text:
<?php

namespace Oro\Bundle\WorkflowBundle\Model\TransitionSchedule;

use Oro\Bundle\WorkflowBundle\Configuration\ProcessConfigurationProvider;
use Oro\Bundle\WorkflowBundle\Configuration\WorkflowConfiguration;
use Oro\Bundle\WorkflowBundle\Entity\WorkflowDefinition;

class ProcessConfigurationGenerator
{
    /** @var TriggerScheduleOptionsVerifier */
    private $verifier;

    /** @var string */
    private $workflowItemEntityClass;

    /**
     * @param TriggerScheduleOptionsVerifier $verifier
     * @param string $workflowItemEntityClass
     */
    public function __construct(TriggerScheduleOptionsVerifier $verifier, $workflowItemEntityClass)
    {
        $this->verifier = $verifier;
        $this->workflowItemEntityClass = $workflowItemEntityClass;
    }

    /**
     * @param WorkflowDefinition $workflowDefinition
     * @return array
     */
    public function generateForScheduledTransition(WorkflowDefinition $workflowDefinition)
    {
        $processConfigurations = [
            ProcessConfigurationProvider::NODE_DEFINITIONS => [],
            ProcessConfigurationProvider::NODE_TRIGGERS => []
        ];
        $workflowName = $workflowDefinition->getName();
        foreach ($this->getTransitionsConfigurations($workflowDefinition) as $name => $transitionConfiguration) {
            if (array_key_exists('schedule', $transitionConfiguration)) {
                $this->verifier->verify($transitionConfiguration['schedule'], $workflowDefinition, $name);

                /** @noinspection SlowArrayOperationsInLoopInspection */
                $processConfigurations = array_merge_recursive(
                    $processConfigurations,
                    $this->createProcessConfiguration(
                        $workflowName,
                        $name,
                        $transitionConfiguration['schedule']['cron']
                    )
                );
            }
        }

        return $processConfigurations;
    }

    /**
     * @param string $workflowName
     * @param string $transitionName
     * @param string $cronExpression
     * @return array
     */
    private function createProcessConfiguration($workflowName, $transitionName, $cronExpression)
    {
        $processName = $this->createProcessName($workflowName, $transitionName);

        $definitionConfiguration = [
            $processName => [
                'label' => sprintf('Scheduled transition "%s"', $processName),
                'entity' => $this->workflowItemEntityClass,
                'order' => 0,
                'exclude_definitions' => [$processName],
                'actions_configuration' => [
                    [
                        '@run_action_group' => [
                            'parameters' => [
                                'action_group' => 'oro_workflow_transition_process_schedule',
                                'parameters_mapping' => [
                                    'workflowName' => $workflowName,
                                    'transitionName' => $transitionName
                                ]
                            ]
                        ]
                    ]
                ],
                'preconditions' => []
            ]
        ];

        $triggerConfiguration = [
            $processName => [['cron' => $cronExpression]]
        ];

        return [
            ProcessConfigurationProvider::NODE_DEFINITIONS => $definitionConfiguration,
            ProcessConfigurationProvider::NODE_TRIGGERS => $triggerConfiguration
        ];
    }

    /**
     * @param WorkflowDefinition $workflowDefinition
     * @return array
     */
    private function getTransitionsConfigurations(WorkflowDefinition $workflowDefinition)
    {
        $config = $workflowDefinition->getConfiguration();

        return isset($config[WorkflowConfiguration::NODE_TRANSITIONS]) ?
            $config[WorkflowConfiguration::NODE_TRANSITIONS] : [];
    }

    /**
     * @param string $workflowName
     * @param string $transitionName
     * @return string
     */
    protected function createProcessName($workflowName, $transitionName)
    {
        $object = new ScheduledTransitionProcessName($workflowName, $transitionName);

        return $object->getName();
    }
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


Wondering how you can practice open water starts? Read on for some handy tips from former 220 Coach of the Year, Simon Ward.
There are several skills to practise for deep-water starts. No-push starts are a perfect way to do this, and can be practised in your local pool.
Firstly, mimic the action of starting while floating. Swim 2m from the pool wall and stretch out on your left-hand side – not face-down but not completely on your side.
Your right arm should be extended out in front and your left hand by your left hip. Flutter-kick your legs gently and scull gently with both arms.
In most races, you'll have 30 or 60secs warning but no countdown. Get a friend to stand on poolside to give you that warning before shouting 'Go!'.
As you start, initiate the catch with your right hand and throw your left arm forwards as fast as possible. You need to get the arms turning fast, so aim for shorter faster strokes to accelerate forward. You only need do this for 10-15 strokes before gradually getting into your normal swimming pace.
Most triathletes don't kick to start. To get the ultimate deep-water start, you'll need to kick very hard while your arms are spinning fast. This will also reduce the potential for other swimmers to swim over your legs.
Make at least 10% of your session kick-related and include some very fast efforts for 10-15m before settling into your normal race rhythm.


'You can see behind me the Union Bridge in it's raised position. This ability to raise and lower the bridge was only installed a little over a year ago when the Scottish Government decided they needed a get out, a little insurance, should England again vote for Theresa May to be re-elected as Prime Minister.
'After last night's results – where a majority of Scots once more voted for Independence-supporting parties in a UK-wide election, while the English voted for a Conservative government – the Scottish Government immediately enacted Article 51. That meant the gates along the new Border Wall were closed and the Union Bridge, for the first time in its 200 year history was raised and the link across the River Tweed between the two countries was cut.
It's a right mess Iain.
I think entirely possible Iain….well done.
Thanks Michael, perhaps not physically like this, but politically those walls are being built and bridges are being raised.
Iain I had the pleasure of visiting Alaska last year aboard a cruise ship and got so much chance to see and appreciate water culture. My home is a quarter day from the nearest coast, so really enjoyed the chance. I imagine having the decision making power in such a case would be real power.
Thank you Joe – and thanks for helping out PJ to keep the FFfAW on the road! It would be easier if they could physically just split Britain up by moving the 2 countries further apart with a nice sea in between! But in reality it's another convoluted and drawn out political process that will drag on for decades to come!
Thank you Reena – some truth in it, although I suspect they will only metaphorically 'raise the bridges', but politically we seem very close to this scenario in Britain.
It's political but it's a hreat piece.
May tolerance reign long and happily, even if it is only in the minority – at least there will be dissenting voices causing trouble. Now, just to find that writing career and start packing!
Can they really stop people from moving into Scotland by simply raising a bridge? Simple thinking, really! People will drop from air if they find a right country to move into.
If only it was that simple, a few governments and right-wing politicians wish they could just raise those bridges and solve all their immigration problems!
Good one Iain. Though with only the Rock Party and the Hard Place Party to choose between, I suspect most of those living in England (including Scottish ex-pats maybe) would stay put, whoever got in. It seems like every election time, lots of people threaten to emigrate if one party or another wins, but they're still there next time round. Too many of us belong to the Can't Be Arsed Party.
As they say: The more things change, the more they stay the same. However, I do wonder if Brexit and whatever follows may make some fundamental change in the politics.of our countries. It certainly needs it.
Very informative. I can't say I am up on your political issues, as there is way too much drama here in the states. Nicely written Iain.
Seems there is drama everywhere in politics at the moment.
Thank you Michael. Who knows how it will all unfold. I'm beginning to think maybe nothing will change in our lifetime anyway, just endless negotiations and referendums!
Very smart use of the prompt. The idea could become a reality. The way things nowadays go with metaphors.
Thanks Neel – who knows!
As long as they allow us to visit both England and Scotland on the same Visa, I would be fine with the raising of this bridge 🙂 On a more serious note, the next few months are certainly going to be interesting for you guys, so all the best.


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Creatrip | 【Korean Express Train (KTX)】Free Online Booking Available via Creatrip!
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Creatrip offers a new online reservation service for foreign tourists who want to book railway tickets to explore Korea.
EX) If you want to book a train ticket for November 13th, you must book by November 8th.
2) The ticket sent via email has to be printed out as a physical copy. You must have your ticket and passport when you board the train.
3) A 50% discount on reservations made for kids under 13 years old.
4) If you change your reservation (or cancel), you must send your request to support@creatrip.com → Creatrip support team will send you an announcement email if you made a request 3 days before the departure date.
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You left your review for KTX Reservation Service.


The government has proposed a two-child limit on child payments for the UK. This may surprise some but I'm in favour of this; some aren't so I'm going to look at arguments I'm seen against.
1. This is just like China's one-child limit. We don't want to be like China do we? Beyond the (well-deserved) attack on China's governance this doesn't equate. Does our government propose fining parents that have more than two children? No. Does out government propose sending them to prison or sterilising parents who have more than two children? No. Our government isn't going to punish parents who have more than two children they're simply not going to reward them.
2. How dare the government get involved in this; setting arbitrary limits on natural processes. Except as soon as a decision was made to provide parents with funds when they have children the government did get involved. Complaining about them setting limits is like complaining about them setting the pensionable age or the voting age.
3. But what if someone has triplets? Seriously I've seen this as an argument and while it is indeed something that needs to be dealt with it's hardly a deal-breaker. Triplets and more don't occur that often and should it happen to someone (except by artificially induced methods) parents should receive funds for all three (or more) children. They just won't receive any more should they have any more children.
So what are the arguments in favour?
1. Population reduction. Our population are living longer and this is putting a strain on various services. A slow, managed reduction will result in a better quality of life for most.
2. The welfare managers. Okay it's very Dale Mailey; but people who constantly have children and aren't working (because they have children) are being supported solely by the government and morally I personally think this is wrong.
3. This doesn't stop people having more than two children it just places the burden of responsibility back on to them and not onto the government. In this instance I think this is morally right.


