Working in a Chinese foam factory         On September 3, 2013, I arrived at a worker’s dormitory in Guangdong, China, to find my new roommate sprawled out on a plywood bunk in the corner of the small and musty room. He was wearing a hot-pink uniform emblazoned with the letters EPS—for expanded polystyrene, a material used to make foam packaging, bicycle helmets, and a slew of other products sold abroad. He and 269 other workers at the JinBao Foam Factory1 manufactured roughly 130,000 foam pieces and 9,000 helmet baskets a day. JinBao is one of 208,900 companies in the…

French President Francois Hollande vowed Thursday to “show no mercy” against French peacekeeping troops if they are proven to have sexually abused displaced children in the Central African Republic. But there’s good reason to believe that won’t happen. For years, governments and multilateral bodies have promised to hold accountable those who abuse the world’s most vulnerable — the same people they are charged with protecting. Yet reports documenting decades of abuse by peacekeepers reveal a pattern of impunity. In 2005, when Jordan’s ambassador to the United Nations presented a damning report on the prevalence of sexual abuse in peacekeeping missions around the world, the…

Peter Carey, Michael Ondaatje, Francine Prose, and at least three other writers have withdrawn from next month’s PEN American Center gala, citing objections to the literary and human rights organisation’s honouring of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. PEN announced on Sunday that the writers were upset by Charlie Hebdo’s portrayals of Muslims and “the disenfranchised generally”. The Paris-based magazine, at whose offices 12 people were killed in a January attack, is to receive a Freedom of Expression Courage award at the 5 May event in Manhattan. Much of the literary community rallied behind Charlie Hebdo after the shootings, but some have expressed…

GONTOR, Indonesia – The silhouette of the large mosque, brick-like but for a bulbous dome, looked blurry in the downpour. The rain of East Java is heavy, lending a sparkle to the green paddies and the scent of moist earth to the air. As the evening prayer ended, hundreds of boys rushed out of the building in waves, mats slung over their shoulders, sarongs hitched up to their knees, flip-flops squelching in the wet. These students attend Pondok Modern Darussalam Gontor, one of Indonesia’s many Islamic boarding schools, or pesantren. (Estimates range from about 13,000 to 30,000.) Almost three-quarters of…

From The Economist -Eleven years ago a satirical film called “A Day Without a Mexican” (2004) imagined Californians running scared after their cooks, nannies and gardeners vanished. Set it in today’s America, and it would be a more sobering drama. If 57 million Hispanics were to disappear, public-school playgrounds would lose one child in four and employers from Alaska to Alabama would struggle to stay open. Imagine the scene by mid-century, when the Latino population is set to have doubled again. Listen to some, and this is a story of foreign scroungers threatening America, a softhearted country with a wide-open border.…