Suchergebnisse

Government leaders in Myanmar are confident that they can make good on their ambitious plans to build a democratic, free-market economy. They acknowledge but dismiss concerns among international investors, and particularly those from Western nations, that the process may stall. It is essential, the leaders say, to understand how the various reforms fit together, rather than to just look at the end result. U Aung Min, the minister for the president's office, is charged with overseeing the political part of the process. It is the foundation on which the administrative, economic, and private-sector reforms must rest. Adapted from the source document.

Being born in a year deemed unlucky could wind up a self-fulfilling prophecy. That may be what befell Japanese girls born in 1966, otherwise known as a year of the fire horse, or hinoeuma in Japanese. Women born in such a year, superstition holds, have troubled marriages, mistreat men, and cause early deaths for their husbands and fathers. In 2010, researchers Hiroyuki Yamada of Osaka University and Satoshi Shimizutani of Japan's Gender Equality Bureau checked in on women born in 1966, the most recent year of the fire horse, to see how they'd fared. Although the researchers did not specifically explore the reasons for these women's relatively poor life outcomes, Yamada and Shimizutani believe the likely cause is discrimination. Adapted from the source document.

An obituary for Tom Langston, a distinguished scholar in the field of American politics. Adapted from the source document.

For decades, scholars have puzzled over why polygyny in Africa is concentrated in the continents western countries -- Guinea, Togo, and Mali, among others. There are competing theories, rooted in variables such as relative infant mortality rates and the agricultural roles women play in different parts of Africa. A new study, however, argues that the answer may be found somewhere else, darker and uglier: the slave trade. Certainly, polygyny may have existed before the slave trade began. But this study suggests that slavery encouraged the practice by ensuring that there were fewer men available to be husbands to West African women. Adapted from the source document.

One of the latest additions to DNA research is a study that points to the possibility that a difficult childhood -- one marked by poverty, instability, and stress -- can effectively 'age' the chromosomes of children as young as 9 years old, potentially making them more prone to bad health down the road. Researchers, including senior author Daniel Notterman of Penn State University, looked at a group of 409-year-old African-American boys: half raised in privileged homes and half raised in disadvantaged environments. The implications of these findings are distressing not only in the context of US inequality, but also in the context of impoverished or war-torn countries. Adapted from the source document.

In early June, a sniper from Azerbaijan reportedly killed two soldiers from Armenia along the two countries' border. This was not an isolated incident. For decades, the neighboring states have been in conflict over several territories that each claims as its own. Military occupation and casualties, however, are far from the only consequences of the conflict. Azerbaijan has one at the world's highest per capita numbers of refugees and internally displaced persons. More than 600,000 people -- most of them ethnic Azeris who fled Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts -- are dislocated from their homes, according to UNHCR, the United Nations' refugee agency. Photographer Ed Kashi spent two weeks in 2013 in Azerbaijan, documenting the lives of the displaced. Many people have been put in apartments in the urban centers of Baku and Sumgait, while others have been placed in government-constructed settlements in the countryside near Nagorno-Karabakh. Still more people, Kashi found, are squatting or making do wherever they can find the space -- in temporary shelters or makeshift camps. Adapted from the source document.