Maria Kolesnikova (Maryia Kalesnikava), one of the leaders of the Belarusian opposition, was arrested at the border with Ukraine on the morning of September 8, says the Belarusian State Border Committee. State officials say Kolesnikova and two other members of the Belarusian opposition’s Coordination Council, Anton Rodnenkov and Ivan Kravtsov, drove between Belarusian and Ukrainian border checkpoints. After noticing a border guard officer, claims the State Border Committee, the car sped up suddenly and left Belarusian territory after “shoving” Kolesnikova from the vehicle. Ukraine’s border service says Rodnenkov and Kravtsov arrived at the Ukrainian checkpoint, where border control officers started inspecting them. The Belarusian State Border Committee says these two men were arrested, but Ukrainian officials deny this.
Alexey Navalny’s branch in Novosibirsk has reported an attack on its office, which is also the campaign headquarters for the opposition coalition “Novosibirsk 2020.”
It’s time to announce the 2020 upcoming launch of Blog4Peace
Welcome to the 15th year of peace blogging!
Our 2020 theme is Peace in the Time of Quarantine
Wherever you find your peace during this time….
share it with others. It’s time to Blog4Peace. November 4th is the day.
I still find my own peace in the sanctuary of silence, meditation, nature
and prayer. Living in the days of a global pandemic calls for more and more of whatever brings you to the place you call peace. Where do you find yours?
Music can take me there. I love Natalie Grant’s honest emotional performances. Those strings! That choir! Recorded with The London Studio Orchestra earlier this year, I was shocked and inspired to see that one of the cellists looks exactly like my Papa, my grandfather, the marble-giver, the one who set my life on a path of discovering peace. Coincidence? Or is it a wink and a nod from Heaven….Papa always leaves me clues. I think this is no different.
YOUare invited to join us on this inspiring day. People from all over the world will be right there with you. Write about your experiences during the coronavirus pandemic, create and fly a peace globe (like those found HERE) and post on social media, your blog, Twitter, Instagram, wherever you are online.
We Blog 4 Peace November 4, 2020. Wherever you find your solace in this year of upside-down humanity, please prepare to share it with us. The world needs peace like never before.
Working means risk of illness; staying home means going hungry
A plantation worker plucking tea in Kerala, India. Image via Flickr by Neil Faz. CC BY-NC 2.0
India, the fifth largest economy in the world, has suffered immensely during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The unemployment rate increased to 24 percent in May, leaving day labourers — like those who tend the country’s tea plantations — facing poverty and hunger due to the scarcity of work and the lack of government assistance.
By April, many of them were forced to resume work despite the country’s COVID-19 restrictions, even though there were not enough healthcare or safety measures in place for their protection.
The #TruthAboutTea
India is one of the world’s largest tea producers. Two regions in particular, Assam and West Bengal, together produce over 70 percent of the country’s tea. The industry is the second largest provider of formal sector employment in India, providing jobs for more than a million families on tea estates. A startling 70 percent of these workers are women, who are paid very low wages and made to work in appalling conditions.
As a result, the majority of them lead a life without dignity — a plight depicted in the #TruthAboutTea campaign series on YouTube by the non-profit Oxfam India. Even before the pandemic, the series claims, they had been living in unsanitary conditions, barely surviving on dirt-cheap wages with little or no access to healthcare and education systems:
According to the video, on average, a plantation worker walks 16 kilometres and carries 24 kilograms of tea leaves every day, only to earn a daily wage of about 150 Indian rupees (INR) daily. That’s the equivalent of two United States dollars (USD), after 13 hours of work. Only 87 percent of workers receive the maximum salary of INR 4,500 (US $61) per month.
Some labourers work barefoot and only a small percentage of them are provided with protective gear like gloves, masks and boots. Women are sometimes forced to return to work mere days after giving birth and there are not enough well functioning creche facilities for babies. There are also no toilets on the tea plantations, and many labourers do not have one at home either.
The human cost of tea production in India is high; deprived of basic rights, workers and their families say they feel like slaves to the tea garden owners.
Limited options
As India entered the first phase of its COVID-19 lockdown on March 25, many tea plantations ceased operation. By April 4, however, the Indian Tea Association had written to the state government asking for the “resumption of normal operations in tea gardens while adhering to the prescribed safety and social distancing guidelines”.
Concerned about the economic effects, journalist Pratim Ranjan Bose questioned the lockdown measures, but also noted the “stigma on the plantation sector with respect to sanitation, health and hygiene issues among labourers”.
Nevertheless, state administrations permitted some plantations to resume operations as early as April 10. By the time the third phase of the lockdown arrived (May 4-17), tea plantations were allowed to operate normally, even though the healthcare facilities supporting them were ill-equipped to manage COVID-19 patients.
Trade unions in North India’s tea gardens soon began filing police complaints over lockdown violations, but at that time people were more concerned about the economy than about the wellbeing of tea workers.
Harihar Nagbansi, a community correspondent from VideoVolunteers whose family works and lives on the Bhatkawa tea estate in West Bengal, reported:
While the whole country is under lockdown to combat coronavirus, work continues as is in the tea estates of [the] Alipurduar district of West Bengal. These estates are in such far off areas that information regarding the virus has not reached everyone and they are willing to work without any protective [gear]. Quite obviously, the tea garden owners also don’t care what this pandemic will do to these workers.
As at the time of publication, COVID-19 cases in India have surpassed four million — nearly three precent of its total population.
