Eideard

Still relying on apartment blocks for most urban residences

China’s urban population exceeded its rural population in 2011 for the first time in the nation’s history, the government’s National Bureau of Statistics reported, continuing a trend that has helped drive its rapid economic growth but poses an increasingly difficult social transition for scores of millions of Chinese.

The statistics bureau stated that China counted 690.79 million urbanites at the year’s end, an increase of 21 million, compared to 656.56 million rural-dwellers, down 14.56 million.

The shift furnishes a ready labor force for the factories that power China’s export-based economy, and better wages in cities have contributed to raising hundreds of millions from poverty. But it also has fueled an urban underclass of migrants and jobless without proper housing and social services, and the hollowing of the countryside has left the elderly without family close by and deprived farms of needed labor.

Barely 10 percent of Chinese lived in cities when Communist forces took control of the Chinese mainland in 1949, Reuters reported. Globally, about 51 percent of people now live in cities, including 51.27 percent of Chinese citizens. The United States counts 82 percent of its residents as city-dwellers.

It took the United States – even with our waves of immigrants – about 140 years to reach 50% city-dwellers. Growing the needed infrastructure in parallel most of the way. China has blown through that process in 60 years. There are advantages and disadvantages to that rate – not counting the difference in culture between a New World society a bit over 200 years old versus a culture estblished in place for thousands of years.

It will be interesting to see where the next 5-year plan settles goals and strategies, this year. Certainly, the government recognizes the needs for sensible energy production – which must be balanced against an economy which they’re also throttling back towards a domestic base and a larger percentage of consumer goods for that domestic market. But, communications systems will be specially interesting. Will they build out fibre and copper or place a greater reliance on RF and cellular/satellite communications?

Reuters pictures used by permission

Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party faces an array of Communists, nationalists and liberals in a parliamentary election on Sunday, but one of its ardent opponents is a more peculiar political animal: a cartoon pig named Nakh-Nakh.

Pushed to the margins since Putin came to power 12 years ago, some of the prime minister’s fiercest foes are urging Russians to reject the political system he has put in place by spoiling their ballots in Sunday’s State Duma vote.

“This is not an election in the European sense of the word, because no party that presents a challenge, or has not been agreed with the Kremlin, has been allowed to run,” said satirist Viktor Shenderovich, a co-founder of the Nakh-Nakh movement.

“The question is what people who understand this is a farce should do.”

Their answer: Nakh-Nakh, a bespectacled pig with an orange scarf, a blue beret and a double-entendre of a name that to Russians evokes both the Three Little Pigs and an obscenity which, put more politely, means ‘Go away!’…

In a series of animated clips posted on the Internet, the pink-cheeked pig casts his vote, angrily marking the box for each party with an X and adding a big black X across the entire ballot before slipping it through the slot…

The message: It’s the same no matter how you slice it…

Russians used to be able to register disapproval of their choice by marking an “against all” box on the ballot.

Nearly three million voters did so in the 2003 election to the Duma, Russia’s lower parliament house. The “against all” option received 4.7 percent of the votes, more than 19 of the 23 parties on the ballot.

The Duma then passed legislation striking the “against all” option from ballots, part of a series of electoral reforms enacted during Putin’s 2000-2008 presidency that critics said were meant to silence dissent and strengthen his grip on power.

The Kremlin-controlled parliament also raised the threshold needed to win State Duma seats to 7 percent and threw up other barriers to potential challengers.

All of the restrictions added in Russia have been practiced in the United States – most are still in force.

Nakh-Nakh.

The dangerous task of removing cluster bombs dropped by Israel on Lebanon

A U.S.-led push to regulate, rather than ban, cluster munitions failed Friday after 50 countries objected, following humanitarian campaigners’ claims that anything less than a outright ban would be an unprecedented reversal of human rights law.

While the United States, China and Russia want rules about the manufacture and use of cluster bombs, activists say such regulations would legitimize the munitions, backtracking from the Oslo Convention, an international treaty that seeks a worldwide ban.

“Against all odds it looks like we’re going to have success this evening,” Steve Goose, head of the arms division at Human Rights Watch, told a press conference in Geneva. “How often do you see the U.S., Russia, China, India, Israel and Belarus push for something, and they don’t get it? That has happened largely because of one powerful alliance driving the Oslo partnership.”

Cluster bombs, dropped by air or fired by artillery, scatter hundreds of bomblets across a wide area and can kill and maim civilians long after conflicts end…

Those lining up against the U.S. plan included the International Committee of the Red Cross and the top U.N. officials for human rights, emergency relief and development.

The U.N. agency chiefs said cluster bombs were a particular threat to children, who were attracted by their unusual, toy-like shapes and colors. They said they were extremely concerned at plans to do anything less than ban them…

Activists said the opposition to the U.S. proposal was led by Norway, Mexico and Austria, while 12 signatories to the 2008 Oslo Convention, including Japan, France and Germany, said they were in favor of regulation of cluster bombs under the CCW.

