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Friday, 19 August 2016

Chinese President Xi Jinping and NPC’s chairman meet Myanmar’s Suu Kyi

from CCTV News http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNwaFbz1FF8
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This Kind of Corporate Debt Gets Bigger as Rates Drop

Investors can expect pension plans in deficit to demand higher contributions at upcoming funding reviews.

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Japanese government seeks record military budget for fiscal 2017

from CCTV News http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gci3BcLL-fY
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Surveillance camera captures car jumping red light, ramming into truck

from CCTV News http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iJrJ9KrUeg
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Syrian government aircraft hit Kurdish-held area

from CCTV News http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtMqKMbzkzw
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Watch: traffic police officers carry patient to hospital in the rain

from CCTV News http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kkb4CCvUys4
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Rio 2016: Olympic sprinter Shaunae Miller says her triumph ‘emotional & unforgettable’

from CCTV News http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAhhfDJ2yqI
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Image of dazed, bloodied Syrian boy encapsulates horror of conflict

from CCTV News http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_-fNT7LHt0
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Rio 2016: USOC apologizes for swimmers’ behavior in Ryan Lochte 'robbery' case

from CCTV News http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOB1W2xD7_4
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Louisiana floods: Death toll climbs to 13, cleanup underway as waters recede

from CCTV News http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lT5Kpp_Up9c
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Chinese women's volleyball team beats Netherlands to reach final

from CCTV News http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vNUuzLCTbQ
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DPRK denounces South Korea's front-line fire exercise as military provocation

from CCTV News http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhu7twVA_z8
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Rio 2016: Interview with Ren Qian, China’s 15-year-old gold medalist

from CCTV News http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kP7PlTwGqJ0
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Donald Trump finds hope in British Euroscepticism

FOR those still trying to puzzling out what goes on in Donald Trump’s mind, the tweet the Republican nominee put out at 8am on August 18th was more than usually intriguing: “They’ll soon be calling me MR. BREXIT!”

What did that mean? Was Mr Trump belatedly taking credit for British voters’ decision to leave the European Union, as he had urged them to? Had the strong data British retailers had released that day, which suggested the damage Brexit will do the British economy has been deferred for a bit, inspired his tweet?

Or was Mr Trump, finding comfort in one or two obvious parallels between his angry nativist “movement” and British Euroscepticism, merely vowing to triumph in November as it did in June?

Mr Trump’s history with Brexit suggests he probably didn’t know what he meant either. Even while issuing his advice to Britons to vote for Brexit, he had admitted that he didn’t really understand what it meant. On a trip to one of his Scottish golf course, the day after the British referendum, he further demonstrated that—by claiming that Scots were thrilled to have taken “their country back”. In...Continue reading

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Turkey hints military cooperation with Russia

from CCTV News http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SS8rTfz_gWo
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Turkish PM blames Kurdish militants for series of blasts killing 10

from CCTV News http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90pZNh8ThiA
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Chinese zoos help animals beat summer heat

from CCTV News http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8AqQKqrvh8
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US women’s 4x100m relay team qualifies for the final after a rerun, Chinese team eliminated

from CCTV News http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=za3RT_uTcs8
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Man saves woman holding a kitchen knife

from CCTV News http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXVol9psR4M
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Watch: Girl falls out of moving vehicle, gets run over

from CCTV News http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxF9mkBbABg
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Korean Peninsula tensions: South Korea conducts largest-ever live-fire artillery drill

from CCTV News http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDMIgHbWBuw
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Turkish president blames Gulen followers for role in bomb attacks

from CCTV News http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skgqh7zjBWc
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China gets first data from its 'hack-proof' satellite

from CCTV News http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KsuXYvufbE
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Chinese FM to attend trilateral meeting of China, Japan and South Korea

from CCTV News http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GLc-k3P5jA
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Cargo train services between Xi'an and Warsaw launched

from CCTV News http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNDNQZNr8-M
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Tough conditions make California wildfire hard to contain

from CCTV News http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbXbk_4Q9WI
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Philippines gets first Japan-funded patrol ship to beef up coast guard

from CCTV News http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aslo_c5yV7I
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China, Myanmar agree to strengthen political cooperation, solve suspended dam issue

from CCTV News http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3JHKw7qEHs
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Rio 2016: US swimmers could face charges after alleged Rio attack

from CCTV News http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vu2XSCKeB3k
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At least 10 killed in Libya car bombs

from CCTV News http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6_DSfAArKQ
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Wounded child in Syria's Aleppo sparks social media outrage

from CCTV News http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmJy8F_I_cQ
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Thursday, 18 August 2016

