People around the globe believe that China will inevitably replace the United States as the world’s leading superpower, but that doesn’t mean they like the prospect, according to a new study on global attitudes.
The survey that the Pew Research Center conducted in 39 countries confirms much of the conventional wisdom in Washington about the shifting balance of power between the United States and China.
Watch it all.
“This is not your grandfather’s airline business,” says Ray Neidl, an aviation consultant for Nexa Capital and former American Airlines official, who notes that the lessening of cutthroat competition doesn’t mean consumers won’t see some benefit. For instance, the financial strength of the airlines will enable them to invest in new technology””including the latest fuel-efficient aircraft and a cutting-edge satellite navigation system to replace the country’s aging radar-based air-traffic control. “It took us 35 years to get there, but it’s almost a brand-new industry,” Neidl says. Indeed, United says that the economic benefits of its merger with Continental allowed it to make much-needed upgrades, such as modernizing airport baggage systems and replacing its aging 757 fleet with new jets with better bin space and in-flight entertainment.
…the airlines’ gain could be the passengers’ loss, as carriers raise prices and rein in spending””often by slashing staff. While fares have, on average, remained relatively stable, fees for add-ons have soared and decreased competition has resulted in steep price hikes in several markets.
When he first revealed his identity a month ago while in Hong Kong, Mr Snowden used selective disclosures about US global surveillance to rally public opinion in China and Russia. Since then, he has managed to create uproar in Europe with information about the bugging of EU offices and over the past week he has created a new international stir in Latin America.
According to reports this week in the Brazilian newspaper O Globo based on documents provided by the 30-year-old former NSA contractor, the US has been using telecoms infrastructure in Brazil to absorb huge volumes of communications and to spy on governments in the region.
With the US economy looking robust for the first time since the financial crisis, the US is again being seen as an over-weaning superpower that brushes aside smaller nations.
Read it all (another link in case needed is there).
Anglicanism was the fastest-growing major Christian tradition in Africa between 1970 and 2010, while the centre of gravity of Christianity has shifted to the Global South, reports a study published by the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts,.
Demographic data published in “Christianity in Its Global Context, 1970”“2020: Society, Religion, and Mission” reports that while agnosticism and atheism has grown in Europe and Christianity plateaued, Europe remains the exception on the world scene as religions continue to gather new adherents round the world.
Last month, Canada was lauded by the OECD for how its college system connects graduates with the labour market and leads to lower youth unemployment. In its annual global education survey, the OECD found that youth employment in countries where vocational training was strong fared better in the last recession and recovered faster.
Yet a bit of rifling through the report suggests that Canada is quite unusual among countries with vocational education: We wait a very long time to offer it. As a result, we are one of the few countries where more people graduate from postsecondary than high school. We think that having lots of graduates from higher ed is good. But what if it means that we waste an awful lot of time in high school?
Compare Germany, Austria, Poland and Slovenia. There, partnerships between business and schools start in high school and training continues throughout one’s career, leading to promotions and advancement in spite of the “lack” of postsecondary credentials.
Nine of Britain’s brightest state school pupils have turned down places at Oxford and Cambridge, mostly to attend Ivy League universities in America, put off by the stuffy elitism and high fees.
It is the first time that a group of state-educated pupils has spurned Britain’s top two universities and follows a warning from the government’s social mobility watchdog that Oxford and Cambridge are failing to meet targets for widening their social mix. Experts predicted that it could be the start of a brain drain of children abroad.
Last week David Laws, the education minister, told The Sunday Times that he was deeply concerned by the situation and planned to intervene.
Read it all (subscription required).
While we give thanks for much that has been achieved, especially in the emergence of the Anglican Church of North America and our Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans, we are painfully aware that the Episcopal Church of the United States and the Anglican Church of Canada continue to promote a false gospel and yet both are still received as in good standing by the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Furthermore, the Church of England itself, the historic mother church of the Communion, seems to be advancing along the same path. While defending marriage, both the Archbishops of York and Canterbury appeared at the same time to approve of same-sex Civil Partnerships during parliamentary debates on the UK’s ”˜gay marriage’ legislation, in contradiction to the historic biblical teaching on human sexuality reaffirmed by the 1998 Lambeth Conference.
