Horse meat was found to be passed off as beef in fast food burgers and frozen products across the United Kingdom and France.

British and French governments are promising to punish those involved. And fingers have been pointing to suppliers in Romania, Poland and Sweden.

Consumer confidence in Europe’s food industry has hit a low.

But there is another side to this scandal.

It seems the demand for horse meat has actually increased. So says, Paul Webb of the website Exotic Meats.

“Zero Dark Thirty” has been doing well at the US box offices since its release in December. But in Pakistan, where the film’s key action scenes are set, the film has been banned.

Still, that hasn’t stopped Pakistanis from watching the film on pirated DVD’s.

Freelance reporter Michelle Stockman, a self-professed film nut, said she was anxious to get her hands on a bootlegged copy from her local DVD store.

She said the movie had been seen largely by the more educated and English-speaking Pakistanis who were interested in how their country was portrayed around the world.

Stockman said criticism had been against director Kathryn Bigelow who seems to have gone through great lengths to make the film as accurate as possible.

But some of the top objections she said is the portrayal of Pakistanis as speaking Arabic. “Pakistanis speak Urdu or English, not Arabic.”

Stockman wasn’t sure if “Zero Dark Thirty” would ever hit the theaters in Pakistan anytime soon. Distributors have said they don’t want to risk the wrath of the military, intelligence services and terrorist groups over showing the Bigelow’s depiction of raid on Osama Bin Laden’s compound.

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Marco Werman: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World, a coproduction of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH Boston. We’re smack in the middle of Hollywood’s awards season and on eof the most talked about movies this year is “Zero Dark Thirty.” That’s director Kathryn Bigelow’s gritty account of the hunt for Osama bin Laden and the raid that killed him. “Zero Dark Thirty” has been doing well at the US box office since its release in December, but in Pakistan, where the film’s key action scenes are set, the film isn’t even officially out. That hasn’t stopped Pakistanis though from watching “Zero Dark Thirty” on pirated DVDs. Michelle Stockman is a freelance journalist in Islamabad and a self-professed film nut. You’ve seen it there, Michelle, how easy was it to get a copy and how much did you pay for it?

Michelle Stockman: It was very easy to get a copy. I had been watching for this video to arrive in my local pirated DVD store for basically every other day after Christmas. And it arrived just about the first or second week in January. So my husband and I went and scooped it up, and we paid just about a dollar for it.

Werman: About a dollar. What about the Pakistanis, have they also been kind of waiting anxiously for it to arrive?

Stockman: You know, it’s just about now, about a month after it’s become available that it really has started entering the conversation here. So I don’t think there were so many people who were as anxious to see it as I was, but now that word is out it is definitely a must-see film here, although many people after they do watch it say oh, well, I’m not gonna recommend that to my friends.

Werman: So who is buying it? I mean what kind of Pakistanis would you see at your local video shop picking up a pirated copy of “Zero Dark Thirty”?

Stockman: These are going to be you know, the educated [inaudible 01:29], I would say, here in Pakistan. These are folks who are really well read, who are watching you know, culture around the world. It’s not gonna be the average Pakistani who you might see on the street. These are folks who are generally Western educated, who speak English very well and who might be interested in the way Pakistan is portrayed around the world.

Werman: So how are they reacting to it, these Pakistani intellectuals? They see this movie as just a good yarn or do they see it as controversial?

Stockman: You know, it’s very interesting. I have spoken to quite a few friends at parties and read a lot of columns that have appeared in newspapers lately that slammed the film for its inaccuracies. Mark Boal, the screenwriter, and Kathryn Bigelow, the director, say they went to great pains to make the film as accurate as possible, but if you’re Pakistani you can pick out just blatant errors. First of all, Pakistanis speak English, Urdu or other regional languages; they don’t speak Arabic as they are portrayed to do in the film. There are some scenes with men in the marketplace or wearing some 17th century headgear. But one friend who works in the public health sector here said, you know, I watched it and it was exciting, it was suspenseful, but it was an absolutely irresponsible piece of filmmaking because there’s one scene that portrays a healthcare worker going to the Osama bin Laden compound and trying to vaccinate the children, to try and get some DNA that might confirm that he’s there. He’s portrayed as a polio worker in the film, and goes inside and is with this child…and the mother comes out dressed in a you know, fully clothed, fully covered, and grabs the child away, something that could be, could be misinterpreted. And since December there had been six polio healthcare workers who have been killed, who were gunned down while they were out on the job trying to vaccinate children.

