tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22027551335262808892024-03-08T05:28:51.258+08:00my humanities classUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger1204125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2202755133526280889.post-21339783036006879842014-02-03T15:39:00.000+08:002014-02-09T15:39:55.355+08:00Growing wealth gap 'reaching point of hurting society'<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18.899999618530273px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
THE Obama administration has devoted countless campaigns and speeches, and political muscle to the issue of income inequality, but the gap between the very rich and everyone else continues to grow.</div>
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In his latest State of the Union address last week, United States President Barack Obama noted that "today, after four years of economic growth, corporate profits and stock prices have rarely been higher, and those at the top have never done better. But average wages have barely budged".</div>
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Indeed, "inequality has deepened" and "economic mobility has stalled", he said.</div>
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Some figures to consider: From 2009 to 2012, the incomes of the top 1 per cent grew by 31.4 per cent, according to a study by economist Emmanuel Saez from the University of California, Berkeley. But for the remaining 99 per cent, incomes grew by a meagre 0.4 per cent.</div>
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Dr Dimitri Papadimitriou, president of the Levy Economics Institute, said: "If you look at the income distribution among the top 0.1 per cent, they control close to 12 per cent of total income. This doesn't exist in any other country."</div>
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The top 5 per cent of households, with incomes of US$191,157 (S$244,000) or more, took home 22.1 per cent of earnings in 2012, census bureau figures show. In contrast, a similar proportion of income - 27.2 per cent - was shared among the bottom 60 per cent of households earning US$64,584 and under.</div>
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Professor James Galbraith, who directs the University of Texas Inequality Project, attributes the rise in inequality over the last two decades in large part to the growth of two sectors: finance and information technology.</div>
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Dr Papadimitriou noted: "Finance has controlled a big part of the economy... and most of the highest paid are getting more than 100 times the average salary."</div>
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According to a survey done last year by the Pew Research Centre, 47 per cent of Americans say inequality is a "very big problem". "It's difficult for people to be oblivious to what is happening around them… people are working hard, playing by the rules, but they are not on a level playing field," said Dr Papadimitriou.</div>
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The growing wealth gap and the anger it causes have had rippling effects, which surface in varying forms such as the Occupy Wall Street protests and the trouble Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney faced fending off attacks that he was an out-of- touch plutocrat.</div>
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Besides unhappiness on the ground, experts point out that inequality has other far-reaching consequences.</div>
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Dr Galbraith said that "extravagant gains by the already rich" causes inequality which "affects the distribution of political power". In particular, he points to the finance industry's lobbying power and ability to influence policy.</div>
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For example, after the 2008-2009 financial crisis, the Dodd-Frank legislation was signed into law in 2010 with the intention of providing greater controls. But till today, many parts of that law have not been implemented because of the pushback from the financial industry.</div>
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Many proposals have been offered as ways to narrow the wealth gap, including raising the minimum wage and tax reform. "The top tax bracket is only 35 per cent and in Scandinavian countries it is double (that)," says Dr Papadimitriou.</div>
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But raising taxes for the rich is hugely difficult given the fraught relations the Obama administration has with Congressional Republicans. It also runs against an American mindset that supports rewarding enterprise.</div>
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As Harvard professor Larry Summers put it at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos: "America succeeds by raising everybody up... The rhetoric of envy and the rhetoric of tearing down, I don't think, is the right rhetoric for America's leaders." He argued that it is easier to allocate resources while growing the pie, rather than cutting up a "stagnant pie".</div>
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Some observers have cautioned that longer-term trends such as the rising cost of college education and the tendency of people of the same educational attainment to marry one another will make even more intractable the problems of social immobility and wealth disparity.</div>
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Princeton professor Alan Krueger, who is noted for creating the "Great Gatsby curve", which traces the link between higher income inequality and lower income mobility, recently warned that while inequality may act as useful spur, a growing imbalance, driven by globalisation and technology, is reaching the point where it hurts society, the Cornell Chronicle reported.</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2202755133526280889.post-65027296251827496882014-02-03T15:38:00.000+08:002014-02-09T15:38:59.833+08:00Real gap 'may be even greater'<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18.899999618530273px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
IT SHOULD have been a proud moment for China. On Jan 20, Beijing announced that its rich-poor gap had narrowed last year to the lowest level in a decade.</div>
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On top of this, farmers' incomes were growing faster those of city-dwellers, while the relatively undeveloped central and western areas of the country were catching up with prosperous eastern regions, senior official Ma Jiantang disclosed at a press briefing on China's 2013 economic performance.</div>
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But the good news couldn't mask the fact that - still - the "urban-rural gap in China is greater than in any country in the world", World Bank economist Branko Milanovic wrote in a post on Harvard Business Review Blog Network.</div>
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Farmers' median incomes last year were less than a third of their urban counterparts', even after climbing 12.7 per cent to 7,907 yuan (S$1,650) last year. Urban incomes rose 10 per cent to 24,200 yuan.</div>
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Last year, China's Gini coefficient - a measure of inequality on a scale of 0 to 1 where 1 represents complete inequality - was 0.473.</div>
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This was down slightly from 0.474 in 2012, when China was No.29 on the world rankings, with Lesotho being the most inequitable country in 2012 with a score of 0.632, according to the CIA World Factbook. Only three economies in Asia ranked higher than China: Singapore, at No. 26 with 0.478, Hong Kong, at No. 11 with 0.537; Thailand was at No. 12 with 0.536 in 2009.</div>
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A 0.4 score marks the threshold above which social tensions start to rise, according to the United Nations.</div>
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So it is no surprise that President Xi Jinping has pushed with great fanfare reforms to tackle inequality across many fronts, from rolling back state monopolies to curbing overheated property prices to raising taxes on the rich and increasing welfare services for the poor. Corruption, which exacerbates the problem, is also one of his targets.</div>
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Given the lessons from the fall of imperial dynasties throughout China's 5,000-year history, the country's top leaders would be well aware of the dangers of letting inequality fester.</div>
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To be sure, the widening wealth gap is happening across the region. The Gini coefficient for the region as a whole has widened over the past two decades from 0.39 to 0.46.</div>
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What's troubling about China is that its score might be much higher, given the hidden grey income of many households - especially officials. According to the Samsung Institute, China's real Gini reading could be as high as 0.6 in 2012, putting it on par with Latin America.</div>
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Professor Wang Xiaolu of the China Reform Foundation found in 2012 that grey income could amount to 6.2 trillion yuan - roughly the size of Australia's economy.</div>
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And the richest 10 per cent of Chinese households had an annual income 21 times that of the lowest 10 per cent. This was significantly higher than the official estimate of 8.6 times.</div>
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A key reason for China's inequality is the dominant role of the government in allocating resources - and keeping the biggest slice of the cake for itself, say analysts.</div>
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In particular, in 2009 and 2010, a chunk of the government's 4 trillion yuan stimulus was converted into grey income, due to inadequate checks which allowed "state money to be easily channelled out into private purses", noted Prof Wang.</div>
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State-owned firms also enjoy unfair advantages over private firms such as "access to cheap loans and land and dominant positions in lucrative markets", said Beijing-based social welfare researcher Zhang Yiqin.</div>
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Property ownership today has become a key symbol of the disparity. Land grabs and property disputes were a key reason behind the estimated 180,000 "mass incidents" such as demonstrations and riots that erupted in 2010, when part of China's stimulus was funnelled into speculative real estate investments, leading to a gross overheating of the property market.</div>
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Now Mr Xi's administration has pledged to make the country more equal. It won't be easy.</div>
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"Implementing the reforms will be difficult amid opposition from vested interests", said Mr Zhang.</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2202755133526280889.post-40973835754013485622014-02-03T15:36:00.000+08:002014-02-09T15:37:02.315+08:00Danger of globalisation backlash growing<div class="byline" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #777777; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 13.75px; margin: 2px 0px 12px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
By Jonathan Eyal Europe Correspondent</div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 18.899999618530273px;">LONDON - No continent is better equipped or more experienced at fighting inequality and poverty than Europe. The Europeans came up with the cradle-to-grave welfare system designed to transfer resources from rich to poor. The continent is also unique in operating a system of massive transfers of cash from wealthy states to their poorer neighbours. Equality in Europe is seen not only as an imperative for individuals, but also for entire nations.<a name='more'></a></span></div>
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Perversely, however, the outcome has been more inequality. The wealth gap between the richest and the poorest European Union states is growing. And last year, the number of people who slid into poverty in Europe was larger than in any other continent, except for Africa, according to a recent global poverty report from the International Red Cross.</div>
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To be sure, the roughly ¤1 trillion (S$1.72 trillion) spent by the EU over the past quarter of a century alone in direct grants to poorer members made a huge difference: Countries such as Greece or Spain may be financially stricken, but they are still better off than they were a generation ago.</div>
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Still, the reality is that Germany remains about a third richer than the European average, while Greece is about a quarter poorer; Europe's centuries-old northsouth divide not only remains, but has also been reinforced by the EU financial crisis.</div>
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More significant, however, have been the growing poverty indicators within each European nation. Throughout the continent, poverty is defined as an income level of less than 60 per cent of the national median household income. In the former East Europe communist countries, up to a fifth of the population lives under this threshold. Around 15 per cent of the citizens of France, Germany and Britain are classified as poor.</div>
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Overall, there are more than 18 million people receiving EU-funded food aid, 43 million who do not get enough to eat each day and 120 million out of a total EU population of 500 million deemed "at risk of poverty" by Eurostat, the continent's statistical agency. "We see a quiet desperation spreading among Europeans," warns the International Red Cross report.</div>
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Wealth inequalities are also rising, often in tandem with growing prosperity, as Ireland's example shows. Two decades ago, just before it embarked on its furious economic growth which earned it the nickname of the "Celtic Tiger", the richest 10 per cent of the population owned 30 per cent of the national wealth. Today, that figure is 36 per cent, the second-highest wealth differential in Europe.</div>
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The continent's disparities and social exclusion trends are only likely to increase, given record-high unemployment. Over 12 per cent of Europe's labour force is currently without a job, with youth unemployment double that rate; in countries such as Spain or Greece, half of all those aged under 25 have no jobs.</div>
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There are many reasons for these developments. Mismanagement is one: huge transfers of cash from wealthier to poorer European countries cannot compensate for bad governance. A European welfare system which just keeps people at the poverty level but offers no incentives for progress does not help either. And a rigid, unionised labour force raises the entry bar for youngsters.</div>
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Yet a key cause for these growing inequalities is globalisation: Skilled people have prospered since they were the best-placed to adapt to changing technologies and working environments, but the unskilled in Europe have been hit hardest, since their jobs have gone to lower-paid workers in the developing world. The most vulnerable group of people in Europe today are not migrants or ethnic minorities but young, uneducated white males, often both unemployed and unemployable.</div>
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World leaders are right to fear the political consequences of this phenomenon. Social exclusion creates a disenchantment with existing political institutions and a yearning for seemingly simplistic new approaches: The growth of racist and anti-capitalist political movements of both the left and right in Europe is an early warning.</div>
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Mr Alexis Tsipras, leader of the extreme left Syriza party in Greece, demands the arrest of all bankers and the confiscation of their assets; he controls almost a third of the country's parliamentary seats. Meanwhile, Ms Marine Le Pen, leader of France's right-wing National Front, regards immigrants as "occupiers" and wants white Frenchmen to be given priority in employment.</div>
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"There is nothing politically more explosive, more dangerous and more destabilising than having a whole generation of young people being very frustrated," said Mr Angel Gurria, the boss of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, at the recent Davos economic forum.</div>
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And, as the middle classes get increasingly squeezed, the danger of a backlash against globalisation and free trade increases.</div>
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The problem for European leaders is that there is little they can do, at least in the short term. Taxing the rich sounds nice, but it never produces enough cash and leads to capital flight. Increasing social expenditure has been tried for decades, and is no longer affordable.</div>
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And, sadly, matters look set to worsen as the continent's overall wealth continues to shrink. According to the EU's own official projections, if nothing is done to reverse the current decline, living standards on the continent will be lower by the middle of the next decade than they were in the mid-1960s.</div>
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And fighting for a slice of an increasingly shrinking pie will get messier.</div>
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<a href="mailto:jonathan.eyal@gmail.com" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">jonathan.eyal@gmail.com</a></div>
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BACKGROUND STORY</h5>
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<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The wealth divide</strong></div>
<ul style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1; list-style: none; margin: 9px 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.3em; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px 0px 0px 15px; padding: 4px 0px; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;">The richest 85 people in the world own as much wealth as its 3.5 billion poorest.</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.3em; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px 0px 0px 15px; padding: 4px 0px; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;">Almost half of the world's wealth is owned by just 1per cent of the population.</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.3em; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px 0px 0px 15px; padding: 4px 0px; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;">The wealth of the 1per cent richest people in the world amounts to US$110 trillion (S$140 trillion). That's 65 times the total wealth of the bottom half of the world's population.</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.3em; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px 0px 0px 15px; padding: 4px 0px; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;">Seven out of 10 people live in countries where economic inequality has increased in the last 30 years.</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.3em; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px 0px 0px 15px; padding: 4px 0px; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;">In the United States, the wealthiest 1per cent captured 95 per cent of post-financial crisis growth since 2009, while the bottom 90 per cent became poorer.</li>
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SOURCES: OXFAM, EUROSTAT</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2202755133526280889.post-68366220332460453322014-02-03T15:34:00.000+08:002014-02-09T15:37:13.322+08:00German leaders want more robust foreign policy<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18.899999618530273px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
MUNICH - German leaders are pushing a vigorous new case that it is time for their nation to find a more muscular voice in foreign affairs, even suggesting that Germany should no longer reflexively avoid some military deployments, as it did in Libya almost three years ago.<br />
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Chancellor Angela Merkel has yet to weigh in on the use of the military, and it is not clear how willing the German public is to embrace a more assertive posture. But a variety of senior officials are urging a rethinking of the country's assumptions about its diplomatic and military role.</div>
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They are driven partly by alarm about crises from Ukraine to Africa but also by unease about the strength of Germany's partnership with the United States after revelations of American spying, and about US officials' increasing reluctance to take the lead in interventions.</div>
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President Joachim Gauck sent the strongest signal yet of a possible change in direction with a speech late on Friday last week at the Munich Security Conference, an annual gathering that attracts an array of world leaders and defence experts and has historically been a forum for sharp policy debates.</div>
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Germany's Nazi and Communist pasts are no excuse for ducking international duties, said Mr Gauck, who has no power to make policy under Germany's Constitution but is expected to guide debate.</div>
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He argued that the current Germany - "the best we have ever known," he said - was well established as a democracy and as a reliable partner and ally and that it should step out "earlier, more decisively and more substantially" on the world stage.</div>
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Mr Gunther Nonnenmacher, co-publisher of Frankfurter Allgemeine, a centre-right newspaper, wrote after the speech that Mr Gauck "may well have spoken the authoritative word in the debate over German foreign and security policy."</div>
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Germany's defence and foreign ministers have also suggested a willingness to pursue a more robust foreign policy, beyond the strong role the country has taken in setting economic policy in Europe.</div>
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Although it is unlikely that the ministers would propose such a change in tone without Dr Merkel's concurrence, it is possible that the Chancellor, known for her caution, is letting others make the case for Germany to leave the sidelines of international affairs, and waiting to see whether the discussion takes off.</div>
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In his speech, Mr Gauck told his 80 million compatriots that stepping up to the demands of a fast-changing world was "the greatest challenge of our time".</div>
