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If ethical prohibitions against, say, infanticide vary based on the culture, whose ethical precepts take precedence when these cultures collide? This Foreign Policy article looks at the conflict between the Brazilian government and certain Amazonian peoples who have their own rules governing who should be killed and why.
"The evangelical missionaries who helped Kanhu [a disabled indigenous child] and her family move to Brasília, the capital of Brazil, have since spearheaded a media and lobbying campaign to crack down on child killing. Their efforts have culminated in a controversial bill aimed at eradicating the practice, which won overwhelming approval in a 2015 vote by the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of Brazil’s National Congress, and is currently under consideration in the Federal Senate, its upper house. But what may seem an overdue safeguard has drawn widespread condemnation from academics and indigenous rights groups in the country. The Brazilian Association of Anthropology, in an open letter published on its website, has called the bill an attempt to put indigenous peoples 'in the permanent condition of defendants before a tribunal tasked with determining their degree of savagery.' The controversy over child killing has raised a fundamental question for Brazil — a vast country that is home to hundreds of protected tribes, many living in varying degrees of isolation: To what extent should the state interfere with customs that seem inhumane to the outside world but that indigenous peoples developed long ago as a means to ensure group survival in an unforgiving environment?" foreignpolicy.com/2018/04/09/the-right-to-kill-brazil-infanticide/
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Interested in sailing in the longest straight path possible without hitting land? Researchers recently confirmed the route from Pakistan to Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula: www.techtimes.com/articles/226599/20180501/what-s-the-longest-straight-path-on-earth-you-can-take-without-hitting-land.htm Prefer to travel by land? The longest land route is from eastern China to Portugal.
The DC chapter of the World Affairs Council is still accepting registrations for its summer Leadership Academy on International Affairs for rising 10th-12th graders (July 16-20). www.worldaffairsdc.org/ForStudents_LeadershipAcademy.aspx  A cartogram is a map that has been weighted for a particular variable. In the case of this cartogram, the variable is the number of people living in rural areas who do not have access to electricity (and "access" includes self-provided electricity like kerosene generators, windmills, or solar panels, not just public grids). As of 2014 there were still 20 countries, all in Africa, where more than 90% of the rural population has no access to electricity. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, less than 1% of the rural population has access to electricity. In absolute numbers, the countries with the most people living without access to electricity are India (with more than 250 million), followed by Ethiopia and Nigeria.
worldmapper.org/maps/housing-ruralnoelectricity-2014/ According to the U.N., more people die every year from drinking unsafe water than from war (30,000 deaths per week). Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have developed a new, inexpensive device that uses sunlight and a special hydrogel to both purify and desalinate water, a potentially game-changing breakthrough for the one in nine people who have limited access to clean, fresh water. Without new technologies, the U.N. estimates that the proportion of people without access to clean, fresh water will rise to one in four by 2050. news.utexas.edu/2018/04/03/water-purification-breakthrough-uses-sunlight-and-hydrogels
Stepwells were designed to provide easy-to-access, year-round water supplies and are found primarily in South Asia. Many Indian stepwells are elaborately decorated structures, but only one has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site: Rani Ki Vav (or "the queen's stepwell") in Gujarat. Rani Ki Vav was built as a seven-story inverted Hindu temple, probably in the 11th or 12th century, with more than a thousand sculptures representing religious and literary figures carved into the natural sandstone. Changes to the flow of the nearby Saraswati River caused the stepwell to flood and silt to accumulate, and Rani Ki Vav was only excavated and restored in the late 1980s. www.atlasobscura.com/places/rani-ki-vav
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