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Monday, 23 May 2011

Chinese Journalists Barred from Shuttle Launch!




 

William Pentland CAPE CANAVERAL, FL - MAY 15:  The U.S. and End...

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Chinese journalists were not allowed into the Kennedy Space Center for the May 16th space-shuttle launch as the result of a little-noticed provision in the federal budget approved by Congress in April.

Ironically, Chinese scientists were responsible for building key parts of the Endeavor’s $2 billion payload, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer.

A spokesperson for the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration told ScienceInsider that the agency was simply following instructions in last month’s spending bill, which prohibited NASA from using any resources to host Chinese officials at any NASA facility.



The Chinese journalists were considered government employees and thus subject to the ban because they worked for an official Chinese news agency, Xinhua.

An editorial on Wednesday in China Daily attacked the policy as insulting and counterproductive:

China’s scientists have played a crucial role in designing and manufacturing some core parts of the device. However, Chinese journalists who hoped to cover the launching of Endeavor were denied entry to the site by a ban initiated by Frank Wolf, chairman of the Committee of Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies in the House of Representatives.
The United States’ National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) revoked the media passes granted to journalists from China due to the ban, or the ‘Wolf Clause’, which was regarded as ‘discriminative’ by even Americans themselves.
The ban — also known as the ‘Wolf clause’ because it was sponsored by Representative Frank Wolf (R-VA) — also prohibits scientific collaboration between Chinese and U.S. scientists. For a more detailed history of the ban, please read a previous my previous post on the issue here.

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Changes needed at IMF




Global Trends By MARTIN KHOR

The International Monetary Fund is looking for a new leader after the downfall last week of Dominique Strauss-Kahn. The way its chief is selected and its policies have to be changed.

LAST week’s arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn on charges of sexual assault was followed by his resignation as managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

This quickly sparked a race for his successor in the most important position in finance among international organisations.

European leaders were quick off the mark, arguing that the post should again be taken by a European, as according to the old but discredited tradition.

It has been increasingly recognised that the convention that the IMF chief must be a European while the World Bank president should be an American can no longer be justified.

The two leaders should be selected from persons from any country according to merit, and not on the basis of their being European or American, which is a colonial or neo-colonial principle.

Candidates from developing countries should have an equal chance, especially since these countries have increased their share of global GNP, and many of them (especially China and other Asian nations) have large foreign reserves.

But the European Commission president and the political leaders of Germany, France, Italy and other European countries are insisting on another European, giving various reasons such as Europeans are the biggest creditors, are having a serious crisis and have candidates of merit.

Ironically, the apparent “front runner” is another French citizen, the finance minister Christine Lagarde.
Why should a French national succeed another French national who had to resign in disgrace, and when the top IMF job has previously been held disproportionately by French nationals (who have had the job for 35 of the 64 years of the IMF)?

European leaders are arguing that the IMF chief needs to be European because much of the present IMF loans in value are going to European countries like Greece, Ireland and Portugal, and Europe is in a serious financial crisis.

They argue that a European IMF chief would be best for dealing with the European crisis as he or she would understand the region better. This is a strange argument fraught with double standards.



When East Asian countries suffered a debt crisis in 1997-99, and the IMF’s main clients became Thailand, Indonesia and South Korea, no one argued that the IMF should have been led by an Asian who could more deeply understand the region’s problems.

Similarly, there was no hope that an African or South American could occupy the upper posts of the IMF, even though many countries in those regions were in financial crisis and were the main borrowers in the 1980s and 1990s.

Veteran journalist and respected analyst of international organisations and affairs Chakravarthi Raghavan argues that the spreading economic crisis in Europe is indeed a valid reason for a non-European to head the IMF.

In the 1980s, when democratising international institutions was on the agenda, the United States and Europe argued that since the developing countries were borrowers, they could not be allowed to control the IMF or World Bank, said Raghavan in comments to the IPS press agency.

“This logic applies here. No European should be allowed to head the IMF,” he said, adding that the IMF’s rescue packages for Europe had become efforts to protect the interests of French and German banks who were major creditors and bond holders of Greece, Portugal and Spain.

European countries hold just over 30% of the votes, the United States 16.7%, Japan 6% and Canada 3%.
If developed countries unite under a single candidate, they will most likely get their way.