In these circumstances, attempts to achieve unity based merely on common humanitarianism and dialogue, without repentance, sacrifice the transforming power of the gospel. The seeds of the East African revival were planted through years of faithful bible teaching and were brought to life by the Spirit of God, with deep conviction of sin and the irrepressible joy of sins forgiven.
… the geopolitics are favorable and the ideological climate is warming. But on a still-deeper level this is shaping up to be an even more American century than the last. The global game is moving towards America’s home court.
The great trend of this century is the accelerating and deepening wave of change sweeping through every element of human life. Each year sees more scientists with better funding, better instruments and faster, smarter computers probing deeper and seeing further into the mysteries of the physical world. Each year more entrepreneurs are seeking to convert those discoveries and insights into ways to produce new things, or to make old things better and more cheaply. Each year the world’s financial markets are more eager and better prepared to fund new startups, underwrite new investments, and otherwise help entrepreneurs and firms deploy new knowledge and insight more rapidly….This challenge will not go away….
Everybody is going to feel the stress, but the United States of America is better placed to surf this transformation than any other country. Change is our home field. It is who we are and what we do. Brazil may be the country of the future, but America is its hometown.
Read it all (dated, but still oh so relevant).
Two more Portuguese ministers from the junior ruling coalition party were ready to resign on Wednesday, local media said, deepening turmoil that could trigger a snap election and derail Lisbon’s exit from an EU/IMF bailout.
Multiple newspaper radio and television reports said Agriculture Minister Assuncao Cristas and Social Security Minister Pedro Mota Soares will follow their CDS-PP party leader Paulo Portas who tendered his resignation on Tuesday. Party officials were not available to comment as the party’s executive commission was in a meeting.
Global markets have fallen sharply after the Federal Reserve signalled it may begin to scale back its stimulus of the US economy later this year.
On Wall Street, the Dow Jones dropped 354 points, or 2.3%, to close at 14,758, while the S&P 500 had its worst day since November 2011, shedding 2.5%.
European stock markets were down 3% or more by the close….
[The]…Rev Matthew Reed from the Children’s Society writes that the Church of England, which is so deeply embedded in our communities, could be the ”˜transformational agency’ in our nation. As a church we are incredibly well-equipped to help change not just the lives of children living in poverty, but the society which currently prevents so many children from flourishing. ”˜This is our time,’ he writes; I share this conviction.
For me, two things are now needed. First, we must be confident in our faith that Christ is the source of all goodness. So it’s necessary for us to develop our own personal spirituality, as well as our communal spirituality, so that this encounter with Jesus is driving our understanding of what is right and good. The other is that we need to be confident, but also gracious and wise in how we share that knowledge ”“ so that we influence society in a way that people can hear, rather by the succumbing to the (all too human) temptation to try convincing people with our words alone, rather than our actions.
I am more optimistic about the Church than I have been at any other time in my life. Something is shifting; a spiritual hunger is starting to emerge. In so many ways this is an extremely difficult time for us as a society. But is it also a great opportunity to show people who Jesus is by how we live our lives.
“The Government deserves huge credit for its efforts in using its Presidency of the G8 to prioritise trade, tax and transparency. The Summit outcomes fall short of what many had hoped and campaigned for, but there has been progress nonetheless that needs to be celebrated. The Government’s announcement that all Crown Dependencies and Overseas Territories are ready to sign the Multilateral Convention on Tax Matters is a significant step forward and will help developing countries access more information and retain more of the money they are owed in order to combat endemic problems to their own development such as hunger and child malnutrition..”
You might have heard about peak oil, but what about peak child? When I was born in 1965, about one in three of the world’s people were children. That will fall to one in five in my lifetime – assuming I make it to the ripe old age of 85.
It might not sound dramatic but the repercussions of that shift are Earth-changing. The number of babies being born around the world is unlikely to ever be higher than now, and that means the domination of the world’s population by those in lower age brackets is ending.
Over the past 50 years, the population aged under 15 ballooned from 1 billion to nearly 2 billion. But revised 100-year population forecasts, released by the United Nations last week, show the number of children will flatten out over the next 15 to 20 years and then fall back to 1.9 billion by 2050.