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Without mentioning Libya - Germany abstained from a UN vote endorsing military intervention there in 2011 and refused to take any part - Mr Gauck signalled that such behaviour should not be repeated.</div>
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International air strikes against Libya helped lead to the ouster of Muammar Gaddafi.</div>
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German troops have been in Afghanistan since 2001 and in the Balkans since the 1990s. But, particularly during Dr Merkel's second term, the country has shied away from other military action, in part because the euro zone crisis has consumed its attention.</div>
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France has taken a more active role in policing recent conflicts, including sending troops to Mali.</div>
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Germany's new defence minister, Ms Ursula von der Leyen, took the stage after Mr Gauck and said: "Indifference is not an option for Germany."</div>
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On Saturday, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier echoed US officials and other foreign policy makers who have encouraged Germany to act in accordance with its status as Europe's largest and the world's fourth-largest economy by saying: "Germany is really too big to just comment from the sidelines."</div>
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Mr Norbert Rottgen, a member of Dr Merkel's conservative party who heads the foreign affairs committee of the German Parliament, said in an interview that the new tone stemmed from "a coincidence of several events that shake you awake", such as the war in Syria and the conflict in Ukraine, as well as what is known here as the NSA affair: the vast intelligence gathering by the National Security Agency, including the tapping of Dr Merkel's cellphone.</div>
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Longtime observers of German affairs said it was not clear that the new tone would result in major change.</div>
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Mr Josef Joffe, publisher and editor of the weekly newspaper Die Zeit and a visiting professor of political science at Stanford University, wrote in Die Zeit that even the government's proposal for muscularity envisioned military engagement only in homeopathic doses.</div>
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Washington, though, appears to have taken heart.</div>
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US Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel welcomed Ms von der Leyen's pledge to take on a larger role in Africa, and the two agreed that she should visit the Pentagon soon.</div>
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NEW YORK TIMES</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2202755133526280889.post-54539871118316227822014-02-02T15:18:00.000+08:002014-02-09T15:37:24.420+08:00Checkpoint breach raises vital questions<div class="byline" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 13.75px; margin: 2px 0px 12px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 18.899999618530273px;"><br />It has been almost two weeks since the revelation that a Malaysian woman drove her car illegally past the Woodlands Immigration Checkpoint and went undetected for three days.</span></div>
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There are too many questions about how such a security breach could have occurred, raising concerns regarding the competence and alertness of the officers involved.<br />
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These queries need to be answered quickly to reassure Singaporeans that the authorities are on top of their game.</div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit;">Questions: How did the woman drive past immigration control in such a brazen manner without being detected?</span></div>
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It was reported that she tailed the car in front of her and went past the vehicle barrier without stopping for the usual immigration checks. Why did the officer manning the booth not notice her car when it went past? When did he notice and at which point was the alarm raised? If it took a full two minutes for the alarm to be raised, as was reported, why did it take so long?</div>
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After clearing immigration, vehicles proceed to the Customs checkpoint where officers check for contraband and goods to be declared.</div>
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This is some distance away, and if the officers there had been alerted in time, the offender might have been apprehended there. Were they alerted, and when exactly? What is the procedure for such alerts to be passed from the Immigration to the Customs checkpoint?</div>
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It is cold comfort to know that the woman had apparently sailed through Malaysian immigration checks as well, as her passport was not found on her when she was arrested.</div>
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Then, there is another set of troubling questions about how she was able to go undetected for three days.</div>
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Questions: What exactly was the nature of the alert raised by the immigration department to the police and security forces in Singapore after she left Woodlands?</div>
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Was it a high priority warning? What is the procedure when such alerts are raised?</div>
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For example, is every police officer asked to be on the lookout for the driver and the vehicle? This question is pertinent because, on the third day of her illegal stay here, the woman tailed a taxi and the cabby called the police to report her suspicious behaviour.</div>
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He was told to drive to the police complex in Cantonment Road, which he duly did, with the Malaysian driver hot on his heels.</div>
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You would have thought that was the perfect trap to lay. Mission accomplished?</div>
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Alas, when they reached the station, she was apparently questioned about her behaviour but she refused to answer and promptly drove away.</div>
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Did the police officer questioning her know she was a wanted immigration offender? If not, why?</div>
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The woman has been charged and the answers to some of these questions might be clearer when the case goes to court.</div>
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No one wants to be unduly critical of the men in blue because the job they do is a difficult one that sometimes puts their lives in danger.</div>
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Singaporeans know that the country's reputation as a peaceful and secure place is founded on the work they do and are grateful for it.</div>
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But it is a job that requires constant alertness and vigilance all round.</div>
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When so many lapses take place one after another, involving the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority of Singapore (ICA) and the police, it calls into question not just the competence and attentiveness of individual officers involved but also the integrity of the system as a whole.</div>
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Indeed, the Government knows the seriousness of this breach and it could not have expressed its displeasure more clearly than when Deputy Prime Minister and Home Affairs Minister Teo Chee Hean made public his comments:</div>
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"I have expressed my deep dissatisfaction to the Commissioner of ICA and the Commissioner of Police over the breach at Woodlands Checkpoint and the subsequent response actions. This case should have been prevented and dealt with more urgently and decisively as it could have resulted in more serious consequences than what occurred."</div>
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His anger wasn't unexpected because this wasn't a case of someone trying to sneak in stealthily in the dead of night but in broad daylight and under the noses of officers responsible for preventing such incidents.</div>
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If the offender had been, say, a terrorist out to create mischief, and not someone with alleged mental problems and who was behaving oddly, the consequences could have been very serious.</div>
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After the attack on the United States in 2001, and when Jemaah Islamiah terrorist cells were discovered here, the public was assured that the authorities were doing everything in their power to prevent an attack here.</div>
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Numerous arrests have been made over the years and persons detained under the Internal Security Act.</div>
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Singaporeans slept peacefully knowing the country's security forces appeared on top of the situation.</div>
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But the Woodlands breach shows how true the old adage is, that the system is only as strong as its weakest link.</div>
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Is the weakness, though, with the foot soldiers manning the booths at Woodlands and the police station at Cantonment? Or are there wider issues that need to be addressed by senior management?</div>
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For example, are officers trained well enough to respond to these incidents? What has been done to make sure their attention levels do not suffer as a result of fatigue or long hours of repetitive work?</div>
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Are the standard operating procedures (SOPs) on sending out alerts and disseminating information islandwide adequate and effective?</div>
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These issues are relevant especially after the Little India riot, when questions were also raised over whether the police responded fast enough to contain the situation.</div>
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One other area that needs to be addressed is the visible lack of enforcement officers on the ground - from Traffic Police to police patrol cars to litter wardens.</div>
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One online commentator wrote: "In the past, when I drove along the expressways, I (would) see traffic police in a BMW or on a patrol bike. Nowadays, I hardly see any."</div>
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Many have made similar observations.</div>
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It is obviously costly to have officers everywhere, and it might not be efficient to do so, beyond a certain number.</div>
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But one consequence of having too few boots on the ground is not only that people get away with offences but that enforcement officers become overworked, and their vigilance levels drop.</div>
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After the Woodlands fiasco, security was apparently tightened at the Causeway making it a nightmare for motorists driving into Singapore, with some reports citing delays of up to three hours.</div>
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Hopefully, this isn't the only way to do the checks properly.</div>
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There must be better, more effective, methods that do not create so much trouble for the public.</div>
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Whatever the reasons behind the extraordinary breach at Woodlands, the authorities need to react and respond fast.</div>
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Singapore's security depends on it.</div>
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By Han Fook Kwang Managing Editor</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2202755133526280889.post-64039420628609677622013-10-19T15:21:00.001+08:002013-10-19T15:36:21.096+08:00New Article Archive<a href="http://sprng.me/it62t">http://sprng.me/it62t</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2202755133526280889.post-63196312619741890532013-10-11T17:27:00.000+08:002013-10-13T17:29:09.263+08:00Book-burning: Start of a slippery slope<div class="byline" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #777777; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 13.63636302947998px; margin: 2px 0px 12px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
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BOOK-BURNING is barbaric.</div>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.18181800842285px;">No ifs, ands or buts. No grey areas. Simple as black and white print on paper.</span><br />
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By Ong Sor Fern, Deputy Life! Editor</div>
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As someone who has loved books all my life, the very idea of burning books fills me with revulsion and the act itself strikes fear in my heart.</div>
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Hold your horses, I hear you say, aren't you over-reacting just a tad? After all, the group of parents and children who organised and took part in a little bonfire of PSLE assessment books and papers recently was just indulging in a little stress-relieving exercise.</div>
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To me, it does not matter if it was assessment books that were set alight. The very act of burning a book, any book, is anathema to me. It is an act of vandalism.</div>
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Arguing that it is simply an assessment book, to me, is just the beginning of a slippery slope.</div>
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Once one dismisses one book as disposable and objectionable, what's there to stop one from deciding another book contains objectionable ideas and therefore needs to be burnt?</div>
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And if books contain objectionable ideas, what about the people who believe in the objectionable ideas?</div>
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Qin Shi Huang burnt books. And he buried scholars alive.</div>
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The Spanish burnt Mayan codices. And they tortured and killed Mayan people in the name of civilising them.</div>
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The Nazis burnt books and works of art. And they were guilty of genocide.</div>
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You might think I am making a great leap in logic here - burning a few assessment books is very far from committing genocide.</div>
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But book-burning has a long, infamous, unbroken association with death and destruction. It often presages narrow-mindedness, intolerance and inhumanity in a community.</div>
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It is not simply the act of burning a book itself, but the symbolic power of the gesture.</div>
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In great cultures throughout human history, there has been a high value attached to the book as an object, as a symbol of learning, a marker of culture, a badge of civility. With good reason, since they carry the wisdom of the ages, the knowledge painstakingly acquired and recorded through the generations.</div>
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Books were once treasured because of their rarity - literacy was the province of the privileged few, and creating books was a laborious process, hence the saying knowledge is power because it was once, literally, so, as access to them was controlled carefully by the powers that be.</div>
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Thus attacking the book was, and still is, a potent move, which explains why bullies in power, tyrants and dictators, have always zeroed in on books as a target.</div>
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Organising a book-burning is an action pregnant with meaning and redolent of threat throughout the ages.</div>
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It is the formality of the ceremony - bringing together people to witness a communal attack on an object which represents the very best of human endeavour and intellect - that fills me with horror and dread at its implications.</div>
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The act signals a blithe disregard for, and active antipathy towards, what every man should strive for - learning, knowledge, culture.</div>
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The recent case in Singapore was deplorable as it was the parents who allowed, even encouraged, their children to take part in an act whose resonances they clearly do not understand.</div>
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Children may be excused because they do not know better. But did the adults who masterminded this act of vandalism think about the message they are conveying to their children? Have they considered that by burning books, they undermine the inherent value of the pursuit of knowledge?</div>
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Blaming it all on the stress created by a pressure-cooker education system is no excuse.</div>
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The system is there; you can buy into it or not. The choice is up to you as a parent to teach the values you want to inculcate in your children.</div>
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Just as the choice was there to find a way to relieve stress that did not attack a symbol of intellect and imagination.</div>
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That decision - to burn books - ironically shows why we so direly, urgently, need more books in our culture.</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2202755133526280889.post-40611801674728028092013-10-11T17:26:00.000+08:002013-10-13T17:27:01.178+08:00My gripes with online wrath<div style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.18181800842285px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
HAVING been an avid Internet user since its inception, I've come to realise there are three universal rules governing cyberspace.<br />
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By Fiona Chan, Senior Economics Correspondent</div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.18181800842285px;">First, there is no right way to spell anything.</span></div>
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Second, just because someone has uploaded 16 photos of her lunch/baby/self in the mirror does not mean people will not give a thumbs-up to her subsequent 23 photos of the same thing from a different angle.</div>
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Third, and most important, everyone can - and should - become vehemently upset about everything they read online, especially if it has nothing to do with them.</div>
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Cats eating cheeseburgers? Someone call the animal rescue hotline to save the poor pets from their abusive owners.</div>
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A young singer pushing the boundaries of sexy dancing? Someone call Madonna.</div>
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Parents burning their children's homework? Call the police - or put a photo of it on Facebook, with a similar effect.</div>
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Indeed, the online persecution that resulted this week after a group of students and their parents were photographed setting their worksheets ablaze after the PSLE exams was almost as bad as an angry bystander dialling 999.</div>
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Every aspect of the proceedings and their participants was vilified by observers who didn't let the fact that they knew almost nothing about the event stop them from denouncing it.</div>
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Disposing of textbooks that could be given away was wasteful, they said - only to be told later that no textbooks were hurt, merely assessment papers that were unlikely to be reused.</div>
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Some then changed their tone to say even completed worksheets could be passed down, if not to students here, then surely to those in Africa, the world's hypothetical dumping ground for all rubbish. Given the sheer volume of stuff that people insist on sending to Africa, it's a surprise the continent hasn't buckled under its own weight yet.</div>
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Others argued that destroying anything bearing the printed word is tantamount to repeating the destruction of knowledge under past tyrannical rulers. I worry the fumes from the mouldy newspapers and books under their beds may be affecting their judgment.</div>
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Perhaps the only justifiable cause for outrage was that the act of burning harmed the environment. By my estimates, this reason was mentioned by about 3 per cent of protesters, roughly the same proportion of people I observe bringing their own shopping bags to the supermarket.</div>
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The fact is that the homework burning exercise was - as later explained by its organiser, a colleague at Singapore Press Holdings - nothing more than a cathartic way to relieve stress after the back-breaking PSLE and promote family bonding.</div>
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It was not, as its detractors have suggested, an attempt to eradicate learning, a protest against the education system, or a stand against any objectionable content in the worksheets (except maybe trigonometry).</div>
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I can barely remember taking the PSLE, but I am willing to bet I would not have objected to burning my homework then or at any other point in my 16 years of schooling, nor would the act have killed my love and respect for books and edification.</div>
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I'm not the only one: a Google search on "homework burning" turns up countless gleeful images, a 2011 Facebook party event, and the enlightening tidbit that the act is considered a crime in Seattle.</div>
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Yet the ferocity of some of the reactions this week had me wondering if something in the water is making us all extra jumpy these days. A big part of it, as with any lapse in modern human behaviour, is likely due to the Internet.</div>