From LA to CA

Thirteen people have been killed and 30,000 forced to leave their homes by severe floods around Baton Rouge in Louisiana. For the second time this year the state’s governor, John Bel Edwards, declared a state of emergency, which allows governors to tap state funds and some federal assistance. In March floods forced thousands from their homes and killed four people. The coast guard and an impromptu flotilla dubbed the Cajun Navy has come to the aid of many of the stranded. The state government is calling for more volunteers to help remove mud from homes as the waters recede. Returning residents have been warned to beware of snakes and ants also sheltering from the floods.In California 80,000 people have been ordered to leave San Bernardino County, to the east of Los Angeles, where a fire is advancing. The blaze, which began in the canyons around San Bernardino and spread quickly in high winds, has already burned up 30,000 acres, destroyed homes and made Interstate 15 impassable. It is just one of three fires wreathing parts of the Golden State in smoke. One in the northern part of the state, at Clayton, east of Oakland, is thought to be the work of...Continue reading

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Fantastic people

Paul Manafort, Trump whisperer

IN A bid to signal readiness to govern, Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, named the heads of her White House transition team on August 16th. The team—which will vet potential senior members of a Clinton administration and begin policy planning, in a standard practice for major party nominees—will be chaired by Ken Salazar, a centrist former senator from Colorado and ex-interior secretary, distrusted on the left for his pro-trade and pro-business instincts.

A day later, signalling his readiness to wage a bare-knuckle, brutally populist slugging-match to keep Mrs Clinton from power, Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, announced a shake-up of his own team, appointing as his campaign chief executive Stephen Bannon, the chairman of Breitbart News, a hard-right, conspiracy-tinged website. Aides to Mr Trump told the New York Times that the businessman is also being advised on his upcoming debates with Mrs Clinton by Roger Ailes, a vastly experienced media strategist who cut his teeth teaching Richard Nixon how to appear more likeable on television. Mr...Continue reading

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Kaned

JOSHUA MORROW testified that he had been taken to a parking garage and searched for a recording device. His wallet, phone and keys were taken away. Mr Morrow, a political consultant, was patted down by the security detail of Kathleen Kane, the attorney-general of Pennsylvania, before they met for lunch. Over the meal, they hatched a plot to deny illegally leaking secret documents from a grand-jury proceeding. Mr Morrow’s tale was one of many such details revealed during Ms Kane’s trial. Her tenure in office, which started with such promise, ended in a conviction on nine charges, including perjury and conspiracy, on August 15th. She resigned a day later.

Ms Kane was elected in a landslide in 2012. Not only was she the first woman to become the state’s attorney-general; she was the first Democrat to win since the job became an elected position in 1980. She had a good start. During her first year she earned praise for calling Pennsylvania’s ban, then in force, on same-sex marriage “wholly unconstitutional” and refusing to defend the state in a federal lawsuit against it. She also took a stand in favour of gun control, preventing...Continue reading

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Normalising narcissism

THE website of the American Psychiatric Association warns members not to opine on the mental health of Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton or other challengers for the White House. The notice, first reported by the Washington Post, reminds psychiatrists that it is unethical to psychoanalyse public figures whom they have never met, though this election’s “unique atmosphere” may make them want to try. The temptation is clear. Crack open the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders”, a widely used handbook, and the checklist for Narcissistic Personality Disorder could be notes for a Trump profile. Symptoms include abnormal attention-seeking, self-centredness, a sense of entitlement, exaggerated self-appraisal (ie, fibbing about achievements) and warped relations with others. The outside world is mostly of interest as a mirror, reflecting back on the narcissistic self. Mr Trump assured a recent interviewer: “I am much more humble than you would understand.”