China and Russia, which like the United States are major producers of cluster munitions, were strongly supportive of the U.S. measure.

No surprises in any aspect of the politics on display here. Whether the question is one of allowing torture – or carrying on with the manufacture, deployment and distribution of anti-personnel weapons generally used by the most reactionary regimes on Earth – the United States has supported continuing use.

We accepted all the premises from the Axis we fought against in World War 2. And invented new rationales, more lies for the Cold War and beyond.

Heavier rainfall, fiercer storms and intensifying droughts are likely to strike the world in the coming decades as climate change takes effect, the world’s leading climate scientists said on Friday.

Rising sea levels will increase the vulnerability of coastal areas, and the increase in “extreme weather events” will wipe billions off national economies and destroy lives, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the body of the world’s leading climate scientists convened by the United Nations.

Scientists have warned of these effects for years, but yesterday’s report – the “special report on extreme weather” compiled over two years by 220 scientists – is the first comprehensive examination of scientific knowledge on the subject, in an attempt to produce a definitive judgment. The report contained stark warnings for developing countries in particular, which are likely to be worst afflicted in part because of their geography, but also because they are less well prepared for extreme weather in their infrastructure and have less economic resilience than developed nations. But the developed world will not be unscathed – heavier bursts of rainfall, heatwaves and droughts are all likely to take their toll.

Chris Field, co-chair of the IPCC working group that produced the report, said the message was clear – extreme weather events were more likely. “Some important extremes have changed and will change more in the future. There is clear and solid evidence [of this]. We also know much more about the causes of disaster losses.”

He urged governments to take note – many of the economic and human impacts of disasters can be avoided if prompt action is taken: “We are losing way too many lives and economic assets in disasters.”

There is a range of caveats in the report – of course – since scientists by definition don’t care to offer anything more than conservative estimates of results from their studies. Something the average politician or know-nothing, what passes for a 21st Century conservative has little or no comprehension of. Scientists traditionally posit results on honest evaluation and conservative conclusions.

Living in a country where we can’t even convince Congressional conservatives to dedicate effort or funds to repair and maintain our crumbling infrastructure – Americans have nothing but disasters to look forward to. Penny-wise and pound-foolish beancounters combined with the admixture of nutballs and paranoids that constitute America’s right-wing will do everything in their power to deny and defeat any planning for weather extremes.

“Don’t eat the knishes!”
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

French President Nicolas Sarkozy branded Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “a liar” in a private conversation with President Barack Obama that was accidentally broadcast to journalists during last week’s G20 summit in Cannes.

“I cannot bear Netanyahu, he’s a liar,” Sarkozy told Obama, unaware that the microphones in their meeting room had been switched on, enabling reporters in a separate location to listen in to a simultaneous translation.

“You’re fed up with him, but I have to deal with him even more often than you,” Obama replied, according to the French interpreter…

The conversation was not initially reported by the small group of journalists who overheard it because it was considered private and off-the-record. But the comments have since emerged on French websites and can be confirmed by Reuters…

Obama and Netanyahu have had a rocky relationship as U.S. efforts to broker a Middle East peace deal have foundered, with the U.S. president openly criticizing Jewish settlement building in the occupied Palestinian territories.

It was unclear why exactly Sarkozy had criticized Netanyahu. However, European diplomats have largely blamed Israel for the breakdown in peace talks and have expressed anger over Netanyahu’s approval of large-scale settlement building.

During their bilateral meeting on November 3, on the sidelines of the Cannes summit, Obama criticized Sarkozy’s surprise decision to vote in favor of a Palestinian request for membership of the U.N. cultural heritage agency UNESCO…

The October 31 UNESCO vote marked a success for the Palestinians in their broader thrust for recognition as a sovereign state in the U.N. system — a unilateral initiative fiercely opposed by Israel and the United States.

Don’t let democracy, sovereignty, history get in the way of the relationship between a global imperial power and a regional hitman. Power, greed, are still the signal deciders in American foreign power. Choosing to work closely with a liar like Netanyahu is not a new choice.

About 10,000 opponents of a proposed pipeline for carrying oil from Canada to the Gulf Coast surrounded the White House on Sunday – exactly a year before the 2012 election – seeking to pressure President Barack Obama to reject the project.

If approved, the 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline, to be built by Calgary-based TransCanada Corp., would carry crude from the tar sands region in Alberta to Gulf Coast refineries in Texas, passing through six states.

Supporters such as oil industry groups and some labor unions say the pipeline would reduce U.S. reliance on oil from the volatile Mideast and create 20,000 jobs in a U.S. economy that desperately needs the boost.

Environmental groups despise the project and call it a needlessly risky method of producing dirty energy. They say the pipeline could leak, endangering drinking water. They say extracting the thick crude from tar sands is itself a greenhouse-gas producing, wasteful process. And they say the promise of jobs is a false one, claiming it would produce only about 6,000 temporary jobs…

The Keystone decision poses a political dilemma for Obama, with an approaching election that likely will hinge on the economy. He will inevitably anger one of his constituencies – either the unions supporting the project or environmentalists and others opposing it.

