The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "The majority of economists who argue that free trade increases wealth in the long run and on the whole through the operation of comparative advantage also admit that in the short run some industries and regions are disadvantaged -- often severely -- by shifts in production to more efficient and innovative enterprises. The inevitability of winners and losers in trade competition opens the way for the latter to seek state protection and subsidies, either to allow them to mature into effective competitors or simply to survive."

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "Since the emergence of globalized capitalist markets in the nineteenth century, the trade policies of states have cycled between support of liberalization and adherence to economic nationalism, depending on whether significant domestic interests are winning or losing in international competition."

People's Daily Online -- 'Harmonious but different', 'coexistence of civilization': "A 'policy of benevolence' 'running the country and bringing peace to the world' requires that a 'policy of benevolence', and a 'benevolent government' should be implemented, and 'rule by force of dictators' should not be practiced. The practice of 'policy of benevolence' and 'benevolent government' should be carried out, which makes it possible for the coexistence and development of different cultures. 'Rule by the force of dictator' will evoke the conflicts of civilizations, and thereby leading cultures toward unilateralism and forming cultural hegemony.
If Confucius' theory of 'benevolence' is used for handling the relations between different civilizations, then there will be no conflicts and even war between different civilizations, and the 'coexistence of civilizations' will be realized. "

KurzweilAI.net: "Research laboratories envision tools that could identify and track just about every person, anywhere -- and sound alarms when the systems encounter hazardous objects or chemical compounds.

Many such ideas seem to leap from the pages of science fiction: An artificial nose in doorways and corridors sniffs out faint traces of explosives on someone's hair. Tiny sensors floating in reservoirs detect a deadly microbe and radio a warning. Smart cameras ID people at a distance by the way they walk or the shape of their ears. And a little chemical lab analyzes the sweat, body odor, and skin flakes in the human thermal plume -- the halo of heat that surrounds each person."

In The Datasphere, No Word Goes Unheard: "Echelon is the global eavesdropping system run by the National Security Agency (NSA) and its counterparts in Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand. For decades, Echelon's electronic ears have been scooping up all communications relayed by satellite, microwave towers, and even some fiber-optic and copper cables. Each day's intercepts -- phone calls, e-mails, and Web uploads and downloads -- would fill the Library of Congress 10 times."

KurzweilAI.net: "A Caltech team argues that 2.3 billion years ago, cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, gained the ability to break down water, which in turn released a flood of oxygen into the atmosphere.

That oxygen reacted with the atmospheric methane, which insulated the Earth at the time, and broke it down. While the oxygen-methane reaction created the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, the protective nature of the barrier cracked.

Temperatures plunged to minus 50 degrees Celsius, and ice at the equator grew to 1 mile thick. Although this process took several million years, substantial damage to the methane layer could have occurred in the first 100,000 years, in a close call to a planetary destruction."

People's Daily Online -- US targets oil in Africa: "Meanwhile, new changes have been made in US policy towards Africa to gradually ease its relations with countries that have rich oil resources but stand opposed to itself, such as Libya and Sudan. Occidental Petroleum Corporation's being the first American company to resume operation in Libya is an obvious example. "

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "Ultimately, while the U.S.-India joint statement is bilateral in tone, its repercussions will be global. Nuclear weapon states and military suppliers like Russia, China, and France are carefully observing the outcome to guide their own future sales. Similarly, countries outside of the N.P.T. or contemplating violation of the treaty are also watching. If the agreements and changes in U.S. or international legislation that come out of the joint statement are not made with this understanding, India's gain may be the nonproliferation regime's loss. "

KurzweilAI.net: "The world's first cloning of a dog has raised concerns that scientists are one step closer to replicating human beings, despite the breakthrough pointing to treatments for currently-incurable human diseases.

Some experts say the cloning of a dog demonstrates that most of key techniques needed to clone humans are now available. "

KurzweilAI.net: "The theoretical price of having one's personal genome sequenced just fell from the prohibitive $20 million dollars to about $2.2 million, and the goal is to reduce the amount further--to about $1,000--to make individualized prevention and treatment realistic.