Werman: Are you saying that’s because of this movie?

Stockman: It’s, it’s not quite yet linked to this movie because again, this movie isn’t very well known amongst the masses here in Pakistan, but the polio program has been linked by the public and by some terrorist groups to the CIA. I mean you have to look back at recent history. Around October of last year there was a film that came out on YouTube that was a very poorly produced film about the life of the prophet Muhammad.

Werman: The Innocence of Muslims, yeah.

Stockman: But there were protests for days. People died in these protests. This film has yet to trickle down I would say to become common knowledge amongst all Pakistanis, but you never know. There could be some more blowback.

Werman: I wonder if it’s just going to stay on DVD, pirated DVDs. I mean it seems like “Zero Dark Thirty” could be so provocative of film in Pakistan, do you really think it’ll be released there?

Stockman: I don’t think it’ll be released there. Many film distributors have already come out saying that they don’t wanna risk the wrath of the military, of intelligence, of terrorist groups to show a film that shows one of the most embarrassing incidents in Pakistani history. So again, I think this is going to be something that if you hear about it you can easily find in your local DVD shop a pirated copy.

Werman: Journalist Michelle Stockman speaking to us from Islamabad, thank you very much.

Stockman: Thank you.

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The law was passed in November 1800 prohibited Parisian women from “dressing like a man” unless she received permission from the local police.

Host Marco Werman talks with New York Times’ Paris-based Elaine Sciolino, who credits the new Socialist government under President Francois Hollande with the law’s revocation.

Scoliono says the there had been attempts to modify the law in 1892 and 1909 that would have allow women to wear trousers if they were holding a bicycle handlebar or the reins of a horse.

Last May, a 37-year-old politician, Cecile Duflot, attending a cabinet meeting while wearing jeans, was criticized.

Sciolino called pants a safer choice for Parisian women than wearing a skirt. She said many times, women who wear skirts to work are sexually harassed.

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Marco Werman: Mali is clearly on the minds of the French these days, but there’s another story that might be stirring political passions even more in France, and that is who’s allowed to wear the pants in Paris? A 200-year-old law preventing Parisian women from wearing trousers has been struck from the books. You need to go back to November 1800 when a woman was prohibited from dressing like a man, unless she received permission from the local police. Elaine Sciolino is a Paris-based correspondent for The New York Times. So Elaine, this is one of those they never just got around to changing it laws. Parisian women have been wearing pants for years and quite well, I might add. Why now though? Why this change now?

Elaine Sciolino: We have a socialist government now and it’s trying to do the right thing for women. Right now you’ve got a bill going through the parliament to legalize gay marriage and I think this is just a side issue that kind of got caught up in this wear the–France’s minister of women’s rights finally just said look, we should make it impossible to arrest a woman for wearing trousers in Paris.

Werman: Now, I know President Hollande made a great effort to include a lot of women in his cabinet. Did any one of them kind of bring this up and say hey, listen, as long as we’re here can we talk about this pants law?

Sciolino: Well, it’s interesting because a lot of the women in the cabinet go to work in pants anyway and one of the ministers was criticized for coming to the first cabinet meeting wearing pants. You have another minister who always wears flouncy skirts. And we also had a bit of a controversy over the weekend with the marathon gay marriage debate, where some of the women came in, Mon Dieu, wearing blue jeans, which is really a no-no, but they were let in anyway.

Werman: They don’t have casual Saturday or Sunday in France?

Sciolino: They don’t, not in the national assembly. Even the guys, all the guy deputies had to come in in ties.

Werman: Now I gather other attempts have been made to overturn the law. Why did they fail in the past?

Sciolino: Well, back in 1892 the law was modified so if a woman was riding a bicycle or riding a horse she could wear her pants, but it kind of was–it took a long time to change public opinion. If you can believe it, as late as 1972 a guard prevented Michele Alliot-Marie, who has been a defense and foreign minister, prevented her from entering the Assembly building because she was wearing pants. So what she said, “Sir, if my pants bother you I’ll take them off right now.” So it got her into the–got her in. The other thing you should know is you know, I’ve done a lot of research on the subject and I’ve gone to actually two, as a serious observer of striptease, and I went to a striptease class. And what you will learn in striptease 101 is don’t both coming in pants because you’ll never get them off. You really have to wear a skirt.

Werman: Right, so that’s a lesson you’re directing or targeting at whom, Elaine?