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It wasn't so long ago that the word "netizens" didn't even exist. Now, not only are they everywhere, they seem to be up in arms about everything.</div>
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The phrase "netizens are outraged" returns 67,700 results on Google. This is not nearly as many as the 25.7 million hits for "Miley Cyrus twerk" - which leads to some suspicion that the number of people upset about Miley Cyrus' dance moves has been severely overstated - but still significant enough to conclude that outraged netizens are indeed a trend.</div>
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A recent study of 200,000 Chinese social media users found that anger is the Internet's most powerful emotion, the one most likely to spread quickly and widely online.</div>
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This may be because the Internet exacerbates the worst in us: our boredom and judgmentalism, conveniently cloaked in anonymity. It doesn't help that the world seems to be caught up in a trend of hyper political correctness, in which any stray word or action is liable to invoke the wrath of dozens of interest groups whose sole raison d'etre is to get offended by things.</div>
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If you must be angry online, at least channel your anger to the right causes: people who share posts that say little more than "share this post" or who constantly ask whether their friends on holiday in foreign countries can help them buy back a bulky product that costs 14 cents less overseas.</div>
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For the rest of it, let's try something that existed long before the Internet: a large dose of empathy.</div>
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Let's entertain the wacky idea that people may have not the worst but the best intentions, give everyone the benefit of the doubt - and feed those cats the cheeseburgers they want so much.</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2202755133526280889.post-2843802343058318182013-10-09T17:19:00.000+08:002013-10-13T17:20:33.500+08:00We were not burning textbooks, says Kiss92 DJ<div style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.18181800842285px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
THE parent who organised the burning of homework to celebrate the end of his son's Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE) clarified yesterday that textbooks had not been set on fire.<br />
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By Amelia Teng</div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.18181800842285px;">"We were not burning textbooks, but only assessment papers and schoolwork, as they were the sources of stress. It wasn't because we're against learning, or that we are against knowledge or books," said Kiss92 DJ Arnold Gay. He has come under fire for organising the event for a group of 20 students and several of their parents last Saturday on a driveway outside his Katong home.</span></div>
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A photo showing them throwing worksheets into a lighted metal drum, with crumpled sheets of paper strewn around it, has been widely distributed online, attracting a host of reactions, most of them critical. Many netizens said the act insults learning and speaks badly of the education system here.</div>
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"It was meant to be cathartic and fun, for the kids to symbolically leave something stressful behind and mark a new beginning," said Mr Gay, 46, adding that he was "surprised" by the reactions.</div>
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"People are reading too much into this. I wasn't trying to make any statement and the kids were really happy getting rid of their work."</div>
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But parents and netizens said Mr Gay, whose son finished the PSLE last Tuesday, was missing the point. It is not so much what was burnt but the act of burning that raised concern, they said.</div>
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"I wouldn't burn test papers and worksheets. I would just throw them into the recycling bin," said housewife Priscilla Lee, 40, whose daughter also sat this year's PSLE. Private tutor Sherley Servos, 42, whose son also took the exam recently, said: "I thought it was just ridiculous. Assessment books can be reused - for instance, you can cover the answers and use the questions."</div>
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The event was also criticised by readers on The Straits Times' Facebook page, gathering nearly 200 comments as of yesterday. Said Mr Jeremy Shiu: "My parents and my mentors taught me to respect books and writings... They are a sacred part of civilisation. They're the hard work of many people and have the ability to transfer knowledge."</div>
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Another reader, Mr Edwin Kang, added: "The parents should know better than to expose their kids to acts (of) arson to (relieve) stress."</div>
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On Monday , Mr Gay put up another photo of the event on Kiss92's official Facebook page, along with the post: "Bye bye PSLE! This is how Arnold spent part of his weekend - helping his son and his pals burn their PSLE papers and homework away!"</div>
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A handful of comments applauded Mr Gay's celebration. Setting up a "bonfire" just to burn schoolwork, they said, showed how much pent-up frustration there is with Singapore's education system.</div>
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Mr Russel Low, who posted on the radio station's Facebook page, said it is "a way for the kids to finally put behind them their primary education and to look forward to the next phase of their education. It's also a great opportunity for parents to bond with the kids."</div>
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<a href="mailto:ateng@sph.com.sg" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">ateng@sph.com.sg</a></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2202755133526280889.post-32554187968111544892013-10-09T17:16:00.000+08:002013-10-13T17:17:11.042+08:00Govt agencies' new goal - write simply, with sincerity<div style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.18181800842285px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
HELP wanted: Government agency wants to communicate simply with sincerity and empathy with the public, but does not know how.<br />
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By Goh Chin Lian</div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.18181800842285px;">That, in a nutshell, is what the Public Service Division (PSD) and other agencies are saying in recent tenders seeking writing consultants and trainers to bridge the communication gap.</span></div>
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The PSD wants to simplify 260 letters and other correspondence that 26 agencies send out all the time, and present information better with graphics.</div>
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The Education Ministry hopes to train 800 school administration managers and vice-principals to write replies, so they no longer sound like they are giving instructions but offering friendly advice.</div>
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They are also to write from the "customer's perspective" and explain policies with "sensitivity and empathy", the tender said.</div>
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Similarly, the National Environment Agency is training its officers to "avoid standard and tired words and phrases, that will project little feeling or sincerity".</div>
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The Ministry of National Development, Internal Revenue Authority of Singapore and Housing Board have also sought such help.</div>
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Their efforts dovetail with recent reminders from political leaders to public officers to show empathy and sincerity in the course of their work. Just last week, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong called on the officers to strengthen trust between citizens and the Government, by seeing things from the people's viewpoint and being in touch with the ground.</div>
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For a long time, bureaucracies here and abroad have been criticised for using jargon. Back in the 1970s, the late Cabinet minister Goh Keng Swee required officers to write clearly and gave them copies of The Complete Plain Words by Sir Ernest Gowers, written for the British civil service.</div>
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By 1990, the Government here also recognised it had to change its tone towards citizens in its drive towards excellence in the public service.</div>
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A 2005 poll of official letters to The Straits Times Forum page found that they sounded less bureaucratic and dismissive than in 1990. The latest push for better writing, however, points to further room for improvement.</div>
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The British government continues to face this issue too. It was reported in July that it had banned more than 30 terms of jargon common in government announcements and policy documents, such as "facilitate", "drive" (unless it is cattle) and "deliver". A new style guide for bureaucrats there said only things like pizzas and post can be delivered, not "improvements" or "priorities".</div>
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The PSD told The Straits Times that its latest move is part of the Government's continuing efforts to "improve service delivery" to the public. It is also planning writing workshops and writing guides for public officers.</div>
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Mr Tay Choon Hong, director of PSD's Public Service for the 21st Century (PS21) office, said: "These efforts reflect our ongoing commitment to be people-centric and service-orientated, to communicate in a manner that citizens and our customers can understand and relate to."</div>
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Associate Professor Lee Chun Wah of the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information said the Government needs to improve its tone of communication to build trust with the public.</div>
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The Nanyang Technological University don said: "If the public is able to sense that the Government is humble, it will be able to recover that reservoir of trust."</div>
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<a href="mailto:chinlian@sph.com.sg" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">chinlian@sph.com.sg</a></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2202755133526280889.post-21517380015716519332013-10-06T15:19:00.001+08:002013-10-06T15:19:00.396+08:00S Lanka Prabhakaran bunker destroyed<p dir=ltr>S Lanka Prabhakaran bunker <u>destroyed</u> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-24402355</p>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2202755133526280889.post-85508724733773500832013-10-05T11:55:00.000+08:002013-10-06T11:56:34.768+08:00The incredible predictive power of Tom Clancy's novels<div style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.18181800842285px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
BEFORE Tom Clancy became an international publishing phenomenon, he was just another insurance salesman, working out of Baltimore and dreaming of a life as an author. With the arrival of his debut novel, The Hunt for Red October, in 1984, that dream suddenly became a reality, establishing the man with the aviator sunglasses and the Navy baseball hats as a perpetual presence on best-seller lists.<br />
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By Elias Groll</div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.18181800842285px;">Drawing on his vast trove of technical military information, Clancy singlehandedly coined a new genre: the "techno-thriller". In Clancy's novels, the reader becomes acquainted with such things as forward-looking infrared scanners and magnetic anomaly detectors (good for finding submarines), vertical temperature gradients and downwind toxic vapour hazards (for studying the effect of chemical weapons), and Russian T-80Us and Chinese M-90s (various types of tanks). Clancy's enthusiasm for the endless advance of technology in warfare was only matched (or nearly matched, anyway) by the outrageous plots he dreamed up. But as Clancy's novels have receded in the rear-view mirror of publishing history, those same plots have taken on an eerie quality, providing yet another spin on that old cliche: Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.</span></div>
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On Wednesday, Clancy died at the age of 66. With his death, we look back on how the master spy novelist managed to predict some of the most far-fetched, surprising developments in geopolitics of the last two decades.</div>
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<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The 9/11 attacks</strong></div>
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IN THE US government's official accounting of what happened on Sept 11, 2001 - The 9/11 Commission Report - the assembled collection of experts and officials took US national security officials to task for what they described as an incredible lack of imagination. How, they asked, could no one have predicted that terrorists might ram airplanes into major buildings and cause untold destruction, especially when none other than Clancy predicted exactly such a scenario?</div>
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In Clancy's 1994 novel Debt of Honor, Japan, led by a faction of hard-line nationalists and having acquired nuclear weapons, goes to war with the United States, aiming to re-establish the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Following Japan's defeat at the hands of the United States - thanks, of course, in large part to the wiles of Clancy uber-hero Jack Ryan - the pilot of a Japan Air Lines 747 decides to fly his plane into the Capitol dome during a joint session of Congress, killing just about the entire American government.</div>
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With this in mind, the 9/11 Report mournfully notes that "neither the intelligence community nor aviation security experts analysed systemic defences within an aircraft or against terrorist-controlled aircraft, suicidal or otherwise."</div>
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As the report reveals, national security officials were reading Clancy and aware of his predictions but never took them particularly seriously: "(The Clinton administration counter-terror official) Richard Clarke told us that he was concerned about the danger posed by aircraft in the context of protecting the Atlanta Olympics of 1996, the White House complex, and the 2001 G-8 summit in Genoa. But he attributed his awareness more to Tom Clancy novels than to warnings from the intelligence community."</div>
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<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Middle East-Latin America connection</strong></div>
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FROM the moment it became public in 2011, it was a plot that seemed straight out of a spy novel. Working with a Mexican drug cartel, Los Zetas, Iran hoped to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States while he dined at Cafe Milano, the tony Georgetown institution.</div>
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To carry out the plot, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps recruited an Iranian-American used car salesman in Texas, who approached a member of the cartel with the aim of recruiting the group to carry out the assassination. If the Zetas member approached by Mansour Arbabsiar, a naturalised citizen residing in Corpus Christi, Texas, had not also been an informer for the Drug Enforcement Administration, the plot may well have gone ahead.</div>
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Though such an alliance of convenience between one of America's enemies in the Middle East and a Latin American drug cartel sounds unlikely, Clancy had already dreamed up such a scenario, albeit with some minor differences. In The Teeth of the Tiger, published in 2003, Islamic terrorists partner with a Mexican cartel to enter the United States and launch a series of attacks on shopping malls. In a meeting at a Vienna cafe between a cartel member and one of the terrorists, the two men begin to scheme against the United States. In exchange for access to the European markets via Islamist networks there, the cartel will help spirit terrorists into the United States. "There is a confluence of interests between us," Mohammed tells Pablo, the cartel representative. "We share enemies."</div>
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<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Osama bin Laden raid</strong></div>
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WHEN US special forces finally located and killed Osama bin Laden in 2011, the world was shocked to find that the terrorist mastermind had in fact not spent his final years sequestered in a cave somewhere along the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan. In fact, he had been living in a posh compound a stone's throw from a major military base.</div>
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In the 2010 thriller Dead or Alive, Clancy chronicles the efforts to track down another terrorist mastermind - known as "the Emir" - with clear similarities to bin Laden. When US forces finally find the man, he too has been hiding in plain sight near a major city. In Clancy's rendering, that city was Las Vegas, not Abbottabad, but the spy novelist nonetheless had the good sense to realise that it is often easier for a terrorist mastermind to find shelter in the most unexpected of places.</div>
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<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Russian-Georgian war</strong></div>
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THOUGH Clancy made his name through his novels, it was one of his Clancy-branded video games that made his most prescient prediction. Ghost Recon, which was released in 2001, is premised on a Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008, when a group of hard-line nationalists in the Kremlin attempt to reconstitute the Soviet empire. That prediction turned out be eerily true - and only off by a few months. Ghost Recon had Soviet tanks rolling across the border in April; in the actual war, they arrived in August. Though Clancy's involvement in his eponymous videogame franchise is said to be limited, the prediction is nonetheless an eerie one for a franchise inspired by the man who sought to lift the veil on high-stakes espionage and war.</div>
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<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The writer is an editorial assistant at Foreign Policy magazine.</strong></div>
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WASHINGTON POST</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2202755133526280889.post-41411045603723067442013-10-02T11:49:00.000+08:002013-10-06T11:50:35.336+08:00Syria deal no utopia for international law<div style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.18181800842285px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
TWO cheers for international law!</div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.18181800842285px;">A month ago, when I first contemplated writing a piece for The Straits Times on Syria and international law, I was preparing for war. As someone who teaches international law, I must periodically explain to my students why countries like the United States occasionally break the law.</span><br />
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By Simon Chesterman, For The Straits Times</div>
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Until a few weeks ago, it looked like the world would see a repeat of the Iraq war a decade earlier. In 2003, the US invaded Iraq in defiance of the United Nations Charter and public opinion.</div>
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The US sought to drape its action in the robes of legality, but few were convinced. The failure to find any weapons of mass destruction – a justification the US used to gird its case for military action – further undermined US claims that its actions were justified.</div>
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When it comes to Syria, the evidence that it not only possessed chemical weapons but also had used them against its own population was much stronger.</div>
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Nevertheless, any such attack by the United States still would have been illegal. International law is actually quite clear on matters like this. The UN Charter prohibits the use of force except in self-defence or when authorised by the Security Council. The Responsibility to Protect, a relatively new addition to international affairs, ensures that situations like Syria get onto the agenda of the Security Council. It does not, however, authorise the use of force without a council resolution.</div>
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During the Iraq war, international lawyers therefore found themselves either apologising for the actions of the US – or apologising for international law.</div>
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Here, it is important to understand how international law is different from the law of a country like Singapore. Whereas Singapore has courts to interpret the law and police to enforce it, no such institutions exist at the international level.</div>
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There is a World Court, for example, but its jurisdiction is voluntary.</div>
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Some people scoff and say that, if this is the case, international law can hardly claim to be “law” at all.</div>
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That might be true if “law” is limited to the command of a sovereign backed up by the threat of punishment. But law does far more than this.</div>
