The World Cup is coming to South Africa next year, and poor South Africans are paying the price. The South African government has forcibly relocated a group of some 600 people to make way for the upcoming soccer tournament, the New Internationalist reports. The World Cup refugees were given seven days to leave their makeshift homes in Cape Town. They’ve now been moved to corrugated iron shacks in an impoverished and crime ridden “Temporary Relocation Area” 30 kilometers outside the city. One of these residents, Nazley Petersen, told the magazine:

They promised us electricity but there is none. They told us we will get houses after a few years, but I don’t believe them. I lived so nicely under the bridge. By the afternoon I would already have collected enough money from begging to feed my family that night. But here, when you are hungry, you remain hungry.

Source: The New Internationalist 

Is kimchi that doesn’t stink really kimchi? KoreAm Journal reports that “Koreans everywhere were stunned” when the Los Angeles Times reported that an odorless type of kimchi had been patented. “Isn’t the pungent aroma precisely what makes kimchi, well, kimchi?” the magazine asks.

In the spirit of celebrating other fetid foodstuffs, KoreAm Journal walks readers through “a breakdown of the smelliest edibles from Asia.” Here are some of our favorite descriptions:

Dried squid: Koreans gnaw on dried squid while drinking beer and soju [a distilled spirit akin to sake]. Too bad the rubbery strands smell like dead mice.

Chungookjang: It’s the amino acid breakdown that gives this soybean paste its foot odor-like fragrance.

Fermented skate: Its hellish aroma is caused by uric acid-soaked flesh that has been left out in room temperature for days.

Durian: The spiky shell should be warning enough. When cracked open, the fleshy, creamy interior emits a scent not unlike gasoline or rotten onions.

Source: KoreAm Journal

Image by Go 4 It, licensed under Creative Commons.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee’s decisions are always scrutinized—and today, Foreign Policy is on the ball with a historical list of “Nobel Peace Prize Also-Rans.” Looking from Eleanor Roosevelt to Ken Saro-Wiwa, the venerable monthly profiles seven visionary people who never won a Nobel Peace Prize—but should have. Who do you think has been overlooked?

Source: Foreign Policy

Writing for The American Prospect, Arlie Hochschild tenderly unpacks a burgeoning field of medical tourism: international surrogacy. The practice has blown up in recent years—since India made surrogacy legal in 2002, for example, over 350 clinics have opened to serve domestic and foreign clients—and with it comes a host of perplexing legal and ethical questions.

Global inconsistencies in regulation currently make surrogacy a “highly complex legal patchwork,” Hochschild writes. “Observers fear that a lack of regulation could spark a price war . . . with countries slowly undercutting fees and legal protections for surrogates along the way.”

Legal issues in mind, however, it’s the trend toward “increasingly personal” global service work—and its ramifications—that Hochschild throws into the starkest relief. “Person to person, family to family, the First World is linked to the Third World through the food we eat, the clothes we wear, and the care we receive,” she writes.

“That Filipina nanny who cares for an American child leaves her own children in the care of her mother and another nanny. In turn, that nanny leaves her younger children in the care of an eldest daughter. First World genetic parents pay a Third World woman to carry their embryo. The surrogate’s husband cares for their older children. The worlds of rich and poor are invisibly bound through chains of care.”

Source: The American Prospect

The walls of Walid al-Ani’s plastic surgey clinic in Fallujah, Iraq are scarred from years of gun battles and American bombardment. He’s a popular guy these days, according to a piece by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting on the surge in demand for plastic surgery in Iraq’s war-torn Anbar province, known to most Americans as the “Sunni triangle”:

Saad Nasir, a 44-year-old bank employee, recently took his wife to see Ani for skin grafts. In March 2006, she suffered severe burns on her back when the US military dropped flares during clashes with insurgents. One of the flares set their house alight. At a cost of 3,000 dollars, the grafts “are not risky, but they are expensive,” Nasir said.

…According to a report released in July by Anbar’s health directorate, an estimated 100 people with war-related injuries undergo reconstructive surgery in the province each month. Between 130,000 and 250,000 US dollars is being spent on the procedures in Anbar monthly, the report said. Most of the patients are women.

  Source: Institute for War and Peace Reporting

Two young architects are taking a novel approach to housing in one Indian slum: They’re working with the community to improve its houses gradually and organically, based on design input and support from the people who live there.

This may not sound radical, but it is, reports Canadian architecture and design magazine Azure (article not available online). The magazine spotlights Filipe Balestra and Sara Göransson, whose incremental housing strategy is quite a departure from most slum “improvement” projects. “Upgrading a slum usually means tearing everything down and building housing blocks,” Göransson told Azure. “We wanted to improve their living conditions and allow them to keep their neighbors and social networks.”

Göransson and Balestra are working with architects and nonprofits in India to roll out the project in Netaji Nagar, a neighborhood within a large inner-city slum in the city of Pune. After a series of community workshops (pictured below), they settled on three different house prototypes, all of which are easy for families to expand or change in the future. One of the prototypes leaves a “void” on the ground floor, so that the space can be easily used as a shop, to house livestock, or store a rickshaw.

Construction is scheduled to begin after the monsoon season, probably sometime in September. Read all about the project on Göransson and Balestra’s website, which houses tons of fascinating details and beautiful photos, illustrations, and maps.

“The poor really need architecture, but they cannot pay,” Balestra told Azure. “We want to contribute.”

Source: Azure

Image courtesy of Filipe Balestra.

Ten years ago a Dutch organization called Women on Waves devised a solution for women seeking abortions in countries that ban it: an abortion clinic on a ship where doctors would perform the delicate operation in international waters under the jurisdiction of The Netherlands.

All told, only a symbolic number of abortions have been performed on the boat, and now that Dutch law is leaning conservative on abortion the ship is docked—for now.

Paul Ames interviews Women on Waves founder Rebbeca Gomperts for Global Post:

Gomperts said WoW's biggest achievement was perhaps a 2004 campaign in Portugal where warships were deployed to prevent the Dutch ship Borndiep from approaching the coast.

No women were able to come aboard for abortions, but Gomperts said the publicity generated helped win over Portuguese public opinion in a referendum that voted to legalize abortion in 2007. Early in 2009, WoW won a case at the European Court of Human Rights against the Portuguese navy’s action.

"We have been able to help a symbolic number of women in order to create a better awareness about the social injustice that is created by illegal abortion and the suffering that is caused for women," she said. "The ship is never a solution … It has been a very important tool to mobilize women's organizations, and other groups, doctors and lawyers, around safe and legal abortion."

…While political developments have hampered the movement, Gomperts said medical progress has made abortion easier and safer, with the widespread availability of pills like mifepristone and misoprostol. The use of such drugs in so-called medical abortions removes the need for the traditional intrusive procedures which, when carried out illegally by backstreet abortionists, kill almost 70,000 women every year.

Source: Global Post

Image by Women on Waves.