Aljazeera.Net - Of homeland, identity and occupation: "I can say that individual states will not have a place in the future. Blocs of population less than 300 million people will not be accounted for, Arabs must realise that."

Aljazeera.Net - Of homeland, identity and occupation: "Knowing that Europe and other big players are trying to book a place for themselves in tomorrow's world, the US is interested in disrupting oil flow to such huge competitive blocs.I think it is vital for any power to control the world's most important resource - oil."

Life After the Oil Crash: "Classical economic theory works great for goods within an economy. Relying on it to address a severe and prolonged energy shortage, however, is going to prove disastrous. Classical economics works well so long as the market indicators arrive early enough for people to adapt. In regards to oil, market indicators will likely come too late for us to implement even the modest solutions we have available. Once the price of oil gets high enough that people begin to seriously consider alternatives, those alternatives will become too expensive to implement on a wide scale. Reason: oil is required to develop, manufacture, transport and implement oil alternatives such as solar panels, biomass, and windmills."

Entrez PubMed: "There are 481 segments longer than 200 base pairs (bp) that are absolutely conserved (100% identity with no insertions or deletions) between orthologous regions of the human, rat, and mouse genomes. Nearly all of these segments are also conserved in the chicken and dog genomes, with an average of 95 and 99% identity, respectively. Many are also significantly conserved in fish. These ultraconserved elements of the human genome are most often located either overlapping exons in genes involved in RNA processing or in introns or nearby genes involved in the regulation of transcription and development. Along with more than 5000 sequences of over 100 bp that are absolutely conserved among the three sequenced mammals, these represent a class of genetic elements whose functions and evolutionary origins are yet to be determined, but which are more highly conserved between these species than are proteins and appear to be essential for the ontogeny of mammals and other vertebrates."

Trade Flip-Flops (washingtonpost.com): "The same is true of most things China makes. China is a low-wage, low-capital economy; the United States is a high-wage, capital-intensive economy; China is unlikely to make the same things we make. Instead, it will make the stuff we want to purchase. If it makes lots of it, forcing down prices, we may want to boost assistance to other low-wage countries, which may genuinely suffer. But we should hardly fear for our prosperity."

People's Daily Online -- Design you DIY tours on the Net: "As China merges into the world, sightseeing tours outside the country are no longer things beyond reach. Chinese tourists now can be seen in Southeast Asia, Australia, the ROK, Japan and Europe, which just opened to China. On the other hand, DIY tours have taken the place of group tours to become the major organization form in domestic tourism. As a combination of the two, overseas DIY tours have gradually won heart of young people. "

Gmail - GPF Newsletter Sep. 7-10-LinksAn Elder Challenges Outsourcing's Orthodoxy (September 9, 2004) The Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul A. Samuelson challenges the view that the US economy benefits from all forms of trade. In contrast to the mainstream consensus among economists, Samuelson argues that the breakdowns of "old geographical boundaries between labor markets" enhanced by globalization, do pose a serious threat to the average wage in the US. (New York Times)

International Aid - Social and Economic Policy - Global Policy Forum
Aid to “Poorly Performing” Countries: A Critical Review of Debates and Issues (July 2004)
Donors increasingly link international aid to the analysis of “poor” or “good” country performance. This paper stresses that such concepts are flawed. “Poor performance” per se is not the problem, but the effect of weak national institutions combined with the inadequacy of donors to address problems integrally. (Overseas Development Institute) http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/develop/oda/2004/07ppcaid.pdf

$2.3 Trillion in New Debt Expected by 2014 - Social and Economic Policy - Global Policy Forum A new Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report predicts that the federal budget will accumulate up to $3.2 trillions in new debt during the next 10 years if the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq continue. The executive director of the Concord Coalition, a conservative budget watchdog group, comments that "tough [fiscal] choices are needed", but so far both presidential candidates have made campaign pledges that most surely will exacerbate the already record high federal budget deficit. (Washington Post)

Global Apartheid Continues to Haunt Global Democracy- Social and Economic Policy - Global Policy Forum Within global apartheid structures and systems, aid has always been connected to politics. During the Cold War, for example, investment flows, development efforts and humanitarian assistance tended to reflect the changing pattern of superpower alliance and competition. It has been pointed out that tying aid to politics translates into “choice less democracy.” Thus, aid is a means of inducing policies and programs favourable to the donor countries, even though promoting economic performance of recipient countries is the given rationale for doing so. According to a World Bank report, “Aid can be the midwife of good policies.”