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A<span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14.666666984558105px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.66666603088379px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">nother way of thinking of “law” is as a system of norms that encourages predictability, consistency, and equal treatment. At the international level, international law typically frames policy choices rather than compelling them.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.18181800842285px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14.666666984558105px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.66666603088379px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">So, when my students challenge me by saying that the 2003 Iraq war shows how useless international law is, I agree that no one went to jail despite the illegality of the conflict.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.18181800842285px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14.666666984558105px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.66666603088379px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">But I also ask them to consider the human and financial costs borne by the United States, because others doubted the legitimacy of its actions. I point to the immense loss of credibility and moral authority that it suffered. And I suggest that this might help explain why, in recent months, the US found it so hard to persuade others of Syria’s wrongdoing – even as the bodies with chemical burns continued to pile up.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.18181800842285px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14.666666984558105px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.66666603088379px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Today, it is tempting to celebrate the triumph of international law.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.18181800842285px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14.666666984558105px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.66666603088379px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The US has seen the need to act within the rules.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.18181800842285px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14.666666984558105px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.66666603088379px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Russia has brokered an international agreement with unanimous endorsement by the Security Council.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.18181800842285px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14.666666984558105px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.66666603088379px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Syria is turning over its prohibited weapons for destruction by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.18181800842285px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14.666666984558105px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.66666603088379px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Utopia?</span></div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.18181800842285px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14.666666984558105px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.66666603088379px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Not quite.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.18181800842285px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14.666666984558105px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.66666603088379px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Let’s consider each country in turn.</span></div>
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<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14.666666984558105px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 18.66666603088379px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">America, Russia and Syria</span></strong></div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.18181800842285px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14.666666984558105px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.66666603088379px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">THE US march to war was undone by an erosion of British support, a sceptical public at home, and a gaffe by the Secretary of State.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.18181800842285px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14.666666984558105px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.66666603088379px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Some have applauded this change of heart, but the view that an interventionist US is a major threat to international peace and security is misconceived.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.18181800842285px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14.666666984558105px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.66666603088379px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The far greater threat now is that the US, diminished by a decade of mismanaged foreign policy and distracted by its dysfunctional domestic politics, will disengage completely.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.18181800842285px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14.666666984558105px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.66666603088379px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Having threatened that the use of chemical weapons was a “red line”, President Barack Obama had appeared to be trapped by his own rhetoric into a strike against Damascus.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.18181800842285px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14.666666984558105px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.66666603088379px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">War was, in the end, averted by accident. At a London press conference on Sept 9, Secretary of State John Kerry made an apparently off-the-cuff remark that Syria could avoid a military strike only by turning over all of its chemical weapons to international control.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.18181800842285px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14.666666984558105px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.66666603088379px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">As he said at the time, this seemed impossible. But Russia immediately leapt in and praised the “initiative”.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.18181800842285px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14.666666984558105px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.66666603088379px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">This was part of a remarkable transformation in the former superpower. After months of stonewalling on Syria, President Vladimir Putin swiftly published an oleaginous opinion piece in The New York Times. Modestly entitled “A plea for caution from Russia”, Mr Putin sought to position himself as the statesman, lecturing Americans in general – and President Obama in particular – on the dangers of US foreign policy exceptionalism.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.18181800842285px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14.666666984558105px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.66666603088379px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">We now know that the article was placed (and, presumably, written) by the public relations firm Ketchum, which has a brief to promote Russian interests in the US and elsewhere.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.18181800842285px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14.666666984558105px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.66666603088379px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Clearly having enjoyed the notoriety of harbouring the whistle-blowing intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, this positioned Russia firmly at the centre of international diplomacy.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.18181800842285px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14.666666984558105px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.66666603088379px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">As for Syria, its hypocrisy is breathtaking. Within the space of a week, President Bashar al-Assad went from straight-faced denial of even possessing chemical weapons to agreeing to hand them over to Russia.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.18181800842285px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14.666666984558105px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.66666603088379px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Mr Assad’s position is now significantly strengthened domestically and internationally.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.18181800842285px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14.666666984558105px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.66666603088379px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">All of this was formalised last week, when the Security Council adopted a unanimous resolution that requires Syria to give up its chemical weapons. As a compromise measure, Resolution 2118 threatens Chapter VII measures – possibly meaning economic sanctions or the use of force.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.18181800842285px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14.666666984558105px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.66666603088379px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">But if Syria fails to comply with the resolution, the Security Council must meet again to negotiate what happens next.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.18181800842285px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14.666666984558105px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.66666603088379px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The resolution is significant in that it has stated that the use of chemical weapons constitutes a threat to international peace and security. This means that the Security Council can act in response to any such use, whether or not a state is party to the conventions prohibiting such weapons and whether they are used in war or against one’s own population.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.18181800842285px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14.666666984558105px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.66666603088379px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">So in the end, everyone wins?</span></div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.18181800842285px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14.666666984558105px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.66666603088379px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The United States avoids a war that it didn’t want or need. Russia reasserts a role for itself as a major power. And Syria can continue brutally suppressing the rebellion against Mr Assad’s reign – albeit with conventional weapons only.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.18181800842285px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14.666666984558105px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.66666603088379px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Two cheers for international law indeed.</span></div>
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<div style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.18181800842285px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14.666666984558105px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 18.66666603088379px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The writer is dean of the National University of Singapore Faculty of Law.</span></strong></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2202755133526280889.post-38392106662876907912013-09-30T12:48:00.003+08:002013-10-06T12:01:05.654+08:00Why does the human brain create false memories?<h1 class="story-header" style="background-color: white; clear: both; color: #505050; font-family: Arial, Helmet, Freesans, sans-serif; font-size: 2.461em; letter-spacing: -1px; line-height: 34px; margin: 3px -160px 13px 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; width: 623px;">
Why does the human brain create false memories?<a name='more'></a></h1>
<span class="byline" style="background-color: white; border-bottom-color: rgb(216, 216, 216); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; color: #505050; display: block; font-family: Arial, Helmet, Freesans, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 16px; margin: -1px -160px 21px 0px; padding: 0px 0px 12px; position: relative;"><span class="byline-name" style="display: block; font-size: 1.231em; font-weight: bold; margin-bottom: 0px; padding-bottom: 2px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility;">By Melissa Hogenboom</span><span class="byline-title" style="display: block; margin-bottom: 0px;">Science reporter, BBC News</span></span><br />
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<img alt="Hot air balloon ride" height="300" src="http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/70157000/jpg/_70157717_wadeimagesdetail.jpg" style="-webkit-user-select: none; border: 0px; font-size: 13px; font-style: italic; letter-spacing: 0px; position: relative;" width="624" /><span style="display: block; width: 624px;">A doctored photo made many people believe they had been on a real hot air balloon ride</span></div>
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Related Stories</h2>
<ul class="related-links-list" style="border-top-style: none; clear: both; list-style: none; margin: 0px 0px 16px; padding: 8px 0px 0px;">
<li style="background-image: none; font-size: 1em; margin: 0px 0px 8px; padding: 0px; position: relative; text-rendering: auto;"><a class="story" href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23447600" rel="published-1374780487050" style="color: #4a7194; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">False memories implanted into mice</a></li>
<li style="background-image: none; font-size: 1em; margin: 0px 0px 8px; padding: 0px; position: relative; text-rendering: auto;"><a class="story" href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-22639040" rel="published-1369447916249" style="color: #4a7194; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">Neuron growth 'cuts memory space'</a></li>
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Human memory constantly adapts and moulds itself to fit the world. Now an art project hopes to highlight just how fallible our recollections are.</div>
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All of us generate false memories and artist Alasdair Hopwood has been "collecting" them.</div>
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For the past year he has asked the public to submit anecdotes of fake recollections which he turns into artistic representations.</div>
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They have ranged from the belief of eating a live mouse to a memory of being able to fly as a child.</div>
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One man who wrote in wrongly believed his girlfriend had a sister who died while at the dentist. So strong was his conviction that he kept all his dentist visits secret.</div>
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He wrote: "Over dinner one day she said she was going to the dentist the next week. It all went quiet at the table and my mum said it must be hard for her to visit the dentist after what had happened."</div>
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This is hardly a rare case. Neuroscientists say that many of our daily memories are falsely reconstructed because our view of the world is constantly changing.</div>
<span class="cross-head" style="background-color: white; color: #505050; display: block; font-family: Arial, Helmet, Freesans, sans-serif; font-size: 1.231em; font-weight: bold; line-height: 16px; margin: 0px 0px 16px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility;">Imagination trick</span><br />
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Subtle cues can easily steer our memories in the wrong direction.</div>
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A famous experiment carried out by Elizabeth Loftus in 1994 revealed that she was able to convince a quarter of her participants they were once lost in a shopping centre as a child.</div>
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Another similar experiment in 2002 found that half of the participants were tricked into believing they had taken a hot air balloon ride as a child, simply by showing them doctored photographic "evidence".</div>
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<img alt="Lost child in shopping centre" height="351" src="http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/70159000/jpg/_70159882_crudelyerased6final.jpg" style="-webkit-user-select: none; border: 0px; font-size: 13px; font-style: italic; letter-spacing: 0px; position: relative;" width="624" /><span style="display: block; width: 624px;">Participants readily believed they had once been lost in a shopping centre when presented with "evidence"</span></div>
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This work was carried out by Kimberley Wade at the University of Warwick, UK. For the current project she was asked by Mr Hopwood to take part in a real hot air balloon ride, video and images of which are now exhibited in his show. She says she was very excited to take part.</div>
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"I've been studying memory for more than a decade, and I still find it incredible that our imagination can trick us into thinking we've done something we've never really done and lead us to create such compelling, illusory memories," she says.</div>
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The reason our memories are so malleable, Kimberley Wade explains, is because there is simply too much information to take in.</div>
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"Our perceptual systems aren't built to notice absolutely everything in our environment. We take in information through all our senses but there are gaps," she adds.</div>
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"So when we remember an event, what our memory ultimately does is fills in those gaps by thinking about what we know about the world."</div>
<span class="cross-head" style="background-color: white; color: #505050; display: block; font-family: Arial, Helmet, Freesans, sans-serif; font-size: 1.231em; font-weight: bold; line-height: 16px; margin: 0px 0px 16px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility;">Lost keys</span><br />
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For the most part false memories are about everyday situations with no real consequences except the occasional disagreement with a friend or partner about trivial things like who lost the keys, again.</div>
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But sometimes, false memories can have more serious ramifications. For example, if an eyewitness testimony in court contributes to a false conviction.</div>
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<a class="hidden" href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24286258?ocid=socialflow_facebook_bbcnews#story_continues_3" style="color: #4a7194; font-weight: bold; left: -5000px; position: absolute; text-decoration: none; top: -5000px;">Continue reading the main story</a><br />
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A simple test</h2>
<ul style="clear: both; list-style: none; margin: 0px 0px 16px; padding: 0px;">
<li style="background-image: url(http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/view/3_0_16/cream/hi/shared/img/story_sprite.gif); background-position: -1200px 5px; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; font-size: 1em; margin: 0px 0px 8px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 16px; text-rendering: auto;">Say the following words to a friend: <em>bed, rest, awake, tired, dream, wake, snooze, blanket, doze, slumber, sore, nap, peace, yawn and drowsy</em></li>
<li style="background-image: url(http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/view/3_0_16/cream/hi/shared/img/story_sprite.gif); background-position: -1200px 5px; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; font-size: 1em; margin: 0px 0px 8px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 16px; text-rendering: auto;">Later, ask your friend to recall the words they heard</li>
<li style="background-image: url(http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/view/3_0_16/cream/hi/shared/img/story_sprite.gif); background-position: -1200px 5px; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; font-size: 1em; margin: 0px 0px 8px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 16px; text-rendering: auto;">How many incorrectly listed <em>sleep </em>as one of the initially given words?</li>
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<a href="http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/class/psy394U/Bower/05%20Con%20Distort%20Mems/Tricks%20of%20memory.pdf" style="color: #4a7194; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">A study found</a> that participants recall the word sleep with about the same probability that they remember other words from the list.</div>
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Forensic technology has now led to many such convictions being overturned. <a href="http://www.innocenceproject.org/" style="color: #4a7194; font-weight: bold; line-height: 16px; text-decoration: none;">The Innocence Project</a>in the US campaigns to overturn eyewitness misidentification and lists all the people who have subsequently been acquitted.</div>
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The project reports that there have been 311 post-conviction DNA exonerations in the US, which includes 18 people who were sentenced to death before DNA evidence was able to prove their innocence.</div>
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Christopher French of Goldsmiths University in London says there is still a lack of awareness of how unreliable human memory is, especially in the legal system.</div>
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"Although this is common knowledge within psychology and widely accepted by anybody who has studied the literature, it's not widely known about in society more generally," he says.</div>
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"There are still people who believe memory works like a video camera as well as people who accept the Freudian notion of repression - that when something terrible happens the memory is shoved down into the subconscious."</div>
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But the evidence of repressed memories, he adds, is "very thin on the ground".</div>
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<img alt="Hot air balloon ride" height="351" src="http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/70157000/jpg/_70157716_wadefilmstill2.jpg" style="-webkit-user-select: none; border: 0px; font-size: 13px; font-style: italic; letter-spacing: 0px; position: relative;" width="624" /><span style="display: block; width: 624px;">A psychologist's memory of her hot air balloon ride features in the exhibition</span></div>
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Prof French was also involved in the memory project. He hopes it will create more awareness of the malleability of human memory.</div>
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Alasdair Hopwood says he was fascinated that people could strongly believe in an entirely imagined event.</div>