Many developing countries have recently called for an open and democratic selection process for the heads of the IMF and World Bank.

Developing and emerging countries have control collectively of 44.7% of the votes. The IMF chief must get 85% of the votes.

Ministers of the G24 (a group of developing countries that operate in the IMF and World Bank) meeting in April, repeated their call “for an open, transparent, merit-based process for the selection of the president of the World Bank and the managing director of the IMF, without regard to nationality”.

They also called for “concrete actions and proposals to be put forward to guarantee this change”.
Though the selection of a new chief is the present preoccupation, more important is the reform required for the IMF’s policies and operations.

A South Centre paper, authored by chief economist Yilmaz Akyuz, points to its failure in preventing financial crises, which is its main task.

In its emergency lending activity, the IMF has also performed badly.

It has advocated pro-cyclical policies to countries taking its loans, often deepening the countries’ crises.
It has also failed to distinguish between countries facing liquidity and solvency problems, and lent to countries to repay their loans, with unfair terms of burden-sharing between the debtor country and its creditors.

The changeover of the leadership of the IMF is a good opportunity to discuss the weaknesses of the IMF and to reform the policies.

Sunday, 22 May 2011

Singapore PM Lee and new cabinet sworn in





Singapore's new cabinet has been sworn into office, with Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong pledging that the government will evolve in tandem with the aspirations of a new generation of Singaporeans.

Prime Minister Lee said: "The Government cannot stand still. It must evolve in tandem with our society and our people. That is the best way for our Government to serve and to govern, in accord with the spirit of the times and the aspirations of our people".

The new cabinet was sworn into office by President S R Nathan on Saturday.



The swearing-in ceremony for the 15 ministers and 10 ministers of state took place at the Istana, the official residence and office of the president of Singapore.

The new cabinet sees a fresh injection of new faces and the retirement of nine ministers including Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew and Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong.

Lee has opted for a smaller cabinet, with only 15 ministers - down from the previous 21. The average age is 53, down from 59.

Source: Xinhua

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Old IMF, new world; Selection of new IMF head should be open, transparent: IMFC




Behind The Headlines By Bunn Nagara

The world continues to change rapidly in economic terms, but some primordial institutions refuse to do so.

AS soon as Dominique Strauss-Kahn resigned as managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on Thursday, European leaders insisted that his successor had to be another European.

The IMF is a global institution with 188 members worldwide. Yet in its 67 years, it has been headed by a European with an American deputy managing director.

With American presidents at sister organisation the World Bank, the IMF’s European front appears to camouflage a dominant US influence. The US wields more influence in the IMF than any other member.

Thus the European clamour for Strauss-Kahn’s successor to be another European translates into sustaining the status quo. The arrangement has seen France taking the lead, with four Frenchmen so far heading the IMF.

Brazil, China, India, Japan and South Africa have challenged that lopsided “tradition” in urging that the choice be based on merit. The tradition of having a European overlord is a colonial-style arrangement that represents neither the IMF’s modern international membership nor the realities of global economic power.

The leading European candidate is French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde, who is not without problems of her own. A French court will decide next month whether to order a full-scale inquiry into her questionable actions involving big money and high politics.

For Lagarde to be a Western frontrunner despite her personal liabilities shows the weakness of Western candidacies in general. Britain, France, Germany and Italy have expressed support for her candidacy, although Britain had also voiced a possible need for a non-Westerner.

The collective European push for a speedy succession, and for “unity” among European members around a single candidate, reveals something of the politicking for continued Western dominance of the IMF.

A G8 meeting in Deauville, France, in the next few days would “decide” on Strauss-Kahn’s successor. That Russia is a member of that elite club may explain its relatively low profile in pushing for changes in the system among major emerging market economies.

Two months ago, IMF reforms finally moved towards better international representation by including Brazil, China, India and Russia among its top 10 shareholders. Two years ago, they had pushed for more IMF bond purchases to increase their voting share.

The world’s “emerging market and developing countries” together hold the biggest share of votes at 44.7%. However, their lack of unity around a single candidate to succeed Strauss-Kahn has given European members the upper hand in deciding on the successor and IMF policies in general.

This means no “bloc” represents major emerging market economies or their interests. So there is the anomaly of G8 countries, which collectively have a smaller share of votes, coming to decide on the IMF’s future.
That may be tradition, but it is not demo­cracy. The remarks of European leaders themselves have been particularly revealing.

