Word: begums
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Every morning, 24-year-old Shahida Begum leaves her home in one of Dhaka's slums, winds her way into a posh diplomatic enclave and turns up for work at a garment factory overlooking the U.S. embassy. She may not be making this commute much longer. Like most of Bangladesh's 1.8 million textile workers, she has heard rumors that the American and European companies that currently buy clothes from her country will switch to Chinese manufacturers next year?leading to closures of garment factories in Dhaka. The zero-sum math of globalization makes little sense...
...stone houses of Safal Bandi in Pakistan's remote Swat Valley have changed little over the past century. The only indication of the passage of time is a series of dates, six weeks apart, chalked on the door of each house. Parwanna Begum steps from behind one of those doors and adds today's date to the list, followed by a fraction: 2/3. Out of three children under the age of five in the household, Begum, a local health worker, has vaccinated two against polio. The third is out playing. Begum will have to come back tomorrow, because one child...
...This year, health workers are the closest they have ever been to eradicating polio?a virus that in 1988 was paralyzing 350,000 children a year?largely due to the efforts of hundreds of thousands of volunteers like Begum participating in a global vaccination program. In 2003, only 784 cases were reported worldwide. But a recent surge of new infections in Africa is raising fears that wiping out the disease may be just beyond humanity's grasp. Three years ago, Africa was on track to meet the World Health Organization's (WHO) objective of a polio-free planet...
...Although Malik insists all Kashmiris would find "psychological healing" in a just peace "in which their aspirations are addressed and accommodated," for some it's too late. Mogli Begum Sheikh, 45, is the matriarch of an extended family living on a small holding just north of Srinagar that counts no less than 10 widows and 24 orphans in its ranks. Since 1995, when Indian soldiers shot dead Sheikh's nephew Ali Mohammad Sheikh, who was a militant, 17 male family members and one female have died at the hands of both soldiers and separatists in an orgy of reprisals...
...whether the four men were trafficking the uranium, which could fetch about $170,000 on the black market, or intending to make a dirty bomb themselves. "It is too early to say who was behind smuggling [the uranium] and what was the purpose," says a spokesman for Prime Minister Begum Khaleda Zia. The village of Puiya is known as an area with al-Qaeda sympathies; police recently arrested 17 suspected militants there for distributing posters and tapes featuring Osama bin Laden. "That brings in the global terror angle, and we're too close to all this for comfort," says...