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Spiegel Online

Africa has a new natural resource it’s exporting — thousands of young soccer players, recruited to the continent’s exploding number of academies, the best of whom are shopped around by agents or funneled to European clubs that work around the E.U.’s human trafficking laws. The rest are discarded, either at home on on Europe’s streets. Indigenous NGOs fight the trade, but demand grows daily — and the exposure the World Cup brings the continent will only make things worse. (Christoph Biermann and Maik Grossekathofer/Spiegel Online; HT: The Goal Post.)

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Read of the Day: The Football Stitchers of Sailkot

The Football Stitchers of Sailkot: One Pakistan city will produce up to 60 million soccer balls this year for world consumption — paying workers 75 cents for hand stitching balls that will fetch up to $150. Western activists got child labor banned in these factories…so now girls age 10 are hauling bricks and working in metal shops instead. (Hasnain Kazim/Spiegel Online)