The sharp drop is due to a new DNA sequencing technology developed by Harvard Medical School researchers. "

Asia Times Online :: South Asia news, business and economy from India and Pakistan: "'As is known, Osama bin Laden, a Saudi millionaire, was an American ally when his band of fundamentalists fought the Soviets in Afghanistan. It is the cynical use of these countries by Washington that built up a reservoir of resentment among large sections of their people against the US.

'This anger may have become all the more intense because there were no democratic outlets - no parliament, opposition parties, a free press and a free judiciary - to let off steam.'' "

Asia Times Online :: South Asia news, business and economy from India and Pakistan: "'A basic reason why the military or feudal autocrats control these countries (Pakistan, Saudi Arabia) is that the US propped them up to serve its economic and diplomatic interests. It was either the presence of oil or their utility as frontline states against the Soviet Union that guided the Americans. "

Asia Times Online :: South Asia news, business and economy from India and Pakistan: "Analysts say that the main reason Indian Muslims have stayed away from international terror circles is the strong democratic tradition that exists in the country. Muslims have been able to give vent to their grievances and grow, unlike international hotbeds where democracy is not a norm. "

Asia Times Online :: Middle East News, Iraq, Iran current affairs: "Muslim leaders must do more to expose the harsh reality of many Muslims throughout the world and speak for Muslim suffering; they must do more to pressure political and public-opinion leaders to address the roots of anger and frustration that breed militancy and give rise to terrorism. The key here is the foreign policy of Western powers, particularly the United States, toward Islam and Muslims. Ignoring legitimate grievances and applying double standards in dealing with Muslim societies and issues must stop if the war on terrorism is to bear fruit. "

Asia Times Online :: Middle East News, Iraq, Iran current affairs: "As for the case of Egypt, veteran Egyptian journalist, Ayman El-Amir, writing for Al-Ahram Weekly articulated it best: Terrorism (as a consequence of political ostracism, not religious fanaticism) is fomented 'not in the mosque or the madrassas but in solitary confinement cells, torture chambers, and the environment of fear wielded by dictatorial regimes as instruments of legitimate governments.' "

inadaily.com | Article service: "All three of these historical state legacies are now challenged simultaneously throughout the Arab world. This is happening through peaceful and evolutionary forces of education, commerce, and globalization - and through violent or political contestation of long-ruling elites and their powers. We should keep in mind the important distinctions between state structures that are losing some of their historical relevance, and individual Arab leaders who are losing their current credibility or legitimacy. Sometimes these two forces converge, and sometimes they do not, but in any case they must be monitored in parallel."

inadaily.com | Article service: "The third fraying legacy is that of the modern Arab security state, in which armed forces, police, intelligence services and others who have a formal mandate to use guns to protect the interests of citizens have tended to focus on protecting the interests of the incumbent regimes - often extended families and tribes. "

inadaily.com | Article service: "The second legacy being challenged in this region is that of the modern Arab state that was also mostly crafted by the Europeans starting around 1920. The modern Arab state that has been in existence for less than a century is deeply pressured by its own erratic ability to meet the basic needs of its citizens - whether in the realm of security, education, health, jobs or international competitiveness."

inadaily.com | Article service: "First is the modern 'nation-state' that entered world history in Europe during the 16th century, and which was exported to the world through the colonial enterprise. This Euro-manufactured state system is evolving and weakening all around the world, due to globalization and other forces, with the evolving nature of sovereignty in Europe itself being the most dramatic example of this."

inadaily.com | Article service: "Arab governance systems are brittle and vulnerable because they are being challenged by two powerful forces simultaneously. The historical legitimacy of the state itself is under pressure - due to both local and global trends - and current leaders are under pressure from angry and concerned citizens (or subjects, as the case may be)."