In West Bengal, there are around 174,659 cases, with 3452 deaths; Assam has approximately 121,224 cases, with 345 deaths — but there is no available information on how many tea plantation workers have contracted COVID-19 to date.
According to a report coming out of an initiative jointly undertaken by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the Indian Tea Association (ITA), plantation workers in these two regions had successfully managed to keep COVID-19 out of the tea gardens until the third week of May. The initiative involved enrolling the workers into mandatory hygiene programmes in order to improve their standards of sanitation.
Workers protest
In another video report, this time from the Madhu Tea Garden in North Bengal, Nagbansi said the tea plantation workers are not being provided with the minimum 100 days of work stipulated in the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA).
With life made even more difficult because of the COVID-19 restrictions, the workers organised a protest on June 29, demanding to be provided with 200 days of work and an increase in payment to INR 600 (US $8) per day:
However, Indian tea plantation workers have been protesting against low wages for the past few years without any success.
‘A cup full of woes’
A February 2019 research study titled ‘A cup full of woes’, in which Subhashri Sarkar and Reji Bhuvanendran examine the pay scale of tea labourers, revealed that the Indian tea industry is in crisis.
Stiff competition, increases in the cost of production, and the closing down of several tea plantations due to a decrease in demand has resulted in huge losses that hamper the industry’s sustainability.
Compounding the issue of unfair wages is a myriad of factors, including a lack of interest from management, failure to implement state laws and the absence of effective monitoring by the central government.
In the meantime, COVID-19 rates continue to climb.
In another tacit admission that he believes American equates to whiteness, President Trump has ordered the cease and desist of any government funding for anti-racism federal training programs because they are “anti-American propaganda.”
A few things: Erratic behavior shouldn’t automatically be perceived as threatening. People on drugs are still people. A person displaying signs of mental illness needs help, not excessive force. The Black Lives Matter explosion will never subside as long as police officers continue being overly aggressive when dealing…
A seven-year investigation of voter suppression in Georgia has found that the state likely removed 200,000 voters from its rolls who were, in fact, eligible to vote. The voters whose registrations were removed were also overwhelmingly concentrated in the counties comprising the Atlanta Metro area…
A seven-year investigation of voter suppression in Georgia has found that the state likely removed 200,000 voters from its rolls who were, in fact, eligible to vote. The voters whose registrations were removed were also overwhelmingly concentrated in the counties comprising the Atlanta Metro area, according to initial…
On Tuesday, Donald Trump made good on his promise to further promote chaos and violence by visiting Kenosha, Wisconsin, against the wishes of pretty much everybody except the racists who love him. As part of his Fascism for Idiots tour, Trump visited a series of local businesses that were destroyed during the protests…
But in terms of sheer on-camera charisma, the Ballets Russes dancer and choreographer definitely steals the collective show, above, currently on exhibit as part of the Museum of Modern Art’s Private Lives Public Spaces, an exhibit exploring home movies as an art form.
Massine’s unbridled al fresco hip-twirling, prancing, and side kicks (preceded by a slow-motion run at 1:55) exist in stark contrast with Matisse’s stiff discomfort in the same setting (11:11) One need not be a skilled lipreader to guess the tone of the commentary Mrs. Chapman’s 16mm camera was not equipped to capture.
Stein (12:00), whose forceful personality was the stuff of legend, appears relaxed at the summer home she and Toklas shared in Bilignin, but also happy to position their standard poodle, Basket, as the center of attention.
Georges Braque (14:50), the introverted Father of Cubism, clings gratefully to his palette as he stands before a large canvas in his studio, and appears just as wary in another clip at 20:10.
The Surrealist Dali (21:50), as extroverted as Braque was retiring, takes a different approach to his palette, engaging with it as a sort of comic prop. Ditto his wife-to-be, Gala, and a painted porcelain bust he once accessorized with an inkwell, a baguette, and a zoetrope strip.
Dali serves up some serious Tik-Tok vibes, but we have a hunch Colette’s struggles with her friend, pianist Misia Sert’s semi-tame monkey (4:35), would rack up more likes.
As the curators of the MoMA exhibition note:
Chapman Films is immensely popular in the Film Study Center for the rare and intimate glimpses of their lives it provides, from a time when the famous were not readily accessible. Yes, there were gossip columns, fan magazines, and juicy exposés in the 1930s and ‘40s, but many notable figures carefully curated their public personas. We know these figures through their paintings, music, or words, not their faces, so to see them at all—let alone in real life, doing everyday things—is remarkable.
Also charming is the freshness of their interactions with Chapman’s camera—many of her subjects were celebrities, but their fame was in no way tethered to the ubiquity of smart phones. Hard to go viral in 16mm, decades before YouTube.
Though dancing, as Massine, and his close second Serge Lifar (8:50) make plain, is an excellent way to hold our attention.
Bem Vindos a este espaço onde compartilhamos um pouco da realidade do Japão à todos aqueles que desejam visitar ou morar no Japão. Aqui neste espaço, mostramos a realidade do Japão e dos imigrantes. O nosso compromisso é com a realidade. Fique por dentro do noticiário dos principais jornais japoneses, tutoriais de Faça você mesmo no Japão e acompanhe a Série Histórias de Imigrantes no Japão. Esperamos que goste de nossos conteúdos, deixe seu like, seu comentário, compartilhe e nos ajudar você e à outras pessoas. Grande abraço, gratidão e volte sempre!
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