Thursday, April 21, 2011
Bradley Manning is a hero
The family of Bradley Manning has welcomed news that he has been moved from a top security military prison in Quantico, Virginia, to a "more open" military facility in Kansas.
Manning, the US soldier accused of downloading and leaking classified cables to WikiLeaks, was transferred to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, early on Wednesday, his aunt, Sharon Staples, confirmed.
His transfer follows sustained protests from human rights campaigners and others over his conditions at Quantico, where he was held in solitary
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Nothing beats scripture': Obama candidly talks about his faith
the royal channel
The wedding will be broadcast live on YouTube as part of an operation to make it the most accessible royal event in history.
Live updates and unique material will also be released on the official royal wedding website, through the British Monarchy’s picture-sharing Flickr account, Twitter and Facebook.
For the first time, broadcast footage of a royal wedding will be streamed in real time on The Royal Channel (www.youtube/theroyalchannel) accompanied by a live multi-media blog put together by St James’s Palace.
Viewers will be able to click to get more information about points of interest along the processional route, for example, or see additional photographs of the happy couple.
Members of the public will also have the chance to upload their videoed messages of congratulations on an official ‘wedding book’, also on YouTube, which will be shown to the couple.
A spokesman said the site would be subject to moderation, but joked that he hoped ‘the majority of messages would be sent in good faith’.
‘Online access to the wedding is a really important component of our service,’ said an aide.
The 'abstinence' underwear designed to put teenagers off sex
Parents are often resigned to the fact that they cannot control their teenagers.
But some mothers refuse to give up trying.
A range of 'anti-sex' underwear has been designed to promote abstinence using slogans like 'zip it' and 'not tonight'.The bizarre collection, sold online, aptly named What Would Your Mother Do, includes 'boy-shorts' underwear, t-shirts and even a tote bag.
WWYMD says: 'We created a line of underwear to use as conversation starters to help reinforce family morals as they relate to relationships and dating.
'We just want to provide you with cute reminders to help you make an impression - somewhat discreetly.'
While unlikely to sway most youngsters in Britain, the designs will perhaps tap into the growing abstinence movement in the U.S.
Monday, April 18, 2011
Love Lost
Our love was lost
But now we've found it
Our love was lost
And hope was gone
Our love was lost
But now we've found it
And if you flash your heart
I won't deny it
I promise
I promise
Your walls are up
Too cold to touch it
Your walls are up
Too high to climb
I know it's hard
But I can still hear it beating
So if you flash your heart
I won't mistreat it
I promise
I promise
Our love was lost
In the rubble are all the things
That you've, you've been dreaming of
Keep me in mind
When you're ready
I am here
To take you every time
Oh our love was lost
Lost, lost, lost, lost....
Our love was lost
But now its found
London Taliban try to impose sharia law on parts of Britain
'London Taliban' is targeting women and gays in bid to impose sharia law | Mail Online
Women who do not wear headscarves are being threatened with violence and even death by Islamic extremists intent on imposing sharia law on parts of Britain, it was claimed today.
Other targets of the 'Talibanesque thugs', being investigated by police in the Tower Hamlets area of London, include homosexuals.
Stickers have been plastered on public walls stating: 'Gay free zone. Verily Allah is severe in punishment'.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Is China Overtaking America?
Joseph S. Nye, Jr. is a professor at Harvard and the author of The Future of Power.
CAMBRIDGE – The twenty-first century is witnessing Asia’s return to what might be considered its historical proportions of the world’s population and economy. In 1800, Asia represented more than half of global population and output. By 1900, it represented only 20% of world output – not because something bad happened in Asia, but rather because the Industrial Revolution had transformed Europe and North America into the world’s workshop.
Asia’s recovery began with Japan, then moved to South Korea and on to Southeast Asia, beginning with Singapore and Malaysia. Now the recovery is focused on China, and increasingly involves India, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in the process.
This change, however, is also creating anxieties about shifting power relations among states. In 2010, China passed Japan to become the world’s second largest economy. Indeed, the investment bank Goldman Sachs expects the Chinese economy’s total size to surpass that of the United States by 2027.
But, even if overall Chinese GDP reaches parity with that of the US in the 2020’s, the two economies will not be equal in composition. China would still have a vast underdeveloped countryside. Assuming 6% Chinese GDP growth and only 2% US growth after 2030, China would not equal the US in terms of per capita income – a better measure of an economy’s sophistication – until sometime near the second half of the century.