Global Apartheid Continues to Haunt Global Democracy- Social and Economic Policy - Global Policy Forum: "Current manifestations of global apartheid are exhibited in the dominance of bilateralism and the hegemonic behaviour of the United States, the unbalanced and undemocratic processes in the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the disproportionate power of multinational corporations and the Washington-based International Financial Institutions (IFIs). "

Global Apartheid Continues to Haunt Global Democracy- Social and Economic Policy - Global Policy Forum: "Global apartheid, like globalization, is a buzzword that has evolved to describe a new global paradigm. Put simply, global apartheid is an international system of minority rule that promotes inequalities, disparities and differential access to basic human rights, wealth and power. Global apartheid is the opposite of global democracy. People like South Africa's president Thabo Mbeki, Fidel Castro of Cuba and the scholars Ali Mazrui, Richard Falk, and Patrick Bond, among many others, have used this concept in an effort to describe the global or economic injustice of our time."

People's Daily Online -- US anti-terror war goes through many wrong paths: "What is puzzling is that senior US officials, on the one hand, loudly shout their opposition to the 'civilization conflict' theory, but on the other hand, they tell the world people: the source of the Middle East terrorist activities and anti-US sentiment does not lie in US biased Middle East policy, but in the radical Islamic forces' opposition to US democracy and concept of value, and their hatred toward Western free lifestyle. Such an attitude is also unfavorable to people's understanding of the real root cause of the emergence of terrorism. "

People's Daily Online -- US anti-terror war goes through many wrong paths: "Just as the British 'Janes Intelligence Review' recently pointed out: Network in sympathy with Qaeda continues to expand, this is one of the reasons explaining why US-led counter-terror war has now seemed to fall into predicament. Fourth, the security situation in Iraq will for a long term attract and consume US financial forces and troops: Currently, the United States spends in Iraq a daily US$177 million, its total expenditure has amounted to nearly US$150 billion; US troops killed in Iraq have exceeded 1,000 people. Recently, Bush had to admit: US troops' quick occupation of Iraq is a 'disastrous victory'. "

People's Daily Online -- US anti-terror war goes through many wrong paths: "US anti-terror war has been going on for nearly three years since the 'September 11, 2001' attack. What's the result of this war in the past three years? President George W. Bush insists on saying: The United States has become more secure and the world has become more peaceful. But the evaluation of world opinion is just the opposite, holding that terrorist activities, instead of decreased, has increased over the past three years. Facts also show there is no sign of any weakening in terrorist activities, instead, there is the trend of intensification. "

People's Daily Online -- China has about 12.5 million teachers: "China had approximately 12.5 million teachers at the end of last year at schools of various levels, an increase of 3.25 million, or 35.2 percent, since 1985, according to government statistics released on Friday. "

People's Daily Online -- More private enterprises into nation's top 500: "What is worth mentioning is that 18 of China's top 500 entered the global tally in 2004, six more than in 2003. State Power Grid Corporation, China's number one, edged into the world's top 50 for the first time. Four manufacturing enterprises: Bao Steel Group, China Faw Group Corporation, Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation (Group) and Dong Feng Motor Co., Ltd, join the world's top-500 family hand in hand. "

Yahoo! News - Scientist: Extreme Weather Will Kill Millions: "Millions of people across the globe are set to die early due to extreme weather events such as floods and heat waves caused by climate change, a British scientist said Tuesday. "

People's Daily Online -- Bush Administration remains untouched towards high oil price, Why?: "The US energy department says, petroleum is the 'lifeblood' of the US economy. The US owns approximately 300 million vehicles, hence known as a 'country on tyres'. With a daily consumption of 20 million barrels of oil it takes up around one fourth of the total oil consumption of the world. "

