The Malaysian Insider

TAIPEI, Nov 20 – Hourly wages below a dollar. Firings with no notice. Indifferent bosses. Labour brokers that leech away months of a worker’s hard-earned wages. A corporate shell game that leaves no one responsible.

Such conditions are widespread at the contract factories cranking out some of the most popular gadgets on the holiday season’s gift lists, according to labour rights activists and workers interviewed by GlobalPost.

Whether it’s your cherished iPhone, Nokia cell phone or Dell keyboard, it was likely made and assembled in Asia by workers who have few rights, and often toil under sweatshop-like conditions, activists say.

NEW YORK, Nov 20 — The competitors stood nervously on stage, awaiting the judges’ decisions. As each name was called the crowd cheered, and the winner stepped forward to claim a prize, bowing his or her head to accept a medal.

“Wow, that was a miracle,” said Kyoko Katsura, the winner in the women’s division of the New York Regional Yoga Championship.

Yoga championship?

SHONGA (Nigeria), Nov 20 — When white Zimbabwean farmer Irvin Reid arrived in Nigeria almost five years ago, he was given a set of grid references in the remote bush and told to find water and build a new farm.

His dairy farm now has 300 Jersey cows, some of among 800 imported from South Africa to start cattle farms in the region. It's a sharp contrast to things back in Zimbabwe, where campaigners say farmers face their worst year ever.

WASHINGTON, Nov 19 — In nearly a dozen recent terrorism cases in the United States, Britain and Canada, investigators discovered the suspects had something in common: a devotion to the message of Anwar al-Awlaki, an eloquent Muslim cleric who has turned the Web into a tool for extremist indoctrination.

Awlaki, 38, the son of a former agriculture minister and university president in Yemen, has never been accused of planting explosives himself. But experts on terrorism believe his persuasive endorsement of violence as a religious duty, in colloquial, American-accented English, has helped push a series of Western Muslims into terrorism.

PETTAH (India), Nov 18 — As he approaches his first tree of the day, S. Mohan presses his calloused palms together and bows his head.

“Oh God, I am climbing the coconut tree,” he whispers. “Protect me from harm.”

With no safety gear beyond a strap of palm frond tied around his ankles, he launches himself onto the tree’s arcing trunk, which rises dozens of feet into the air. With a swift series of spider-like manoeuvres, he is at the top of the tree within seconds, slicing the nuts from their stems with a heavy blade he carries tucked into his loincloth.