They say the IMF’s next managing director should be a European not because of tradition, which they know is indefensible, but because a European would better “understand” Europe. A European head would have “more intimate knowledge” of Europe’s debt crisis.

Indeed the IMF’s biggest clients are currently European, the major ones being Romania, Ukraine, Hungary and Greece. Other European countries in financial trouble include Iceland, Ireland and Portugal, with Spain and Britain also on or near the ropes.

This in fact means that for an IMF chief to be more professional and neutral, and seen to be so, he or she should be a non-European. For the post to go to a European would risk a conflict of interest.

If Asians had insisted on an Asian head of a global financial institution soon after the 1990s Asian financial crisis, Western leaders would have rejected it as inappropriate. After more than a decade, Asians have learned from that experience and moved on, while the US and Europe have produced crises of their own.

It must therefore be equally inappropriate for a European to head a global financial institution today. If Europe’s best financial minds cannot deal with their several crises at home, what hope is there of solving the world’s larger financial problems?

Even under Strauss-Kahn, who was supposed to better “understand” Europe’s financial mess, the IMF’s pro-cyclical policies made economic matters worse. These policies affected several European countries as well as others elsewhere.

Where special inputs are needed, a non-European managing director can always have access to appropriate advisers. Strauss-Kahn himself had China’s Zhu Min as special adviser at the IMF when China became the world’s second largest economy.

French Transport Minister Thierry Mariani said in support of Lagarde’s candidacy that he was “able to verify her popularity among ministers of large emerging countries”. That underlines the importance of large emerging countries, even for France, so they are now asking why any of their candidates is less suitable.

It is not possible to reconcile meritocracy with an insistence on a French candidate for the IMF post. When the European Com­missioner for Monetary and Economic Affairs tried to do so, he tripped over himself.

Olli Rehn said “it is essential that the appointment will be merit-based ... it is a merit if the person has quite solid knowledge of the European economy.”

For European leaders to insist on a European because of his or her assumed superiority would amount to racism anywhere else. But then the IMF is an old-fashioned institution.

There is a more nuanced argument that the personal origin of the IMF’s managing director does not matter so long as he or she can introduce meaningful change. None of the IMF’s European heads has done that before.

Many voices around the world now say that for the needed changes to happen, it would be “a merit” if that person came from the non-Western world.


Selection of new IMF head should be open, transparent: IMFC

 The International Monetary and Financial Committee (IMFC), the policy advisory body of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), on Saturday called for an "open, transparent and merit-based" process in selecting a new IMF head.

"The selection process for a new Managing Director has begun. The challenges we face are pressing, and an early conclusion to the selection process will be advantageous," IMFC Chairman Tharman Shanmugaratnam said in a statement.

"It is also imperative that the process be open, transparent and merit-based, so as to ensure the selection of a highly capable candidate, with the qualities needed to engage with a broad group of stake-holders internationally and sustain the Fund's active and effective role in global economic management," the statement added.

The IMFC, comprising finance ministers and central bank governors, is the primary advisory body of the IMF Board of Governors and deliberates on the principal policy issues facing the IMF.

Former IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn resigned earlier this week after he was accused of sexually assaulting a hotel maid in New York. John Lipsky now serves as acting Managing Director of the Washington-based financial agency.

Source: Xinhua,
 

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Saturday, 21 May 2011

“God’s Country: The New Zealand Factor”





 
Michael Tobias Green Conversations 

Aoraki/Mount Cook is the tallest mountain in N...
Image via Wikipedia

New Zealand may well be the most desirable tourist destination in the world. It is certainly among the most beautiful island nations on the planet, its biodiversity magnificent in every respect. New Zealand’s artistic and scientific communities are remarkable; the nation’s politics a model of true democracy in action. In fact, there are so many wonderful things to say about the country that my co-author Jane Gray Morrison and I were hesitant, in our newly-released Dancing Star Foundation book, God’s Country: The New Zealand Factor, to lavish too many superlatives on a country that might find it difficult to live up to our shared belief in, and love of, this particular nation, her people and her wildlife.