Moreover, linear projections of economic growth trends can be misleading. Emerging countries tend to benefit from imported technologies in the early stages of economic takeoff, but their growth rates generally slow as they reach higher levels of development. And the Chinese economy faces serious obstacles to sustainable rapid growth, owing to inefficient state-owned enterprises, growing inequality, massive internal migration, an inadequate social safety net, corruption, and inadequate institutions, all of which could foster political instability.
China’s north and east have outpaced its south and west. Almost alone among developing countries, China is aging extraordinarily fast. By 2030, China will have more elderly dependents than children. Some Chinese demographers worry that the country will get old before getting rich.
During the past decade, China moved from being the world’s ninth largest exporter to its leader, displacing Germany at the top. But China’s export-led development model will need to be adjusted as global trade and financial balances become more contentious. Indeed, China’s 12th Five-Year Plan is aimed at reducing dependence on exports and boosting domestic demand. Will it work?
China’s authoritarian political system has thus far shown an impressive capacity to achieve specific targets, for example, staging a successful Olympic Games, building high-speed rail projects, or even stimulating the economy to recover from the global financial crisis. Whether China can maintain this capability over the longer term is a mystery to outsiders and Chinese leaders themselves.
Unlike India, which was born with a democratic constitution, China has not yet found a way to channel the demands for political participation (if not democracy) that tend to accompany rising per capita income. Communist ideology is long gone, so the legitimacy of the ruling party depends on economic growth and ethnic Han nationalism. Whether China can develop a formula to manage an expanding urban middle class, regional inequality, and resentment among ethnic minorities remains to be seen. The basic point is that no one, including the Chinese, knows how China’s political future will affect its economic growth.
Some analysts argue that China aims to challenge America’s position as the world’s dominant power. Even if this were an accurate assessment of China’s intentions (and even Chinese cannot know the views of future generations), it is doubtful that China will have the military capability to make this possible. To be sure, Chinese military expenditures, up more than 12% this year, have been growing even more rapidly than its economy. But China’s leaders will have to contend with other countries’ reactions, as well as with the constraints implied by the need for external markets and resources in order to meet their economic-growth objectives.
A Chinese military posture that is too aggressive could produce a countervailing coalition among its neighbors, thereby weakening China’s hard and soft power. In 2010, for example, as China became more assertive in its foreign policy toward its neighbors, its relations with India, Japan, and South Korea suffered. As a result, China will find it more difficult to exclude the US from Asia’s security arrangements.
China’s size and high rate of economic growth will almost certainly increase its relative strength vis-Ã -vis the US in the coming decades. This will certainly bring the Chinese closer to the US in terms of power resources, but China will not necessarily surpass the US as the most powerful country.
Even if China suffers no major domestic political setback, many current projections based on GDP growth alone are too one-dimensional: they ignore US military and soft-power advantages, as well as China’s geopolitical disadvantages in the internal Asian balance of power. My own estimate is that among the range of possible futures, the more likely scenarios are those in which China gives the US a run for its money, but does not surpass it in overall power in the first half of this century.
Most importantly, the US and China should avoid developing exaggerated fears of each other’s capacities and intentions. The expectation of conflict can itself become a cause of conflict. In reality, China and the US do not have deeply rooted conflicting interests. Both countries, along with others, have much more to gain from cooperation.
Joseph S. Nye, Jr. is a professor at Harvard and the author of The Future of Power.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2011.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Snaptu: Insects will be important part of UK diet by 2020, says scientist
Consumers in the UK will turn to insects as food as conventional meat becomes scarce, says entomologist
• Insects could be the key to meeting food needs of growing global population
Western diners should get used to the idea of eating insects…
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Snaptu: Obama and the left, Romney and the right | Michael Tomasky
Roger Simon writes in Politico today that while he thinks Barack Obama won't "have a hard time defeating his Republican opponent in 2012, barring a financial meltdown or a major foreign crisis," he sees it as more and more likely that Obama could…
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Monday, April 11, 2011
Happy pills? Who needs them As Prozac prescriptions soar, one woman tells how she travelled to the ends of the earth to beat her depression
Journey of self-discovery: Abi found she didn't need to take anti-depressants once she left her old life behindLast November, the lights went out. A series of catastrophic events had knocked me off my feet and I wanted out.
During the course of six months, I had witnessed a fatal car crash, spent two months on crutches after another accident and broken up with my boyfriend.
Then in November my horse died in front of me and two days later my GP told me I had pre-cancerous cells in my cervix that needed to be monitored. She’d ordered me to reduce the stress in my life — but it seemed that whatever I did, the punches still came.