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text:
Home » Interviews/ Reports
Robots continue their relentless rise
The global market for industrial robot systems is already worth more than $40bn, and could almost double again by 2020. As Tony Sacks reports, this growth is being driven by several factors including the emergence of new markets, such as SMEs, and the development of more flexible, easier-to-use technologies.
The number of industrial robots in use around the world will soar from 1,828,000 in 2016 to 3,053,000 by 2020, according to the latest forecasts from the International Federation of Robotics (IFR). Between 2018 and 2020, it predicts that the annual growth rate will average 14%.
Except for a small blip in 2012, the number of robots installed globally has grown every year since 2009 and their sales are expected to continue growing at double-digit annual rates until 2020, at least.
Last year, global sales of industrial robots rose by 294,312 to hit a new record for the fourth year in a row. But there have been changes in what is driving this growth.
Traditionally, the biggest market for industrial robots has been the automotive sector. While it remains the biggest buyer of these machines – accounting for 35% of all robots sold last year – its growth rate dropped to a relatively moderate 6% in 2016.
The fast-rising star of the robot market is the electrical/electronics sector, which shot ahead by 41% last year, and is now breathing down the neck of the automotive sector, with 31% of the global market for industrial robots during 2016.
Because many of the electronics and electrical manufacturers are based in Asia – especially in China and South Korea – this region is leading the world in the uptake of industrial robots. Last year, China bought about 87,000 industrial robots – 31% of them coming from domestic suppliers – taking it close to the combined sales of Europe and the Americas (97,300). Some 30% of the robots sold globally during 2016 went to Chinese customers. And, by 2020, the IFR predicts that China will be using about 950,300 industrial robots – considerably more than in Europe (611,700).
South Korea is the world's second-largest robot market. Substantial investments by its electrical and electronics industry resulted in 41,400 systems being sold in the country during 2016. Korea also has the world's highest industrial robot density, with about 631 robots installed per 10,000 people employed in the manufacturing industry in 2016. The global average is 74.
Japan, for a long time the world's biggest user of robots, before slipping back in recent years, experienced a rebound in 2016 with sales increasing by 10% to about 38,600 systems – its highest level since 2006. Japan remains the world's leading robot manufacturer, with production more than doubling from 73,900 machines in 2010 to 152,600 in 2016 (equivalent to 52% of the global supply).
IFR predicts that during 2017, robot installations in the Asia-Australia region will expand by 21%. By 2020, it forecasts that about 1.9 million robots will be in use across Asia – almost equal to the total global stock of robots today.
The world's five biggest markets for industrial robots – China, South Korea, Japan, the US and Germany – together represented 74% of total sales during 2016.
In Europe, Germany is by far the largest user with 41% of the region's robot sales. In 2016, it bought 20,039 robots (compared to 19,945 in 2015) – and it has the world's second-highest robot density with more than 300 robots per 10,000 manufacturing jobs.
By contrast, the UK continues to languish near the bottom on the European league in terms of its uptake of industrial robots, although last year did mark the first rise in UK sales since 2012. According to the IFR, 1,787 industrial robots were shipped in the UK during 2016, compared to 1,645 the previous year. But the UK still lags well behind other countries in Europe in its use of these machines. Last year, for example, Italy bought 6,465 new industrial robots, France bought 4,232, and Spain bought 3,919.
Looking ahead, the IFR predicts that the UK industrial robot population will expand with a CAGR of 10% between 2018 and 2020, when the country is forecast to buy 2,500 new robots. This may be a faster growth rate than those predicted for Germany (6%), France (8%) or Italy (6%) during the same period, but in terms of numbers of robots expected to be shipped during 2020, the UK will still trail far behind Germany (on 25,000), Italy (8,500), Spain (6,500) and France (6,000). So the gap between the UK and other European countries in terms of the total number of industrial robots in use will continue to widen.
The IFR predicts that the number of robots sold in Europe this year will grow by 8%. Some of the drivers for this include: the use of robots to respond to faster business cycles; the need for more flexible production, tailored to customer demand; and the emergence of a new generation of industrial robots that will pave the way for increasingly flexible automation.
"Robots offer high levels of precision and their connectivity will play a key role in new digital manufacturing environments," predicts IFR president, Joe Gemma. "Increasing availability enables more and more manufacturers from companies of all sizes to automate."
Steve Wyatt – an IFR board member who is group vice-president and head of marketing and sales at ABB Robotics – believes that industrial robots will be vital in tackling some of the challenges posed by Industry 4.0. He points out that the shift from high-volume/low-mix to low-volume/high-mix production is having a profound effect on manufacturing. In addition, many industries are facing acute shortages of skilled labour, rising wages and an increasing focus on safety.
An associated problem is that many younger people – the so-called millennials or digital generation – do not want to do the same types of work as previous generations. They not like what Wyatt calls "4D" jobs – dirty, delicate, dull and dangerous – and prefer more challenging jobs that use their cognitive skills. Robots are ideal for performing many of the jobs they are shunning.
The robot-makers sees a massive potential market for their products among the small-to-medium-sized manufacturers (SMEs) that make up 99% of companies in the EU and US, and account for around two-thirds of jobs in the private sector. At the moment, says Wyatt, "they struggle to deploy robots ¬– they find them too complex and difficult to use. They have a lot of competence, but not typically with robots."
Simplification is therefore a key to expanding the SME market. Robots need to be easier to install, program and use. "These are things that our members are working on that will help us to unlock this opportunity and to move this industry forward," says Wyatt.
For example, there is trend away from the need to write code to "lead-through" programming where the user simply guides a robot arm along the desired path.
Smarter robotic systems will be especially useful for industries which lack specialised in-house production engineers.
Another way that some robot manufacturers hope to accelerate the adoption of robots by SMEs is to introduce new ownership models, such as leasing. They are also building condition monitoring and predictive maintenance into their systems, with the aim of boosting uptime, efficiency and productivity.
Another factor driving the robot market is the emergence of smart factories that link real-life manufacturing operations with virtual ones. Wyatt believes that vision and sensing devices, coupled with analytics platforms, will pave the way new business models and that machine learning will be a key driver for robotics developments in the coming years.
Robot manufacturers are already developing and commercialising new service models based on real-time data collected by sensors attached to their machines. The IFR predicts a rapidly growing market for "self-optimising" robotic cloud networks which allow the performance of individual robots doing similar tasks at different sites around the world to be compared. This information will be used to optimise parameters such as the speed, angle or force of their movements.
An allied capability is for robots to program themselves. Wyatt points out that a typical manufacturing cell can cost four times as much as the robot by itself, once additional costs such as grippers, feeders, engineering and installation are included. "There is a great interest to reduce costs and to get robots up and running a lot faster," he reports. One way of achieving this will be to have cloud-based libraries of routines that robots can download and use to optimise their performance through self-learning. This will simplify set-ups and operation, and save costs and time.
The robot-makers also realise that it will become increasingly important for them to provide simple-to-use robots that can be integrated easily into standard production processes. Such developments will allow industrial robots to be deployed in a wider range of industries to sustain efficient and flexible manufacturing.
At the same time, the emergence of collaborative robots (cobots) is shifting the traditional ideas of which activities can be automated. As low-volume/high mix becomes the new normal, cobots will increase manufacturing flexibility. Wyatt believes that collaboration is changing the face of manufacturing.
All of this translates into big business. In 2016, global revenues from sales of industrial robots rose by 18% to hit a new peak of $13.1bn. If the costs of software, peripherals and systems engineering are included, the market is worth about three times as much. This means that worldwide market for robot systems is now worth more than $40bn.
UK: A reluctance to invest in robots?
Teaching old robots new tricks
A unified vision
A digital vision
Why does the UK lag in its use of industrial robots?