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"What's interesting is that the submissions become mini-portraits of the person (albeit anonymously) yet the only thing you are finding out about this person is something that didn't actually happen. So there's a lovely paradox there which I'm very drawn to as an artist," he says.</div>
<span class="cross-head" style="background-color: white; color: #505050; display: block; font-family: Arial, Helmet, Freesans, sans-serif; font-size: 1.231em; font-weight: bold; line-height: 16px; margin: 0px 0px 16px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility;">Saving us from the tiger</span><br />
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According to another researcher, the errors the human brain makes can sometimes serve a useful purpose.</div>
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Sergio Della Sala, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Edinburgh, UK, says it can be thought of in the following way. Imagine you are in the jungle and you see some grass moving. Humans are likely to panic and run away, with the belief that there could be a tiger lurking.</div>
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A computer, however, might deduce that 99% of the time, it is simply the wind. If we behaved like the computer, we would be eaten the one time a tiger was present.</div>
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"The brain is prepared to make 99 errors to save us from the tiger. That's because the brain is not a computer. It works with irrational assumptions. It's prone to errors and it needs shortcuts," says Prof Della Sala.</div>
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False memories are the sign of a healthy brain, he adds. "They are a by-product of a memory system that works well. You can make inferences very fast."</div>
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<img alt="Hot air balloon ride" height="232" src="http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/70158000/jpg/_70158680_wadeprint.jpg" style="-webkit-user-select: none; border: 0px; font-size: 13px; font-style: italic; letter-spacing: 0px; position: relative;" width="624" /></div>
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<em style="line-height: 16px;">The False Memory Archive, supported by the Wellcome Trust, opened at The Exchange in Penzance on Saturday 28 September</em></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2202755133526280889.post-48717338719273960052013-09-30T11:28:00.000+08:002013-10-06T11:28:54.372+08:00Are human beings hard-wired for war?<div style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.18181800842285px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">WAR is in the air. Sad to say, there's nothing new about this. Nor is there anything new about the claim that war has always been with us, and always will be.</span><br />
<a name='more'></a></div>
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By David P. Barash</div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.18181800842285px;">What is new, it seems, is the degree to which this claim is wrapped in the apparent acquiescence of science, especially the findings of evolutionary biology with respect to a war-prone "human nature".</span></div>
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This year, an article in The National Interest titled What Our Primate Relatives Say About War answered the question "Why war?" with "Because we are human". In recent years, a piece in New Scientist asserted that warfare has "played an integral part in our evolution" and an article in the journal Science claimed that "death in warfare is so common in hunter-gatherer societies that it was an important evolutionary pressure on early Homo sapiens".</div>
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The emerging popular consensus about our biological predisposition to warfare is troubling. It is not just scientifically weak; it is also morally unfortunate, as it fosters an unjustifiably limited vision of human potential.</div>
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Although there is considerable reason to think that at least some of our hominin ancestors engaged in warlike activities, there is also comparable evidence that others did not. While it is plausible that Homo sapiens owed much of its rapid brain evolution to natural selection's favouring individuals that were smart enough to defeat their human rivals in violent competition, it is also plausible that we became highly intelligent because selection favoured those of our ancestors who were especially adroit at communicating and cooperating.</div>
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Conflict avoidance, reconciliation and cooperative problem solving could also have been altogether "biological" and positively selected for.</div>
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Chimpanzees, we now know, engage in something distressingly akin to human warfare, but bonobos, whose evolutionary lineage makes them no more distant from us than chimps, are justly renowned for making love instead. For many anthropologists, "man the hunter" remains a potent trope, yet at the same time, other anthropologists embrace "woman the gatherer", not to mention the cooperator, peacemaker and child rearer.</div>
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When, in the 1960s and 1970s, the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon began reporting his findings concerning the Yanomamo people of the Amazon, whom he claimed lived in a state of persistent warfare, his data was eagerly embraced by many - including myself - because they represented such a beguilingly close fit to our predictions about the likely positive correlation between early human violence and evolutionary fitness.</div>
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In retrospect, even though I have no reason to doubt Yanomamo ferocity, at least under certain circumstances, I seriously question the penchant of observers (scientific and lay alike) to generalise from small samples of our unquestionably diverse species, especially about something as complex as war.</div>
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I have little doubt that the perspective of many evolutionary biologists and some biological anthropologists has been distorted by the seductive drama of "primitive human war". Conflict avoidance and reconciliation - although no less "natural" or important - are considerably less attention-grabbing.</div>
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Yet peacemaking is, if anything, more pronounced and widely distributed, especially among groups of nomadic foragers who are probably closest in ecological circumstance to our hominin ancestors. The Hadza people of Tanzania have interpersonal conflicts, get angry and sometimes fight, but they assuredly don't make war and apparently never have. The Moriori people, original inhabitants of the Chatham Islands off the coast of New Zealand, employed several methods (including social ridicule) that prevented individual disputes from escalating into group-versus-group killings. The Batek of peninsular Malaysia consider overt violence and even aggressive coercion to be utterly unacceptable, viewing themselves and their larger social unit as inherently and necessarily peaceful.</div>
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The problem with envisioning Homo sapiens as inherently and irrevocably warlike isn't simply that it is wrong, but also that it threatens to constrain our sense of whether peacemaking is possible and, accordingly, worth trying.</div>
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I am counselling neither greater nor lesser involvement in specific wars. But I urge that any such decisions not be based on a fatalistic, empirically invalid assumption about humanity's warlike nature.</div>
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There is a story, believed to be of Cherokee origin, in which a girl is troubled by a recurring dream in which two wolves fight viciously. Seeking an explanation, she goes to her grandfather who explains that there are two forces within each of us, struggling for supremacy, one embodying peace and the other, war. At this, the girl is even more distressed, and asks her grandfather who wins. His answer: "The one you feed."</div>
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NEW YORK TIMES</div>
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<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The writer is an evolutionary biologist and professor of psychology at the University of Washington.</strong></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2202755133526280889.post-70154415560300731052013-09-28T11:18:00.000+08:002013-09-29T11:18:38.579+08:00Soviet officer may have averted nuclear war 30 years ago<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; line-height: 12.727272033691406px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
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MOSCOW - Thirty years ago this week, a potential nuclear disaster was averted, thanks to Mr Stanislav Petrov.<br />
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The duty officer at a Soviet Union early warning base decided to breach his instructions on the night of Sept 26, 1983, when sirens went off one after the other telling him that America had launched several missiles.</div>
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Mr Petrov, whose job was to register enemy missile launches and alert the Soviet military and political leadership, decided not to report the matter, and instead dismissed it as a false alarm.</div>
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Given the political atmosphere of 1983, a retaliatory attack from the Soviet side would have been a given, BBC reported, adding that his decision may have saved the world.</div>
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"I had all the data (to suggest there was an ongoing missile attack).</div>
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"If I had sent my report up the chain of command, nobody would have said a word against it," Mr Petrov told the BBC's Russian Service 30 years after that overnight shift.</div>
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Mr Petrov - who retired with the rank of lieutenant-colonel and now lives in a small town near Moscow - was part of a well-trained team which served at one of the Soviet Union's early warning bases. And yet, when the moment came, he said he almost froze in place.</div>
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Although the nature of the alert - sirens howling and computers alerting of a missile strike - seemed to be abundantly clear, Mr Petrov had some doubts.</div>
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Other experts, a group of satellite radar operators, told him they had registered no missiles.</div>
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But what made him suspicious was just how strong and clear that alert was. "There were 28 or 29 security levels. After the target was identified, it had to pass all of those 'checkpoints'. I was not quite sure it was possible, under those circumstances," said Mr Petrov.</div>
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If he was wrong, the first nuclear explosions would have happened minutes later. "Twenty-three minutes later, I realised that nothing had happened... It was such a relief," he said.</div>
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Now, Mr Petrov admits he was never absolutely sure that the alert was a false one, but believes his civilian education kicked in at the crucial time.</div>
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"My colleagues were all professional soldiers, they were taught to give and obey orders," he said. If somebody else had been on shift, the alarm would have been raised.</div>
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But he was disappointed that the system had malfunctioned.</div>
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Mr Petrov, who has received several international awards, does not think of himself as a hero.</div>
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"That was my job," he said.</div>
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BACKGROUND STORY</h5>
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<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">DOUBTS ABOUT ALERT</strong></div>
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I had all the data (to suggest there was an ongoing missile attack). If I had sent my report up the chain of command, nobody would have said a word against it.</div>
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<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">- Mr Stanislav Petrov (left), duty officer at the Soviet Union's early warning systems, who decided to breach his instructions on Sept 26, 1983, when sirens went off one after the other telling him that America had launched several missiles</strong></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2202755133526280889.post-17762485682212171402013-09-28T11:17:00.000+08:002013-09-29T11:17:37.909+08:00Online comments: Kill them or fix them?<div class="byline" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #777777; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 13.63636302947998px; margin: 2px 0px 12px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
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POPULAR Science is closing comments on its articles. Citing "trolls and spambots", the 141- year-old American magazine has decided that an open forum at the bottom of articles "can be bad for science".<br />
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By Alex Hern</div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.18181800842285px;">The decision was "not made lightly", said online content director Suzanne LaBarre - nor, appropriately, without some supporting scientific evidence.</span></div>
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Citing research from a study by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Dominique Brossard, the magazine argued that exposure to bad comments can skew a reader's opinion of the post itself.</div>
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"Simply including an ad hominem attack in a reader comment was enough to make study participants think the downside of the reported technology was greater than they'd previously thought," Professor Brossard wrote in the New York Times.</div>
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"If you carry out those results to their logical end," said Ms LaBarre, "commenters shape public opinion; public opinion shapes public policy; public policy shapes how and whether and what research gets funded - you start to see why we feel compelled to hit the 'off' switch."</div>
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The reaction to Popular Science's announcement was mixed (though on their site, there was silence: comments weren't enabled on the post announcing comments were to be disabled).</div>
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The Washington Post's Alexandra Petri argued that "it can't come soon enough", but Mr Mathew Ingram of paidContent echoed the sentiment of many, asking: "Why not try to fix comments instead of killing them?"</div>
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That's what Google's trying to do. The company has announced a major change to the way comments on YouTube, widely seen as the worst of the worst, are displayed. Now, comments will be tied to a commenter's Google+ profile - which they will have to have to be able to comment. When viewing comments, you will be able to see posts from those who your Google+ circles show as friends and acquaintances, or who are "popular personalities" near the top of the thread; by contrast those from random passers-by are relegated further down the list.</div>
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As already occurs, the video's creator will have a privileged place in the thread. But so too will popular personalities on YouTube. But hiding bad comments only solves part of the problem. For one thing, the person who moderates the comments still has to read all the abuse. It's preferable, surely, to focus on encouraging good comments?</div>
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That's the approach the Huffington Post is taking, as it attempts to increase the accountability of its commenters.</div>
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Starting this month, the site is asking new users to verify their identity when creating an account, in the hope that it will "reduce the number of drive-by or automated trolls".</div>
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"Rather than participating in threads and promoting the best comments, our moderators are stuck policing the trolls with diminishing success," said Mr Jimmy Soni, the group's managing editor.</div>
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It's a weaker requirement than "real name" policies of the past, since the site is keen to point out that "many people are not in a professional or personal situation where attaching their name to a comment is feasible".</div>
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But, argued Mr Soni, "we are capable of doing far worse things to one another when we do not have to own up to the things we do".</div>
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By requiring, if not real names, then at least stable pseudonyms, HuffPo hopes to inject some humanity back into comments.</div>
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Gawker Media, the blog network which includes sites like Valleywag, Kotaku and io9 as well as gossip blog Gawker itself, is taking an entirely different approach to comments, focusing on the carrot rather than the stick.</div>
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Kinja is Gawker Media's new comment platform. But it's also the network's new blogging platform. Both commenters and bloggers write using it, and readers can follow a commenter's feed just as easily as they can their favourite blogger.</div>
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On top of that, Mr Nick Denton, Gawker's founder, views it as an effective tipline, telling Mr Ingram that: "We want sources as well, we want them to be able to participate in these discussions. And the principle is that in order to be able to achieve the potential of the Internet we need to harness the collective intelligence of the readership."</div>
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Gawker's pitch to commenters isn't "behave or we'll block you", but "behave and we might promote you". And Mr Denton has made good on that promise. Jalopnik, Gawker Media's site for car enthusiasts, hired its weekend editor based on his active participation on Kinja.</div>
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But maybe the problem is something which doesn't need to be solved with technology at all. Boing Boing had onsite comments since 2007, but this May went back to the future, moving all discussion on the site onto a dedicated forum, BBS.</div>
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Comments no longer appear directly underneath stories, which could ameliorate Popular Science's fears that they would ruin discourse. Instead, readers are invited to discuss the story further on the subsite, where they can also make their own threads, link to their own work and, wrote managing editor Rob Beschizza, "demolish serious culture without any help from us at all".</div>
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Given how many look back fondly on the days when the Internet was bulletin boards as far as the eye could see, maybe Boing Boing has the right idea.</div>
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THE GUARDIAN</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2202755133526280889.post-68673584088537240802013-09-28T11:15:00.000+08:002013-09-29T11:15:40.482+08:00UN breakthrough on Syria chemical arms<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; line-height: 18.18181800842285px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
UNITED NATIONS - The five permanent members of the deeply divided UN Security Council have agreed on a resolution that will require Syria to give up its chemical weapons, but there will be no automatic penalties if the Syrians fail to comply.<br />
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News of the breakthrough came as the global chemical weapons watchdog in The Hague was set to discuss plans to start inspections and disarmament of the civil-war-torn country's chemical arsenal by next Tuesday.</div>
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The United Nations agreement, hammered out after days of back-room negotiations, is a compromise among the United States, its allies and Russia about how to enforce the resolution, which would eliminate Syria's chemical arms programme.</div>
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Russia and the US jointly introduced the text to the 10 non-permanent council members on Thursday night, supported by other permanent members, Britain, France and China.</div>
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A vote on the resolution depends on how the full council responds to the draft, and on how soon an international group that oversees the global treaty on chemical weapons can adopt a plan for securing and destroying Syria's stockpile.</div>
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The executive board of the international group - the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) - was expected to meet yesterday in The Hague in the Netherlands to set out the exact procedures.</div>
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The UN said yesterday that its experts in Syria - in a separate mission from the OPCW - are also investigating seven alleged chemical weapons attacks. They expect to finish their work on the ground next Monday. It was previously thought that the UN probe would look into only three locations in Syria.</div>
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In a statement issued from the Syrian capital of Damascus, where the team arrived earlier this week, the UN said the experts hoped to have a comprehensive report ready by late October.</div>
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The UN Security Council deal would amount to the most significant international diplomatic initiative of the Syrian civil war. It would also be a remarkable turn for US President Barack Obama, who had been pushing for a military strike on Syria before accepting a Russian proposal to have Syria give up its chemical arsenal.</div>
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Western diplomats said the resolution would be legally binding and would stipulate that if Syria failed to abide by the terms, the Security Council would take measures under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, the strongest form of a council resolution.</div>
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Such measures could include economic sanctions or even military action. But before any action could be taken, the issue would have to go back for further deliberations by the council, on which Russia, like the other permanent members, holds a veto.</div>
