Monday, October 18, 2010

The globalization of car theft

Monday 18th October, 2010

(Op-ed) Cesar Chelala - The Japan Times Monday 18th October, 2010

Every 24 seconds, a motor vehicle is stolen in the United States.

Contrary to popular belief, thieves target not only expensive cars but also, most frequently, those in the mid-price range.

Cars are stolen usually for the resale value of their parts, which become particularly valuable when they are no longer manufactured or are too difficult or too expensive to obtain.

Stolen cars transported across international borders have become a common, almost inevitable consequence of globalization.

Recently, in Albania, I was amazed at the large number of Mercedes Benz cars in Tirana, the capital city, until a friend explained to me that many of them were stolen cars that came from Germany. A similar sight can be observed in Central American countries, where many stolen cars stolen up north in the U.S. end up.

When I told a policeman recently that I lived in Soho, downtown Manhattan, and drove a leading Japanese model, he said, "You are a prime candidate to have your car stolen."

He explained that Japanese cars get a good resale price and that downtown Manhattan is near the Holland tunnel. This makes it easy for robbers to flee to New Jersey, out of reach of the New York police. From New Jersey, the car may be transported to other states. Since then, I've decided to use a parking garage rather than leave my car in the street, even though garage fees in New York can run into several hundred dollars a month.

Recent research from the Netherlands found that thieves are less likely to steal brightly colored cars because they have a lower resale value. They can also be more easily detected. Of 109 pink cars in the study, none were stolen.

In the past, if thieves didn't steal a car, they often might break a window and take the portable radio or CD player. For a long time, parking a car in the street could be annoying, particularly when one was liable to find a broken window and the car's interior vandalized.

My wife had this unpleasant experience when she left the car in a suburban parking lot. The car was stolen by adolescents for a joy ride, and when the police returned it, the interior had been practically destroyed — probably by the police looking for hidden drugs.

A physician friend of mine thought he had solved this problem. When he parked his car in the street, he used to put up a note in the window reading, "RADIO ALREADY STOLEN, NO CD PLAYER, NO VALUABLES INSIDE."

For a long time his car was safe and my friend was happy at having fooled would-be robbers. One day, though, he came back to his car and found a note in the back window: "NOW, NO SPARE TIRE."

(The writer Cesar Chelala, M.D. and Ph.D., is a writer on human rights and foreign policy issues).

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Major storm breaks in Philippines

Monday 18th October, 2010

Big News Network.com Monday 18th October, 2010

Thousands of people in the Philippines have fled their homes as a powerful storm approaches.
A man is believed to have died in the northern Philippines with Typhoon Megi sweeping in with heavy rain and strong winds.

Megi, is generating winds of up to 260 kilometres per hour in the strongest storm the country has faced in four years.

More than 30 provinces and islands in the north have been placed under a storm alert and many people have been evacuated as the fears of mudslides grow stronger.

The so-called super-typhoon reached the country early on Monday with the high winds damaging buildings, power supplies and agriculture.

The typhoon is forecast to move toward the South China Sea after sweeping the northern Philippines.

The last storm of this magnitude occurred in 2006, triggering mudslides, destroying villages and killing about 1,000 people.

Floods have already been reported in the north-eastern provinces of Cagayan and Isabela.
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China says US is using currency as a scapegoat

Monday 18th October, 2010


Big News Network.com Saturday 16th October, 2010

A spokesperson for the Chinese Commerce Ministry alleges the US is using the yuan as a scapegoat, despite ongoing criticism of China's restrictive financial system.
China has told the United States not to make the yuan, their national currency, a scapegoat for domestic problems with the US dollar, in a new twist to the deteriorating trade conflict between the world’s two biggest economies.

Yao Jian, a spokesperson for the Chinese Commerce Ministry made the comments just hours before the United States decides whether to formally label their biggest trade competitor a currency manipulator due to allegations of China artificially depressing the value of the yuan.

Jian accused the US government of looking only at China’s trade surplus as evidence of currency manipulation, rather than considering whether that trade surplus was the result of China’s legitimate supremacy over the US in the current financial climate.

China offers a cheaper alternative to most developed countries, which makes it difficult to compete with the export giant, especially in a financial climate in which businesses and governments are seeking to save money wherever they can.

China remains under pressure from major economies such as Japan and the US to enact faster currency reforms in the Asian powerhouse, which is renowned for a financial system that remains restrictive compared to other major economies.

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Explosion in Chinese mine kills 20, over 30 trapped

Monday 18th October, 2010


Big News Network.com (ANI) Saturday 16th October, 2010

An explosion in a Chinese coal mine has killed 20 workers and trapped over 30 underground in Yuzhou City.

According to Xinhua news agency, the blast happened at about 6 a.m. on Saturday morning.

Rescuers have retrieved 20 bodies, and are still searching for other miners.