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Veritas® Small Plow Plane Blade - Right Hand - 1/8"
All of the Standard and Wide blades to suit the Veritas® Small Plow Plane are A2 tool steel. This steel is easy to sharpen, and the blades are available for either the left or right planes.
These blades are set in the Plow Plane at a 45° angle, and are lapped ready for use. The usual honing is recommended before use, as with any other Veritas blade. This blade suits a right Plow Plane and is 1/8" wide.


text:
//*****************************************************************
//
// File Name:   AccessMeta.cs
//
// Description:  Sys_Access:权限表
//
// Coder:       CodeSmith Generate
//
// Date:        2013-06-27
//
//*****************************************************************

using System;
using System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations;

namespace ProjectManager.Models
{
    [Serializable]
    [MetadataType(typeof(ProjectModelMeta))]
    public partial class ProjectModel
    {
        public partial class ProjectModelMeta
        {
            [Display(Name = "编号")]
            public int ID { get; set; }

            [Display(Name = "名称")]
            [Required]
            [StringLength(20)]
            [UIHint("Text")]
            public string Name { get; set; }

            [Display(Name = "描述")]
            [StringLength(4000)]
            [Required]
            [UIHint("Text")]
            public string Description { get; set; }

            [Display(Name = "角色")]
            [StringLength(200)]
            [Required]
            [UIHint("Text")]
            public string Roles { get; set; }
        }
	}
}


Amick Brown is an IT consultant specializing in SAP services and supports all SAP technology implementations. The goal of the site redesign was to create a new look and update the company's branding. The site uses a color palette that works with the existing logo and includes images that highlight the firm's diverse employees. Additionally, the site needs to generate more leads and encourage visitors to explore the site, so we used large buttons with a strong call to action to encourage email sign-ups and inquiries.


text:
Items Tagged with "Operation Dervish"
USS Carr Honored To Visit St. Petersburg
/Story/19488/uss-carr-honored-to-visit-st-petersburg
The guide-missile frigate USS Carr (FFG 52) pulled into St. Petersburg, Russia, as part of a series of scheduled port visits to strengthen the bonds between the U.S. and partner countries, June 28.
Operation Dervish 6th Fleet NAVEUR U.S. Naval Forces Europe France Russia USS Carr anniversary international cooperation Military-to-Military Engagement Program
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia (July 1, 2011) - Cmdr. James Sposato, executive officer aboard the guided-missile frigate USS Carr (FFG 52), speaks to veterans from the World War II arctic convoy, 'Operati
/Image/14830/st-petersburg-russia-july-1-2011-cmdr-james-sposato-executive-officer-ab
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia (July 1, 2011) - Cmdr. James Sposato, executive officer aboard the guided-missile frigate USS Carr (FFG 52), speaks to veterans from the World War II arctic convoy, "Operation Dervish" during a tour of the ship while inport St. Petersburg. Operation Dervish was the first of the Arctic Convoys which the Western Allies supplied material aid to the Soviet Union in its fight against Nazi Germany in August, 1941. Carr is homeported out of Norfolk, Va., and is on a scheduled three-month deployment supporting maritime security operations and theater security cooperation efforts in the U.S. 6th Fleet area of responsibility. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Gary Keen/Released)
Operation Dervish U.S. Naval Forces Europe Russia partnership USS Carr Baltic Sea WWII arctic convoy international cooperation Offices of Defense Cooperation
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia (July 1, 2011) - A 92-year-old veteran from the World War II arctic convoy,"Operation Dervish" reminisces about his time in the Russian navy during a tour aboard the g
/Image/14828/st-petersburg-russia-july-1-2011-a-92-year-old-veteran-from-the-world-war
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia (July 1, 2011) - A 92-year-old veteran from the World War II arctic convoy, "Operation Dervish" reminisces about his time in the Russian navy during a tour aboard the guided-missile frigate USS Carr (FFG 52) while inport St. Petersburg. Operation Dervish was the first of the Arctic Convoys which the western allies supplied material aid to the Soviet Union in its fight against Nazi Germany in August, 1941. Carr is homeported out of Norfolk, Va., and is on a scheduled three-month deployment supporting maritime security operations and theater security cooperation efforts in the U.S. 6th Fleet area of responsibility. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Gary Keen/Released)
Operation Dervish U.S. Naval Forces Europe Russia partnership USS Carr Baltic Sea WWII arctic convoy international cooperation
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia (July 1, 2011) - Cmdr. James Sposato, executive officer aboard the guided-missile frigate USS Carr (FFG 52), shows veterans from the World War II arctic convoy, 'Operation D
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia (July 1, 2011) - Cmdr. James Sposato, executive officer aboard the guided-missile frigate USS Carr (FFG 52), shows veterans from the World War II arctic convoy, 'Operation Dervish,' the MK 32 Torpedo Tub during a tour of the ship while inport St. Petersburg. Operation Dervish was the first of the Arctic Convoys which the western allies supplied material aid to the Soviet Union in its fight against Nazi Germany in August, 1941. Carr is homeported out of Norfolk, Va., and is on a scheduled three-month deployment supporting maritime security operations and theater security cooperation efforts in the U.S. 6th Fleet area of responsibility. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Gary Keen/Released)
Operation Dervish U.S. Naval Forces Europe Russia partnership USS Carr ready forces Baltic Sea WWII arctic convoy international cooperation


text:
How Safe Is Niger for Travel?
Niger, also colloquially referred to as the Heart of Darkness is a landlocked country in Africa with a population of about 16 million.
It shares its borders with Algeria, Mali, Burkina Faso, Benin, Nigeria, Chad, and Libya.
Like many of African country, Niger is also a former colony: it was under the French until it gained independence in 1960.
Most of the country is covered in desert plains and dunes, with rolling savanna in the southeast.
Niger has incredible natural beauty, and there are a lot of things to see if you decide to venture to this country.
Its mountain ranges in the north of the country are breathtaking, as are the wild giraffe herds that can be seen near Koure, around sixty km from Niamey.
You can also see houses a few old trading centers in the Sahara, such as Agadez and Zinder that have that unique mixture of Arab/Tuareg and black African culture about them.
There is also much to see when it comes to the Hausa architecture in those towns.
Count on friendly locals and don't be surprised if someone even invites you into their home.
Warnings & Dangers in Niger
Overall, Niger isn't a safe country to visit. With its political turmoil and UN labeling it the major drug smuggling port, violent and petty crime on the streets, there are lots to think about when planning a trip to Niger.
TRANSPORT & TAXIS RISK : HIGH
Like in most countries in Africa, transport in Niger is unreliable and unsafe. Buses are in poor condition and since there are a lot of cases of banditry, the buses are commonly attacked and passengers inside hassled, tortured or worse. Many taxis and buses lack basic safety equipment like seat belts and headlights. Drivers in Niger can be reckless more often than not.
Pickpockets are somewhat active, especially in markets and places where rare tourists, if there are any, tend to go. Refrain from flashing your belongings and leave your valuables in your accommodation.
Two completely opposite natural disasters bring misery every year to Niger. Droughts are its worst natural disasters as it destroys the crops, kills the cattle as well as thousands of people who starve to death. Then the rainy season comes, causes heavy rain that leads to severe flooding and again, thousands of people are left homeless.
MUGGING RISK : HIGH
Muggings and robberies are common and you should be extremely careful all the time in Niger. You should under no circumstance go to the region north of Agadez since there have been numerous reports of robberies and kidnappings there.
Terrorists are very likely to try and carry out attacks in Niger. These could be retaliatory attacks since this country has participated in the French-led intervention in Mali and has been involved in the regional fight to counter Boko Haram.
As in almost any countries, there is a great risk of getting scammed in Niger, too. Always check everything twice and negotiate everything in advance. Taxi drivers might try to trick you into paying more, giving you wrongful information about the price of the ride.
Women aren't safe in Niger. Under any circumstance don't leave your accommodation unaccompanied at night, and try not to do it during the day either. This country is dangerous for anyone to walk around alone.
So... How Safe Is Niger Really?
Niger is not very safe to visit, due to political turmoil and crime on the streets.
There is a non-violent crime in the form of pick-pocketing and purse-snatching, and there's a violent crime as well, mostly in the form of armed robbery, muggings, and assaults.
The violence decreased in the past couple of years compared to how it was before, but it still happens.
Places, where you should practice extreme vigilance, are traditional markets, and areas near hotels and restaurants frequented by foreigners.
There's also terrorism in Niger and it can be and has been directed towards Westerners.
This is a politically unstable country, and lawlessness is ever-present.
Avoid demonstrations or any kind of display of unease, follow the independent news closely and stay in contact with your embassy.
Al-Qaeda is also present in Niger and has kidnapped and killed tourists, so it is of extreme importance to know the regions that are off-limits and avoid them at all costs.
There have also been many reports of carjacking, kidnappings and armed robberies in the region north of Agadez.
You shouldn't go beyond Agadez under any circumstance, and keep in mind that the roads past this point are of terrible quality.
Banditry is another issue as they are abundant, so avoid driving late at night in a private vehicle.
Some of the places where bandits and armed robbers operate are near the town of Galmi and around Dosso-Doutchi, as well as on the road to Gao, Mali in the Tillabery region.
There are, however, police checkpoints on the main highways that are in charge of limiting criminal activities during the day.
How Does Niger Compare?
Niger 37
Morocco 54
New Zealand 90
Visas - Most countries need a visa to enter Niger. In order to enter the country, actually, you will need a passport, a visa, and proof of vaccination against yellow fever. Make sure your passport is valid for at least six months past the date of your arrival. If you are not sure about your visa status, visit www.doyouneedvisa.com which will let you know whether or not you need a visa based on your nationality and the country you want to visit.
Currency - West African CFA franc is the official currency in Niger. ATMs are not widespread but you will be able to withdraw your money from the local bank.
Weather - Niger is one of the hottest countries in the world with a rainy season that lasts from May to October, with most rainfall in July and August. The heat in Niger is intense, and in Niamey, the capital, temperatures go from 31° C in August to scorching 41° C in April. Nights, however, are cool and the temperature average somewhere below 20° C from November to February.
Airports - Diori Hamani International Airport is the busiest airport in Niamey, the capital of Niger. It is located 9 km from Niamey in the south-eastern suburbs of the city.
Travel Insurance - Just like anywhere else, we recommend getting travel insurance when traveling to Niger, since it covers not only the costs of medical problems but also theft and loss of valuables.
Niger Weather Averages (Temperatures)
°F 90 97 102 106 106 100 93 91 95 100 99 91
10 Reviews on Niger
Travel Enthusiasts says:
DO NOT TRAVEL
As of 2019 do not travel to Niger, Niger is currently in a civil war. and its just not safe and i think this page did a good job at getting that point across so im going to talk about if do travel there what should you do and how do you stay safe. first if you are white it is a hundred times more dangerous, it means that you'll almost certainly be a victim of mugging, pick pocketing, or robbery. you are seen as a walking ATM machine. do not handle money in public white or black or your just asking to be robbed. do not show and slightest sign of wealth and i mean no sign of wealth at all. you have to seem just as poor as everybody else to blend in and if you dont you could die. this is a very serious issue and its too be taken serious. women travelers are very likely to be raped or sexually assaulted when going there no matter how hard you try to avoid it. do not go out at night under any circumstances but if you have too try and bring a weapon with you cause your probably gonna need it. cops and law enforcement are very weak and do not respond to many crimes especially rape. also keep in mind you can be imprisoned for up to 10 years for being homosexual or transgender. do not participate in any political protests either. do not travel within 50 meters of the Nigerian boarder, Algerian boarder, Burkina Faso boarder, Togo boarder, Benin boarder, Chad boarder, or Libyan boarder due to armed conflict, civil unrest and terrorism. do not eat any street food what so ever no matter how delicious it might be. ultimately just stay low and excise a ginormous amount of caution and do everything ive mentioned.
yes good place to visit
You can go if you're black.
You must be black.
Liam.P says:
Niger Is Not Safe For Travelers
Do Not Travel To Niger It Is Very Very Dangerous There Is Lot's Of Crime There Niger Is Not Safe
Well crime is everywhere ur dumb says:
even don't travel to Portugal its in a war in corona they kill people
Niger Is Great says:
Great country
I hate how people make it seem horrible my family lives in the rich region and never had a problem. In Niamey there are some beggar kids 5 dollars (2,917.50 CFA) will make them very happy.
Somruetai Choeikuen. says:
Hi! I have plan to go there after corona please tell me more about Niger🤗
UR DUMB says:
YARE A NOB
I THING TRAVEL SAFE,HERE IS WRIGHT. YOU DUMB NOOBS COME SEARCH GOOGLE"is niger safe"AND YOU SHALL SEEEEEE!!!
Galexa says:
Only what I read!
I have a cousin who is currently in Cairo, Egypt serving with USAID. His next assignment is for him to go back to Niger for two years. He will be sent there sometime in August. After reading the above, I fear for my cousin and his wife who will accompany him. Kevin spent some twenty-plus years in Africa and loves the area. But I think, at the age of 65 and his last assignment, I would have hoped he would have been given a safer place to serve.
yes fafa says:
VWERY GOOD STAY AT NIGER AND ITA FUN AN YUO WONT GET ASSAULTED BEACAUZE I WAZ AND AISO ITS FUN FOR STUFF AND STUFF
Rated 3.6 / 5 based on 10 user reviews.