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"This resolution makes clear there will be consequences for non-compliance," US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power said on Thursday night. In an earlier Twitter message, she said the resolution established a "new norm" against the use of chemical weapons.</div>
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The Washington Post also reported yesterday that American and Russian officials now believe that most of Syria's nerve agent stockpile consists of "unweaponised" liquid precursors that could be neutralised relatively quickly, lowering the risk that the toxins could be hidden away by the regime or stolen by terrorists.</div>
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A confidential assessment by the two governments also concludes that Syria's entire arsenal could be destroyed in about nine months, assuming Syrian officials honour promises to surrender control of its chemical assets to international inspectors, according to two people briefed on the analysis.</div>
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NEW YORK TIMES, ASSOCIATED PRESS, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2202755133526280889.post-37543416428273988492013-09-24T10:58:00.000+08:002013-09-29T10:59:07.609+08:00Myanmar can 'learn from, not copy S'pore'<div style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.18181800842285px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
EVEN as she seeks to learn from Singapore's institutions, Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi says her country should not copy them wholesale.<br />
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By Jeremy Au Yong</div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.18181800842285px;">Speaking at a press conference yesterday to wrap up her first visit here, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate was, by turns, complimentary and critical of her hosts.</span></div>
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Asked what she saw in Singapore that she might like to recreate in Myanmar, Ms Suu Kyi responded: "I don't think 'recreate' is the word, 'learn' yes."</div>
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On education, for instance, she said Singapore's system was very "workforce-oriented", going by a presentation given to her by the Education Ministry and her tour of the Institute of Technical Education College East.</div>
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"That made me think, what is work all about? What are human beings for? What are human lives about?</div>
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"So I want to learn a lot about the standards that Singapore has been able to achieve, but I wonder whether I don't want something more for our country."</div>
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She added: "I want to probe more into the successes of Singapore and to find out what we can achieve beyond that because I think the human capacity for progress is limitless and I am not just talking about material progress."</div>
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It was not the first time she raised what she saw as Singapore's focus on materialism at the press conference. In her opening remarks, she made reference to it.</div>
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"One gets used to thinking of Singapore as a financial, a commercial city, where people are more intent on business and money than human relations, but I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised that there is a lot of human warmth going around this place," she said.</div>
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"And I think this should be the best and greatest tie between our two countries, a bond that is based on caring for one another as people who belong to the same region and also as people who have been through the same experience," she said referring to both countries' struggle with colonialism.</div>
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She wants Myanmar to forge its own path and to add to the "diversity of the world", she says, adding Singapore could also learn from her country. "Perhaps Singapore could learn from us a more relaxed way of life. Perhaps warmer and closer family relationships. I think we have much to offer you, you come and find out."</div>
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Ms Suu Kyi also fielded questions about the situation in Myanmar. She said she would continue to push for a change to the Constituion that reserves seats in Parliament for the military and disqualifies her from becoming president.</div>
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Earlier yesterday, she called on Speaker of Parliament Halimah Yacob at Parliament House before heading to the Istana to call on President Tony Tan Keng Yam, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and Emeritus Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong.</div>
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Ms Suu Kyi discussed Myanmar's development with PM Lee and ESM Goh, said the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.</div>
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PM Lee reaffirmed Singapore's support for Myanmar's chairmanship of Asean next year and also reiterated Singapore's commitment to supporting Myanmar's development.</div>
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Ms Suu Kyi leaves Singapore today.</div>
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<a href="mailto:jeremyau@sph.com.sg" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">jeremyau@sph.com.sg</a></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2202755133526280889.post-5511747031839832992013-09-24T10:49:00.000+08:002013-09-29T10:50:05.238+08:00Why people like sad music<div class="byline" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #777777; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 13.63636302947998px; margin: 2px 0px 12px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
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SADNESS is an emotion we usually try to avoid. So why do we choose to listen to sad music?<br />
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By Ai Kawakami</div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 18.18181800842285px;">Musicologists and philosophers have wondered about this. Sad music can induce intense emotions, yet the type of sadness evoked by music seems pleasing in its own way. Why? Aristotle famously suggested the idea of catharsis: that by overwhelming us with an undesirable emotion, music (or drama) somehow purges us of it.</span></div>
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But what if, despite their apparent similarity, sadness in the realm of artistic appreciation is not the same thing as sadness in everyday life?</div>
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In a study published this summer in the journal, Frontiers In Psychology, my colleagues and I explored the idea that "musical emotion" encompasses both the felt emotion that the music induces in the listener and the perceived emotion that the listener judges the music to express. By isolating these two overlapping sets of emotions and observing how they related to each other, we hoped to gain a better understanding of sad music.</div>
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Forty-four people served as participants in our experiment. We asked them to listen to one of three musical excerpts of approximately 30 seconds each. The excerpts were from Mikhail Glinka's La Separation (F minor), Felix Blumenfeld's Sur Mer (G minor) and Enrique Granados' Allegro de Concierto (C sharp major, though the excerpt was in G major, which we transposed to G minor).</div>
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We were interested in the minor key because it is canonically associated with sad music, and we steered clear of well-known compositions to avoid interference from any personal memories related to the pieces.</div>
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(Our participants were more or less split between men and women, as well as between musicians and non-musicians, though these divisions turned out to be immaterial.)</div>
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A participant would listen to an excerpt and then answer a question about his felt emotions: "How did you feel when listening to this music?" Then he would listen to a "happy" version of the excerpt - that is, transposed into the major key - and answer the same question.</div>
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Next he would listen to the excerpt, again in both sad and happy versions, each time answering a question about other listeners that was designed to elicit perceived emotion: "How would normal people feel when listening to this music?"</div>
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(This is a simplification: In the actual study, the order in which the participant answered questions about felt and perceived emotion, and listened to sad and happy excerpts, varied from participant to participant.)</div>
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Our participants answered each question by rating 62 emotion-related descriptive words and phrases - from happy to sad, from bouncy to solemn, from heroic to wistful - on a scale from 0 (not at all) to four (very much).</div>
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We found, as anticipated, that felt emotion did not correspond exactly to perceived emotion. Although the sad music was both perceived and felt as "tragic" (gloomy, meditative and miserable), the listeners did not actually feel the tragic emotion as much as they perceived it. Likewise, when listening to sad music, the listeners felt more "romantic" emotion (for example, fascinated and in love) and "blithe" emotion (for example, merry and animated) than they perceived.</div>
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Something similar happened with the happy music: Perceived blithe emotions were rated higher than their felt counterparts. In general, it appears that perceived emotions may be rated higher than felt emotions when it comes to emotional categories characteristically associated with a given key.</div>
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When listening to sad music, then, there is a tension, or slippage, between the two types of emotions. How are we to understand this gap?</div>
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One answer may be that in everyday life we typically experience emotions that have a direct connection to whatever object or situation gives rise to them. But when we listen to sad music (or watch a sad movie, or read a sad novel), we are inoculated from any real threat or danger that the music (or movie or novel) represents.</div>
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If this is true, what we experience when we listen to sad music may be thought of as "vicarious emotions". Here, there is no object or situation that induces emotion directly, as in regular life. Instead, the vicarious emotions are free from the essential unpleasantness of their genuine counterparts, while still drawing force from the similarity between the two.</div>
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We need to study vicarious emotions further. In doing so, we may be able to improve our understanding of a neglected feature of our emotional system - namely, its sensitivity to something other than palpable needs or threats. When we weep at the beauty of sad music, we experience a profound aspect of our emotional selves that may contain insights about the meaning and significance of artistic experience - and also about ourselves as human beings.</div>
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NEW YORK TIMES</div>
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<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The writer is a post-doctoral fellow with the Okanoya Emotional Information Project of the Japan Science and Technology Agency.</strong></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2202755133526280889.post-70602955535135889132013-09-22T12:57:00.001+08:002013-09-22T12:57:50.155+08:00Should scholarships go to wealthy kids?<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; line-height: 12.727272033691406px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
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When I applied for a scholarship to go overseas for my university studies in 1971, I gamed the system. I looked at past records of which particular course had the most number of scholars and picked it to increase my chances of success.<br />
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<span style="color: #777777; font-size: 11px; line-height: 13.625px;">By Han Fook Kwang Managing Editor</span></div>
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It wasn't a difficult decision to make.</div>
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Ninety per cent of Colombo Plan scholarships were given for engineering, so the choices were really between areas of specialisation.</div>
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There were more successful candidates who selected mechanical engineering. So that was how I decided, and graduated with the degree three years later.</div>
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Getting the scholarship was the only way I could get an overseas education, and the course didn't really matter to me as long as I got my studies funded. It wasn't the ideal way to decide one's career but, back in the 1970s, that was how most of us did it.</div>
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I didn't practise engineering on my return because I wasn't really interested, and was posted to the Economic Development Board and subsequently the Administrative Service to do policy work.</div>
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Many of my contemporaries followed a similar career path.</div>
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You could say there wasn't much diversity among scholarship recipients then - we came mainly from poor and lower middle class families, and mostly did engineering.</div>
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On the other hand, you could also argue that because most Singaporeans at the time came from similar backgrounds, we represented the large majority and whatever diversity was out there.</div>
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Singapore was a much more homogeneous society then - we were all poor - and no one made a big deal of the fact that we were so alike, in family background as well as in our life and educational experiences.</div>
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Even if you wanted to have a more diverse pool, you wouldn't know where to start.</div>
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Today's Singapore is completely different and the Public Service Commission (PSC) should be commended for trying to broaden its search for scholarship candidates.</div>
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Writing on its website, PSC chairman Eddie Teo argued that having a more diverse group of public service officers was essential to avoid "groupthink and to tackle the much more complex and diverse issues today".</div>
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"The PSC is also acutely conscious of the need to have public servants coming from all socio-economic classes, lest we end up breeding a class of elitist public servants who lack empathy. While it does not follow that only those with a less fortunate background can empathise with the poor, a Public Service comprising only the privileged and upper classes will add to the impression that meritocracy leads to a lack of social mobility in Singapore," he wrote.</div>
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This is quite a departure from the traditional thinking of getting the best into the public sector regardless of family background.</div>
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As Mr Teo disclosed, the two elite schools, Raffles Institution and Hwa Chong, dominated, with their proportion of scholarship recipients peaking at 82 per cent in 2007. It has since dropped to 60 per cent in the last two years.</div>
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It is well known that in these two schools, students from better-off households are over-represented, and critics say this shows that Singapore society is no longer as socially mobile as before.</div>
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And if the bulk of public sector scholars are from these schools, it will reinforce the perception of a closed and elitist system that draws its leaders from better-off segments of the population.</div>
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How though to put into practice Mr Teo's thinking, especially his wanting to get officers from all socio-economic classes?</div>
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The PSC says it will reach out to other schools and even to the polytechnics. That's worth trying though it remains to be seen if it will produce the desired result.</div>
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The most radical and effective way, put forth by a reader of The Straits Times in a letter published on Friday, is to discriminate against those from wealthy families.</div>
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Writer Devadas Krishnadas put it forcefully and I can do no better than quote him: "...government scholarships are generous and open up rich pathways for personal and professional growth. They are also effectively special transfers from the public balance sheet to the household balance sheet of the recipients' families. But do high- and upper-middle-income families really need such transfers?</div>
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"Government scholarships should be engines of social mobility and be awarded based on a mix of merit and need, and not just different kinds of merit. In this way, children from middle- and lower-income households can have access to the best education that their families could not otherwise afford."</div>
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It would be interesting to hear the PSC's response to this. I suspect it will argue that government scholarships are not meant to achieve social mobility - there are other programmes for that - and that they are primarily to attract talent into the service.</div>
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But it still does not address the question of why public money is used to fund the education of someone whose family can afford it. If that person were truly interested in public service, he could enter it after completing his studies, and let the scholarship go to someone from a less well-off family. From a national budget point of view, that means two well-educated Singaporeans in the public service for the price of one.</div>
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Perhaps a hybrid system could be devised with a certain number of scholarships reserved for the poor.</div>
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If the PSC is really serious about having a public service leadership drawn from all socio-economic classes, I cannot see how it can avoid some sort of income criteria.</div>
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What about the issue of groupthink in the service which Mr Teo highlighted?</div>
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I am glad he raised it as a concern because it is a real problem in a bureaucracy like Singapore's that has been dominant for so long and which has such a close relationship with the political leadership.</div>
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The PSC's approach is to encourage its scholars to go to universities other than those in Britain and the United States, and to do a variety of courses.</div>
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But groupthink is a problem more of an organisation's culture than the background of its scholars.</div>
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It has to do with whether the leadership encourages critical thinking and questioning and is open to ideas from outside.</div>
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It requires officers with high levels of professionalism and expertise in all the different services who are able to make independent assessments and decisions, and not wait for or second-guess their bosses.</div>
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But this is really outside the scope of the PSC.</div>
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It's about the culture of the public service, of the political leadership and the relationship between the two.</div>
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But that's another story.</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2202755133526280889.post-9760826112175681592013-09-22T12:55:00.001+08:002013-09-22T12:56:11.585+08:00Tuition too prevalent to ignore<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; line-height: 12.727272033691406px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
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There was widespread incredulity last week when Senior Minister of State for Education Indranee Rajah declared that tuition is unnecessary.<br />
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<span style="color: #777777; font-size: 11px; line-height: 13.625px;">By Chua Mui Hoong, Opinion Editor</span></div>
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Responding to a question in Parliament on the "shadow education system" and its impact, she said: "Our education system is run on the basis that tuition is not necessary. Some parents believe they can give their children an added advantage by sending them to tuition classes, even though their children are doing reasonably well. We cannot stop them from doing so."</div>
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The parents who spend US$680 million (S$848 million) each year (according to a 2012 Asian Development Bank report on tuition) on private tuition for their children here clearly think that tuition isn't unnecessary.</div>
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Various polls suggest tuition prevalence here as anything from nearly half of households (a MasterCard survey on spending in April) to over 90 per cent of students (the Asian Development Bank report).</div>
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But in a way, Ms Indranee's view is internally consistent: the Ministry of Education (MOE) does not consider tuition necessary, so it designs its curriculum accordingly, and its teachers are expected to teach like there is no such thing as private tuition.</div>
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Thinking within the box that says tuition is unnecessary leads to this rather ostrich-like way of tackling the issue: not needed, not an issue, go away.</div>
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How different it would be if the ministry could get out of its self-imposed box to contemplate: What is it about the education system that is making so many parents send their children for private tuition?</div>