Sciolino: Well, that’s for you to figure out, Marco. You know, if you have women who on their vacations to Paris want to come and take a striptease class, they should pack a skirt.

Werman: Roger, you write in a recent article to explain that pants for women are a safe choice as compared to skirts. Explain what they mean by that.

Sciolino: Well, this is really a serious as well as a frivolous subject because sexual harassment is still quite rampant in France, and this issue came to the fore when there were sex scandals in France, most notably one involving Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund. And in some government offices even, women do not want to come to work in a skirt because if they come dressed in a lovely skirt, they’re going to get remarks and maybe even get touched, which is something that would never be approved of or acceptable in the United States.

Werman: Well, it’s a seemingly anachronistic story with surprising relevance today.

Sciolino: Absolutely.

Werman: Elaine Sciolino with The New York Times in Paris, good to speak with you, thanks.

Sciolino: Lovely to speak to you, thank you.

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Jennifer Cooke, director of the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said France had been reluctant to intervene, preferring instead to let the Economic Community of West African States address the situation in Mali.

But the advance of the rebel Islamic forces southward toward the capital Bamako may have been the turning point for the French, said Cooke.

The fear of a rebellion in the south of Mali threatens to turn the Sahel region into a haven for terrorists, drug traffickers, hostage takers, Cooke said, and could further destabilize neighboring countries of Niger and Mauritania.

Paul Greenberg, a James Beard award winning author, “Four Fish – The Future of the Last Wild Food,” says the Japanese buyer, Kiyoshi Kimura, set the record last year for the most expensive fish.

There are three species of bluefin tuna, Atlantic, Southern and Pacific. Though all three species may be found at any one time on any one menu in the world, Greenberg says it is often Atlantic bluefin that we see on menus in the US and Europe, whereas the Pacific bluefin is more commonly found in restaurants in Japan. All three species of bluefin have suffered from overfishing.

Bluefin tuna didn’t become popular in Japan until after World War 2 when the Japanese were introduced to more fatty foods found in the American diet.

Greenberg cautions sushi eaters of the potential contamination of the tuna found in the waters off Japan due to last year’s Fukushima nuclear meltdown. Mackerel, anchovies and sardines, he suggests, might be better choices.

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Marco Werman: I’m Marco Werman, this is The World. How much would you pay for a fish? Well the head of a popular sushi restaurant chain in Tokyo, just paid $1.7 million dollars for a single blue fin tuna. More than $3,000 per pound of fish that better be some good tuna! Paul Greenberg is the author of “Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food’. Now fish is a traditional dish eaten by the Japanese for the New Year Paul, and each year the prices in the fame Tsukiji fish market keep chalking up a new record, but a million and a half dollars for a single fish, is that excessive or that really what good blue fin, or toro as they call it, is worth?

Paul Greenberg: You know I think it’s something of a stunt to tell you the truth. The person who bought this $1.7 million dollar fish, I think set the previous record last year for seven hundred odd thousand dollars, and I think there’s a certain kind of status associated with buying a somewhat rare thing for a lot of money. So, I don’t think it really reflects the true price of blue fin in the world, but certainly blue fin is a very pricey fish in general.

Werman: Well if it’s a stunt, it could be a pretty expensive stunt. Won’t that drive up the cost of blue fin in restaurants and fish markets around the world?

Greenberg: Well I think what it will do is keep blue fin on the radar as this status symbol fish, which I think is something that is not really good for the fish. You know, I’ve had a lot of tuna over the course of my life. I’ve eaten yellow fin and blue fin and I’ve had very good yellow fin tuna, which is a much more common fin tuna than a blue fin, and it is not more inferior then a blue fin tuna. So I think what it is going to do is keep people talking about a blue fin tuna and for a certain kind of sick consumer, who wants to, you know, just show how fancy he is when he goes out to eat. It’s going to, unfortunately, keep it high atop price lists on fancy menus.

Werman: Paul where did the blue fin reputation come from? Why is it so valuable and sought after?

Greenberg: Well, it’s actually a relatively recent thing, as recently as forty years ago the Japanese didn’t really particularly like blue fin. But my sources indicate to me that blue fin started coming into the Japanese diet after the American occupation, when we actually introduced beef eating and fattier foods into the Japanese diet. Then there was another thing that happened which was, in the late 60’s sport fisherman would go after these, you know, 500,000 pound fish in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, and they were just sort of throwing them in the garbage afterward. At the time, Japanese businessmen were sending over a lot of electronics to the United States, and then flying the planes back empty. At certain points somebody realized, well, if you have all these empty cargo holds, maybe we should fill them up with something else going back. And so, these big blue fins started going back in the empty holds that previously held TV sets and radios so forth.

