BMTH live in Jakarta 2024

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This time around Ravel gets it right and BMTH (Bring Me The Horizon) are headlining the Nexfest festival in Jakarta which also features Babymetal. In this format there is no seating - which makes for a much more intimate experience - although you do have to arrive really early if you want to pick a spot right up close to the stage.  We arrived about six hours before BMTH were scheduled to start their performance and bought plenty of drinks to stay hydrated in the tropical afternoon heat (mind you, some of those were Iceland vodka mix!) This was a gig I had long been looking forward to - especially after the debacle last year. Not everyone likes BMTH of course. For deathcore fans the band sold out. For metal heads the band is not purist enough. And for the wider mainstream audience, the band is too heavy. You can't please everyone of course but there are few bands in the rock world which can match the sheer emotional velocity of BMTH. To bring metal and even aspects of metalcore t...
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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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