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In fact, this was precisely what Nominated MP Janice Koh asked in Parliament: Whether more should be done to make tuition "less necessary and desirable" in Singapore, and if the ministry had data on tuition.</div>
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If the ministry took the issue of tuition seriously, its thinking might go this way: "We think it's unnecessary, but many parents and students clearly think otherwise. Is there something we're missing? In fact, how prevalent is tuition? Maybe we should study this, and see what students have tuition in, how much is spent, and if tutors are qualified.</div>
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"Better still, let's study if tuition is effective, for different groups of students: the weak, the average and the academically strong.</div>
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"Do some of MOE's existing policies create conditions that fuel demand for tuition? Could large class sizes result in weaker students needing personalised attention from tutors? Could our move to grade exams on raw scores rather than in broad bands compel students to get extra coaching to chase up every extra mark to get ahead of others?</div>
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"Could our marking and grading system fuel hyper-competitive behaviour and lead to an arms race in grades and tuition? What can we do to reduce these effects?"</div>
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If such thinking goes on in the ministry, the public is none the wiser.</div>
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Singapore's policymakers have a tendency to present a closed, united front on an issue and speak within the confines of existing practice, ignoring different realities and views.</div>
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There may be reason for such an approach: in this case, it might be to avoid spurring a frenzy for tuition; or to assure parents that schools are doing their job teaching students. But this approach lacks credibility when there is a vast gap between their pronouncements, and the reality on the ground.</div>
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As Singapore undergoes significant shifts in policy, and its leaders try to recalibrate a new bond with the people, it is vital that the Government discard the old mode of responding to criticisms - or questioning of its policies - by ignoring them out of existence.</div>
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I have interviewed and spoken with many senior civil servants in both formal and informal settings and know most of them for a thoughtful, serious-minded bunch. I would be extremely disappointed if the questions on tuition I can think of, off the top of my head as I write this article, have not occurred to them in the course of their work.</div>
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I am sure ministry officials, and educationists, have studied these issues and come to some conclusions. But when the discussion is kept behind closed doors, out of sight and hearing of the public, it might as well not have taken place.</div>
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When all the public sees are pronouncements that defend the status quo and ignore the shadow system beneath, it begins to think that either the Government doesn't know what's going on, or doesn't care, or is powerless. It can erode the Government's credibility.</div>
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The ministry would be unwise to ignore tuition when it has become part of students' life, and when the excesses of a hyper-competitive tuition culture in countries such as South Korea and Japan are so visible.</div>
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I cite the example of tuition not because I believe tuition is a good thing. Indeed, I went through my school days without any. I cite it only as the most recent example of a distressing tendency to gloss over problems in Singapore, rather than look at them candidly and tackle them.</div>
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The policy shifts of the last year, on public transport, health care, childcare and housing, among others, should be reminder enough to all policymakers and Singaporeans just how dangerous it is to ignore problems, to close one's eye to troublesome specks of activity and refuse to connect the dots.</div>
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If officials who noticed the surge in employment pass, work permit, permanent resident and new citizenship numbers had voiced their concerns, and if the Government had listened to its own MPs' complaints about overcrowding instead of dismissing them, there might have been a faster build-up of housing and transport infrastructure to prepare for the larger population.</div>
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In health care, calls to extend the MediShield umbrella to cover people till death, and to include people with pre-existing illnesses, have been made for years. Thinking within the box led policymakers to defend the status quo resolutely and refuse extending coverage.</div>
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When you keep within the confines of policy, the refusal is internally consistent: Bringing in the very old and sick will jack premiums up so much, the young and healthy will flee the insurance scheme and scupper it. Ergo, keep the old and sick out.</div>
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Then, this year, the Government acquiesced.</div>
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What changed? The Government was ready to get out of its self-imposed policy box. Instead of treating MediShield as an opt-in insurance system that healthier people can flee from if the net is broadened to cover the very old and sick, it decided to make it compulsory. With a broader risk pool, the sums will be more manageable.</div>
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Singapore faces many choices in the years ahead, on social policy, on education, and certainly in politics. The Government and the intellectual elite in Singapore can choose to debate options within the confines of what is currently agreed on, and within the self-imposed limits of existing policy.</div>
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Or it can do the more politically difficult thing and really acknowledge problems, study them and see how the status quo can change to address the problems.</div>
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Start with the shadow education system. The best way to remove a shadow is to bring it into the light, not dismiss its utility.</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2202755133526280889.post-33230282016766492942013-09-22T12:53:00.001+08:002013-09-22T12:54:41.153+08:00Chin Peng: A divisive figure even in death<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; line-height: 12.727272033691406px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
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Few people knew where exactly Chin Peng lived. But friends and followers turned up in Bangkok anyway, bearing what pleasures the frail octogenarian could still enjoy: Chinese meals, ice cream, and short trips to nearby provinces like Chanthaburi.<br />
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By the time he breathed his last in Thailand's Bumrungrad International Hospital last Monday, cancer had robbed him of most speech. Yet his face remained serene - the way followers remembered it was some 60 years ago, as he led a guerilla war from the jungles of Malaya.</div>
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The quiet death of former communist leader Chin Peng, whose real name is Ong Boon Hua, has however stoked a war of words over his role in Malaysian history.</div>
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Was the Perak-born secretary-general of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) a freedom fighter, or a mere terrorist who once had a 250,000 Malayan-dollar price tag on his head?</div>
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Malaysia's leaders are adamant it is the latter, and never acceded to his recent efforts to return home, on the grounds that it was part of a Thailand-brokered peace deal signed in 1989 between the communist forces and the Malaysian government.</div>
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Chin Peng's death did not change the Malaysian government's position. Malaysia's Inspector-General of Police Khalid Abu Bakar went to the extent of tweeting that the police would monitor all of the country's entry points to keep his remains out.</div>
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For former Malaysian soldier Juhata Mohd Yusof, who saw several fellow soldiers lose their legs to booby traps set up by the communists in the mid-1980s while serving in jungles near the Thai border, the emotional scars run too deep for any talk of forgiveness.</div>
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"I spent months in the jungle looking for the communists," said the 53-year-old who now drives a cab in Kuala Lumpur. "His death closed a chapter that cannot be forgotten."</div>
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Others, however, don't see why an old man, or his ashes, should be banished from his homeland.</div>
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The Malaysian Chinese Association supported the return of his remains, pointing out that even ethnic Malay terrorists had been allowed burials in their respective hometowns.</div>
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At Chin Peng's wake in Bangkok's That Thong temple last Friday, his old comrades repeated the plea for his ashes to be taken home. A 69-year-old woman, who wanted to be known only as Ms Quah, reasoned: "It was a war, and a lot of our people on our side died too. They were also Malaysian and they also had families."</div>
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She was among the tens of former guerillas in their 50s and 60s paying their respects to their leader. Some had arrived from Kuala Lumpur, Perak, Penang as well as southern Thailand.</div>
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Others present included retired Thai general Kitti Ratanachaya, one of the major players behind the 1989 peace accord which ended communist hostilities.</div>
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Outside the funeral hall bordered by wreaths, photos of Chin Peng at various party milestones were flashed on a TV screen. Attendees were given a booklet with a letter by him, titled My Last Wish.</div>
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In it, he expressed regret at being unable to return home. But he also wrote: "My comrades and I had dedicated our lives to a political cause that we believed in and had to pay whatever price there was as a result. Whatever consequences on ourselves, our family and the society, we would accept with serenity."</div>
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<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Divisive figure</strong></div>
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Chin Peng, the son of a migrant from Fujian province in China, was born in the western Perak district of Sitiawan in 1924. He joined the communist party in his teens and was not even 24 when he was made secretary-general of the then Malayan Communist Party.</div>
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In 1946, British colonial authorities made him an officer of the Order of the British Empire after World War II for his role in resisting the Japanese invaders. Not long after, however, the communists launched an armed struggle to drive out the British, which cost an estimated 11,000 lives between 1948 and 1957.</div>
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During their armed struggle, communists struck fear through rail and road ambushes and assassinations, and extorted money or supplies from villagers to sustain their campaign.</div>
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While wily and tenacious, Chin Peng also tended to rule by consensus, which also meant he was slow to react. That, coupled with the lack of a long-term political vision, left him eventually pursuing a lost cause, said Mr C.C. Chin, an independent researcher who co-edited the book Dialogues With Chin Peng: New Light On The Malayan Communist Party.</div>
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Various other factors, including the forced relocation of communist-friendly villages, starved the guerillas of support. But historians say it was Malaya's independence in 1957 that took the wind out of the campaign.</div>
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Deprived of their anti-colonial rudder, the communist cause struggled to gain traction among citizens of the new Malaysia. Their fighters eventually retreated across the border to southern Thailand.</div>
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It was there that some of these communists, including Chin Peng, would remain, after the peace deal that was inked in 1989 with the Malaysian government in the city of Hat Yai.</div>
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At home in Malaysia, Chin Peng remained a divisive figure. While some historians say his actions forced the British government to relinquish power sooner than later, former servicemen who witnessed their colleagues die at the hands of the communists see him as a murderer. A 2006 Malay documentary based on his life, titled The Last Communist, was banned in Malaysia.</div>
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<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Hopes dashed</strong></div>
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Cancer ravaged his body in the last few years of his life, which he endured quietly. "Whenever we asked him if he was in pain, he just shook his head," said one of his former comrades, who wanted to be known only as Mr Chong.</div>
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The ailing Chin Peng led a private life in a friend's house in Bangkok, a location kept from all but a small circle. Mr Chong, a fellow Perak native who had known Chin Peng since 1969, never met him in his home. Chin Peng met Malaysian supporters for Chinese New Year celebrations in restaurants, and his lawyers in hotels.</div>
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Although he gave up the armed struggle, he never renounced his political ideology. In his ghost-written 2003 memoir Alias Chin Peng: My Side Of History, he said: "I fought a liberation war. To ask whether I would do it again is idle talk."</div>
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But he tempered his stance six years later in an interview with the Malaysian newspaper The Star. While stressing that it was impossible to "differentiate between the innocent (and) the non-innocent" in a war, he said sorry for possible mistakes his party had made.</div>
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"If we had intentionally killed innocent people, then I apologise. I apologise to the families who had suffered," he told the paper.</div>
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Chin Peng also never gave up hope of returning to Malaysia despite his ailing health.</div>
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A left-wing supporter from the Perak-based 21st Century Friendship Association Malaysia, who declined to be named, remembers asking Chin Peng about three years ago when he planned to return to Malaysia. "Wait for Anwar to come to power," she recalled him saying.</div>
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He was referring to Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim, Malaysia's opposition leader. But the Pakatan Rakyat coalition he led won only 89 of the 222 seats in Parliament in the May general election even though it secured more than half the total votes.</div>
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Datuk Seri Anwar, who has supported Chin Peng's return, told the Malaysian media last week: "Yang sudah, sudah lah (let bygones be bygones)."</div>
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As the body of the former communist leader is cast into the flames tomorrow, the big question is whether this will ever be possible.</div>
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BACKGROUND STORY</h5>
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<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">THE MAN AND HIS ARMED STRUGGLE</strong></div>
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<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 1.3em; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px 0px 0px 15px; padding: 4px 0px; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;">Chin Peng's real name was Ong Boon Hua.</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 1.3em; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px 0px 0px 15px; padding: 4px 0px; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;">He was born in Sitiawan, Perak, on Oct 21, 1924.</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 1.3em; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px 0px 0px 15px; padding: 4px 0px; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;">His father was a migrant from Fujian province in China.</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 1.3em; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px 0px 0px 15px; padding: 4px 0px; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;">In his teens, Chin Peng joined the Malayan Communist Party. Formed in 1930 to establish communist rule, the party initially operated underground. But when World War II broke out, the British colonial authorities agreed to cooperate with its members to resist the Japanese.</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 1.3em; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px 0px 0px 15px; padding: 4px 0px; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;">In 1946, Chin Peng was given the Officer of the Order of the British Empire award for helping the British to retake Malaya from the Japanese invaders.</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 1.3em; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px 0px 0px 15px; padding: 4px 0px; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;">But in 1948, as secretary-general of the communist party, he launched an armed struggle against the British. About 11,000 lives were lost from 1948 to 1957.</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 1.3em; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px 0px 0px 15px; padding: 4px 0px; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;">The guerilla war continued after Malaya gained independence in 1957. It ended only in 1989, with the signing of a peace accord in Hat Yai, Thailand.</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 1.3em; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px 0px 0px 15px; padding: 4px 0px; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;">In 2004, Singapore lifted a ban on him temporarily and allowed him to visit the city for three days. He spoke at a closed-door session at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, toured historical landmarks such as City Hall, and also called on local war heroine Elizabeth Choy.</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 1.3em; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px 0px 0px 15px; padding: 4px 0px; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;">He died of cancer on Sept 16 in Bangkok.</li>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2202755133526280889.post-83227507979797074882013-09-15T20:37:00.001+08:002013-09-15T20:37:59.698+08:00A long week: Putin's diplomatic gambit<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; line-height: 18.18181800842285px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
Middle East - Shortly after 10 o'clock last Monday morning, US Secretary of State John Kerry acknowledged the scale of the difficulties facing the United States. President Barack Obama had decided to launch a punitive strike against Syria, following an alleged chemical weapons attack in an eastern suburb of Damascus, but he had also taken the surprising step of asking Congress to authorise military action.<br />
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A growing number of US lawmakers looked ready to vote the President down. Mr Obama had taken that decision to consult Congress "based on his gut". Speaking at a press conference in London, Mr Kerry said that the President "knew it would be tough".</div>
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Mr Kerry's performance was far from fluent. Somewhat strangely, he said that any military action would be "unbelievably small". But when a reporter from America's CBS network asked if there was anything the Assad regime could do to stop a US attack, Mr Kerry said something even more unexpected. "Sure," he replied. "He could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week. Turn it over, all of it, without delay, and allow a full and total accounting for that. But he isn't about to do it. And it can't be done, obviously."</div>
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Throughout this week, those 50 words have been repeatedly dissected as the moment that stopped another US war. Four hours after Mr Kerry spoke, his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov responded. Russia, he announced, would propose to President Bashar al-Assad, its loyal ally, that he should hand over his chemical weapons to the international community for destruction.</div>
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The Russian offer had an electric effect. At the end of that day, Mr Obama was grasping at the Russian initiative, suspending his proposed missile strike and accepting negotiations with Moscow. The vote in Congress was averted. But at what price? The US has argued that, for the first time in the Syrian crisis, Russian President Vladimir Putin has given ground and is imposing demands on Mr Assad. But others argue that Mr Putin has outmanoeuvred Mr Obama with a masterstroke that will bog the US down, forcing Washington to negotiate an unrealistic plan to remove Syria's chemical weapons. Whoever is right, one thing is clear: the US should have seen Mr Putin's diplomatic coup coming.</div>
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<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Friday, Sept 6: <span style="background-color: transparent; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14.44444465637207px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 18.88888931274414px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">A short talk in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14.44444465637207px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 18.88888931274414px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">St Petersburg</span></strong></div>
