In vitro meat was hailed as the world’s solution to looming environmental problems caused by industrial meat production. That was until the science lost its way. This week, a group of leading international researchers are meeting to try to steer it back on course.
Read online at Radio Netherlands Worldwide
 Photo: Tim Collings |
While young people are told that engaging in activism might imperil their future careers, Belinda Lopez meets someone who has made a career out of pranking powerful evildoers. Read More
One of a series of articles published as the Jakarta Globe’s correspondent for COP15. Links to other articles follow.
Copenhagen. A world away from the official climate talks are the forests of the world’s developing nations. Agreements may be made (and unmade) in carpeted conference halls by world leaders, but it is local forest communities who will now be on the frontline of the fight against deforestation — and the many ways governments and companies may be able to make a quick buck in the process. Read More
Image by Nick Perry
Featured on Radio National’s documentary show, 360.
Night Butterflies was a finalist in the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s 360 ‘City Nights’ Competition. Co-produced with Nick Perry.
One of the more polite names given to sex workers in Indonesia is ‘night butterflies’. Transsexual night butterflies haunt the streets of Jakarta, eking out an income from passing cars. They have often left their deeply-religious families Read More
I am sitting in the backpacker cafe in West Sumatra, Indonesia, that members of the Southeast Asian terrorism network Jemaah Islamiya had planned to bomb. I am drinking a beer. It may be an immature way of giving the middle finger to fundamentalism, but in the otherwise peaceful town of Bukittinggi, the tourism industry clearly needs a toast. Read More
Published on Asia Sentinel
| Indonesia’s conservative Muslim party abandons Valentines to woo voters
Indonesia’s most conservative Islamic party, briefly considered wooing young voters politically for upcoming national elections with chocolates and flowers on Valentine’s Day before pulling up short and abandoning the plan in the mistaken idea that the holiday is “too Jewish.” The PKS, whose name in English is the Prosperous Justice Party, has had a difficult time “finding a formula to reach” more liberally-minded young voters, a party member, Mujtahid Rahman Yadi acknowledged. So it decided on the affectionate approach – Valentine’s gifts attached to stickers bearing mug shots of their candidates for Indonesia’s April legislative elections. The romantic plan to use hearts and flowers to attract voters was dreamed up by the same party that pushed through a controversial anti-pornography law in the country last year, banning acts that “violated public morality” and “incited sexual desire”, (which, until some late revisions, would have included bikinis in Bali). Read More |
Published in the Jakarta Globe. View PDF of publication.
Journalist Jose Belo. Photo by Lirio da Fonseca.
East Timor’s Justice Minister denies she will block the long-anticipated removal of Indonesia’s criminal defamation law that is still used in the fledging nation, despite using it to bring an action against a journalist who published a series of articles accusing her of corruption.
Jose Belo, the publisher of the respected investigative weekly newspaper Tempo Semanal, will defend his paper against defamation charges for a series of articles he published in October last year, accusing Justice Minister Lucia Lobato of corruption, collusion and nepotism in the handing out of government tenders. Read More
Published in the Jakarta Globe. View PDF of publication here.
For a publishing empire that has lasted 35 years, spawned more than 500 books on travel and is now heaving into the digital age, Lonely Planet began rather modestly, on a London park bench in 1970.
A 20-year-old woman named Maureen sat on the opposite side of a seat occupied by Tony, 23, who was reading a magazine. He remarked that it was a good place to read on a Thursday afternoon.
“That was a good pick-up line,” says a now 61-year-old Tony Wheeler, who got the girl in the end. Maureen became his wife and the co-founder of Lonely Planet.
But had they been seated on the same bench sometime this decade, their exchange might never have happened. Read More
Published in the Jakarta Globe. View as PDF here.
If anything is certain to be found in Jakarta — aside from nightmarish traffic and shopping malls — it’s a multitude of bars.
Though many people do not drink alcohol or frequent bars in Jakarta, those who do often show a level of commitment equal to a long-term, live-in relationship.
Discussions over where my impending birthday celebrations would be held therefore seemed unnecessary — in a dark room purveying alcoholic beverages, naturally. But I had begun to loathe the predictability of the whole affair. Another birthday in my 20s, more beers, bar tops, karaoke and kerosene-wielding bartenders lighting up the dance floor — literally. Yawn. It just felt so passe. Read More
Published on New Matilda here.
Belinda Lopez explains the small print of the Forest Carbon Partnership with Indonesia.
Take a cautious first step into the tropical peat swamp of Central Kalimantan, Indonesia, and it’s likely to open up before you. Sensory nerves sending messages to the brain prove unreliable as your foot, expecting to eventually find a firm surface, is painfully deceived. You sink deeper and deeper into the mud, and count yourself fortunate if you bruise yourself grabbing desperately for a tree root, lest you lose limbs and boots forever.
This is what Kevin Rudd wants to save. In the grand ballroom of a grand hotel in Indonesia’s capital last Friday, Rudd addressed an elite crowd on the “inseparable” relationship between Indonesia and Australia. Read More