The Obama administration must issue a permit to approve Keystone because it would cross the U.S.-Canada border. Though Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has said she’s “inclined” to approve the project, the final verdict rests with Obama, who recently said he will wait until after the State Department finishes its review of the proposal.

I support a couple of the environmental groups involved in this political battle. Doesn’t mean I think they’re completely in the right. When they stretch facts and presume statistical likelihoods of pipeline failure, oil spills resulting from pipelines transiting the United States north-to-south, they haven’t a leg to stand on. The number of failures in the lower 48 over the decades [and miles] of pipeline is negligible.

The issue has to be decided on sound environmental practices. Whether or not you can have confidence on both governments doing the right thing on behalf of citizens of both countries? Can they be trusted to work to standards sufficiently high to protect the environment in Canada and the United States?

Nikita Sachdeva – from Delhi – now a student at University of Chicago

Moulshri Mohan was an excellent student at one of the top private high schools in New Delhi. When she applied to colleges, she received scholarship offers of $20,000 from Dartmouth and $15,000 from Smith. Her pile of acceptance letters would have made any ambitious teenager smile: Cornell, Bryn Mawr, Duke, Wesleyan, Barnard and the University of Virginia.

But because of her 93.5 percent cumulative score on her final high school examinations, which are the sole criteria for admission to most colleges here, Ms. Mohan was rejected by the top colleges at Delhi University, better known as D.U., her family’s first choice and one of India’s top schools…

Mohan, 18, is now one of a surging number of Indian students attending American colleges and universities, as competition in India has grown formidable, even for the best students. With about half of India’s 1.2 billion people under the age of 25, and with the ranks of the middle class swelling, the country’s handful of highly selective universities are overwhelmed…

“The problem is clear,” said Kapil Sibal, the government minister overseeing education in India, who studied law at Harvard. “There is a demand and supply issue. You don’t have enough quality institutions, and there are enough quality young people who want to go to only quality institutions.”

American universities and colleges have been more than happy to pick up the slack. Faced with shrinking returns from endowment funds, a decline in the number of high school graduates in the United States and growing economic hardship among American families, they have stepped up their efforts to woo Indian students thousands of miles away…

Indians are now the second-largest foreign student population in America, after the Chinese, with almost 105,000 students in the United States in the 2009-10 academic year, the last for which comprehensive figures were available. Student visa applications from India increased 20 percent in the past year, according to the American Embassy here.

RTFA. A multipliplex of incompetence, political foolishness, unwillingness to see beyond your nose.

Young people capable of learning, acquiring skills and knowledge, of contributing to the betterment of society lose the opportunity. The barriers in either nation may differ. The result is the same.

Today marks the end of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell“. The law is repealed. From this day forward Gay and Lesbian soldiers may serve in our Army with the dignity and respect they deserve. Our rules, regulations and policies reflect the repeal guidance issues by the Department of Defense and will apply uniformly without regard to sexual orientation, which is a personal and private matter.

Click on the link above for the whole statement.

Overdue.

They are crap spilling over the rim of the overstuffed garbage can of history.

The Beatles showed their support for the US civil rights movement by refusing to play in front of segregated audiences, a contract shows.

The document, which is to be auctioned next week, relates a 1965 concert at the Cow Palace in California. Signed by manager Brian Epstein, it specifies that The Beatles “not be required to perform in front of a segregated audience”.

The agreement also guarantees the band payment of $40,000 (£25,338). Other requirements include a special drumming platform for Ringo Starr and the provision of 150 uniformed police officers for protection…

The Beatles had previously taken a public stand on civil rights in 1964, when they refused to perform at a segregated concert at the Gator Bowl in Jacksonville, Florida.

City officials relented, allowing the stadium to be integrated, and the band took to the stage.

“We never play to segregated audiences and we aren’t going to start now,” said John Lennon. “I’d sooner lose our appearance money.”

I knew there was another great reason why I always loved the Beatles. Actually, among folks active in the civi rights movement – in the Land of the Free – we all knew about the Beatles’ stance against racism. It was only the “official” newspapers and radio and TV stations that wouldn’t admit it.

Before the ticker tape parades and the inevitable world tour, the triumphant Apollo 11 astronauts were greeted with a more mundane aspect of life on Earth when they splashed down 40 years ago today – going through customs.

Just what did Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins have to declare? Moon rocks, moon dust and other lunar samples, according to the customs form filed at the Honolulu Airport in Hawaii on July 24, 1969 – the day the Apollo 11 crew splashed down in the Pacific Ocean to end their historic moon landing mission.

The customs form is signed by all three Apollo 11 astronauts. They declared their cargo and listed their flight route as starting Cape Kennedy (now Cape Canaveral) in Florida with a stopover on the moon.

It never ends.