If Republicans hope to reclaim their party, they need to grasp how their leaders—including people who disagree with Mr Trump on many questions of...Continue reading

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Hot sauce

Megan Barry, standing by

DURING last year’s mayoral race in Nashville, Megan Barry was accused of being an atheist; she duly went to church for a laying-on of hands. But if Music City remains traditional enough for politicians’ faith to be a sticking-point, it is sufficiently liberal to have installed Ms Barry, who as a councillor conducted its first same-sex wedding, as its first female mayor. Her experiences suggest a possible strategy for Democrats elsewhere, as well as the frictions they may experience.

One has been with the Republican supermajorities in the Tennessee capitol, around the corner from her office—part of a widening stand-off between left-leaning southern mayors and conservative legislatures. In 2011 Nashville was involved in an early tussle over protections for gay and transgender people; this year a state bathroom bill like the one that ignited controversy in North Carolina failed, but a measure letting counsellors turn away patients on the grounds of “sincerely held principles” was passed. That cost Nashville at least three convention bookings, Mayor Barry laments, gently noting that the state...Continue reading

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The only way is up

FOR many Brazilians, the high point of the Olympic games in Rio de Janeiro came in the rain-drenched Engenhão stadium on August 15th. That was when Thiago Braz (pictured) won an unexpected gold medal, and set an Olympic record, in pole vaulting. Brazil’s beaten-down economy is nowhere near performing a feat that would remind anyone of Mr Braz’s jump. But it may be starting to pick itself back up.

The signs are still tentative. Manufacturers are investing again: imports of capital goods were 18% higher in dollar terms in June than in the same month last year, the first year-on-year rise since September 2014. Industrial production increased in June for the fourth consecutive month after two years of nearly uninterrupted decline. Firms’ stocks of unsold goods are starting to shrink, and the number of lorries on motorways has stopped falling.

Firms are not yet ready to hire more people, says Arthur Carvalho of Morgan Stanley, a bank, but firings have slowed. That is making consumers less glum; one consumer-confidence index rose for the third straight month in July. After repeatedly reducing its growth forecasts, the IMF recently revised...Continue reading

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Open city

Happily same-sex in the city

OMAR GARCÍA CERVANTES, an aspiring novelist, was brought up in the state of Veracruz but moved to Mexico City 16 years ago. As a gay man, he is happier there than anywhere else. Mexico City has grown only more welcoming since he moved there. In November last year the mayor, Miguel Ángel Mancera, signed a declaration proclaiming its gay-friendliness. Gay marriage has been legal in the city since 2010; under a law passed in 2014, people can change their legal sex simply by applying to alter their birth records. Hate crimes against gays are almost unheard of, says Alejandro Brito of Letra S, a gay-rights activist group.

Outside the city, the climate is more forbidding. Fans of the national football team are wont to shout “puto” (“faggot”) at opposing goalkeepers. The Catholic church, the spiritual home of 80% of Mexicans, continues to denounce gay marriage as a threat to families. Its influence is especially strong in states north-west of the capital. A demonstration last year against gay marriage in Guadalajara, the second-largest city, attracted more than 50,000...Continue reading

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Belize blazes a trail

TINY Belize is having a moment of global fame. Simone Biles, the United States’ spring-loaded gold-medal gymnast, is also a citizen of the Caribbean state. Human-rights advocates, meanwhile, are more excited about the decision by its high court to decriminalise homosexuality. Section 53 of the criminal code, which threatens people who engage in “carnal intercourse against the order of nature” with up to ten years in prison, is unconstitutional, ruled the chief justice, Kenneth Benjamin, on August 10th. The decision may set a precedent for a conservative region.

It was a long time coming. Caleb Orozco, a leader of the United Belize Advocacy Movement, a gay-rights group, waited three years for a hearing after challenging the law in 2010. His campaign provoked attacks and insults. Churches fought it, both in the courtroom as “interested parties” and through the media. Lance Lewis, president of Belize’s National Evangelical Association, called the court’s ruling “an abomination”.