The latest way for the left to reject the truth is to call it a conspiracy. Then they simply pass off all evidence as a far right conspiracy. Once the label is applied they cease their inquiry into the evidence. However, the following video should give them pause for it is evident that Kennedy believed in a conspiracy against the country that was going on in secret and in high places. After viewing the video and giving it some thought, take a look at George Soros and his army of useful idiots that are undermining our country. He has given $100 million to the DNC and has funded millions more to them through his shadow organizations. Watch the video on him after Kennedy's on lyleduell.me. Hit below link.
Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them. It is shameful even to mention what the disobedient do in secret. But everything exposed by the light becomes visible—and everything that is illuminated becomes a light.
In my interaction with the clergy and those in full time religious work, I hear a lot of concerns about the faith becoming irrelevant for the majority of the people. I think this is and should be a real concern, because this isn't an idle observation or concern, but the truth. Religious leaders have become ill, relative to the people in western culture. The clergy has become a group of people whose sole purpose is to make their people feel good, inflate the membership and teach them abstract doctrines that have no relationship to real life, or sometimes God.
It seems that most religious leaders are quite content with being muzzled by our secular culture that would and has relegated the clergy to second rate citizens that are not allowed to speak about politics in the public square or in their pulpits. This seems to be true even though the government and society is corrupt and doing evil things.
I think the thing that bothers me the most about all of this is that the clergy in private seems to think of themselves as great defenders of the truth. However, the only truth they stand for is truth that is convenient and non-offensive. This all becomes quite obvious, when you look through Face book and see an amazing absence of any real content posted by preachers. Most of the posts that are submitted about the corruption of politicians and government are posted by laypeople. Little is said by the clergy about anything that is controversial. So the Christian movement has become an army of foot soldiers with its officers hiding behind the wall of separation between the church and state. By the way, that wall was erected by a corrupt politician, Senator Lyndon Johnson in 1954, and then voted in by a bipartisan ballot in Congress. Just think, large corporations can do anything they want politically and yet nonprofits like churches, American Legion and veterans organizations have no say, less they lose their tax-free status.
The consequence of this withdrawal from the real world is that the church and its leadership have ceased being the light of the world and the salt of the earth. They are more like sugar and spice and everything nice. The result is; the world, western culture, and the church, are filled with corruption and decay. My counsel to the clergy is for them to take their heads out of the sand. Stop speaking platitudes to the choir and get your holy hands dirty and engage the world. If you haven't noticed there is a war going on.
It seems that most religious leaders are quite content with being muzzled by our secular culture that would and has relegated the clergy to second-rate citizens that are not allowed to speak about politics in the public square or in their pulpits. This seems to be true even though the government and society is corrupt and doing evil things.
Why all the social unrest?
It's obvious someone is benefiting from it. Therefore, to know where it comes from all one has to do is look for the people who are benefiting from it. Let's look at two examples of immigration and race. Who benefits from massive immigration? There are a number of groups but for our purpose we will look at two. The first of them is the large corporations that need the cheap labor that open borders provide. This cheap labor keeps wages down and allows the corporations to make more money. Of course this is done at the expense of the working class. It is simply a matter of supply and demand. The more labor that is available the cheaper it is. This is especially true in a declining job market as we have here in United States. This coupled with a system of crony capitalism where the government works with the corporations to guarantee them cheap labor by keeping the borders open. Of course, the same effect takes place when you implement so-called free trade laws that benefit corporations when moving out of the country. Most of our free-trade agreements benefit large and middle size corporations that have the power to use the government and the funding to move their companies offshore. The unbalanced free trade laws do little for the American working class and Small Business. They're in place manly to help corporations to make more money. Free trade is not free; someone pays for it.
Massive immigration also helps the political class that uses minorities as a part of their voting base. This is simple math. The more immigrants you bring in the more votes you have in your voting bloc. In fact, if you build this block large enough you can control the elections for decades. This raises the question of why any political party would then try to improve the economics of their voting bloc if in doing so, they would no longer need the help of that political party thus eradicate its own voting bloc ? This may explain the economics stagnation of many of the ethnic groups in our culture i.e. their political party does not want them to succeed economically, for if they do they may leave the party.
Who benefits from massive immigration? It's big business, the rich and powerful, that own corporations and the political parties that capture the immigrants as a voting block to strengthen their base. In this, I find it strange that most working-class people vote for politicians and parties that support one-sided free trade and open borders. I think the communist Lennon referred to these people as useful idiots.