Werman: Paul, how endangered is blue fin tuna?

Greenberg: Well, it depends on which blue fin you’re talking about. There are actually three different species of blue fin around the world. There’s the Atlantic, the pacific, and then the southern and the Atlantic and the southern have been markedly over fished and are pretty pretty low abundance. Pacific, it’s expected that they are not doing so well either, but we actually don’t really have great stock status information and people are sort of drawn to this enigma of scarcity in the same way that people are drawn to, you know, rhino horn or elephant tusks. When people see things slipping through their fingers and into extinction, there’s two reactions. It’s either, the more ethical among us want to save it for generations, and the less ethical just want to eat it and get it or it’s gone, and then want to be among that last to have tried it. I think there are that many bad people in the world who think that way.

Werman: So from an environmental point of view, what should I know before I order an expensive piece of sushi, or really any piece of sushi?

Greenberg: When you go to have sushi in American restaurants, quite often it’s going to be tuna that’s headlining the menu. And I’ve certainly read that there’s been some radiation detection in, you know, seafood off of Japan, and a big predatory fish that’s going to be a lot of smaller fish. Geez, I, I certainly would think twice about eating that one. So I guess I always say when people go to have sushi, why not at some fish that are more abundant and just as delicious, that have a better managed regime attached to them, that make for a more conscientious choice.

Werman: Paul Greenberg, author of the James Beard Award-Winning bestseller, ‘Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food’. Paul, good to speak with you, thank you.

Greenberg: Thank you, Marco.

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Here’s a video of the auction:

Inouye was elected to the US House in 1959, the year Hawaii became a state. He won election to the US Senate three years later where he served for nearly 50 years.

Hawaii political commentator Dan Boylan, said Inouye made a name for himself during World War II as a member of the 442nd, a highly decorated regiment of Japanese American servicemen. Inouye lost his right arm in combat.

Boylan said Inouye and the rest of the 442nd were known for their bravery and sacrifice because they wanted to prove that they were honorable Americans. As a result, Inouye became a champion of Native American Indians, Israel and any group that was discriminated against.

Inouye knew too well the pain of discrimination. Despite becoming a war hero and decorated veteran, he was turned away at a San Francisco barber shop when he tried to get a haircut.

Boylan said incidents like that only encouraged Inouye to push for social equality.

Well Tuesday, The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History had a kind of re-run of that.

They announced that Nefertiti, a celebrity spider, has died.

Nefertiti was a spidernaut and she traveled into outer space. Last July NASA sent her up to the International Space Station.

Nefertiti had been part of YouTube Space Lab, an online video contest. An 18-year-old Egyptian student came up with the idea to send the spider into space.

Nefertiti lived at the space station for 100 days, proving that her species was able to adapt to the effects of weightlessness and still be able to capture a prey.

Nefertiti landed back on Earth in October, and went to her new home at the Smithsonian at the end of November. She went on display in the “Insect Zoo.”

This morning though, before the museum doors opened, a member of the staff discovered that Neffi, as she became known, had died of natural causes. She was 10-months-old, only two months shy of the average life-span of spiders like her.

On its Facebook page, The Smithsonian said Neffi was “a special animal that inspired so many imaginations.” Neffi will now rest in peace in the Smithsonian’s specimen collection.

Neffi was not the first spidernaut, by the way. “Arabella” and “Anita” — who both spun webs in space — died while living at the first American space station, Skylab, back in 1973.

Tissue samples were taken from Arafat’s remains and will be examined by a team of forensic experts from France, Switzerland and Russia.

James Starrs, professor of law and forensic sciences at George Washington University, directed or participated in the scientific investigations of many controversial figures including outlaw Jesse James and Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler.

Professor Starrs says exhumation experts may never know fully whether Arafat was poisoned because it’s one of the hardest to detect.

“Top Toy” is the franchise holder for “Toys R Us” and “BR Toys” in Europe and Scandinavia.

Sweden has made a push to create more gender-neutral images and gender-neutral activities, said Nathalie Rothschild, a freelance journalist in Stockholm.

In April, a movement for gender neutrality added a new word to the Swedish lexicon that refers to both boys and girls. The pronoun “hen” takes the place of using he (han in Swedish) and she (hon in Swedish).

