GOOD parenting requires, who raise children who are often trying to survive their own parents.
The Death of Bees has redemption. It has two sisters who love one another and are smarter than the average child. It has a neighbor who notices, not in a snoopy or intrusive way, but in a kind, helping and ultimately sacrificial way. It has moments of black humor, when the neighbor’s dog keeps digging at the parental graves in the backyard and bringing bones inside just at the worst moments.
Ultimately, it is a tale of survival, in spite of the parents, in spite of the system, in spite of betrayals by family and friends. There is a glimmer of hope that life may be different for these sisters, if they can survive their upbringing and overcome their childhood.
Now, go read the book 🙂
Amitav Ghosh and River of Smoke
The National Public Radio website recommended this book as one of the best historical fiction reads, and I had never heard of it, so I ordered it. I ordered it in spite of the little voice I had in my head reminding me that this was the second in a trilogy, that the first is Sea of Poppies. I was too eager. I wanted to jump right in, and the review said it could be read stand-alone. I had read Ghosh’s Glass Palace a couple years ago for book club, loved it, and was eager to read this one.
With a raging cold and no possible way I can be around humanity, it was a good time to start. Just picking up the book, it has a dense feel. Once you start, it is like being suddenly in a whirlpool, drowning in new words, characters who have more than one name and more than one identity, whirling between England, Mauritius, Hindustan, Gujerat, Hong Kong, Macau and China, whirling between cultures and professions and trades, but oh, what a ride.
It would have been helpful to be reading River of Smoke on an iPad, where I could poke at a new word and it would give me the meaning, but in truth, you can guess a lot of the meaning of the vocabulary from the context. The seafarers all speak a language sort of like Jack Sparrow, a pidgen language filled with simplified grammar and with words from many nations and cultures. It forces you to slow down. It’s worth it. It would also be nice if you could poke on a place-name and have Google Earth show you where it is. There used to be a website called Google Books, and you could put in a book and it would show you the places in which actions in the book took place; that would be particularly handy reading this book, provide context in place-relations.
But reading slowly is it’s own reward. This book has depth, depth of character, depth of textures and senses, and depth of morality. I love a book like this where you can smell the smoke drifting over the water, where you can smell the sewer and bloated animal corpses floating outside the foreign hongs of the Canton traders, you can feel the textures of the textiles and see their colors, you can taste the exquisiteness of Macau cuisine and you can hike in a Hong Kong not yet settled by anyone, Chinese or foreign.
The scope of time covered by the major part of the story is short, although there are years of back-stories for several characters. The period is 1837-8, during which the Chinese Emperor decides to put teeth in the long established edict against opium trade to China. The edict had been in place, but not enforced, and China watched her citizens sink into opium addiction and lowered productivity. The traders were making fortunes – shiploads of money. Opium was grown in India and shipped from there to China.
When the ban against shipping opium into China is announced, many traders believe it is just another attempt to attain greater bribes on the part of the mandarins, and decline to obey. There is great debate, and while it is lively in the book, it is based on documents from that era, many of the arguments word for word. Traders stood to loose a great deal of money, in truth, it would ruin most of them to lose their shipments.
There is a side story I also like, that of the botanical trade between China and England, and the importation of many of the garden plants we take for granted today, which were unknown until sent from China. Camellia – one of which is the plant for tea, did you know that? Roses, azaleas, orchids – many many familiar plants would be missing from our gardens were it not for their introduction during this period.
Ghosh gives us disparate characters of many cultures and upbringings, and slowly weaves them together, each one tangential to all the others, some closely interwoven. It is a fascinating read, and I can’t wait for the next volume. I may have to go back and read Sea of Poppies while I am waiting.
New Mexico Bill Would Criminalize Abortions After Rape As ‘Tampering With Evidence’
And Republicans wonder why they have problems getting elected, why they are accused of war on women. This proposed law is not a whole lot different than Morocco’s law that the rapist can escape prosecution by marrying the rape victim. Like let’s just go back a couple centuries where women have no rights, and a rape victim is considered damaged property. So a rape victim who has an abortion is prosecuted for destroying evidence???’
New Mexico is an interesting state, historically Republican but trending Democrat. No wonder . . .
New Mexico Bill Would Criminalize Abortions After Rape As ‘Tampering With Evidence’
Laura Bassett
lbassett@huffingtonpost.com
A Republican lawmaker in New Mexico introduced a bill on Wednesday that would legally require victims of rape to carry their pregnancies to term in order to use the fetus as evidence for a sexual assault trial.
House Bill 206, introduced by state Rep. Cathrynn Brown (R), would charge a rape victim who ended her pregnancy with a third-degree felony for “tampering with evidence.”
“Tampering with evidence shall include procuring or facilitating an abortion, or compelling or coercing another to obtain an abortion, of a fetus that is the result of criminal sexual penetration or incest with the intent to destroy evidence of the crime,” the bill says.
Third-degree felonies in New Mexico carry a sentence of up to three years in prison.
Pat Davis of ProgressNow New Mexico, a progressive nonprofit opposing the bill, called it “blatantly unconstitutional” on Thursday.
“The bill turns victims of rape and incest into felons and forces them to become incubators of evidence for the state,” he said. “According to Republican philosophy, victims who are ‘legitimately raped’ will now have to carry the fetus to term in order to prove their case.“
The bill is unlikely to pass, as Democrats have a majority in both chambers of New Mexico’s state legislature.
UPDATE: 12:25 p.m. — Brown said in a statement Thursday that she introduced the bill with the goal of punishing the person who commits incest or rape and then procures or facilitates an abortion to destroy the evidence of the crime.
“New Mexico needs to strengthen its laws to deter sex offenders,” said Brown. “By adding this law in New Mexico, we can help to protect women across our state.”
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