text:
Is Hersha Hospitality Trust (HT) Going to Burn These Hedge Funds?
Debasis Saha
Insider Monkey December 13, 2019
Based on the fact that hedge funds have collectively under-performed the market for several years, it would be easy to assume that their stock picks simply aren't very good. However, our research shows this not to be the case. In fact, when it comes to their very top picks collectively, they show a strong ability to pick winning stocks. This year hedge funds' top 20 stock picks easily bested the broader market, at 37.4% compared to 27.5%, despite there being a few duds in there like Berkshire Hathaway (even their collective wisdom isn't perfect). The results show that there is plenty of merit to imitating the collective wisdom of top investors.
Is Hersha Hospitality Trust (NYSE:HT) a buy right now? The smart money is in a bullish mood. The number of long hedge fund bets increased by 1 in recent months. Our calculations also showed that HT isn't among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q3 rankings and see the video below for Q2 rankings). HT was in 13 hedge funds' portfolios at the end of September. There were 12 hedge funds in our database with HT holdings at the end of the previous quarter. Video: Click the image to watch our video about the top 5 most popular hedge fund stocks.
5 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds
Hedge funds' reputation as shrewd investors has been tarnished in the last decade as their hedged returns couldn't keep up with the unhedged returns of the market indices. Our research has shown that hedge funds' large-cap stock picks indeed failed to beat the market between 1999 and 2016. However, we were able to identify in advance a select group of hedge fund holdings that outperformed the Russell 2000 ETFs by 40 percentage points since May 2014 (see the details here). We were also able to identify in advance a select group of hedge fund holdings that'll significantly underperform the market. We have been tracking and sharing the list of these stocks since February 2017 and they lost 27.8% through November 21, 2019. That's why we believe hedge fund sentiment is an extremely useful indicator that investors should pay attention to.
[caption id="attachment_27480" align="alignnone" width="600"] Israel Englander of Millennium Management[/caption]
Izzy Englander of MILLENNIUM MANAGEMENT
We leave no stone unturned when looking for the next great investment idea. For example Europe is set to become the world's largest cannabis market, so we check out this European marijuana stock pitch. One of the most bullish analysts in America just put his money where his mouth is. He says, "I'm investing more today than I did back in early 2009." So we check out his pitch. We read hedge fund investor letters and listen to stock pitches at hedge fund conferences. We also rely on the best performing hedge funds' buy/sell signals. Let's take a peek at the latest hedge fund action regarding Hersha Hospitality Trust (NYSE:HT).
How are hedge funds trading Hersha Hospitality Trust (NYSE:HT)?
At the end of the third quarter, a total of 13 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock, a change of 8% from the second quarter of 2019. On the other hand, there were a total of 8 hedge funds with a bullish position in HT a year ago. So, let's see which hedge funds were among the top holders of the stock and which hedge funds were making big moves.
Is HT A Good Stock To Buy?
The largest stake in Hersha Hospitality Trust (NYSE:HT) was held by Millennium Management, which reported holding $4.1 million worth of stock at the end of September. It was followed by GLG Partners with a $2.5 million position. Other investors bullish on the company included Arrowstreet Capital, Renaissance Technologies, and Citadel Investment Group. In terms of the portfolio weights assigned to each position Tudor Investment Corp allocated the biggest weight to Hersha Hospitality Trust (NYSE:HT), around 0.03% of its 13F portfolio. Weld Capital Management is also relatively very bullish on the stock, dishing out 0.03 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to HT.
As one would reasonably expect, specific money managers have been driving this bullishness. Arrowstreet Capital, managed by Peter Rathjens, Bruce Clarke and John Campbell, initiated the most outsized position in Hersha Hospitality Trust (NYSE:HT). Arrowstreet Capital had $1.9 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter. David E. Shaw's D E Shaw also made a $0.7 million investment in the stock during the quarter. The only other fund with a new position in the stock is Paul Marshall and Ian Wace's Marshall Wace.
Let's now take a look at hedge fund activity in other stocks similar to Hersha Hospitality Trust (NYSE:HT). These stocks are CorePoint Lodging Inc. (NYSE:CPLG), MeiraGTx Holdings plc (NASDAQ:MGTX), National Energy Services Reunited Corp. (NASDAQ:NESR), and CryoPort, Inc. (NASDAQ:CYRX). This group of stocks' market valuations are similar to HT's market valuation.
[table] Ticker, No of HFs with positions, Total Value of HF Positions (x1000), Change in HF Position CPLG,10,32667,2 MGTX,13,191351,4 NESR,9,24826,2 CYRX,10,28222,-1 Average,10.5,69267,1.75 [/table]
As you can see these stocks had an average of 10.5 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $69 million. That figure was $18 million in HT's case. MeiraGTx Holdings plc (NASDAQ:MGTX) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand National Energy Services Reunited Corp. (NASDAQ:NESR) is the least popular one with only 9 bullish hedge fund positions. Hersha Hospitality Trust (NYSE:HT) is not the most popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still above average. This is a slightly positive signal but we'd rather spend our time researching stocks that hedge funds are piling on. Our calculations showed that top 20 most popular stocks among hedge funds returned 37.4% in 2019 through the end of November and outperformed the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) by 9.9 percentage points. Unfortunately HT wasn't nearly as popular as these 20 stocks and hedge funds that were betting on HT were disappointed as the stock returned -4.7% during the fourth quarter (through the end of November) and underperformed the market. If you are interested in investing in large cap stocks with huge upside potential, you should check out the top 20 most popular stocks among hedge funds as many of these stocks already outperformed the market so far this year.
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text:
Your Clothes Were Made by a Bangladeshi Climate Refugee
Climate change is driving women to work in Bangladesh's dangerous garment factories.
George Black
Photos by George Black
This story originally appeared on the OnEarth website.
Down in the hole that used to be Rana Plaza, the crushed remains of half a dozen cars were still waiting for removal, and next to them was a broken mannequin. She was lying on her back. She wore a pair of tight purple knee-length pants, but she was naked above the waist. Her torso had been severed in a neat diagonal below the right breast, but her head was intact. She had ivory skin, a pink rosebud mouth, ash-blonde hair brushed straight back off her forehead, and piercing blue eyes that stared up without expression at the sky.
More than 1,100 Bangladeshi garment workers died here in April, almost half as many as died in the World Trade Center. Yet the first thing that hit me about Rana Plaza was how small it was. The footprint of the building was not much larger than a basketball court. The site of the Twin Towers covered 16 acres. All that remained of Rana Plaza now was this shallow pit, a few inches deep in muddy water from the pre-monsoon rains, ringed by mountains of rubble and twisted rebar and damp piles of half-sewn clothing and bolts of brightly colored cloth.
The building next door was still under construction. Its façade had been stuck on, a thin veneer of blue reflective glass, but the interior was just a raw skeleton of brick and mortar walls and concrete pillars. It was hard not to wonder whether it would be any safer from collapse than Rana Plaza had been, whether its construction had involved the same unholy collusion between venal developers and corrupt local politicians. I took the unfinished stairway to the top floor and found that the upper levels had suffered a good deal of collateral damage. Huge segments of the roof had bellied downward and were propped up in a tentative way with culms of bamboo. Whole walls had been blown out by the force of the collapse, and papers from the upper floors of Rana Plaza had floated in. Even two months after the disaster, many were still strewn about in the wreckage. There were cards with samples of buttons and zippers, and pattern forms and order books and cutting instructions. Many of these related to contracts with the United Colors of Benetton, headquartered in Treviso, Italy, and were shakily translated from the Italian for workers who couldn't speak English (regolare bene le tensione delle macchine—"adjuste better the tension machine").
You could see the mannequin and the pattern books, of course, as a simple parable of the modern world economy, the hidden costs of a global supply chain that keeps us well supplied with cheap consumer goods. Many of the journalists who flocked here after the disaster probed the raw nerve of our moral culpability, although mostly they hewed to the conventional tragedy-in-a-poor-country narrative: evil owner (which he was), innocent victims (which they were), the one miraculous survivor. (There always is one in these stories; at Rana Plaza it was a woman who somehow made it out alive after being trapped in the rubble for 17 days.)
Yet while the image of the broken, blue-eyed mannequin haunted me, I wondered if it really captured the full story behind the catastrophe. It seemed to me that there were deeper meanings to be uncovered. Who were these women? Why had they left their rural homes and flocked to Dhaka, probably the most unlivable, environmentally blighted mega-city in the world? In the end, I found that it wasn't the mannequin that held the answers, or the Benetton patterns. It was those few inches of rainwater in the pit. For water is the existential curse of Bangladesh, and it is the point of intersection between the two stories that periodically drive this country of 160 million into the headlines: its disaster-plagued garment industry and its extreme vulnerability to climate change.
The twin garment centers of Savar (where Rana Plaza was located) and nearby Mirpur (the most rapidly growing area of the city) lie on the northwestern outskirts of Dhaka. The capital of Bangladesh today is a city of 15 or 16 million, and that number is swelled each year by more than 400,000 migrants from rural areas. By 2020 the population may reach 20 million. By 2030, it will rise to 25, even 30 million. "That's when our real nightmare begins," said Babar Kabir, senior director for disaster, environment, and climate change at BRAC, a giant NGO that occupies a 21-story building in Dhaka. "Will the city even survive?" Like many educated Bangladeshis, Kabir affects a kind of droll gallows humor in describing his country's calamities. But when he posed this question, I think he was entirely serious. The whole city, he seemed to imply, was like Rana Plaza on an epic scale, a rickety, jerrybuilt structure that might eventually collapse.
A growing number of the new rural migrants are young women, mainly poor and uneducated, drawn to Dhaka by the promise of work in the apparel industry, which now employs more than three and a half million people, mostly in and around the capital. They will work for ten hours a day, six days a week, and often more, starting at the minimum wage of 3,000 taka a month—about $37. But that's only one way to look at the industry. Another is that it accounts for fully 80 percent of Bangladesh's export earnings. Growing at 12 percent a year, it is the single factor driving the country's progression from one of the world's poorest to what J. P. Morgan calls one of the "Frontier Five" emerging economies, along with Kazakhstan, Kenya, Nigeria, and Vietnam. For European and US buyers, Bangladesh is the new China—because rising wage levels and labor shortages are pricing China's garment factories steadily out of the market. Newly prosperous Chinese are more likely these days to wear Benetton clothes than to sew them.
For migrants from rural Bangladesh, then, jobs in the apparel industry, no matter how unsafe and poorly paid, are the pull. But what is the push?
In essence, it's water. Some Bangladeshis have too much of it, and others, paradoxically, too little. But for almost everyone, there is too little of the right kind—the kind you need for your household needs, for farming, for keeping your children healthy. "We are a country of rivers, but we have no water to drink," said Shirin Akhter, the founder of an NGO called Karmojibi Nari (Working Women) and a veteran advocate for the garment workers.
Two of Asia's great rivers cut through the western half of Bangladesh, and their combined floodplains are never more than a few feet above sea level. The Ganges—which Bangladeshis call the Padma—snakes its way into the country across the Indian border. The Brahmaputra pours down from the mountains of Tibet. A little way west of Dhaka, the two rivers merge to form the Meghna. By the time it reaches the Indian Ocean and straggles off into an ever-shifting archipelago of low-lying islands and sandbanks, the Meghna is 20 miles wide. Stretching westward to the Indian border and beyond are the "100 Mouths of the Ganges," a vast delta of smaller rivers and channels and the labyrinthine mangrove forests of the Sundarbans, last redoubt of the Bengal tiger. And this whole area lies squarely in the path of the ferocious cyclones that gather their strength from the warming waters of the Bay of Bengal.