The pressure to create a more gender-equal country, says Rothschild, is coming from academics, media commentators and feminists.

“It’s particularly affecting children,” said Rothschild. “We have preschools in Stockholm where teachers don’t refer to their (students’) gender, they will refer to them by their first names or as ‘buddies.’ They won’t say he or she is late for school. They’ll say our buddy is late for school.”

“I feel it goes too far when its directed at children because they don’t relate to gender relations and gender identity in the way adults do. And you’re changing education to become something that is not just about learning subjects because every subject gets reinterpreted within the frame of gender neutrality,” Rothschild said.

Last week, Baan was in New York when the city was left staggering from the effects of Hurricane Sandy. Baan did what he’s done many times before — he boarded a helicopter to view the city from above.

And his dramatic photographs show a half-lit, half-dark Manhattan.

Now, a government truth commission is investigating these abuses. But the commission has come under fire from military officials, as well as from torture victims.

Ceceilia Coimbra, torture victim. (Photo: John Otis)

“I can still feel its cold skin,” she said.

Brazil is a world economic power but the country lags far behind its neighbors when it comes to examining its dark past. In Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, hundreds of military officers have been convicted of human rights abuses that occurred during their so-called dirty wars. In contrast, not a single Brazilian military officer was ever been charged for torture or assassination; they’re protected by a 1979 amnesty law.

But legal and political pressures are mounting. In March, a huge protest broke out in front of the Military Club in Rio de Janeiro when retired officers gathered to celebrate the 1964 coup that ushered in the dictatorship.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights recently ruled that Brazil’s amnesty law doesn’t apply in cases of gross human rights violations. Brazil did not comply with the ruling, but last year, President Rousseff announced the formation of a truth commission.

It was an emotional moment because Rousseff, a former Marxist guerrilla, was captured and tortured by the military in 1970.

“Brazil deserves the truth,” she said. “The new generations deserve the truth. Above all those who lost friends and relatives and continue suffering as if they were dying again everyday deserve the truth.”

The truth commission began work in June. But its seven members have just two years to investigate decades of human rights violations by both the military and Brazil’s now defunct guerrilla groups.

Vitoria Gabois, director of the NGO Torture Never Again (Photo: John Otis)

Coimbra and other victims say the truth commission is a sham, designed to polish Brazil’s image abroad.

Victoria Gabois, who heads Torture Never Again, a group that lobbies on behalf of torture victims, says President Rousseff would have preferred a stronger truth commission, but she bowed to pressure from Brazil’s still-powerful military.

“Brazil’s former companions in the armed resistance are making deals with the military and the oligarchs of Brazil,” Gabois said.

Without the Inter-American court ruling, there would be no truth commission in Brazil. Still, some military officers see the commission as a threat. They fear it could be the first step toward repealing the amnesty law, which is the only one of its kind still on the books in Latin America.

Navy Admiral Ricardo Veiga, president of the Naval Officers Club in Rio who opposes the truth commission (Photo: John Otis)

Even among average Brazilians, there is little interest in digging up the past. Many are too young to remember the dictatorship. Plus, the number of people killed or tortured was far lower here than in most other Latin American nations, and many of the perpetrators are now elderly or have died.

Cecilia Coimbra, who is now 71, says achieving closure doesn’t necessarily require trials and prison sentences. She would simply like her interrogators to show their faces and publicly admit they tortured her.

Host Lisa Mullins talks with Andrew Hilton, director of the Center for the Study of Financial Innovation about the economic impact the shutdown will have oversees that may not occur to most Americans

Hilton says shuttering the New York Stock Exchange puts New York in a very vulnerable position because markets in London and Asia could try to steal away listing companies.

Hilton believes Wall Street should look to develop a electronic stock market where trading can continue despite extreme weather events.

He says this event is not catastrophic, but it does jack up the cost of doing business.