Sunday, April 10, 2011
Saigon...
Mungkin coba browsing www.jetstar.com dan pilih rute dari HCMC ke Danang
(pesawatnya pacific airline anak perusahaan jetstar yg melayani rute
domestic Vietnam), kira2 1jam flight. Atau mungkin naik train (rute, waktu &
fare bisa dicek di www.seat61.com )
Dari Danang, bisa ke Hoi An salah satu UNESCO World Heritage (kota tua), My
Son (candi yang terbuat dari batu merah), dan Marble Mountain.
Snaptu: If you sleep with a man, trust him to take the pill | Barbara Ellen
Women should stop infantilising their partners
It is time to drop the silliness and the name-calling and approach this issue calmly – how stupid are men? No, really, I want to know – slow, dim, mentally challenged or just plain thick? How bad is…
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Snaptu: Muslims must be free to debate issues such as evolution without fear | Salman Hameed
The hounding of an imam for his pro-evolution views only plays to anti-Muslim prejudice
The imam of a mosque in east London, Dr Usama Hasan, was earlier this year subjected to death threats over his support for the theory of evolution. Whatever the…
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Portrait of the young Gaddafi
Top British diplomats and MI6 officers have spent nearly two weeks questioning Libya’s former Foreign Minister Moussa Koussa in the hope that they can unlock the secrets of Colonel Gaddafi’s war strategy and end his hated regime.
But a crucial insight into the Libyan leader’s mindset has already been provided by Koussa – the top-flight Gaddafi aide who defected to Britain – in a 226-page study of the dictator written more than 30 years ago.
The Mail on Sunday has uncovered a university dissertation – titled The Political Leader And His Social Background, Muammar Gaddafi, The Libyan Leader – written by Koussa when he was studying at Michigan State University in the United States in the Seventies. The document has been buried in the college archive until now.
Prejudice: Gaddafi (far left) is pictured here with a group of British students in the Libyan capital Tripoli in 1973
For his dissertation, part of a master’s degree course in sociology, Koussa conducted a series of interviews with Gaddafi, and his work reveals vital clues about the source of the dictator’s hatred of the West and in particular the British, linking this animosity to a previously unknown visit to London at height of the swinging Sixties.
Gaddafi, who was sent to England in 1966 to complete his military training, claims that during his four-month stay in England he was insulted by British Army officers whom he accused of ‘oppressing’ him for days.
Further secret National Archive reports, also uncovered by The Mail on Sunday, show that by the time Gaddafi came to power in 1969 the British Government considered him mad, moronic, messianic and a genuine threat to the security of the region.
These papers also reveal how Gaddafi’s table manners during a state occasion caused acute embarrassment – as he drank the water from a finger bowl because he didn’t know what it was for – and that the dictator was once a sex symbol in Sri Lanka.
Koussa’s interviews with Gaddafi took place in 1977 and 1978. Koussa was unknown to the Libyan leader and had to rely on wealthy family connections to secure privileged access to him in order to complete his dissertation.
Saturday, April 09, 2011
Sharia Law: Irdayanti Mukhtar from Indonesia is whipped for having an affair
A woman flinches as she is about to be repeatedly caned for having an extramarital affair.
Irdayanti Mukhtar, 34, received nine lashes by Sharia Police for having a relationship with another man, even though she is said to be in the process of divorcing her husband.
The harsh punishment was meted out in front of a crowd of 200 people outside the Al Munawwarah Mosque in Jantho, Indonesia.
Ryan Donovan
Able seaman Ryan Donovan has been arrested after a gun rampage yesterday left Lieutenant Commanders Ian Molyneux dead and Chris Hodge injured. He is pictured here with his crewmates as his sub HMS Astute arrived in Southampton. City council leader Royston Smith, who was visiting the vessel, grappled the gunman to the floor
Wednesday, April 06, 2011
Snaptu: US budget: The shrinking of our society | Michael Tomasky
Without presenting an alternative of fair taxes, Democrats are playing into the Tea Party agenda
Back during the Vietnam war an antiwar senator is reputed to have said that the United States should just declare victory and go home. I've been…
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Snaptu: Obama goes to war, the US left goes awol | Clancy Sigal
Once again, liberals have bought into American power as a force for good. But it's just another ugly, expensive war we now own
The world works best when America leads.
– The late US diplomat Richard Holbrooke
One night, when I was editor of a news…
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