The mine is owned by Pingyu Coal and Electric Co. Ltd., a company jointly established by Zhong Ping Energy Chemical Group and China Power Investment Corp.he China blast comes shortly after the world was riveted by the Chile's dramatic rescue of 33 trapped miners after they spent over two months in the collapsed San Jose copper and gold mine. (ANI)

Sunday, October 17, 2010

‘Culture of Poverty’ Makes a Comeback

William C. Eckenberg/The New York Times
The study of urban blight has long been influenced by political fashions.
For more than 40 years, social scientists investigating the causes of poverty have tended to treat cultural explanations like Lord Voldemort: That Which Must Not Be Named.
George Tames/The New York Times: Daniel Patrick Moynihan in his office at Harvard in 1971.
Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times:
A Chicago mother and child in 1997 at the notorious Robert Taylor Homes, since demolished.

The reticence was a legacy of the ugly battles that erupted after Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an assistant labor secretary in the Johnson administration, introduced the idea of a “culture of poverty” to the public in a startling 1965 report. Although Moynihan didn’t coin the phrase (that distinction belongs to the anthropologist Oscar Lewis), his description of the urban black family as caught in an inescapable “tangle of pathology” of unmarried mothers and welfare dependency was seen as attributing self-perpetuating moral deficiencies to black people, as if blaming them for their own misfortune.
Moynihan’s analysis never lost its appeal to conservative thinkers, whose arguments ultimately succeeded when President Bill Clinton signed a bill in 1996 “ending welfare as we know it.” But in the overwhelmingly liberal ranks of academic sociology and anthropology the word “culture” became a live grenade, and the idea that attitudes and behavior patterns kept people poor was shunned.
Now, after decades of silence, these scholars are speaking openly about you-know-what, conceding that culture and persistent poverty are enmeshed.
“We’ve finally reached the stage where people aren’t afraid of being politically incorrect,” said Douglas S. Massey, a sociologist at Princeton who has argued that Moynihan was unfairly maligned.
The old debate has shaped the new. Last month Princeton and the Brookings Institution released a collection of papers on unmarried parents, a subject, it noted, that became off-limits after the Moynihan report. At the recent annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, attendees discussed the resurgence of scholarship on culture. And in Washington last spring, social scientists participated in a Congressional briefing on culture and poverty linked to a special issue of The Annals, the journal of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
“Culture is back on the poverty research agenda,” the introduction declares, acknowledging that it should never have been removed.
The topic has generated interest on Capitol Hill because so much of the research intersects with policy debates. Views of the cultural roots of poverty “play important roles in shaping how lawmakers choose to address poverty issues,” Representative Lynn Woolsey, Democrat of California, noted at the briefing.
This surge of academic research also comes as the percentage of Americans living in poverty hit a 15-year high: one in seven, or 44 million.
With these studies come many new and varied definitions of culture, but they all differ from the ’60s-era model in these crucial respects: Today, social scientists are rejecting the notion of a monolithic and unchanging culture of poverty. And they attribute destructive attitudes and behavior not to inherent moral character but to sustained racism and isolation.
To Robert J. Sampson, a sociologist at Harvard, culture is best understood as “shared understandings.”
“I study inequality, and the dominant focus is on structures of poverty,” he said. But he added that the reason a neighborhood turns into a “poverty trap” is also related to a common perception of the way people in a community act and think. When people see graffiti and garbage, do they find it acceptable or see serious disorder? Do they respect the legal system or have a high level of “moral cynicism,” believing that “laws were made to be broken”?
As part of a large research project in Chicago, Professor Sampson walked through different neighborhoods this summer, dropping stamped, addressed envelopes to see how many people would pick up an apparently lost letter and mail it, a sign that looking out for others is part of the community’s culture.
In some neighborhoods, like Grand Boulevard, where the notorious Robert Taylor public housing projects once stood, almost no envelopes were mailed; in others researchers received more than half of the letters back. Income levels did not necessarily explain the difference, Professor Sampson said, but rather the community’s cultural norms, the levels of moral cynicism and disorder.
The shared perception of a neighborhood — is it on the rise or stagnant? — does a better job of predicting a community’s future than the actual level of poverty, he said.
William Julius Wilson, whose pioneering work boldly confronted ghetto life while focusing on economic explanations for persistent poverty, defines culture as the way “individuals in a community develop an understanding of how the world works and make decisions based on that understanding.”
For some young black men, Professor Wilson, a Harvard sociologist, said, the world works like this: “If you don’t develop a tough demeanor, you won’t survive. If you have access to weapons, you get them, and if you get into a fight, you have to use them.”
Seeking to recapture the topic from economists, sociologists have ventured into poor neighborhoods to delve deeper into the attitudes of residents. Their results have challenged some common assumptions, like the belief that poor mothers remain single because they don’t value marriage.
In Philadelphia, for example, low-income mothers told the sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas that they thought marriage was profoundly important, even sacred, but doubted that their partners were “marriage material.” Their results have prompted some lawmakers and poverty experts to conclude that programs that promote marriage without changing economic and social conditions are unlikely to work.
Mario Luis Small, a sociologist at the University of Chicago and an editor of The Annals’ special issue, tried to figure out why some New York City mothers with children in day care developed networks of support while others did not. As he explained in his 2009 book, “Unanticipated Gains,” the answer did not depend on income or ethnicity, but rather the rules of the day-care institution. Centers that held frequent field trips, organized parents’ associations and had pick-up and drop-off procedures created more opportunities for parents to connect.
Younger academics like Professor Small, 35, attributed the upswing in cultural explanations to a “new generation of scholars without the baggage of that debate.”
Scholars like Professor Wilson, 74, who have tilled the field much longer, mentioned the development of more sophisticated data and analytical tools. He said he felt compelled to look more closely at culture after the publication of Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s controversial 1994 book, “The Bell Curve,” which attributed African-Americans’ lower I.Q. scores to genetics.
The authors claimed to have taken family background into account, Professor Wilson said, but “they had not captured the cumulative effects of living in poor, racially segregated neighborhoods.”
He added, “I realized we needed a comprehensive measure of the environment, that we must consider structural and cultural forces.”
He mentioned a study by Professor Sampson, 54, that found that growing up in areas where violence limits socializing outside the family and where parents haven’t attended college stunts verbal ability, lowering I.Q. scores by as much as six points, the equivalent of missing more than a year in school.
Changes outside campuses have made conversation about the cultural roots of poverty easier than it was in the ’60s. Divorce, living together without marrying, and single motherhood are now commonplace. At the same time prominent African-Americans have begun to speak out on the subject. In 2004 the comedian Bill Cosby made headlines when he criticized poor blacks for “not parenting” and dropping out of school. President Obama, who was abandoned by his father, has repeatedly talked about “responsible fatherhood.”
Conservatives also deserve credit, said Kay S. Hymowitz, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, for their sustained focus on family values and marriage even when cultural explanations were disparaged.
Still, worries about blaming the victim persist. Policy makers and the public still tend to view poverty through one of two competing lenses, Michèle Lamont, another editor of the special issue of The Annals, said: “Are the poor poor because they are lazy, or are the poor poor because they are a victim of the markets?”
So even now some sociologists avoid words like “values” and “morals” or reject the idea that, as The Annals put it, “a group’s culture is more or less coherent.” Watered-down definitions of culture, Ms. Hymowitz complained, reduce some of the new work to “sociological pablum.”
“If anthropologists had come away from doing field work in New Guinea concluding ‘everyone’s different,’ but sometimes people help each other out,” she wrote in an e-mail, “there would be no field of anthropology — and no word culture for cultural sociologists to bend to their will.”
Fuzzy definitions or not, culture is back. This prompted mock surprise from Rep. Woolsey at last spring’s Congressional briefing: “What a concept. Values, norms, beliefs play very important roles in the way people meet the challenges of poverty.”