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Lisa Mullins: While all of us are focused on the damage Sandy is causing here in the U.S., the Caribbean is already dealing with the storm’s aftermath. More than 60 people were killed in the region as the hurricane downed trees and unleashed flash floods in several countries. Roads were washed out in Jamaica, homes were destroyed in Cuba, and landslides were triggered in the Dominican Republic. But Haiti was the hardest hit by Sandy in the Caribbean, 51 people were killed there. The country, still devastated after the 2010 earthquake, was battered by uninterrupted rain and high winds for three straight days. And, there is another storm causing widespread damage and deaths in Asia. Typhoon Son-Tinh made landfall in northern Vietnam today, two people were killed. Before it became a typhoon, Son-Tinh swept through the Philippines. It triggered flash floods and landslides that killed 27 people. Son-Tinh has now been downgraded, though, to a tropical storm, again, as it heads into southern China. Meanwhile, Sandy is still a hurricane. As we mentioned earlier, Wall Street shut down today because of the storm. It’s the first time since the 9/11 terrorist attacks that the New York Stock Exchange is shuttered in a crisis. Andrew Hilton is with the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation in London. We asked him about today’s Wall Street closure.

Andrew Hilton: Well, it’s certainly not unique. It has happened before. It’s happened in certain circumstances where you’ve had terrorist outages, obviously, it’s also happened if you’ve had extreme weather conditions. But it’s most unusual that it should take place at this time of the year for something that hasn’t actually happened yet. To close the markets in advance of the storm and to suggest that they’re going to be closed for two days is extremely unusual.

Mullins: It’s unusual, but does that mean it has any more impact than if it happened at any other time with more notice?

Hilton: I think it does, yes. The markets nowadays trade around the world. It’s a 24-hour business, seven days a week, really, and to take New York out for a day or for two days means that there’s a sort of discontinuity. You don’t quite know where prices are going to reopen when the market opens again, and people, they’ll have to look for a shock when the market opens. If indeed stocks have been trading in other markets and they’ve gone up or down, that will be magnified because New York was closed for two days.

Mullins: So, who benefits and who loses, in terms of perhaps, industries, fields that are affected, and even other markets that are affected?

Hilton: Well, I think that competitors to New York, presumably, benefit a bit. And that means that London might benefit. It might try and steal some business away from New York on the basis it doesn’t close. I think Asian markets, similarly might feel that they can make a pitch to potential listing companies, “You should list with us rather than in New York because after all our weather is allegedly better than yours,” kind of thing.

Mullins: Is that really an argument?

Hilton: That I suppose is really my concern that the New York authorities closed without really discussing it with Wall Street as a whole, and without discussing it with the investment community. New York is in some sense peculiarly vulnerable because it’s less automated and more dependent on individual trading pits and a floor. Other exchanges tend to be much more electronic, and to that extent, I think that they are less vulnerable to this kind of outage. If we’re going to have more and more extreme weather events, then I think it’s an argument in favor of a sort of all-electronic stock market where you can run it from your basement if you really want to but you can run it from the top of a mountain if you need to.

Mullins: Andrew, can you paint a picture for us perhaps of the knock-on effect in terms of industries that feel the hit even if they are far away from Hurricane Sandy?

Hilton: Well, obviously tourism is devastated. And, I suppose the fact that flights in and out of the U.S. are shut down is pretty devastating for many, many industries. If one thinks how many people actually fly across the Atlantic from Europe to the East Coast of the U.S. every day, it is completely astonishing. Its numbers, 50, 60, 70,000 people fly. Those flights have been canceled. Those people are not moving, presumably most of them had a real business reason to be traveling, so it’s disruptive. It’s not the end of the world. None of this is sort of apocalyptic but it jacks up the cost of doing business.

Mullins: Andrew, any other knock-on effects overseas that might not occur to us at first blush?

Hilton: Well, I think certainly, it’s going to feed the environmental movement, if you like. Extreme weather events are likely to become much more common in the future, and that will feed the environmental movement, it will feed the alternative energy movement, it will give a boost to Green political parties, certainly in Europe if not in the U.S.

Mullins: OK. Andrew Hilton, Director of the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation, in London. Nice to speak with you.

Hilton: Good to speak with you.

Copyright ©2012 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Last year’s uprisings in the Middle East launched the region into a period of turmoil that’s continuing to boil. In the midst of dictators falling, economic uncertainty and fiery protests, an unlikely group is thriving – women entrepreneurs are pushing ahead as crises loom around them.

As pieces of silk fly around the room, First Bazaar, an online shopping site for women, makes a fashion shoot for one of their designers, Abbayya Modern.

Jordanian sisters Hanan and Linda Hallaq launched First Bazaar last March. Some might think that would be an extremely bad time for a company launch, just as the region exploded in revolutions, but Hanan says surprisingly the Arab Spring has been good for business.

She says “actually it was a solution, because a lot of people are afraid to go out from their homes in certain times, for example in the weekends when they have problems or something. This is a solution for the woman and everybody.”

The wave of revolutions that swept the Middle East has brought with it uncertainty – even fear – of what might happen on the streets. So people are increasingly shopping online. And women entrepreneurs are taking advantage of this – venture capital firms are noticing the trend too.

Usama Fayyad, who runs Oasis 500, a startup incubator in Jordan, notes that women are proving to be twice as successful as their male peers in attracting his company’s investment

Oasis 500 decides which start-ups to support after putting them through business boot-camp. And Fayyad says surprisingly a lot of the success stories these days are women. “If you look at the statistics, around 20-22% of the attendees of the boot camp are women. But here’s what’s interesting is, of those, compared to their peers, around 38-40% of our investments are in companies that are led by women.”

Fayyad thinks that because the so-called “glass ceiling” for women is so much lower in the Middle East, women are looking for ways to be their own boss. And so they’re turning to the Internet.

Abeer Qumsieh, founder of a consulting firm, Better Business Jordan, believes that the Arab Spring has given women a voice and the confidence to succeed in business, “because women now can see that they can make a difference,” she said. “You know, when they see from Facebook, Twitter and all the social media aids they can believe literally that they have a say and that their opinion counts and that’s why that they are more involved, more interested in this sector.”

Women entrepreneurs have become such a hot topic in the Middle East that a conference was held in Jordan recently to bolster the new leadership roles of women regionally.

But as much as an event like that tries to encourage women to start businesses, the reality is they still need the moral support of their families to succeed. Fida Taher started Zeytouneh.com, an on-line video cooking site a year ago. She says her mother was incredibly important to her success, “I’m lucky, my parents were very supportive, yes. I think of my mother as an entrepreneur. She’s always been a working mom, and that she was an inspiration for me and I’d like to set an example for my daughter.”

Taher will never forget the lessons that Egypt’s uprising taught her. On the first anniversary of the revolution she flew to Cairo, hoping to find that spark of inspiration. She says she watched mothers and daughters demanding their rights alongside men – a scene she never thought she’d see. “The enthusiasm and courage and the optimism is contagious. It was life changing for me because I’ve learned how to speak louder, how to express myself more and fight for what I believe in because if the Egyptians did it then we women can do it as well.”

But there are still many that view women in traditional roles, even though this debate went by the the wayside decades ago in places like the US.

As if to highlight the difficulties for women, Muhammed Salah, an Islamic television presenter expresses a sentiment that is now seen as taboo in the States – he says it’s fine for women to join the workforce, as long as it doesn’t interfere with their jobs as wives and mothers. “Somebody has to stay at home to take care of the kids, wait for them when they come back from school and study with them and so on. So if a woman doesn’t have these commitments and she has free time, no problem.”

But opinions like his are becoming less common, and women are gaining ground in the business world. And they hope their increasing business clout will give them political influence as well.

Kayyem’s column for the Boston Globe Monday is titled: “Is the foreign policy debate irrelevant?”

Kayyem tells anchor Marco Werman what we will hear from the candidates this evening will be interesting and illuminating but are rarely the issues that will test a presidency.

She says there will be new challenges that the president would never have anticipated. The best example given was during President George Bush’s watch in 2001.

Kayyem says Bush was focusing on Mexican-US relations when he first started, but quickly changed once the September 11th attacks occurred.

Sihanouk helped lead Cambodia to Independence from France and he formed friendships with Mao Zedong and North Korean leader Kim Il Sung and had alliances with the Khmer Rouge which eventually led to disastrous consequences for his family.

Magistad said Sihanouk was “charming and highly entertaining” and he often held four hour news conferences where he would read poetry. She said the former king saw himself as a Shakespearean character — someone who was larger than life at a time when Southeast Asian Politics really mattered.”

“In his spare time, when he should have been governing the country in the 1960s, he would make films with a North Korean film crew because Kim Il Sung was one of his good friends, and he would write love songs, and he would play the saxophone and then he would execute political opponents and then he would make films of the executions and show them in theaters around the country so other people think about opposing him.”

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Marco Werman: I’m Marco Werman and this is “The World”, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI, and WGBH Boston. Here are just some of the words used to describe the former King of Cambodia, Norodom Sihanouk: flamboyant, cunning, ruthless, revered, and reviled. Today, Norodom Sihanouk died in Beijing after suffering a heart attack. He was eighty-nine years old. Sihanouk first became King of Cambodia in 1941 when he was only eighteen. He went on to become a fundamental, yet always controversial part of his country’s history. The World’s Mary Kay Magistad is in Beijing and has followed the late king for years. And, Mary Kay, this must have really felt like the end of an era for you anyway.

