1 IMF boss' call to avoid decade of low growth
(Phillip Inman in The Guardian) The boss of the International Monetary Fund has
made an impassioned plea for governments to make the next decade one of
sustainable and inclusive growth that cuts national debt burdens and tackles
high unemployment.
Christine Lagarde warned that developed and emerging
economies still suffering the after-effects of the 2008 crash must collaborate
better to avoid an era of low growth. Lagarde welcomed a recovery in the US and
UK, which she said was “firming up”, but voiced concerns about the eurozone and
pointed to Russia and Brazil as major trading nations in economic trouble.
She said: “With overall growth moderate, the global
economy continues to face a number of significant challenges. For example, what
I have called the ‘low-low, high-high’ scenario: the risk of low growth-low
inflation and high debt-high unemployment persists for a number of advanced
economies.”
Calling for extra effort to rebuild battered
consumer and business confidence, she invoked speeches by former US president
John F Kennedy and Britain’s wartime leader Winston Churchill, who she quoted
saying: “I never worry about action, only inaction.”
Lagarde also criticised European governments for
allowing thousands of zombie companies to continue rolling over unsustainable
debts seven years after the crash. In a clear reference to the stagnation
suffered by Japan over two decades, she said: “Effective insolvency frameworks
are crucial to tackle the private debt overhang and deal with the total stock
of €900bn in non-performing loans that is blocking credit channels.”
2 Forty years since Cambodia ‘handed to butcher’
(Denis D Gray, Associated Press in San Francisco Chronicle) Twelve helicopters,
bristling with guns and US Marines began a daring descent toward Cambodia's
besieged capital. Residents believed the Americans were rushing in to save
them, but at the US Embassy, in a bleeding city about to die, the ambassador
wept. Forty years later, John Gunther Dean recalls one of the most tragic days
of his life — April 12, 1975, the day the US "abandoned Cambodia and
handed it over to the butcher."
"We'd accepted responsibility for Cambodia and
then walked out without fulfilling our promise. That's the worst thing a
country can do. And I cried because I knew what was going to happen," he
says. Five days after the dramatic evacuation of Americans, the US-backed
government fell to communist Khmer Rouge guerrillas. They drove Phnom Penh's 2
million inhabitants into the countryside at gunpoint. Nearly 2 million
Cambodians — one in every four — would die from executions, starvation and hideous
torture.
Many foreigners present during the final months
remain haunted to this day by Phnom Penh's death throes, by the heartbreaking
loyalty of Cambodians who refused evacuation and by what Dean calls
Washington's "indecent act." I count myself among those foreigners, a
reporter who covered the Cambodian War for The Associated Press and was whisked
away along with Dean and 287 other Americans, Cambodians and third country
nationals.
"It was the first time Americans came anywhere
close to losing a war. What worries me and many of us old guys who were there
is that we are still seeing it happen," says Frank Snepp, a senior CIA
officer in Saigon and author of "Decent Interval." After Cambodia and
Vietnam came Laos; there would be other conflicts with messy endings, like
Central America in the 1980s, Iraq and — potentially — Afghanistan.
Today, at 89, Dean and his French wife reside in an
elegant Paris apartment graced by statues of Cambodian kings from the glory
days of the Angkor Empire. A folded American flag lies across his knees, the
same one he clutched under his arm in a plastic bag as he sped to the
evacuation site. Captured by a photographer, it became one of the most
memorable images of the Vietnam War era.
The former ambassador to four other countries is
highly critical of America's violation of Cambodian neutrality by armed
incursions from neighboring Vietnam and a secret bombing campaign in the early
1970s. The US bombed communist Vietnamese sanctuaries and supply lines along
the Vietnam-Cambodia border, keeping Cambodia's Lon Nol government propped up
as an anti-communist enclave, but it provided World War II aircraft and few
artillery pieces to Phnom Penh forces fighting the Khmer Rouge.
Congress was cutting the aid lifeline to Phnom Penh.
The American public had had enough of the war. The embassy closed down at 9:45
a.m., the evacuees driven to a soccer field. The "Jolly Green Giant"
helicopters were setting down. Children and mothers scrambled over fences to
watch. They cheered, clapped and waved. I tried to avoid looking into faces of
the crowd. Always with me will be the children's little hands aflutter and
their singsong "OK, Bye-bye, bye-bye."
3 Where women can be lawyers but can’t drive (Louise
Redvers on BBC) Change is coming, albeit slowly, for Saudi women. For many
years strict laws and conservative traditions have kept Saudi women out of the
workplace. Some 60% of Saudi university graduates are female, but barely 15% of
the Kingdom’s women have jobs.
Slowly, however, restrictions are loosening. The
number of Saudi women employed in the Kingdom’s private sector grew from just
55,000 in 2010 to 454,000 by the end of 2013, according to figures from the
Saudi Ministry of Labour.
This increase is credited to both campaigning by
women and a series of reforms by the late King, Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, who
during his final years in office accepted women onto the Shura Council (Saudi
Arabia’s formal advisory body), appointed the first female vice minister and
generally relaxed rules on the kinds of jobs women could do.
Saudi women are now permitted to work in retail and
hospitality; the first Saudi female lawyers were granted their practising
certificates in late 2013; and the Kingdom now employs women nationals for its
diplomatic services. As well, females can now hold jobs as newspaper editors
and television chat-show hosts.
While female graduates are well qualified and many
have wanted to work, they have lacked basic knowledge about the workplace. In
many cases, they had never experienced mixing with men who weren’t family
members, according to Khalid AlKhudair, the founder and CEO of Glowork, Saudi
Arabia’s first recruitment agency specifically for women.
Under Saudi law, all women and girls are required to
have a male guardian. That guardian can be their father, brother, husband, or
even a son, and he has to grant the woman permission to do a range of things
from travelling, working, marrying, divorcing, opening a bank account and having
medical procedures. Different families apply guardianship restricts to
different degrees.
Significant obstacles still remain for Saudi women
who want to work outside the traditional sectors of teaching and healthcare. Saudi
Arabian women aren’t allowed to drive, which also holds back female employment.
To give jobs to Saudi women without upsetting conservative values held by many
families, who don’t want women mixing with men who aren’t relatives, some firms
are creating female-only workplaces.
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