With just over 4 million human occupants, approximately 80 endemic bird species (including those sea birds which visit and breed there), three native bats and countless marine mammals, but no snakes or other predators in the normal sense (other than Man himself), New Zealand – for some 80 million years – has enjoyed relative tranquility.

Then things started to change. Settlers from England, Norway and elsewhere brought cows and sheep and dogs and (inadvertently) mice and rats. Possums were deliberately introduced in the early 1800s for the purposes of hunting and a fur trade (a tragically omnipresent fact today: possums kill native biodiversity). The result of this misstep in many decades past: conservation in New Zealand has meant, in many guises, killing: the killing of bio-invasives. Not just the “eradication” of possums, but the killing of three introduced members of the Mustelid family, namely, stoats, weasels, and ferrets, whose rapacious hunger for native birds (along with that similar hunger on the part of three species of rats, feral cats, dogs, and mice) has exerted horrific impacts upon native species who for millions of years had no concept of fear and are, today, sitting ducks.

This is where immuno-contraception for predators (that might necessitate genetically modified organisms) has become a major public and scientific debate as in few countries. Where human rights versus animal rights has taken on dimensions that countries like the United States can scarcely identify with, given the fact North American birds and other mammals co-evolved with native predators, whether coyote, bobcat, mountain lion, rattle snake or wolverine. Such creatures never existed in New Zealand. The country’s native birds, like the Kiwi, after whom the resident locals have nick-named themselves, never had to worry about being eaten and thus, in a few cases, gave up the need of flight, saving their energy, and becoming ground dwellers (Kiwi and Kakapo, for example, not to mention the numerous species of now extinct Moa as well as a giant penguin nearly the size of the equally giant penguin fossils found recently just South of Lima, Peru).



New Zealand has been called a “capital of extinctions” as a result of the human introduction of those aforementioned non-native mammalian predators. A pet dog once devastated an entire penguin rookery in a single evening on the South Island a few years ago. In addition, there are thousands of invasive plant species, like Darwin’s Barberry or Chilean Fireweed, in addition to non-native wasps that compete for tree sap with native parrots -the two sub-species called Kaka, or Nestor meridionalis.

New Zealand is unique in a myriad of ways, not just because parrots and penguins live side by side, but in the fact that much of her foreign exchange income comes from the sale of animals, shipped live or dead, as well as animal by-products like wool and dairy products. An inordinate amount of New Zealand land has been given over to pasturage for grazing farm animals, a percentage much higher than in the majority of all other nations.

For these, and countless other reasons, New Zealand is truly a template for the study of human nature and ecology. The country probably has more scientists, artists, intellectuals and environmentalists per square kilometer than any other political entity in the world. Her farmers are among the most hardworking, well-read, witty and generous of any. And her history is one that is inextricably tied to the arts, science and exploration. Mark Twain did stand-up comedy in Dunedin after going bankrupt in Connecticut; visits by Charles Darwin, Captain Cook and the great painter William Hodges, as well as (allegedly) Medieval Chinese mariners. Not to mention the original settlers, the glorious Maori and Maorori indigenous cultures.
New Zealand was also the first nation in the world to give women their rights back; to suggest that Antarctica be declared a World Park; and to make itself the first nuclear free nation.

New Zealanders who read of such superlatives will yawn, or exhibit knee-jerk reactions of one sort or another, as should be expected. They share something of a conspiratorial secret (the reason most Kiwi college students who explore the world upon graduation typically return to New Zealand: they know they are living in one of the best countries on earth). Indeed, for most of the world, this is a democracy that represents what a human paradise must look like.

Which is why my co-author, Jane Gray Morrison and I chose New Zealand as a fitting example of a test-case for what the country has exported by way of a welcoming (though somewhat debated) mantra, namely, “Clean, Green New Zealand.” Could it be true?

To find out more about the dialectics of this tourism slogan, and all of the “Middle Earth” glories that the “Lord of the Rings” locations made globally manifest, we suggest a visit to New Zealand. She can certainly use your tourist dollar revenues right now, especially in Christchurch, following one of the worst natural disasters in the nation’s history, nearly three months ago on February 22nd, Tuesday, at 12:51 pm, the 6.3 devastating earthquake.

Notwithstanding that tragedy, there is no better place to examine what a human paradise might, could, or should mean in the 21st century.

Copyright Michael Charles Tobias, 2011

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