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To explain why, we must trace events back to Sept 6 and the concluding stages of the G-20 summit in St Petersburg's 18th-century Constantine Palace. For Mr Putin, the host, the event was a success. He had lined up many of the G-20 leaders to oppose a military strike. For Mr Obama, the event was dominated by a growing sense that Congress would prevent his attack.</div>
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The body language between the two was notably frosty. But as the final session ended, Mr Putin and Mr Obama settled into a corner of the main hall for a short conversation. Mr Putin focused on one question: Why not work on a joint plan to get Syria to place its chemical weapons under international control?</div>
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This was not the first time the two had discussed this. US and Russian officials say it was first raised at the G-20 summit in Mexico in 2012. Mr Kerry and Mr Lavrov have also talked about it several times over the past year. But the US had always viewed it with suspicion. Any plan to remove Syria's chemical weapons would be a challenge in the midst of a war. But the US also took the view that it was pointless discussing such an idea unless Mr Putin was prepared to force Mr Assad to the negotiating table, something Russia had failed to do. Mr Obama came away from the conversation agreeing, albeit rather vaguely, that the US and Russian foreign ministers could explore the idea. Leaving St Petersburg, he told Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron what Mr Putin had said. "But there was nothing concrete about it," said a Downing Street official. "It all seemed very notional. Nobody thought this would be a way out."</div>
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Nobody except Mr Putin. In his summit press conference that afternoon, Mr Putin warned that Russia would go to Syria's aid if the US attacked. But then he paused. "Incidentally," he said, "we have agreed on some possible scenarios designed to settle this crisis peacefully. We've agreed that Sergei Lavrov and John Kerry will be in touch in the near future to discuss this very sensitive issue."</div>
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Clearly, this idea was on his mind.</div>
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<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Sunday, Sept 8: <span style="background-color: transparent; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14.44444465637207px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 18.88888931274414px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">A battle to win </span><span style="background-color: transparent; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14.44444465637207px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 18.88888931274414px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">in Congress</span></strong></div>
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Back in Washington, Mr Obama was focused on the impending votes in Congress. The White House drew up a campaign plan to win over lawmakers and a deeply sceptical public. Mr Denis McDonough, White House chief of staff, toured the Sunday morning television news shows to make the President's case. Arrangements began for Mr Obama to conduct back-to-back interviews with six TV networks the following night. The President would do a live TV address on Tuesday. All the signs were that Mr Obama was losing a big section of the moderate middle of his own party.</div>
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In the Kremlin, Mr Putin took no comfort from Mr Obama's troubles. He was determined that the US must not carry out this strike, believing it would inflame the Syrian civil war. Plans were therefore finalised to invite Syria's Foreign Minister Walid Muallem to Moscow. There, Mr Lavrov would spell out his plan to get Damascus to hand over its chemical weapons.</div>
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Some Western diplomats have a nagging question about Mr Putin's thinking. Why did he feel he had to act to stop Mr Obama's plan? He could have taken the view that Congress was probably about to do the job anyway. "Obama was in trouble," said a European diplomat. "Putin could have sat back and enjoyed the show on Capitol Hill. He clearly felt that Russia still needed to act."</div>
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Mr Putin has always taken the view that the US would ultimately be drawn into military action in Syria - as it has been in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. But one other factor may well have preyed on his mind. The UN was beginning to circulate the findings of its inspectors into the chemical attacks on Aug 21. Russia insists opposition rebels carried out the attacks. But the UN was letting it be known that it had found missile parts, suggesting that the Assad regime must have been culpable. One senior British diplomat said this would have loomed large in Mr Putin's calculations. "He must have taken the view that once the report was out, political momentum behind a US strike could only grow."</div>
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<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Monday, Sept 9: Moscow's plan <span style="background-color: transparent; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14.44444465637207px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 18.88888931274414px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">goes public</span></strong></div>
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On Monday morning, the international media focused on Damascus. Extracts of an interview by CBS with Mr Assad were emerging, with the Syrian President warning Americans to "expect everything" if the US were to attack. But while his words were defiant, events in Moscow were offering more clues about where the diplomacy was heading. At a joint press conference, Mr Lavrov and Mr Muallem avoided saying anything about their discussions on a plan to remove chemical weapons. But the Syrian Foreign Minister let slip that something was afoot. "Because we trust the Russian efforts, we will fully cooperate with Russia... in order to foil the pretexts used to launch (US) aggression."</div>
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No one in Moscow was yet saying what these "Russian efforts" were. But Mr Kerry would help provide the answer a few minutes later.</div>
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It is unclear why Mr Kerry mentioned the idea of Syria handing over its arms. He may have had the short discussion in St Petersburg in his mind. The idea had also been raised by European foreign ministers at a meeting with him in Lithuania the previous day. In any event, when the State Department was deluged with questions from journalists, Mr Kerry's aides played it down. "Secretary Kerry was making a rhetorical argument," one said. "His point was that this brutal dictator... cannot be trusted to turn over chemical weapons."</div>
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In Moscow, however, Mr Lavrov seized his chance. As the Secretary of State's aircraft left London, the Russian rang Mr Kerry. Mr Kerry insisted again that this had just been a rhetorical argument. But the Russian was insistent: He would launch an immediate proposal for Syria to hand over its chemical arms to an international body. Fair enough, said Mr Kerry, at the end of a 15-minute call. "But this is not a game. It has to be real. It has to be comprehensive."</div>
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According to one Western diplomat, Mr Kerry had effectively offered Russia a golden opportunity. Mr Lavrov feared that if he had launched the Russian proposal "out of the blue", it would have looked like little more than a crude attempt to derail the US. "Kerry's words gave Lavrov the cover he needed and a chance to present this as something consensual that the US and Russia had discussed," said the diplomat.</div>
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But the opportunity offered to Mr Obama was more substantial. At the White House, officials were parsing Mr Lavrov's words and coming to two conclusions. First, there were hard commitments from the Kremlin, not least requiring Syria to sign an international convention prohibiting chemical weapons. This could not be ignored. But the bigger implication was that, by signing up to the Russian proposal, a potentially disastrous confrontation in Congress could be averted. Mr Obama showed interest in Mr Lavrov's proposal in that night's TV interviews and redrafted his address for the following night. There was just one problem: the US and Russia were embarking on a proposal about which there had been only cursory discussion.</div>
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<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Wednesday, Thursday, Friday: <span style="background-color: transparent; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14.44444465637207px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 18.88888931274414px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">A relationship reset?</span></strong></div>
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As soon as the US accepted the proposal, diplomats in Washington, Moscow, Paris and London engaged in what one official calls "an almighty scramble". It is hard to think of any moment - certainly since the fall of the Berlin Wall - when the US and Russia have set out on such a big diplomatic venture without any technical groundwork being laid. "Nobody was ready," said Mr Romain Nadal, diplomatic spokesman for French President Francois Hollande. "Not even the Russians themselves. That was all too clear when the Russians called a UN Security Council meeting for Tuesday night and then ended up cancelling it."</div>
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Confusion reigned for much of the week. On Wednesday, France insisted there must be a UN Security Council resolution threatening "extremely serious consequences" if Syria refused to hand over its chemical stocks quickly. Russia baulked at what it deemed France's aggressive approach. On Thursday night, Mr Kerry and Mr Lavrov met in Geneva, accompanied by dozens of their countries' security officials, to hammer out the details of a UN resolution. In the meantime, chemical weapons experts have lined up to describe the task of destroying Syria's stockpile - the world's third-largest - as practically impossible in the midst of a civil war.</div>
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How might the events of the week ultimately be judged? For many, the verdict will be that Mr Putin has outplayed Mr Obama. By launching his initiative, the Russian President has achieved numerous aims: He has stopped a US military strike and taken Mr Obama down a tortuous diplomatic road. Above all, he has achieved something he has long sought: the chance to place Russia - and himself - at the centre of global diplomacy, presenting himself as indispensable to solving the crisis. "Lavrov deserves a raise," tweeted Mr Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group consultancy, describing an "extraordinarily effective promotion of his country's interests on the international stage".</div>
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Many will also judge that Mr Obama has emerged weaker. Over the past three weeks, he has zigzagged from one initiative to another. "I can't think of a foreign policy issue in my lifetime where America has offered us so little sense of strategy and such a strong sense of making things up as it goes along," said one British official.</div>
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Others will see this judgment as too harsh. For one thing, Mr Obama can argue that his initial threat of military action has forced Mr Putin to give ground on Syria, putting some heat on Mr Assad for the first time.</div>
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Moreover, events in the coming week may prove significant. The United States and Russia yesterday agreed on an ambitious plan to eliminate Syria's chemical weapons by the middle of next year, AFP reported. Russia also said the United Nations Security Council would act if Syria breached the international convention banning chemical weapons under the deal reached with the US, as the two countries seek a solution to end the civil war.</div>
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It looks like Mr Assad may be starting to sweat.</div>
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Financial Times</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2202755133526280889.post-19509201069313532492013-09-14T21:21:00.001+08:002013-09-14T21:22:03.337+08:00The Great Depression in Economic Memory by Jean Pisani-Ferry - Project Syndicate<div data-line-id="8344b40146f86f280efb100a" style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 15px; margin-top: 5px; padding: 0px;">
PARIS – The dispute that has emerged in the United States and Europe between proponents of further government stimulus and advocates of fiscal retrenchment feels very much like a debate about economic history. Both sides have revisited the Great Depression of the 1930’s – as well as the centuries-long history of sovereign-debt crises – in a controversy that bears little resemblance to conventional economic-policy controversies.<br />
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<div data-line-id="8344b40146f86f280efc100a" style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 15px; margin-top: 5px; padding: 0px;">
<a aria-hidden="true" class="inline " href="http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-great-depression-in-economic-memory#" style="border: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153) !important; display: inline; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraph</a>The pro-stimulus camp often refers to the damage wrought by fiscal retrenchment in the US in 1937, four years after Franklin Roosevelt’s election as US president and the launch of the New Deal. According to computations by the economist Paul van den Noord, the net result of the 1937 budget was a fiscal contraction amounting to three percentage points of GDP – certainly not a trivial amount. Economic growth plummeted from 13% in 1936 to 6% in 1937, and GDP shrank 4.5% in 1938, while unemployment rose from 14% to roughly 20%. Although fiscal policy was not the only cause of the double dip, ill-timed retrenchment certainly contributed to it.</div>
<div data-line-id="8344b40146f86f280efd100a" style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 15px; margin-top: 5px; padding: 0px;">
<a aria-hidden="true" class="inline " href="http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-great-depression-in-economic-memory#" style="border: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153) !important; display: inline; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraph</a>So, are we in 1936, and does the budgetary tightening contemplated in many countries risk provoking a similar double-dip recession?</div>
<div data-line-id="8344b40146f86f280efe100a" style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 15px; margin-top: 5px; padding: 0px;">
<a aria-hidden="true" class="inline " href="http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-great-depression-in-economic-memory#" style="border: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153) !important; display: inline; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraph</a>Clearly there are limits to the comparison. For starters, much less time has elapsed since the financial crisis, the recession has been much shallower, and recovery has come faster. Moreover, important developments that occurred between the 1929 stock-market crisis and the 1937 fiscal retrenchment – especially America’s turn to protectionism in 1930 and the monetary turmoil of subsequent years – have no analog today.</div>
<div data-line-id="8344b40146f86f280eff100a" style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 15px; margin-top: 5px; padding: 0px;">
<a aria-hidden="true" class="inline " href="http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-great-depression-in-economic-memory#" style="border: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153) !important; display: inline; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraph</a>Nevertheless, the 1937 episode does seem to illustrate the dangers of attempting to consolidate public finances at a time when the private sector is still too weak for economic recovery to be self-sustaining. (Another case with similar consequences was Japan’s value-added tax increase in 1997, which precipitated a collapse of consumption).</div>
<div data-line-id="8344b40146f86f280e00110a" style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 15px; margin-top: 5px; padding: 0px;">
<a aria-hidden="true" class="inline " href="http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-great-depression-in-economic-memory#" style="border: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153) !important; display: inline; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraph</a>Fiscal hawks also rely on history-based arguments. The economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff have studied centuries of sovereign-debt crises, and remind us that today’s developed world has a forgotten history of sovereign default. A particularly telling example is the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars of the early nineteenth century, when a string of exhausted states defaulted on their obligations. The 1930’s are relevant here as well, given another series of defaults among European states, not least Germany.</div>
<div data-line-id="8344b40146f86f280e01110a" style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 15px; margin-top: 5px; padding: 0px;">
<a aria-hidden="true" class="inline " href="http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-great-depression-in-economic-memory#" style="border: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153) !important; display: inline; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraph</a>What history tells us here is that defaults are not the privilege of poor, under-governed countries. They are a threat to all, especially in times of high capital mobility, when governments rely too much on foreign lenders’ apparent willingness to provide funds and find themselves in dire straits when capital inflows stop.</div>
<div data-line-id="8344b40146f86f280e02110a" style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 15px; margin-top: 5px; padding: 0px;">
<a aria-hidden="true" class="inline " href="http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-great-depression-in-economic-memory#" style="border: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153) !important; display: inline; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraph</a>Again, there are limits to comparisons: it is especially hard to infer from past episodes the limits to public debt. After all, British public debt exceeded 250% of GDP in the aftermath of World War II, and Britain did not default. But an important insight from history is that unsustainable fiscal policies are more likely to result in defaults when fiscal problems cannot be inflated away. This was the case under the gold-based monetary regimes such as the Gold Standard of the nineteenth century, and it is the case today for countries that have relinquished their monetary autonomy, such as the members of the eurozone.</div>
<div data-line-id="8344b40146f86f280e03110a" style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 15px; margin-top: 5px; padding: 0px;">
<a aria-hidden="true" class="inline " href="http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-great-depression-in-economic-memory#" style="border: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153) !important; display: inline; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraph</a>In normal times, history is left to historians and economic-policy debate relies on models and econometric estimates. But attitudes changed as soon as the crisis erupted in 2007-2008. Indeed, central bankers and ministers were obsessed at the time by the memory of the 1930’s, and they consciously did the opposite of what their predecessors did 80 years ago.</div>
<div data-line-id="8344b40146f86f280e04110a" style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 15px; margin-top: 5px; padding: 0px;">
<a aria-hidden="true" class="inline " href="http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-great-depression-in-economic-memory#" style="border: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153) !important; display: inline; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraph</a>They were right to do so. In extraordinary times, history is, in fact, a better guide than models estimated with data from ordinary times, because it captures variance that standard time-series techniques ignore. If one wants to know how to deal with a banking crisis, the risk of a depression, or the threat of a default, it is natural to examine times when those dangers were around, rather than to rely on models that ignore such dangers or treat them as distant clouds. In times of crisis, the best guides are theory, which captures the essence of a problem, and the lessons of past experience. Everything in between is virtually useless.</div>
<div data-line-id="8344b40146f86f280e05110a" style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 15px; margin-top: 5px; padding: 0px;">
<a aria-hidden="true" class="inline " href="http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-great-depression-in-economic-memory#" style="border: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153) !important; display: inline; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraph</a>The danger with relying on history, however, is that we have no methodology to decide which comparisons are relevant. Loose analogies can easily be regarded at proofs, and a vast array of experiences can be enrolled to support a particular view. Policymakers (whose knowledge of economic history is generally limited) are therefore at risk of being drowned in contradictory historical references.</div>
<div data-line-id="8344b40146f86f280e06110a" style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 15px; margin-top: 5px; padding: 0px;">
<a aria-hidden="true" class="inline " href="http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-great-depression-in-economic-memory#" style="border: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153) !important; display: inline; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraph</a>History can be an essential compass when past experience provides unambiguous headings. But an undisciplined appeal to history risks becoming a confusing way to express opinions. Governance by analogy can easily lead to muddled governance.</div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 15px;"><br />
Read more at <a href="http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-great-depression-in-economic-memory#BV0rAHcKwAGZbRtK.99" style="border: none; color: #003399; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-great-depression-in-economic-memory#BV0rAHcKwAGZbRtK.99</a> </span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com