Over 80 million threatened by poverty in EU Society

BRUSSELS, Oct 17 (KUNA) -- The European Union (EU) is one of the richest regions in the world, yet over 84 million people are still threatened by poverty, EU Commissioner for Employment and Social Affairs Laszlo Andor said here in a statement today to mark the International day for the Eradication of Poverty.
The decision to lift at least 20 million people out of poverty by 2020 sends a powerful message that the EU takes social inclusion very seriously, he added.

The 27-member European bloc has a population of over 500 million people.

"The International Day for Eradication of Poverty is a day when the whole world is reminded that there are people who suffer from poverty and we need to act together to make a difference," he added.

On his part, EU Commissioner for Development, Andris Piebalgs declared that radicating poverty is also a global challenge. "Today, 1.4 billion people in the developing world are still denied the chance to build a future by living in extreme poverty. In September, global leaders gave a new impetus to the fight against poverty and committed to make the Millennium Development Goals a success by 2015," he noted.

The UN summit on MDGs in September adopted a global action plan to achieve the anti-poverty goals by 2015. (end)

nk.mt KUNA 171332 Oct 10NNNN 

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Southern Russia floods leave 11 dead

Updated: 08:21, Sunday October 17, 2010

Floods in southern Russia have killed 11 people, and three are missing, authorities say.

Two days of heavy rain in the Krasnodar region caused a mountain river to burst its banks, sending torrents of water down the mountains onto villages.

Local Emergency Ministry spokesman Roman Kravchenko said three of the 11 killed were elderly people trapped in their houses. Two more were found dead in a sewer hole.

About 160 people were evacuated from their homes on Friday, but as the rain stopped on Saturday they headed back home to take stock of the damage, the spokesman said.

Authorities say heavy rain also caused mudslides in the mountains, blocking several sections of the North Caucasian railway.

Source Article

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