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kate_heartfield 10 days ago
This blog has been great fun over the last three years, and I've appreciated getting to know more readers and having a chance for public dialogue. But I'm going on maternity leave in a couple of months, so I'm winding The World Next Door up now. In the meantime, I'll still be blogging (as will several of my Citizen colleagues) over on The Ed Board. Please do come visit me there and subscribe and comment. It's a great blog.
kate_heartfield 16 days ago
Today's column is about 1989, that year of remarkable things, and the effect it had of creating optimism about the state of the world. An excerpt: To the young and naïve in 1989 -- and even to some of the not so young and naïve -- it really did seem like the global triumph of democracy was inevitable. World peace couldn't be far behind. Of course, to embrace that view, one had to ignore worrying signs to the contrary, such as the fatwa against Salman Rushdie or the house arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi -- or the brutal end of the Tiananmen Square movement. But either because of eurocentrism or idealism, a lot of people did assign more significance to the good news of that year than the bad. Any memories from 1989, from when the Wall came down and apartheid was crumbling? Share 'em in the comment space. What do you think of my very tentative thesis that one's age in the late 1980s had a lot to do with how one interpreted those events?
kate_heartfield 18 days ago
About a year and a half ago, I wrote a column about Roger Stone, a Stittsville man who found himself with four acres of extra land and decided to put it to good use. He had read one of my columns about the Karen refugees arriving in Ottawa after spending years in refugee camps on the Thai-Burma border. He borrowed a rototiller, invited the Karen to come plant what they wanted, and the results have been just incredible. They're even selling some of their produce at the Carp Farmers' Market. This is probably the most heart-warming thing I've had a chance to witness so far in my career as a journalist. Coleen Scott, a great friend of the Karen community in Ottawa, thinks that if some farmers were compensated for their time, and were able to buy a little basic equipment, the farm could be an even greater success. She's entered the idea into a nifty new online competition. The Aviva Community Fund has agreed to fund ideas that could have a positive impact, anywhere in Canada. ...
kate_heartfield 24 days ago
It's kind of refreshing to see a bill named honestly and plainly these days. But that's the only nice thing I have to say about Uganda's "The Anti-Homosexuality Bill 2009", which prohibits "any form of sexual relations between people of the same sex." This goes beyond criminalizing anal sex. The bill prescribes the death penality for anyone who commits "aggravated homosexuality", which includes being gay while HIV-positive, or being a "serial offender." Otherwise, the punishment is life in prison. It also makes it a crime not to snitch on gays. It also prohibits "the licensing of organizations which promote homosexuality", which probably means that NGOs trying to prevent the spread of HIV in the country will be expelled. This is a tragedy on a national scale. Uganda was once considered one of the African success stories when it came to HIV prevention. President Yoweri Museveni spoke out about the importance of condoms. But in ...
kate_heartfield 31 days ago
We on the Citizen's editorial board recently published an editorial about migration, which was the theme of this year's UN Human Development report. The Economist has put a nice little videographic about movement trends and remittances up on YouTube:
