Indonesian Women Settle Madagascar

From the Jakarta Post:

A new research report shows that 30 women of Indonesian descent settled in Madagascar about 1,200 years ago, raising the possibility that the island nation was settled through a small, perhaps even unintended, transoceanic crossing, instead of a large-scale planned colonization.

The study titled “A small cohort of Island Southeast Asian women founded Madagascar” published by Proceedings of the Royal Society B reveals that Malagasy, a term that represents people living in the island located off the east coast of Africa, have biological and linguistic connections not only to east African populations but also to Southeast Asia, particularly Indonesia.

Herawati Sudoyo, a senior research fellow of the Eijkman Institute for Molecular Biology in Jakarta said on Monday that Malagasy people descended from the East and West as their ancestors came from both Africa and Indonesia.

Madagascar: Womens Rights, Human Rights

From All Africa:

The political situation in Madagascar is far from improving, after several unsuccessful attempts from national, regional and international mediators to resolve the political crisis during more than a year.

The cases of human rights violations have been much less publicised than the power struggles among the proponents of the political crisis, not only because such information is not of the kind that the authorities would like to publicise, but also because it has not attracted the attention of the international mediators involved in the protracted process for the resolution of the political crisis, nor that of the mainstream media.

Thus, very few local newspapers have reported on the ongoing campaign by human rights defenders for the immediate release of the so-called 'political detainees' who had been arrested by the police during the street demonstrations of September 2009 and had been waiting in vain for eighth months for their cases to be addressed.