Mary Kay Magistad: Well, absolutely. And as I’m listening to that list of words describing Sihanouk, the ones left out are “charming” and “highly entertaining”. I mean I went to many a four-hour news conference that he held and it sounds like that might have been agony, but, in fact, journalists loved going to his news conferences because he would sometimes be histrionic, he would be quoting poetry, he would play off of journalists who might quote poetry back to him. He was always reading very carefully what everyone wrote about him and occasionally he’d go off in a sulk because he didn’t like some cartoon that had been made about him. In fact, this held up the Cambodian peace talks in 1990 I think for a couple of days. He was just an extraordinarily colorful figure.

Werman: So colorful could be a good thing, but if you pull back, generally what’s going to be the legacy of King Sihanouk?

Magistad: Well, different people would answer that very differently.One part of the legacy is that he helped lead Cambodia to independence from France, and that’s something the French definitely didn’t expect when they made him King when he was a teenager. After that though, he felt that he had the ability to be able to outmaneuver the great powers. So as the Vietnam war was building up on Cambodia’s border, he forged relations with China, he helped to found the non-aligned movement, he tried to keep friendly relations with Vietnam and he sort of tried to have it both ways. So the Vietnamese said, “Hey, we want to bring arms across Cambodian territory.” He said, “Sure.” When President Nixon said, “Hey, we don’t like the Vietnamese bringing arms across the country. We’re going to bomb along the border,” he didn’t really protest, but that bombing led to the coup that ousted him from power in 1970 and he never really forgave the Americans for that and he never forgave Lon Nol for that, who was the general who threw him out. So Sihanouk went and joined the Khmer Rouge, again thinking that he could outmaneuver them. Instead, they used him, they came to power, they put him under palace arrest, they killed some of his children, they almost killed him. Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai has to intervene to stop that from happening. He gets out of palace arrest when the Khmer Rouge are thrown out of power and once again he aligns himself with them to try to push the Vietnamese out of Cambodia. And right to the peace accord in 1991, he thought he was outmaneuvering other, the Khmer Rouge, the Americans, the Vietnamese. In the end, Sihanouk ended up getting pushed to the edges of political life by someone who had kind of learned from him, learned at his knee, Hun Sen, who remains the premier in Cambodia now.

Werman: Politically, it sounds like King Sihanouk kind of wavered in the wind.

Magistad: Many people called him mercurial, and in fact, he liked to play off of that and say, “Yes, I’m called the mercurial prince.” He had a very high voice. “Yes, I’m mercurial, but I’m canny,” and he really did see himself as almost a Shakespearean character, someone who was almost larger than life, who was playing out on this great stage of Southeast Asian politics at a time when Southeast Asian politics really mattered. And in his spare time, when he should have been governing the country in the 1960s, he would make films with a North Korean film crew because Kim Il-sung was one of his good friends, and he would write love songs and he would play the saxophone, and then he would execute political opponents and then he would make films of the executions and show them in theaters around the country so other people didn’t think about opposing him.

Werman: How was he viewed by the US government?

Magistad: The US government found Sihanouk to be kind of a pain in the neck quite often and, in fact, Sihanouk had a sort of troubled relationship with the US, particularly in the 1960s. And this wasn’t just with the US government. Peter O’Toole was in Cambodia making the film “Lord Jim” and he ended up complaining in a Time Magazine article that Cambodia was a horrible place, all these mosquitoes, he found a snake in his soup, he never wants to go back. Sihanouk was so angry and he demanded that the US government should shut down Time Magazine. The US government explained that they didn’t do that kind of thing, but once Sihanouk was out, there wasn’t like there was any reconciliation between the US and Sihanouk. That didn’t really start to happen until after the Khmer Rouge were driven from power by invading Vietnamese troops. Finally, the US and Sihanouk were on the same page and eventually in the early 2000s he decided that he was gonna bow out of royal life in Cambodia, so he handed the throne over to his gay ballet dancer son who is now the King of Cambodia, Sihamoni.

Werman: The World’s Mary Kay Magistad in Beijing telling us about the late King Sihanouk of Cambodia. Good to speak with you, Mary Kay. Thanks.

Magistad: Thanks, Marco.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.