RIA Novosti - Russia - Russia, China take relations to new level: "Nezavisimaya Gazeta wrote that the biggest concerns of the United States and other Pacific countries were that the exercise would be conducted under the aegis of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which comprises China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. While the organization used to be regarded as an anti-terrorist one, it is now beginning to show the signs of a military bloc. If India joins the SCO, a bloc covering Eurasia might emerge, which, no doubt, would bring an end to the unipolar world that emerged after the Cold War."

i-Newswire.com - Press Release And News Distribution - Will urbanization in developing countries in 2030 be less pronounced than model projections ?: "In a world that would be less intensively urbanized, the industrialized countries would still be the main producers of greenhouse gas emissions and the essential part of natural resources would remain located in the regions of the South. "

i-Newswire.com - Press Release And News Distribution - Will urbanization in developing countries in 2030 be less pronounced than model projections ?: "This theoretical threshold, which represents the maximum urban capacity of a country as a function of its economic development, is reached when the urban transition has finished. Ten large developing countries, with together 18.8% of world population, would alone contribute to more than half the world urban growth between 2025 and 2030. Most countries would already have reached their saturation threshold and would therefore contribute only in a small way to urban growth beyond 2030. "

i-Newswire.com - Press Release And News Distribution - Will urbanization in developing countries in 2030 be less pronounced than model projections ?: "UNO projections on population and urbanization are used widely as input for assessments of other global trends such as poverty, energy consumption and so on. However, they appear to have been overestimated in the past, especially figures for developing countries. An IRD demographer suggests using a model different from the UN one for measuring urbanization levels. This adopts a historical approach to development of these urban concentrations, applied to reflect the particularities of each country. Predictions from this new model indicate that UN projections for 2030 may well overestimate world urban population by as much as one billion. Populations in Africa and Asia could thus remain much more rurally-based than predicted. This points to a possible revision of environmental policies and the demographic tendencies envisaged for this date. "

Wired 13.08: We Are the Web: "thousand years from now, when keen minds review the past, I believe that our ancient time, here at the cusp of the third millennium, will be seen as another such era. In the years roughly coincidental with the Netscape IPO, humans began animating inert objects with tiny slivers of intelligence, connecting them into a global field, and linking their own minds into a single thing. This will be recognized as the largest, most complex, and most surprising event on the planet. Weaving nerves out of glass and radio waves, our species began wiring up all regions, all processes, all facts and notions into a grand network. From this embryonic neural net was born a collaborative interface for our civilization, a sensing, cognitive device with power that exceeded any previous invention. The Machine provided a new way of thinking (perfect search, total recall) and a new mind for an old species. It was the Beginning."

Wired 13.08: We Are the Web: "We should marvel, but people alive at such times usually don't. Every few centuries, the steady march of change meets a discontinuity, and history hinges on that moment. We look back on those pivotal eras and wonder what it would have been like to be alive then. Confucius, Zoroaster, Buddha, and the latter Jewish patriarchs lived in the same historical era, an inflection point known as the axial age of religion. Few world religions were born after this time. Similarly, the great personalities converging upon the American Revolution and the geniuses who commingled during the invention of modern science in the 17th century mark additional axial phases in the short history of our civilization. "

Wired 13.08: We Are the Web: "There is only one time in the history of each planet when its inhabitants first wire up its innumerable parts to make one large Machine. Later that Machine may run faster, but there is only one time when it is born.
You and I are alive at this moment."

Wired 13.08: We Are the Web: "What will most surprise us is how dependent we will be on what the Machine knows - about us and about what we want to know. We already find it easier to Google something a second or third time rather than remember it ourselves. The more we teach this megacomputer, the more it will assume responsibility for our knowing. It will become our memory. Then it will become our identity. In 2015 many people, when divorced from the Machine, won't feel like themselves - as if they'd had a lobotomy."

Wired 13.08: We Are the Web: "who will write the software that makes this contraption useful and productive? We will. In fact, we're already doing it, each of us, every day. When we post and then tag pictures on the community photo album Flickr, we are teaching the Machine to give names to images. The thickening links between caption and picture form a neural net that can learn. Think of the 100 billion times per day humans click on a Web page as a way of teaching the Machine what we think is important. Each time we forge a link between words, we teach it an idea. Wikipedia encourages its citizen authors to link each fact in an article to a reference citation. Over time, a Wikipedia article becomes totally underlined in blue as ideas are cross-referenced. That massive cross-referencing is how brains think and remember. It is how neural nets answer questions. It is how our global skin of neurons will adapt autonomously and acquire a higher level of knowledge."

