Coke and a Burmese fizz; Lady in Red inspires Turks; How corporate power corrupts Britain; Mumbai feels mannequins stoke rape; Federer loses, tennis wins

1 Coke and a Burmese fizz (Linda Yueh on BBC) Coca-Cola is opening not one but two plants in Burma in the coming year. This is after a more than 60-year absence because of the country entering military rule in 1962. Coca-Cola sees potential in selling to Burma even though it is the poorest country in Asia. Average income is below $1,000 a year, which is lower than even North Korea, according to the best estimates by the OECD and others. Measurement is an issue of course, but Burma isn't industrialised, a key factor in raising incomes.

But, it is a sizeable country with the 26th largest population in the world, according to the World Bank. It is nearly three times larger than that other closed Asian country, North Korea. This is why Burma's opening up has attracted such interest. However, it was only two years ago that Aung San Suu Kyi was under house arrest and there were 9pm curfews. Now, businesses, like the giant Coca-Cola, are pouring into the last large Asian economy to open up.

Coca-Cola is counting on the political and economic reforms continuing. I went along to the opening of its factory outside of Rangoon and spoke to the CEO Muhtar Kent. He emphasised that Coca-Cola views Burma as a market worth investing in because of its size, and that the time was right to return since he expects the opening up process to continue. Interestingly, he was also not very concerned about poor infrastructure, which is not uncommon in developing countries.

2 Lady in Red inspires Turkey protestors (Michael Kelley in San Francisco Chronicle) Turmoil in Turkey has entered its fifth straight day as protests over the destruction of trees in a public park morphed into an indictment of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government. And the "lady in red" — a woman who was sprayed directly in the face with pepper spray by a policeman on May 28 in Gezi Park of Taksim Square — has become symbol of the dissidents.

In her red cotton summer dress, necklace and white bag slung over her shoulder she might have been floating across the lawn at a garden party; but before her crouches a masked policeman firing teargas spray that sends her long hair billowing upwards.

Endlessly shared on social media and replicated as a cartoon on posters and stickers, the image of the woman in red has become the leitmotif for female protesters during days of violent anti-government demonstrations in Istanbul. A message on some of the posters read: "The more they spray, the bigger we get."

Erdogan has remained defiant — he's blamed the unrest on "bums," "looters," "the extremist fringe," "Twitter," the main opposition party, and even "foreign agents" while also predicting that "the situation will return to normal" in a matter of days.

3 How corporate power corrupts Britian (Seumas Milne in The Guardian) The real corruption that has eaten into the heart of British public life is the tightening corporate grip on government and public institutions – not just by lobbyists, but by the politicians, civil servants, bankers and corporate advisers who increasingly swap jobs, favours and insider information, and inevitably come to see their interests as mutual and interchangeable. The doors are no longer just revolving but spinning, and the people charged with protecting the public interest are bought and sold with barely a fig leaf of regulation.

Privatisation has extended the web of lubricated relationships, as a mushrooming £80bn business uses jobs and cash to foist a policy that is less accountable, lowers standards and is routinely more expensive on the public realm. When 142 peers linked to companies involved in private healthcare were able to vote on last year's health bill that opened the way to sweeping outsourcing, it's not hard to see why.

Britain is now an increasingly corrupt country at its highest levels – not in the sense of directly bribing officials, of course, and it's almost entirely legal. But our public life and democracy is now profoundly compromised by its colonisation. Corporate and financial power have merged into the state.
That vice can be broken, but it demands radical change: closure of the revolving doors; a ban on ministers and civil servants working for regulated private companies; a halt to the corrosive tide of privatisation; and a downward squeeze on boardroom pay to reduce the corporate allure. It's going to need a democratic backlash.

4 Mumbai feels mannequins stoke rape (Dawn) Mannequins displaying lingerie and other skimpy clothing may soon be banned in India’s cosmopolitan city of Mumbai as an anti-rape measure. The municipal council overwhelmingly passed a resolution last month barring stores from putting scantily-clad mannequins outside their shops. The municipal commissioner has yet to give the required approval of the resolution.

City council member Ritu Tawde said she proposed the mannequin ban because such displays degrade women and could provoke men to attack them. Indians have increasingly demanded stronger protections for women since the gang rape and killing of a student on a bus in the capital of New Delhi in December.
”Such people get provoked by mannequins. After all, a mannequin is a replica of a woman’s body. That’s why I oppose it, because mannequins do not suit Indian culture,” Tawde said. However, shop owners will still be able to display mannequins how they want inside their stores, she said.

Business officials ridiculed the resolution, saying it would have no impact on violence against women. ”We are living in the 21st century where these kinds of things, all porn, the movies, the pictures, all these things are available on websites, available on mobiles. (A) mannequin hardly makes any difference to the people,” said Viren Shah, president of the Federation of Retail Traders’ Welfare Association.

5 Smartphone-using kids ‘at risk’ (Amelia Teng in Straits Times)  Children using electronic gadgets like smartphones at a younger age are increasingly exposed to certain social and health risks that come with it. Parents, however, do not fully understand the negative effects of using such devices. Many also do not teach their children how to use them properly.

These preliminary findings are part of a new study led by Dr Nirmala Karuppiah from the National Institute of Education's (NIE) early childhood and special education academic group. The study is believed to be the first that looks at how pre-schoolers in Singapore use gadgets such as computers, tablets and smartphones. Current research in this area deals mostly with primary school children and youth, said Dr Karuppiah.

The study found 65% started playing with electronic devices such as smartphones and tablets before they turned three and 95% used devices for video and simulation games, and half of them used them to play educational games such as spelling quizzes. Other uses include surfing the Internet and social networking.

As for parents, 30%t had rules on how much "computer time" their children could have. The remaining 70%t gave their children free rein to use devices of any kind. And 85% felt their children would benefit from using such gadgets, as they saw them becoming more IT-savvy.

6 Federer loses, tennis wins (Tom Perrotta in The Wall Street Journal) The unthinkable happened at the French Open Tuesday. Roger Federer lost early in the second week—and still, tennis won. It sounds sacrilegious. Federer is perhaps the greatest player to ever hold a racket, a 17-time Grand Slam champion who won his 900th career match this week and reached a record 36th consecutive Grand Slam quarterfinal.

Tsonga was a man in search of an identity: He was in the middle of an 18-month stretch without a coach, a nomad in a tour dominated by four men that there was little room for anyone else to play in major finals, never mind win them. In October, Tsonga hooked up with Roger Rasheed, the former coach of Lleyton Hewitt and Gael Monfils. Eight months later, the Tsonga who won Tuesday looks more like Federer than the Tsonga of old.

Federer has kept his foot to the floor for 10 years now. Only three men—Jimmy Connors, Ivan Lendl, and Guillermo Vilas—have won more matches than him, and he could catch all of them. No one is likely to match his streak of 36 Slam quarterfinals. His streak of 23 consecutive Slam semifinals, which ended in 2010, is mind-boggling. And Federer isn't going anywhere. He could easily play through the 2016 Rio Games, around the time of his 35th birthday.

Tsonga is 28 years old, but his chance to be more than, well, Jo-Wilfried Tsonga isn't going to last long. When Tsonga lost to Djokovic last year, he was in the player's lounge moments later, sharing hugs with friends and laughing. Nadal likely would have been crushed. Djokovic and Federer, too. In the race to become a champion, Tsonga has gotten a late start, and one can sense that he wants to make up for lost time. "Sports, it's beautiful because you can always do something," Tsonga said. "The guy in front of you [has] two legs, two arms, one head. That's it." And it's even beautiful, sometimes, without Federer.