"We are a country of rivers, but we have no water to drink."
The monsoon, which finally broke in full force three days after my visit to Rana Plaza, would subject Bangladesh to its customary annual floods. Rivers would burst their banks, inundating farmland. Entire sections of riverbank would succumb to the force of the current, dumping fields and homes into the water. On occasion, the Ganges has even been known to swallow up entire villages. Huge and laden with silt, the rivers would continue to carve out new channels and alter their course. As one illustration of this, the river that curls around the western edge of Dhaka is called the Buriganga, or "old Ganga." The reason is that several centuries ago it was connected to the Ganges. Today the big river is 40 miles away.
It is from these sodden places that the garment workers and other migrants flock to Dhaka. The easy shorthand is to call them "climate refugees." That term had recently come into vogue when I last visited Bangladesh five years ago, after a monstrous cyclone named Sidr battered the country and scientists began to run scary projections of the numbers of people who would eventually be driven from their homes by sea-level rise and ever-fiercer storms. Now it's understood that "climate refugees" is a crude oversimplification. Better, I was told by Sarat Dash, the chief of mission in Bangladesh for the International Organization for Migration, to speak of "environmental migrants," because that captures the full complexity of their situation, embracing the interplay of factors—some dramatic, others more subtle—that drive them from their homes.
Yes, Dash agreed, the ocean was still the headline-grabber. "If there's a one-meter rise in the sea level, that will lead to the loss of 18 percent of our land area," he said. "That means 11 percent of our population, and that means 17 million people." And people, as Babar Kabir had told me a couple of days earlier, "are not so stupid as to just sit there and die."
Yet there may be a whole tapestry of other reasons behind any given family's decision to move. Migration specialists distinguish "slow-onset" environmental change from change that is "sudden" or "extreme." A cyclone or a storm surge is extreme, but unless it wipes out a family's livelihood completely, it may provoke only short-term migration to a nearby town or village, followed by return home when conditions permit. Dash calls this "circular migration." While less visibly traumatic, it's the slow-onset change that is more pernicious.
In the coastal southwest, it may be the steady seep of salt into farm fields and drinking wells as a result of the encroaching ocean and the diminished flow of rivers in the dry months, which reduces their ability to flush the salt back out to sea. In the early stages, a farmer will begin to notice that he is harvesting less rice, a fisherman that his catch is smaller, a pastoralist that there is less grazing land. Steadily things grow worse until he runs out of ways to adapt. Perhaps the worst affected area is Barisal district, along the lower reaches of the Meghna, which accounts for almost a quarter of all migrants to Dhaka, including, as I would discover, a large number of garment workers.
In the drier northwest, north of the Ganges, the problem is often a rapidly declining water table and recurrent crop failures. "With population growth, the extraction of groundwater and surface water is getting pretty enormous," Kabir said, "and with climate change it becomes a semi-permanent problem." When people leave in response to slow-onset changes like these, they tend to leave for good.
And so they come to Dhaka, a thousand or more every day, even as the experts debate whether their movement is a legitimate adaptation to climate change or proof that the effort to help people adapt to harsher conditions has failed. This may sound like an arcane distinction, but in fact it's hugely important, because billions of dollars—in government budgets and international aid—are at stake. Where should the money go? To improve conditions in climate-threatened rural areas so that people can stay in their homes? Or to invest more in the cities, accepting that the battle against forced migration is lost? Or both? Opinions are deeply split.
The flight from sea-level rise, flooding, storms, and the loss of farmland has a powerful cascade effect on the city. Once they arrive in Dhaka, migrants find that they face a new version of the very thing they were trying to escape, trading one form of water scarcity and pollution for another, and aggravating the problem by the simple fact of their own presence. Generally it's the main breadwinner who comes first, his family following in stages as he gains a foothold in the city. As likely as not he'll start off as a pavement-dweller. Tracking opportunities by word of mouth, he may find work as a day laborer or a garbage picker, a seller of tannery scraps or a brick-breaker or a security guard, sitting all night on a plastic chair in the dark outside a parking garage or an ATM booth. Many will join the ranks of rickshaw-pullers, earning 230 taka a day ($3) pumping the pedals of one of the 600,000 or more machines that careen around Dhaka's overcrowded streets, many of them decorated with bright, wistful fantasies of a rural world filled with blue lakes, brightly painted cottages, tropical flowers, swans and peacocks, deer and tigers.
The migrant will find a place to live in a basti, one of Dhaka's hundreds of slum areas, some no more than a precarious straggle of bamboo stilt houses along a polluted canal, others virtual townships of 100,000 or more, with their own complex internal economy and social order. He'll sleep in a room that measures six feet by eight, perhaps sharing his bed with other men working rotating shifts, paying his monthly 700 taka to the local slumlord. "It's like the Godfather or Al Capone," Kabir said. "There's a whole invisible pyramid of lieutenants and sublieutenants and rent collectors. And if you fall behind on payments, you'll get a visit from the mastaan, the muscleman." As for potable water, unless some kindly NGO has installed a tap, the migrant may have nowhere to turn but to the "gray business" that controls its sale in the slums, often paying more than 50 times as much for a liter of potable water as middle-class people who get it from their faucets.
Once they arrive in Dhaka, migrants find that they face a new version of the very thing they were trying to escape.
As he puts down fragile roots, the man's family will join him, sometimes one by one, sometimes all at once, the sons following his pursuit of menial jobs and the women bound for domestic service, manual labor, or the apparel industry. But increasingly, the women who flock to the garment factories also come alone, or to join a sibling or a friend from the same village. "These are often adventurous young women," Kabir told me, "and they need to find an honest middleman, because there are plenty of others out there who will take them for a ride, sell them into brothels or traffic them across the border into commercial sex work in India." Sometimes women will even be drawn into Bangladesh's booming black market in human organs, cajoled into selling a kidney for the equivalent of a year of minimum wages. Once a young woman finds a job, kinship is the engine that drives much of the subsequent recruitment: she does well, she recommends her sister, who then calls a cousin, and so on until a half-dozen members of the family may be working in the factories of Savar and Mirpur.
The less fortunate may find their way to the sweatshops that serve the domestic market, where I met 11- and 12-year-old boys and girls working 80-hour weeks to keep up with demand. (We forget, with all the talk of the Benettons and Gaps and WalMarts, that 160 million Bangladeshis also need a steady supply of cheap saris and lungis, pants and T-shirts.) Many of these miniature factories are strung out along the west bank of the Buriganga, which runs sluggish and foul, biologically dead, almost black in color, coated with an iridescent sheen of spilled oil. In the whole of Bangladesh there is just a single sewage treatment plant; located on the southern outskirts of Dhaka, it can deal with less than 10 percent of the sewage generated in the city. The rest, 1,100 tons of untreated human waste each day, goes straight into the rivers, ponds, canals, and gutters.
Dhaka's poorest bastis occupy the lowest and most flood-prone sections of the city, inundated during each monsoon system with sewage-tainted water that brings disease in its wake. Overall, rainfall in Bangladesh has declined as the climate changes, but the rains are now more concentrated in the peak months of the monsoon season, more than doubling in volume in August alone over the past 20 years. "The city's drainage system is equipped to deal with 10 millimeters of rain [less than half an inch]," said Iftekhar Mahmud, a senior reporter for Prothom Alo, the leading Bangla-language newspaper, who has reputedly written more on climate change than any other journalist in the country. "But we often get 10 or 20 times that much in a single day." To make matters worse, the natural drainage areas that are critical in buffering the monsoon floods have steadily been encroached upon as land grabbers pump them dry to put up new housing, much of it illegal. Bangladeshis call this sandfill; one new development I saw on drained land next to the Buriganga covered nearly 400 acres, more than half a square mile.
If the horrors of Rana Plaza made us think about the industry behind our clothing labels, the image it conjured was probably one of rows of women bent over sewing machines. But this is only the top layer of the apparel pyramid. Beneath it are thousands of other, less visible workplaces, without which there is nothing to sew in the first place. No cloth, woven, colored, and patterned; no leather to be fashioned into belts, shoes, and sneakers, or the decorative trim on blue jeans. And the impact of these hidden links in the global supply chain on Bangladesh's scarce supply of clean water is hard to grasp until you see it up close.
I went out one hot, humid morning to a neighborhood called Hazaribagh, which is home to virtually all of Bangladesh's tanneries and the single worst source of pollution of the Buriganga. I stopped outside the Salma Leather Factory and chatted with a woman who was laying out rough squares of cowhide to dry on a garbage-strewn patch of waste ground. I wasn't surprised when she told me that like many people in Hazaribagh, she was originally from Barisal District, a farming village near the mouth of the Meghna. Two of her brothers had found work in the garment factories, she said. Nearby, a grizzled older man, helped by a girl of 10 or 11, was trampling scraps of dried meat that had been scraped off the hides, reducing them to powdered fishmeal or chicken feed. Two other men squatted at the edge of a garbage dump, surrounded by piles of old shoes, painstakingly separating out the leather from the rubber and plastic, which they said would be melted down to make new soles. Nothing goes to waste in Dhaka—nothing, that is, except water.
I asked if I could look around inside the factory. The foreman, whose name was Bahar, a paunchy, barrel-chested man with a bushy beard, said that would be fine. Business was slow right now; Hazaribagh was waiting for the Shab-e-Barat, the "night of deliverance," at the end of June, when there would be a mass slaughter of animals. Tons of meat for the feasting; tons of hides for the tanneries.
What they produced here, he said, was "wet blue," the first stage of leather manufacturing. Later the hides would be shipped off to a separate plant to be turned into "crust leather," and then to a third factory for finishing. "Wet blue" is the dirtiest and most dangerous part of the industry. The conditions in the windowless, unventilated shed would have shocked Engels or Dickens, and they lived in an age before the invention of synthetic chemicals. Bahar showed me how the hides are softened for 24 hours in huge, rotating wooden drums, where pumped groundwater is mixed with lime and sodium sulfide to remove the last of the hair and flesh. After that comes a whole suite of other toxic chemicals and additives (a recent report on Hazaribagh by Human Rights Watch listed about 30). I tried not to think too hard about the belt and shoes I was wearing.
The most hazardous of the chemicals, however, is chromium sulfate, which gives the wet hides their distinctive gray-blue color. Bangladesh's tanneries use 3,000 metric tons of the stuff each year, and those who handle it should always wear protective gloves, safety goggles, and a face mask. Perhaps it is unnecessary to say that none of these was in evidence here. Factory inspectors never visit Hazaribagh; the government itself acknowledges that, "There is no monitoring and no enforcement in Hazaribagh." There are regular vows to relocate the tanneries to Savar, one of the two main garment districts, consolidating them into fewer, larger, and more modern facilities that would share a central effluent treatment plant. The Savar tannery complex was first suggested 20 years ago. In 2002, a deadline was set for the move: the end of 2005. Wait, make that 2006. No, let's say 2010. If the Hazaribagh tanneries were not gone by then, the High Court of Bangladesh ruled, they would be closed down. Three years later, they're still there. The move to Savar is now set for 2015; or perhaps 2017; or perhaps never.