KurzweilAI.net: "If Louis de Branges really has cracked the Riemann hypothesis, financial disaster might follow. Suddenly all cryptic codes could be breakable. No Internet transaction would be safe, since they all depend on generating prime numbers; the Riemann hypothesis would explain primes and possibly allow for them to be easily cracked. "

KurzweilAI.net: "Scientists in the 'Virgo Consortium' are working on an ambitious project whose goal is to simulate on a supercomputer the evolution of the entire universe, from just after the Big Bang until the present -- the largest and most detailed computer model of the universe ever made. "

TheStar.com - Brain research? Pay it no mind: "I think the reason people want to believe in all of this is that they have lost religion and the little of religion that remains to them takes the form of a belief that science will explain things,' he comments.
'My students get very bothered even by the suggestion that some problems will not be solved. When I talked about this in class, one of my students was almost crying. She actually said I had removed the meaning of her life. I thought, get a grip.'"

TheStar.com - Brain research? Pay it no mind: "A friend of mine, who teaches physics at the University of Toronto and has read a shelf-load of books on cognitive science, neuroscience, and so on, says to me, 'You take a problem such as human creativity � anything I have ever read on that particular topic says to me that these scientists have absolutely no idea, not even the beginning of an idea, how we come up with new ideas, whether as artists or scientists. We just don't know.' "

People's Daily Online -- Ten specious fallacies on current world's high oil prices: "In 1990, Cheney, then Secretary of Defense, said, the root why Iraq was not allowed to swallow Kuwait, was that the 20 percent of the world's proven oil reserves were not hoped to be left to Saddam, who is hostile to the United States. "

People's Daily Online -- Ten specious fallacies on current world's high oil prices: "The US-led war on Iraq was laughably interpreted as defending the Western freedom and democracy. However, it was for the oil there. Just like Dr. Kissinger once said, oil is too important to be left to the Arabians. "

People's Daily Online -- Ten specious fallacies on current world's high oil prices: "While oil price can be settled, the drought is irresistible. With the depletion of oil resources, there will never be any cheap oil. Many scientists and engineers in the world project that the outputs of oil and natural gas will peak one after another in the first two decades of the 21st century, which means the present oil price is not overestimated but underestimated. The prediction by French Institute of Petroleum in August is that the oil price will linger between US$ 30 to 80 per barrel. "

Reinventing US Foreign Aid at Millennium Challenge Corp.- Social and Economic Policy - Global Policy Forum: "The federal agency will hand over huge sums of money to a select group of countries that are evaluated and ranked according to series of benchmarks graded by outside parties. Only 16 countries -- out of a potential pool of 75 of the world's poorest nations -- qualified for the first round of funding, based on the quality of the government, public investment in people and economic freedoms. When the program is fully funded, each eligible country could receive as much as $300 million in additional aid per year beyond its current foreign assistance. "

The More We Grow, The Less Able We Are to Feed Ourselves- Social and Economic Policy - Global Policy Forum: "The world is consistently failing to grow enough crops to feed itself, alarming official statistics show. Humanity has squeaked through so far by eating its way into stockpiles built up in better times. But these have fallen sharply and are now at the lowest level on record.
The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation's (FAO) latest report on global food production says that this year's harvest is expected to fall short of meeting consumption for the fifth year running. Even a forecast record harvest this year is failing to ease the crisis. This suggests that rising demand, through population growth and increasing affluence, is outpacing production, fulfilling the gloomy predictions of Thomas Malthus over 200 years ago. "

Cultural Imperialism in the Late 20th Century - Empire? - Global Policy Forum: "Imperialism cannot be understood merely as an economic-military system of control and exploitation. Cultural domination is an integral dimension to any sustained system of global exploitation. "

Big Media the Real Elephant in the Garden - Empire? - Global Policy Forum: "In 1987, a bill to turn the Fairness Doctrine into federal law was vetoed by President Ronald Reagan after furious lobbying by the media industry. Today, most Americans still believe that news media are held to this rule, which required broadcasters to cover controversial issues in their community, and to do so by offering opposing views and diverse political perspectives. This is not the case. An August 2004 Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting study of Fox's 'Special Report with Brit Hume' found that conservatives accounted for 72 percent of the show's political guests, while centrists made up 15 percent and progressives only 14 percent. "

