Archive for August 2017

Why China’s traditional medicine boom is dangerous

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Why China’s traditional medicine boom is dangerous

FANG YUAN gazes around his crowded shop and says happily that business is booming. He has a reliable supplier in Russia and hospitals and pharmaceutical companies are queuing up to buy what he sells: antlers. Tangles of them lie in huge meshes on the floor. Thousands more, sliced into discs, fill glass boxes. They are used to treat breast disease in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). The shop looks a bit like a Scottish baronial hall. Deer-head trophies gaze down from the walls, as does a red-fronted gazelle with black horns like scimitars. “I don’t sell those,” he says hastily. “Endangered list.”

Mr Fang is a trader at the world’s largest market for TCM, a system of diagnosis and treatment that goes back 2,500 years. The scale of the business is staggering. The small town where the market is located, Bozhou, is three hours drive from the nearest railway station. Yet the main market (pictured) is the size of a football stadium. Mr Fang is one of almost 10,000 traders—four...Continue reading

Source: China http://ift.tt/2x9hEcH

Donald Trump’s shutdown threat intrudes on Virginia’s governor race

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Donald Trump’s shutdown threat intrudes on Virginia’s governor race

AN ACCIDENT of geography—that Virginia is hard by Washington, DC, albeit separated by the Potomac River—means that the federal government is a huge economic engine for the state. More than one in four dollars flowing through the state’s economy is linked to direct and indirect spending by the capital.

So when President Donald Trump suggested that he might favour a government shutdown next month to exact funding for his wall on the border with Mexico, Virginia politicians, particularly those running for governor this year, took notice.

Their concern—in the aftermath of the violence in Charlottesville that looms over the campaign—is electoral as well as economic. They know only too well the consequences of the federal government going dark.

There is little doubt that a federal shutdown would exacerbate voter hostility towards Mr Trump in a state that was comfortably carried last November by Hillary Clinton. And that would probably help the Democratic nominee for governor, Ralph Northam, who rarely misses an...Continue reading

Source: United States http://ift.tt/2xNsAtB

Oman is benefiting from the standoff over Qatar, for now

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Oman is benefiting from the standoff over Qatar, for now

THE Omani port of Sohar usually slows down during the summer. But this year it is buzzing. According to a government official, cargo volumes are up 30% in the past few months, as more ships arrive carrying goods bound for Qatar. Such is the level of traffic that the Qatari ambassador to Oman hails the sultanate’s ports as the new gateway to his country, supplanting the port of Jebel Ali in Dubai, which is part of the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Oman sits at the entrance to the Persian Gulf, but beyond the Strait of Hormuz there is discord. On the western and southern shores lie Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which have cut diplomatic and commercial ties to Qatar, their neighbour, over its alleged support for extremists and ties to Iran. Oman has stayed out of the dispute. It is helping Qatar to bypass the siege and quietly benefiting from the crisis.

Oman has often acted as a mediator of squabbles in the region. But early in the current crisis, the sultanate...Continue reading

Source: Middle East and Africa http://ift.tt/2xxifTB

It has been a summer of progress for women in the Arab world

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It has been a summer of progress for women in the Arab world
Protesting marriages made in hell

THE Koran devotes whole verses to inheritance, and Muslim scholars have spent centuries ruling on what they mean. Beji Caid Essebsi, the Tunisian president, is not happy with their conclusions. Under his country’s law, derived from Islamic jurisprudence, a daughter receives half of what a son inherits. Mr Essebsi has asked parliament to equalise it. Not content with one controversy, he also wants to let Muslim women marry non-Muslim men—a forbidden act in every school of Islam.