As the U.S. Senate continues to debate the bipartisan immigration reform bill introduced earlier this spring, leaders of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) and The Episcopal Church commemorate World Refugee Day with a joint statement to “celebrate our churches’ shared commitment to welcoming the stranger through service, accompaniment and advocacy.”
In their statement the Rev. Mark S. Hanson, presiding bishop of the ELCA and the Most Rev. Dr. Katharine Jefferts Schori, presiding bishop of The Episcopal Church, wrote that the observance of the day is an “opportunity to examine the dire global and regional conflicts and persecutions that create refugees, and to celebrate the resilience and success of the former refugees who bless communities in our midst with the riches of their earned wisdom, energy and spirit.”
In 2000, the U.N. General Assembly declared that each June 20 would be dedicated to raising awareness about the situation of refugees throughout the world. According to the U.N. Refugee Commission, more than 45.2 million people were in “situations of displacement” around the world as of 2012.
Against all Vatican expectations, the pope’s has gained more than 100,000 followers in six months and continues to grow.
Followers are not exclusively Roman Catholics or Latin scholars, but represent a wide variety of professions and religions from all over the world. Some go so far as to claim that the language of the ancient Romans is perfectly suited to 21st-century social media.
Google is to spend $5m (£3.1m) fighting child pornography and abuse, the company will announce today, after criticism that it is not doing enough to prevent the spread of harmful online imagery.
With a Whitehall summit on online protection set for…. [today], chaired by the Culture Secretary, Maria Miller, the internet giant has pledged to tackle child sex abuse images through “hashing” technology that gives each picture a web “fingerprint” that can be identified and removed.
The myth of perfectly secure communication is dying.
Since the revelations of widespread intelligence-agency eavesdropping on the digital communications of millions of people in the United States and around the world, governments and technology companies have been under immense pressure to explain exactly how pervasive the monitoring has become. Users of e-mail and social networks provided by the likes of Google Inc., Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corp. have found themselves asking whether there are any means of keeping their data totally secure.
The short answer, it seems, is that there isn’t. And new revelations suggest that even the BlackBerry, touted by Research In Motion Ltd. as the most secure form of wireless communication in the market, could not clock the prying eyes of government.
Google says it has uncovered a vast Iranian spy campaign that had been targeting tens of thousands of Iranian citizens over the past three weeks.
“These campaigns, which originate from within Iran, represent a significant jump in the overall volume of phishing activity in the region,” the company said in a blog post. “The timing and targeting of the campaigns suggest that the attacks are politically motivated in connection with the Iranian presidential election on Friday.”
The company said that thousands of its users inside Iran had been the targets of a sophisticated email phishing campaign in which attackers sent users a link that, when clicked, sent them to a fake Google sign-in page where the attackers could steal login credentials.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/security-it/google-uncovers-iranian-spy-campaign-20130614-2o7rh.html#ixzz2W8gG8bct
The leaks by Edward Snowden reveal a vulnerability in U.S. intelligence since 9/11, triggered by a surge of information collected on people around the world and the proliferation of private government contractors to store, sift and manage it.
Mr. Snowden and other private employees with permission to plug directly into National Security Agency systems have unprecedented access to highly sensitive information””the result of years of pressure to break down the walls dividing U.S. intelligence agencies and share information that might expose the next terror plot.
Thousands of workers employed by government contractors sit side by side with federal workers and hold security clearances that provide access to intelligence databases. The result is a system so enmeshed that government and contract workers are often indistinguishable.
The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, in an article for the Daily Telegraph talks about his support for the IF Campaign, calling on global leaders to ensure that on issues of aid and taxation that the poorest get a fair deal.
The Archbishop explains that we all have a responsibility for our neighbours, that tax evasion should be tackled and speaks about the importance of transparent public budgets. In his article, Dr John Sentamu outlines the vast disparities between the rich and the poor and the need to send a united message to end the extremes of inequality around the planet.
The Archbishop of Canterbury has spoken out in support of a campaign encouraging world leaders to tackle hunger, saving the millions of lives it claims each year.
Archbishop Justin spoke via video to thousands gathered in Hyde Park..[Saturday] to launch the IF campaign, of which the Church of England is a member. The IF campaign is made up of more than 200 charities, faith groups and organisations. The campaign is urging G8 leaders to take big steps that will tackle the global injustice of hunger.