The air in the Salma Leather Factory was rank with hydrogen sulfide, sulfur dioxide, and ammonia. A noxious blue slime coated the floor and slithered into a drain hole. On the other side of the wall, laden with heavy metals, animal flesh, fat, and dissolved hair, the slime would make its way into the gutters and alleyways of the neighboring basti, and thence to a series of drainage channels and small streams before finally being decanted into the Buriganga, half a mile away. Actually, that is an over-simplification, because until it was sluiced along on its journey by the monsoon rains, which were due any day, much of the effluent sat in a nearby stagnant pond that was half-choked with water hyacinths. Naked children were frolicking in the water, and a woman from the basti was beating her laundry on a rock.
Next day, a friend drove me out beyond the city limits to the northeast to see the dyeworks and the textile mills that produce the raw material for Dhaka's sewing machines. The monsoon had finally broken, and the first fierce showers were hammering down on the fields, which were still waterlogged more than six months after the end of last year's rains. For mile upon mile these fields had been staked out for drainage and development by real estate companies, whose signs were planted at intervals in the knee-deep water. This is where Dhaka would grow in the future to accommodate the 25 million, the 30 million that Babar Kabir feared would push the city to the tipping point, threatening its very survival.
The dyeworks that supply the domestic sweatshops along the Buriganga with lower quality cloth, not suitable for the export market, had me thinking of Dickens again. Whole villages, rabbit warrens of poor homes divided by narrow, muddy lanes, and vibrating to the clatter of cast-iron looms that looked as if they dated back to the Industrial Revolution, were dedicated to the business of weaving and dyeing. The highway was lined with lengths of dyed cloth, orange, yellow, red, purple, green, and blue, hung out on string to dry like some roadside version of Christo's Central Park project, The Gates. In their earth yards, men and boys were sloshing more cloth around in zinc bathtubs, up to their armpits in dye, hands and wrists stained permanently indigo and crimson. One man said he scrubbed his arms every night with scouring powder and bleach, but it didn't make much difference. He upended his tub and poured some of the liquid into a drain to run off into a nearby stream. "Don't worry," he grinned, "this is good water. It doesn't harm you."
Farther east was Bangladesh's main concentration of textile mills, strung out along a 25-mile stretch of highway near the town of Narsingdi. We stopped at B.L. Apparels ("100% Export Oriented and Composite Industries"). This was a much larger enterprise, a solid cement building occupying several floors. The word composite meant that it handled everything from weaving and dyeing to the silkscreen printing of finished fabric, producing saris as well as polo shirts, the latter destined mainly for markets in Australia and New Zealand. At first, the visit did nothing to lift my gloom. Standing pools of gray caustic liquid had gathered under the rollers in the washing and pressing area. There was a pervasive stench of hydrochloric acid.
But this wasn't the whole story, I discovered, as the factory manager showed off some of the recent innovations to the mill. When a country begins to develop its garment industry, most of the raw material has to be imported. But as it grows, the domestic textile-milling sector will rapidly expand to serve it, with all stages of production housed under one roof. That's what happened in China, and it's happening now in Bangladesh.
"There are about 100 larger textile mills in this area now," the manager said. "Within 10 years there will be hundreds more, and they'll be much bigger. This mill was very small when I came here 10 years ago. It had only 25 or 30 workers. Now there are close to 800."
He took me upstairs and along a narrow catwalk to see the pride of B.L. Apparels: its effluent treatment plant. The water that's used in the mill is recycled, filtered, and pumped up to a series of diamond-shaped rooftop tanks, where it's treated with powdered lime and ferrosulfate until its pH level is within government-set limits, only slightly more acidic than the surrounding groundwater. Then it's released into a canal that flows into a nearby river.
"This is all new," the manager said. "The rules came in about two years ago. About 10 percent of the mills have completed their treatment plants, and the other 90 percent are under construction. They're financed by government loans, and you can no longer get a license to open a new plant without one." You had to be on your toes, he said, for government inspectors show up unannounced about once a month for spot checks.
The rule of thumb seemed to be that bigger was better. The small tanneries and local dyeworks operated in the regulatory darkness, flushing their vile effluent into the waterways without restriction. To judge from the textile mills of Narsingdi, the more the industry was dedicated to the export market, the larger the factories, the more they would be scrutinized, the more likely it was that they would be forced to clean up their act. Rana Plaza had exposed Western buyers like Benetton as complicit in the dark side of Bangladesh's apparel industry. But here was the paradox: that those same companies, by deepening their engagement, might also be its best hope for reform. The most important question of all, it seemed to me, was what the garment workers themselves thought of this, so I went to Savar and Mirpur to ask them.
There is a surprising lack of hard demographic data about the women in the garment industry: the companies may know the basic facts (name, age, place of origin), but they see no compelling need to share them; the government doesn't seem interested; and the academics, NGOs, and advocacy groups don't have the resources to do a systematic analysis. Yet some clear patterns emerged from my conversations.
Sarat Dash of the International Organization for Migration had talked to me earlier about the complexity of environmental migration, and the time I spent in Savar and Mirpur began to fill in some of the granular detail. I picked up one early clue from Mahmudul Sumon, an anthropologist at Jahangirnagar University in Savar, who heads a team studying Bangladesh's last-but-one disaster, the fire at Tazreen Garments last November that killed at least 112 people (that was the official estimate: Sumon says the true figure was 124). Eighty percent were women, the majority were in their twenties; a good number were under 18. But the most striking finding, Sumon said, was that a high percentage of those who died had migrated to Dhaka from a single small district in northwestern Bangladesh, in an area notable for its falling water table and frequent crop failures.
Later, in Mirpur, I found that a large number of the women were from the southwest, not the northwest, forced from their homes by cyclones, floods, and salinated farmland. Shirin Akhter thought the different demographics had a lot to do with transportation routes: buses from the southwest arrived at a big depot near Mirpur; those from the northwest stopped first in Savar. She said she had watched migration trends closely since founding her advocacy group, Karmojibi Nari, back in 1991, when women first began entering the labor market in large numbers. They gave many reasons: rural poverty, lack of educational opportunity, job prospects in the city. But in recent years, and especially after Cyclone Sidr in 2007, they increasingly cited environmental stressors. "They don't necessarily use those words," Akhter said. "But what they do say clearly is that they can't go back because they've lost their homes or their land to the water."
I met a number of migrants from the northwest in a sprawling Savar neighborhood called Jamgora. It's one of Dhaka's largest slums, home to more than 100,000 people, and it turned out to be quite different from the others I'd visited. Some women may live in the bamboo, tin, and palm-frond huts of the bastis when they first arrive and are making minimum wage, but in time, as their earnings rise closer to the average of about 6,000 taka ($75) a month, they will gravitate to places like Jamgora.
The development is dominated by rows of grim concrete tenements, and the rooms, often shared by several people, are dark and cheerless, with heavy metal doors and windows secured by padlocks against theft. Yet the women who live here are not the poorest of the poor. Rents in Jamgora are two or three times higher than in the bastis, and water and electricity are included. In one room, two young women in their late teens were sprawled on the bed watching a soap opera. One of them, speaking in a shy whisper, said she was from a village in an arid northwestern district, near the town of Bogra. A young man wandered over to join us. He said he was from the same area. The family's crops had failed once too often; now his mother, a brother, and three sisters were all working the sewing machines.
Despite their arduous working conditions, with low wages, no sick leave, little job security, frequent sexual harassment, not even the right to ask for a toilet break—not to mention the constant fear of another disaster like Tazreen or Rana Plaza—women in places like Jamgora have begun to achieve a modest degree of upward mobility and independence. Most are still unmarried, and although they may sometimes yearn to return to their villages, they have broken free of many of the restrictive taboos of village life. Remaining at home, they might have faced an early marriage, arranged by a father desperate to keep down the cost of his daughter's dowry, which will increase as she gets older. But here they can chat with friends on their cell phones, go out at night if they're not too tired, perhaps dare to put on a little lipstick. If they're hard-pressed to pay the rent, I was told, some will even split the cost with a (usually Platonic) male roommate.
I spent the following evening with a group of about a dozen women in Mirpur. They gathered in a circle on the floor of a local office of Karmojibi Nari and recounted the stories of their migration. All but one were from the southwest coastal region, nine of them from Barisal, the area worst afflicted by climate change and extreme weather. The stories varied from one woman to the next, but water was their common thread.
One young woman had come to Dhaka from the edge of the Sundarbans, the vast coastal mangrove forest, because a tiger, driven from its customary habitat as the land grew saltier and the availability of prey diminished, was menacing her village. Another got a call on her mobile from a neighbor, warning that the riverbank by her home was slipping into the water; by the time she got there, her house, garden, and trees had all vanished. Other stories were a more nuanced mix of "extreme" and "slow onset" changes. Nargis, from a village near the mouth of the Meghna, had left after Cyclone Sidr with four siblings, all of whom now worked in the garment industry. But her parents had insisted on staying behind, and the remittances from their children had helped them rebuild their small farm. Jesmin, also from southern Barisal, had come to the city as a teenager with her brother after their father died of leukemia. Another brother followed, and soon all three were working in the garment industry. A decade later, after Sidr struck, village life became so precarious that Jesmin's mother and two remaining siblings concluded they could no longer survive in Barisal, and they headed for the city too.
Jesmin was 30 now. She wore an elegant red sari and a tiny gold nose stud. She had high, sculpted cheekbones and dark, deep-set eyes, and while some of the other women stared shyly at the ground and told their stories in almost inaudible monosyllables, Jesmin had a calm and direct gaze, a poise, a natural charisma that marked her out right away as a future leader. She spoke eloquently of the hardships the women faced, the nostalgia they sometimes felt for their villages, their resentment of official indifference. But when the conversation turned to Rana Plaza, and the well-intentioned reluctance of western consumers to buy clothes from a country that permitted such things to happen, she began to laugh, and soon most of the women in the room were laughing and shaking their heads. It was as if I'd told the sickest joke in the world.
"What our girls are saying is don't boycott us," Shirin Akhter said later. "Just give us a safe workplace."
It's the greatest of ironies: while shoppers are tortured by conscience, while the Walt Disney Company pulls out to protect its "brand integrity," no one in Bangladesh—no one—wants the apparel companies to leave. The government needs the export earnings; the economists see the industry as the key to Bangladesh's emergence as the next Asian tiger; the factory owners want the profits; those concerned with corporate social responsibility warn that if western garment buyers pull out, Chinese and Indian buyers will move in (and no one should expect them to care as much about effluent treatment plants and safe water); and the women and their advocates want the jobs—together with the labor rights, fair wages, and healthy working and living conditions that should go with them.
When the laughter in the room finally subsided, Jesmin looked me straight in the eye and said with a smile, "If you stopped buying the clothes we make, what do you think we would do? We'd die."
Clothing Giant Zara Pledges to Ditch Toxic Chemicals
Maggie Caldwell
In Bangladesh, a Battle Between Farmers and Climate Change
— By Jon Miller, Center for Investigative Reporting
I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave
Mac McClelland