Big Media the Real Elephant in the Garden - Empire? - Global Policy Forum: "The real elephant in The Garden this year is the rise of big media to the commanding heights of power and influence in America. The eight top media firms in New York to cover the conventions now rank among Fortune's 2004 list of the 300 largest corporations in the world. General Electric, which owns NBC, USA Network, and Universal Pictures to name a few, posted $134.2 billion in worldwide revenues in 2003 -- more than five times the gross domestic product of Azerbaijan. This year, Forbes magazine calculated that over one-third of the 40 richest Americans generated the bulk of their income through media or media related industries"

Oil, Guns and Money - Empire? - Global Policy Forum: "As the U.S. searches for new ways to reduce its reliance on Middle East oil, protecting energy supplies from Latin America, Central Asia and West Africa will take on greater importance. The new realignment of its global military might will likely see the U.S. risk placing its armed forces in danger throughout the most treacherous and politically unstable areas of the world for decades to come. It is a scenario likely to be replayed not just in the Persian Gulf but also across the Central Asian republics, West Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America and anywhere else in the developing world where new oil is found. The net result may ensure America gets the oil it needs, but it is a policy that makes the United States secure, not safer. More U.S. troops will perish protecting oil and hatred of America will expand far beyond the ravings of Islamic extremists. Ultimately, it is an unsustainable policy. "

Oil, Guns and Money - Empire? - Global Policy Forum: "There are very few known terrorist outfits in the waters off West Africa but there is an enormous amount of oil. Africa possesses an estimated 80 billion barrels of oil, 8 percent of total world crude reserves. The U.S. imports some 16 percent of its foreign oil from this part of the world and by 2015 it is expected to rise to 25 percent. And that makes African oil, in the words of U.S. undersecretary of state for African affairs, Walter Kansteiner, 'a national strategic interest.' "

Oil, Guns and Money - Empire? - Global Policy Forum: "The Pentagon is also concerned with other areas of the world that have been indentified by the US government as crucial to its energy future. The Caspian Sea, especially the waters of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, could prove to be one of the largest oil finds in the world after the Middle East. In 2000, oil companies discovered the Kashagan field off the coast of Kazakhstan -- the single largest oil find in over 40 years. By the end of the decade, Kazakhstan is destined to be the world's fifth largest oil producer. "

Oil, Guns and Money - Empire? - Global Policy Forum: "The most recent redeployment of military forces is just one more reaffirmation that in the post-Cold War global order, preserving access to energy resources is the prime strategic imperative. "

KurzweilAI.net: "The force driving the development of personal robots-- and what will eventually create demand for them in the marketplace -- is aging baby boomers, who will be increasingly unable to care for themselves or their homes.

Robot experts predict that a decade from now, boomers might buy a specialized R2D2-like robot to clean the kitchen and another health care 'bot to monitor vital signs and make sure pills are taken. Yet another robot -- built more like a skinny, five-foot-tall human -- might specialize in fetching things from shelves or the basement, making life easier and reducing chances for falls. "

Wired News: Hydrogen Fuel Closer to Fruition: "The premise is sound, but the obstacles are substantial. Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. However, it is shamelessly promiscuous. It will hook up with almost any atom it passes. Like oxygen, in whose sweet embrace it produces water. Or carbon, in whose grubby grope it makes fossil fuels. It doesn't come in a pure form."

Wired 12.09: Let a Thousand Reactors Bloom: "Explosive growth has made the People's Republic of China the most power-hungry nation on earth. Get ready for the mass-produced, meltdown-proof future of nuclear energy."

sacbee.com -- Opinion -- Editorial: Worlds of work and play: "What's clear is that the global economy is changing rapidly, and that the forces driving it are unlikely to be stopped or even slowed much by shortsighted, nationalist policies. What's not clear is how, or if, the world can adapt to such changes with as little painful disruption as possible. In that context, Americans, with the world's largest and most dynamic economy, need to rethink assumptions about how to balance work and leisure in ways that enhance the quality of workers' lives. That's a lot to think about on a day that's supposed to be a day of rest."