Wired 13.08: We Are the Web: "In 10 years, the system will contain hundreds of millions of miles of fiber-optic neurons linking the billions of ant-smart chips embedded into manufactured products, buried in environmental sensors, staring out from satellite cameras, guiding cars, and saturating our world with enough complexity to begin to learn. We will live inside this thing."

Wired 13.08: We Are the Web: "Danny Hillis, a computer scientist who once claimed he wanted to make an AI 'that would be proud of me,' has invented massively parallel supercomputers in part to advance us in that direction. He now believes the first real AI will emerge not in a stand-alone supercomputer like IBM's proposed 23-teraflop Blue Brain, but in the vast digital tangle of the global Machine. "

Wired 13.08: We Are the Web: "Today, the Machine acts like a very large computer with top-level functions that operate at approximately the clock speed of an early PC. It processes 1 million emails each second, which essentially means network email runs at 1 megahertz. Same with Web searches. Instant messaging runs at 100 kilohertz, SMS at 1 kilohertz. The Machine's total external RAM is about 200 terabytes. In any one second, 10 terabits can be coursing through its backbone, and each year it generates nearly 20 exabytes of data. Its distributed 'chip' spans 1 billion active PCs, which is approximately the number of transistors in one PC.
This planet-sized computer is comparable in complexity to a human brain. Both the brain and the Web have hundreds of billions of neurons (or Web pages). Each biological neuron sprouts synaptic links to thousands of other neurons, while each Web page branches into dozens of hyperlinks. That adds up to a trillion 'synapses' between the static pages on the Web. The human brain has about 100 times that number - but brains are not doubling in size every few years. "

Wired 13.08: We Are the Web: "This gargantuan Machine already exists in a primitive form. In the coming decade, it will evolve into an integral extension not only of our senses and bodies but our minds."

Wired 13.08: We Are the Web: "The Web continues to evolve from a world ruled by mass media and mass audiences to one ruled by messy media and messy participation. How far can this frenzy of creativity go? Encouraged by Web-enabled sales, 175,000 books were published and more than 30,000 music albums were released in the US last year. At the same time, 14 million blogs launched worldwide. All these numbers are escalating. A simple extrapolation suggests that in the near future, everyone alive will (on average) write a song, author a book, make a video, craft a weblog, and code a program. This idea is less outrageous than the notion 150 years ago that someday everyone would write a letter or take a photograph"

Wired 13.08: We Are the Web: "Today, 52 percent of netizens are female. And, of course, the Internet is not and has never been a teenage realm. In 2005, the average user is a bone-creaking 41 years old. "

Wired 13.08: We Are the Web: "I run a blog about cool tools. I write it for my own delight and for the benefit of friends. The Web extends my passion to a far wider group for no extra cost or effort. In this way, my site is part of a vast and growing gift economy, a visible underground of valuable creations - text, music, film, software, tools, and services - all given away for free. This gift economy fuels an abundance of choices. It spurs the grateful to reciprocate. It permits easy modification and reuse, and thus promotes consumers into producers. "

Wired 13.08: We Are the Web: "The accretion of tiny marvels can numb us to the arrival of the stupendous. Today, at any Net terminal, you can get: an amazing variety of music and video, an evolving encyclopedia, weather forecasts, help wanted ads, satellite images of anyplace on Earth, up-to-the-minute news from around the globe, tax forms, TV guides, road maps with driving directions, real-time stock quotes, telephone numbers, real estate listings with virtual walk-throughs, pictures of just about anything, sports scores, places to buy almost anything, records of political contributions, library catalogs, appliance manuals, live traffic reports, archives to major newspapers - all wrapped up in an interactive index that really works. "

Wired 13.08: We Are the Web: "How could we create so much, so fast, so well? In fewer than 4,000 days, we have encoded half a trillion versions of our collective story and put them in front of 1 billion people, or one-sixth of the world's population. That remarkable achievement was not in anyone's 10-year plan."

