There's no such thing as a free lunch...Or is there?

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It's official. The next president of Indonesia is former army general Prabowo Subianto. Quite how the next five years will pan out is anyone's guess but hopefully the foreign pundits who always bring up his dodgy human rights record will be proven wrong. Nonetheless, on policy making, Prabowo's popularist move to literally offer the poor 'a free lunch' every day of the week does not augur well for the future. Such a policy - if it ever came to fruition - would cost a phenomenal amount of money and likely lead to huge inefficiencies (food waste) and poor incentives (make people lazy). Another concern is Prabowo's strong nationalist bent. Thus, in the possible event that he finds himself with his back against the proverbial wall in the face of stern economic challenges, there is a big chance that he will simply scapegoat foreigners. But he will have to be careful. Construction of the new capital city, Nusantara, for example, is highly dependent on foreign in

Nour Miyati: maid to pay the price

Just look at Nour Miyati:
What a mess. By the time she was dragged off to the hospital she was nearly dead, with gangrene eating away her fingers, toes and a part of her right foot. But even though she’d been beaten close to death, I bet she couldn’t believe what was coming next: 

At first Miyati claimed that her Saudi sponsor tied her up for a month in a bathroom and beat her severely injuring her eyes and knocking out several of her teeth. But Miyati later changed her testimony and was subsequently charged with making false accusations of torture against her sponsor. 

 I suppose she tortured herself did she? What rubbish. 

But while such extreme cases of torture like this are rare, abuse of Indonesian maids is fairly common in the Gulf, especially in counties like Saudi Arabia and Bahrain where many Indonesian maids are employed. In Bahrain an average of three Indonesian housemaids run away every day. 

And in November last year, the Indonesian Embassy in Kuwait was holding 350 runaway workers - all of whom were complaining of maltreatment. In fact, things got so bad that the Indonesian government even imposed a temporary halt on the deployment of all workers in the Middle East, as impregnated maids returning to Indonesia made the headlines on TV news here. And now the very same legislators who were complaining of maid abuse are now considering passing an “anti pornography” law that will force women to cover up “to reduce crimes such as rape”! 

Argggg!!

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