sacbee.com -- Opinion -- Editorial: Worlds of work and play: "There's no end of debate about which system is best. The pro-U.S. argument is that, while inequities are greater here, the flexibility of the U.S. economy has brought more growth, created more jobs (the current U.S. jobless rate of 5.6 percent is just over half the 10 percent rates in most of Europe) and fostered greater technological innovation and job-creating new businesses. Critics of the U.S. system call it trickle-down economics and say it puts too much emphasis on work and too little on social factors that, over time, make for a healthier, happier, more cohesive - and rested - society."

ZNet |Foreign Policy | The Faith that Supports U.S. Violence:: "The Bush administration inaugurated an era in which the U.S. withdrew from arms control, environmental, and human rights treaties, and conducted its foreign policy as an unapologetic hegemon, openly disdainful of the rule of law, the interests of other states, and the concerns of other peoples. Not since the Nazis came to power in Germany and imperial Japan seceded from the League of Nations (March 1933), abrogated the Washington Arms Reduction Treaty (December 1934), and withdrew from the London Naval Conference on arms reduction (January 1936) had a major power so quickly lost the trust of other governments. "

Headlines for Thursday, September 2, 2004: "Multilateral development banks or MDBs have strayed far from their original mission of being what their name implies: that is, 'banks' that borrow money where there are capital surpluses and lend it where there are capital deficits. If the MDBs did not already exist they would need to be invented, because there obviously is a crying need for institutions able to intermediate long-term credits to projects that are critical to economic progress."

Foreign Policy: Think Again: Bush?s Foreign Policy: "During the Cold War, preventive action in the Third World was standard operating procedure. If the United States did not intervene, falling dominos would threaten U.S. security. In other words, containment and deterrence in Europe did not foreclose unilateral, preventive initiatives elsewhere. The United States took anticipatory action to deal with real and imagined threats from Central America, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. In each case, policymakers employed the same rhetorical justification that Bush uses now: freedom. "

Income poverty In spite of increased income poverty in much of Africa, in the transition countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, and most recently in some countries in Latin America, the huge weight of population in India and China dominates in the world counts. While it would be true to say that, apart from two countries, poverty in the world is getting worse, it is also true that nearly half the world’s population lives in places where poverty is falling. On the negative side, there is no progress or even negative progress in Africa, with increasing income poverty accompanied by falling life-expectancy associated with HIV/AIDS.

Market exchange rate The problem is that (to simplify matters a little) market exchange rates are determined by supply and demand of imports and exports; importers into India need dollars and euros which are supplied by exporters selling Indian goods in the world market. The market exchange rate then ensures that goods that are traded into and out of India have prices in rupees that, when converted at the market exchange rate, are comparable to the world prices of those goods in dollars.

Measuring poverty at the local level is traight forward, at the national level it is hard but manageable, but at the level of the world as a whole it is extremely difficult, so much so that
some people argue that it is not worth the effort. In particular, because there is no world political authority that can set a poverty line, and use it in anti-poverty policies, we lack the opportunities that exist at the national level to come to some sort of political agreement on what is a useful
definition of poverty.

Poverty lineThe current (2001) poverty line in the United States for a family of two adults and two children is $18,000 a year, more than ten times as much as the international “extreme poverty” line of $1 a person a day used by the World Bank and the United Nations.

PovertyIn recent years, Amartya Sen has been an important voice urging that poverty needs to be seen more broadly than inadequacy of income. He argues that poverty is the absence of one or more of the basic capabilities that are needed to achieve minimal functioning in the society in which one lives.

Economic growthWhen there is economic growth, in the sense of an increase in average consumption and average income, what happens to poverty depends on what happens to the distribution of income and consumption. If everyone’s incomes grow together, then growth at the mean goes straight into poverty reduction. If economic growth benefits only the rich, the distribution of income widens, and there will be no reduction in poverty in spite of the fact that growth among the rich means that average incomes are growing.

Economic development As the name suggests, economic development was originally thought of as economic growth, but in recent years it has increasingly come to be thought of as poverty reduction.