Wired 13.08: We Are the Web: "The scope of the Web today is hard to fathom. The total number of Web pages, including those that are dynamically created upon request and document files available through links, exceeds 600 billion. That's 100 pages per person alive. "

KurzweilAI.net: "In 10 years, the system will contain hundreds of millions of miles of fiber-optic neurons linking the billions of ant-smart chips embedded into manufactured products, buried in environmental sensors, staring out from satellite cameras, guiding cars, and saturating our world with enough complexity to begin to learn. We will live inside this thing."

KurzweilAI.net: "The Web, a planet-sized computer, is comparable in complexity to a human brain. Both the brain and the Web have hundreds of billions of neurons (or Web pages). Each biological neuron sprouts synaptic links to thousands of other neurons, while each Web page branches into dozens of hyperlinks.

That adds up to a trillion 'synapses' between the static pages on the Web. The human brain has about 100 times that number - but brains are not doubling in size every few years. The Machine is. "

Beating Hurdles, Scientists Clone a Dog for a First - New York Times: "South Korean researchers are reporting today that they have cloned what scientists deem the most difficult animal, the dog."

Where there's a will, there's a tactful way: "With $7.2 trillion in wealth about to be handed to the baby boomer generation from their parents, that's not a trivial issue. Of course, most of that financial legacy will be given by wealthy parents to children who are already financially secure. In fact, 30 percent of the wealth bequeathed to the boomer generation will go to 1 percent of the population. "

Future Survey -- Top Ten Trends, Forecasts, and Proposals: "For the overwhelming preponderance of human history, humans have lived in societies that were characterized by 80% continuities, 15% cycles, and only 5% novelties at best. Now I believe the figures are reversed: 80% of our futures may be novel, 15% cyclical, and only 5% continuous with the past and present.'"

Future Survey -- Top Ten Trends, Forecasts, and Proposals: "'The masculinization of Asia's sex ratios is one of the overlooked megatrends of our time, a phenomenon that may very likely influence the course of national and perhaps even international politics in the 21st century.'"

Future Survey -- Top Ten Trends, Forecasts, and Proposals: "'Over the last three decades a major cultural shift has taken place in the attitudes of Western societies toward the future. Optimism has given way to a sense of ambiguity�(which) threatens to stifle hope at a personal as well as a social level.'"

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "On July 5, the members of the S.C.O. -- China, Russia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan -- met in Astana, Kazakhstan to discuss the changing political situation in Central Asia. While previous meetings focused nearly exclusively on the 'three evil forces' -- terrorism, separatism and extremism -- and were dominated by China's desire to control the Uighur population in its Xinjiang region and protect its access to energy resources, this meeting demonstrated that the organization, which represents nearly 50 percent of the world's population, desires to be a serious force in international affairs. This can be seen in the granting of observer status to India (at Russia's request), Pakistan (at China's insistence) and Iran (to the delight of all members). "

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "Before the S.C.O. meeting, Russia's and China's leaders met at the Kremlin on July 1 to discuss their goals in Central Asia and the upcoming G8 summit. The meeting signaled a shift toward greater cooperation between the two states, completely solved their long-standing border disputes from the legal perspective, and laid the foundation for greater integration of their state-controlled oil companies and banking sectors. One reason that the atmosphere in the Kremlin was so unusually amiable was the perception that a shared threat loomed larger than their differences in policy goals; that threat was Washington's role in Central Asia."

Calling All Luddites - New York Times: "The world is moving to an Internet-based platform for commerce, education, innovation and entertainment. Wealth and productivity will go to those countries or companies that get more of their innovators, educators, students, workers and suppliers connected to this platform via computers, phones and P.D.A.'s."

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "Given the recent increase in Islamist terrorist activities -- which directly involve Pakistani radical circles -- and the country's inner political instability, Islamabad's position emerges as one of the world's decisive geopolitical pivots. At a time of intense competition between Washington and Beijing, coupled with India's rise as a regional power, Pakistan occupies a geostrategic space open to dangerous developments. "