His announcements drew a furious reaction from many clerics, not just in Tunisia but across the region. The proposals will probably face months, if not years, of debate. Still, even putting them on the agenda was another in a summer of victories for Arab women. On August 16th Lebanon abolished a law that let rapists dodge punishment if they married their victims. Jordan did the same this month, and closed a separate loophole that allowed lighter...Continue reading

Source: Middle East and Africa http://ift.tt/2xvYhrc

Egypt’s surprising friendship with Hamas

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Egypt’s surprising friendship with Hamas

TIME was when Egypt balked at involvement in Gaza. In 2005, when Israel withdrew soldiers and settlers, Egypt fretted that it would become responsible for the territory, which it saw as a liability. More recently, the enclave’s rule by Hamas, a Palestinian offshoot of Egypt’s own Islamist bugbear, the Muslim Brotherhood, made engagement toxic. Egypt has even matched Israel’s restrictions on the flow of goods and people across Gaza’s frontiers, destroying smuggling tunnels and leaving the enclave under a gruelling siege.

It is strange, then, that Egypt is now riding to Gaza’s rescue. It is revamping the border crossing at Rafah and easing the restrictions. Palestinian pilgrims bound for Mecca crossed into Egypt last week, along with a Hamas delegation. Fuel is flowing the other way and more electricity is promised. Stranger still is that Hamas is also working with the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which is vehemently anti-Islamist and, along with Egypt, regards the...Continue reading

Source: Middle East and Africa http://ift.tt/2wBBHBn

The high cost of red tape in Nigeria

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The high cost of red tape in Nigeria

MANY Nigerians may see building a hotel as an easy way to launder money. For legitimate entrepreneurs, however, running a hotel is far from cheap or simple. In Abuja, the capital, it is rather like erecting a sign that says: “Tax me”. In fact, erecting such a sign would result in city and local taxes of about 80,000 naira ($221) a year.

One Abuja hotelier recorded no fewer than 20 bills for various annual fees, taxes and licences. They range from a 5m-naira charge from the city council for having a car park, to demands from two different agencies for putting a logo on a company car. The hotelier has also been issued with bills for four different types of property tax and a bicycle/cart licence, despite having neither a bicycle nor a cart. Although he is challenging some of the notices in court, it is often safer to pay up and avoid facing the policemen that bureaucrats send to enforce payment on the spot. “It’s a racket …like in the mafia movies,” he says.

Trying...Continue reading

Source: Middle East and Africa http://ift.tt/2wBt0XR

Closing African orphanages may be less heartless than it seems

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Closing African orphanages may be less heartless than it seems
Thinkin’ about tomorrow

ARLENE BROWN is worried about her children. “I have 52,” she says. The former nurse from Pennsylvania founded Urukundo Village, an orphanage, in the Rwandan hillside town of Muhanga in 2006. Half of the children live with her permanently. The rest are at boarding school or university. “I don’t want any of my children taken away,” says Ms Brown.

But they may be. More than half of Rwanda’s orphanages have closed since 2012, when the government decided they were doing more harm than good. There are 14 left, says Hope and Homes for Children (HHC), a British charity that is helping the government. A decade ago there were some 400.

Orphanages have proliferated in Africa in recent decades in response to war, disease and natural disasters. In Uganda the number of children in them jumped from 2,900 in 1992 to 50,000 in 2013. But their number seems to have peaked. In Ghana nearly 100 were closed between 2010 and 2015. The...Continue reading

Source: Middle East and Africa http://ift.tt/2xvMdq0

Zimbabwe’s first lady is accused of assault, again

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Zimbabwe’s first lady is accused of assault, again

GRACE MUGABE, the first lady of Zimbabwe and an accomplished shopper, is no stranger to controversy, at home or abroad. The most recent revolves around allegations that she flogged a young woman, Gabriella Engels, whom she found when she stormed into her sons’ swanky apartment in Johannesburg. Photos released on social media after the incident showed Ms Engels with gashes on her head that required 14 stitches.

Charges were laid and the South African police asked Mrs Mugabe to come into a station to make a statement. But within days she had been whisked out of the country after being granted diplomatic immunity. Having to skip a country on a diplomatic passport once might be regarded as a misfortune. But to do so twice begins to look like careless disregard for the law. In 2009 Mrs Mugabe left Hong Kong under diplomatic immunity after she was accused of punching a news photographer who had dared to snap her in a high-end shopping district.

Back home, Mrs Mugabe...Continue reading

Source: Middle East and Africa http://ift.tt/2wBrAML

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