text:
Jury: University of Iowa discriminated against lesbian athletics official
And the jury handed her a whopping $1.4 million in damages because of it.
By Associated Press Friday, May 5, 2017
FILE - In this April 18, 2011, file photo, Jane Meyer, former senior associate athletic director at the University of Iowa, speaks in Normal, Ill. Attorneys gave closing statements Wednesday, May 3, 2017, in a discrimination lawsuit filed by Meyer against the university. Meyer filed the suit after being transferred to another department after the firing of Iowa field hockey coach Tracey Griesbaum, her partner. Meyer's job was eliminated in 2016. Photo: (Lori Ann Cook-Neisler/The Pantagraph via AP, File)
A jury on Thursday awarded more than $1.4 million to a former University of Iowa athletic administrator, ruling that the university had discriminated against her because of her gender and sexual orientation.
Jane Meyer alleged she suffered workplace discrimination as a gay woman in a relationship with the school's longtime and highly successful field hockey coach Tracey Griesbaum, that the school retaliated against her for complaining about Griesbaum's firing, and that she was paid less than a male counterpart for similar work.
Judge Michael D. Huppert said the eight-person jury found in favor of Meyer on all five counts.
"This is for everyone who has fought for discrimination," Meyer said. "It's much bigger than Jane Meyer."
The trial lasted nearly three weeks and featured testimony from Iowa football coach Kirk Ferentz and wrestling coach Tom Brands.
The jury began deliberating Wednesday and delivered its sealed verdict on Thursday. Meyer's attorney, Jill Zwagerman, said she expects Iowa to appeal the verdict — partly because of the size of the award.
But Zwagerman also said that the $374,000 in lost wages the jury awarded to Meyer can be tripled under Iowa law because the jury found Iowa's actions to be willful. Zwagerman also said that they will file a request through the courts to investigate claims of gender discrimination at Iowa.
A lawsuit filed against the university by Griesbaum is set to begin early next month.
Meyer, who was Iowa's top assistant and the top ranking female athletics administrator for a decade, filed the lawsuit after being transferred to another department soon after Griesbaum was fired. Meyer's job was eliminated in 2016.
Meyer's lawyers closed their case by bringing up a memo from Meyer to athletic director Gary Barta that outlined many of the concerns of gender and sexual discrimination that ultimately led her to sue her former employer. A day after Meyer gave the memo to Barta, she was reassigned outside of athletics.
"This is a landmark case….Jane is amazing. She stood up and fought for herself and a lot of other women," Zwagerman said.
Meyer's lawyers also brought up an email from the university acknowledging that it was moving Meyer from the department because Griesbaum had threatened to sue the school and that she had made their relationship public through The Associated Press.
Coaches Ferentz, Brands and Heller criticized Meyer as not being responsive to their requests, especially involving plans to improve athletics facilities. Barta testified some coaches were no longer willing to work with Meyer, prompting him to decide to hire Gene Taylor as his deputy.
Iowa Assistant Attorney General George Carroll told jurors that Meyer ultimately was moved out of the department because she had behaved "intolerably" in the months following Griesbaum's firing. Carroll also argued that Iowa had no history of discrimination against gay coaches.
Jurors awarded Meyer $444,000 in past emotional distress and $612,000 in future emotional distress in addition to lost wages, according to Huppert.
Iowa spokeswoman Jeneane Beck said the "university is disappointed by the jury's decision" but had no further comment.
Still, the ruling was a blow to Barta, who has been with Iowa since 2006 and received a contract extension in early 2016 that guarantees him $4.6 million in compensation through 2021.
As for Meyer, she said throughout the trial that her career in athletics was likely finished no matter what the jury decided. But after winning on every count, Meyer might reconsider that stance.
"I would love for an institution to hire me. To stand up and say 'You know what? She stood up and wants to do the right thing.'"
Associated Press Writer Ryan J. Foley contributed to this report.
© 2017, Associated Press, All Rights Reserved.
Anti-gay discrimination, athletic programs, Jane Meyer, nondiscrimination laws, University of Iowa
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