But it has given hope to campaigners in the ten other English-speaking Caribbean countries that still have Victorian-era anti-sodomy laws on their...Continue reading

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A narrow passage

Inspectors knock

TO BECOME a Japanese citizen, a foreigner must display “good conduct”, among other things. The rules do not specify what that means, and make no mention of living wafu (Japanese-style). But for one candidate, at least, it involved officials looking in his fridge and inspecting his children’s toys to see if he was Japanese enough (he was).

Bureaucratic discretion is the main reason why it is hard to get Japanese nationality. The ministry of justice, which handles the process, says officials may visit applicants’ homes and talk to their neighbours. It does not help that wannabe Watanabes must renounce any other passport: Japan does not allow dual nationality. And applicants must have lived in Japan for a minimum of ten years. Other requirements—speaking Japanese, holding sufficient assets—are similar to those in many countries, but still daunting.

Small wonder that so few people naturalise. Last year the government received just 12,442 applications, which take 18 months or so to process; it granted citizenship to 9,469 people, compared with almost 730,000 in America. But that at least suggests most...Continue reading

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Cowboys and Indians

Full steam

WITH all respect to the endearing Fu Yuanhui, the Olympic swimmer whose goofy post-race interviews have made her a global star, the Chinese are creatures of the land, not the water. On the beaches of Sanya on the southern island of Hainan, China’s new Hawaii, crowds of holidaymakers in tropical shirts dabble awkwardly at the water’s edge; few actually plunge into the sea. In the Sanya market a fishmonger explains a national aversion to deep water more bluntly: the Chinese, she says, simply don’t have sea legs. Refusing to go afloat herself, she buys her fish from the boat people living in the harbour, an ethnic subgroup whose generations have come into the world afloat and gone out the same way. Tanka, as these people are called in southern China, have historically faced discrimination. Even the name, “egg people”, has the force of an insult in Chinese (they call themselves “on-the-water people”).

So it is striking how large water now looms in China’s diplomatic calculations and in the region’s geopolitics, nowhere more so than in the South China Sea that Sanya looks out on. It is there that the gunboat diplomacy which China has employed...Continue reading

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A hopeful Aga saga

Khorog at rush hour

THE region of Badakhshan, which covers most of the eastern half of Tajikistan but hosts barely 3% of its population, is probably the poorest bit of the former Soviet Union’s poorest country. Scraping a living at the rugged western end of the Pamir mountains, its people feel remote from the government in Dushanbe. Their biggest town, Khorog, where anti-government violence has broken out twice in the past four years, is slap on the border with turbulent Afghanistan to the south. Warlords and drug-traffickers, often one and the same, frequently hold sway on both sides of the frontier. The inhabitants, most of whom follow the Ismaili version of Shia Islam, were generally on the losing side of the vicious civil war that ravaged Tajikistan from 1992 to 1997.

Their biggest benefactor by far is the Ismailis’ hereditary leader, Prince Karim Aga Khan. A Swiss-born British citizen, he is resident mainly in France; one of his horses recently won the Epsom Derby, one of the grandest British races of the year; he also skied for Iran in the 1964 Winter Olympics.

His most ambitious educational project in...Continue reading

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Transported

“NO TWO nations could be closer,” insists Malcolm Turnbull, Australia’s prime minister, of his country’s ties with New Zealand. Gary Howes is not so sure. Like many young New Zealanders, he moved to Australia with his family when he was a child. “Australia is my home,” he says. But after a brush with the law Mr Howes, now 25 years old, was locked in an immigration detention centre and then deported to New Zealand, a country he says he barely knows.

Immigration detention centres in Australia now hold almost 200 Kiwis, more than any other nationality (Australia also keeps some would-be immigrants in camps in Papua New Guinea and Nauru). About 650,000 New Zealanders live in Australia, ten times the number of Australians in New Zealand. They are entitled to “special category” visas, which allow them to live and work in Australia without restriction. But they are not citizens, and so are subject to the tighter rules on the conduct of immigrants introduced by Tony Abbott, Mr Turnbull’s predecessor. In particular, any foreigners who are jailed for a year or more lose their visas automatically.

Because their visas are otherwise...Continue reading

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