Word: malaysia
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Iqbal Hussein feels like a marked man. An itinerant laborer from rural Khulna district in Bangladesh, he now scraps for odd jobs in a market town 19 miles (30 km) south of Malaysia's capital, Kuala Lumpur. Last year, he agreed to pay a recruitment agency $2,400 to win a position on the production line of an auto parts manufacturer. But in the wake of the financial crisis, that job is gone, and Hussein, like hundreds of thousands of migrant workers around the world, is stranded far from home, saddled with debts that will take years to repay...
...Hussein's plight reflects one of the burgeoning problems of the global downturn. Countries that built successful economies in part on the backs of cheap migrant workers now face upheaval in their labor markets. In places like Taiwan, Malaysia, South Korea, and the Gulf states, companies are folding, factories are closing, and thousands are losing their jobs - meaning migrant workers like Hussein are being shoved out of the labor pool and into a tenuous half-life on the margins of the world economy...
...alone, up to five million people are sustained by money the country's expatriate workforce - one of the world's most disparate and omnipresent - sends home. Some 10% of Bangladesh's total GDP, and 16% of Nepal's, comes from the remittances of pools of unskilled laborers working in Malaysia and the Gulf states. The economic impact of remittances is even higher in Central Asia, where entire villages send their able-bodied men to Russia. Tajikistan, for example, draws more than a third of its GDP from remittances, and the country's economy will suffer badly as jobs in Russia...
...Temple Tree resort, www.templetree.com.my, in Malaysia's Langkawi archipelago, purring cats are ready to trail you everywhere. If you allow it, a friendly four-legged fur ball will curl up at the foot of your bed, or rest on your shoulder as you make yourself a cup of tea. And if you get really attached, you can sponsor the little cutie for as little as $14 a month. Australian resort owner Narelle McMurtrie's 15-year-old animal shelter, the Langkawi Animal Shelter & Sanctuary Foundation, has grown so enormous - yielding, at last count, 130 dogs and 150 cats - that...
...identical twin when confronted with the matching DNA. Although he was already serving a sentence for a rape conviction, the jury could not agree on a verdict, and the judge declared a mistrial. Earlier this year, an identical twin suspected of drug-smuggling and sentenced to death in Malaysia was set free when the court could not prove beyond doubt whether he or his brother had committed the crime. (Read a TIME cover story...