He said: “We’ve come to celebrate the opportunity we have to end hunger in our lifetimes. The only way that’s going to happen is by mass movements of people, like yourselves, getting together”.
Read it all and check out the video also.
“”˜The world is undergoing a massive transition, particularly in terms of power, demographics, climate, urbanisation and technology. In this context, the opportunities are huge; but so are the uncertainties and challenges to the well-being of citizens”, concludes the ”˜Global Trends 2030 ”“ Citizens in an Interconnected and Polycentric World’ report of the European Strategy and Policy Analysis System (ESPAS).
The ”˜Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds’ of the US National Intelligence Council (NIC) comes to a similar conclusion that we are living through a transformative period that is “equal to if not greater than the aftermath of the political and economic revolutions of the late 18th century”. This transition point is similar to 1815, 1919, 1945, and 1989.
But what do these reports say to the global Christian community, and especially evangelicals? Are there issues for which we need to get better prepared? Are there areas where we can actually influence trends and therefore the future of the world[?]
The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden has been working at the National Security Agency for the last four years as an employee of various outside contractors, including Booz Allen and Dell.
The Guardian, after several days of interviews, is revealing his identity at his request. From the moment he decided to disclose numerous top-secret documents to the public, he was determined not to opt for the protection of anonymity. “I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong,” he said.
Snowden will go down in history as one of America’s most consequential whistleblowers, alongside Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning. He is responsible for handing over material from one of the world’s most secretive organisations ”“ the NSA.
Read them all, very stimulating stuff.
Bioethicist Peter Singer compared women and children to cows overgrazing a field and said ”” at the global Women Deliver Conference last week, hailed as the most important meeting to focus on women and girls’ human rights in a decade ”” that women’s reproductive rights may one day have to be sacrificed for the environment.
The controversial Princeton University professor, known for championing infanticide and bestiality, was a featured panelist on Thursday at the three-day Women Deliver conference attended by Melinda Gates and more than 4,000 abortion and contraception activists in Kuala Lumpur.
We live in a relentlessly commercial culture, so it’s natural that many people would organize their lives in utilitarian and consequentialist terms. But it’s possible to get carried away with this kind of thinking ”” to have logic but no wisdom, to become a specialist without spirit.
Making yourself is different than producing a product or an external outcome, requiring different logic and different means. I’d think you would be more likely to cultivate a deep soul if you put yourself in the middle of the things that engaged you most seriously. If your profoundest interest is dying children in Africa or Bangladesh, it’s probably best to go to Africa or Bangladesh, not to Wall Street.
Education is forever balancing and rebalancing uniformity and creativity. Basic competence has to be mastered. But innovative thinking must be encouraged. Read the canon of great literature, but don’t be afraid to demolish conventional wisdom. Students and their parents seek out the best school and best teachers, hoping for the best education. But students can flourish at middling colleges and with average teachers if their reading is inspiring, their lab work intriguing, their thinking encouraged.
When you read Laura Pappano’s cover story on the huge stir being caused by Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs, pronounced “mooks”), you may at first think that there’s nothing new under the sun. Correspondence courses, after all, began in the 19th century. Over the decades, educational institutions have experimented with teaching via radio, television, closed-circuit video, and the Internet. And each new distance-learning technology has prompted predictions of the demise of ivy-clad campuses, the loss of mentoring by belovedly quirky profs, and the end of fond memories of college life. Fifteen years ago, a reporter from The Boston Globe marveled at how 1990s cutting-edge technology ”“ “a two-way PictureTel compressed-video system linked by high-speed phone lines” ”“ was connecting a classroom on Martha’s Vineyard with a university on the Massachusetts mainland. As one university official told him (well, actually, told me): “What is better in terms of quality ”“ a dull, boring, standard lecture, or a penetrating lecture by a great teacher, backed up with all the best video props…?”
In their letter, the church leaders commended the G-8 officials for focusing on agriculture and nutrition ahead of the summit and called for particular emphasis to be placed on Africa, where the need to improve local agriculture is great and, according to the World Food Program, 23 million primary-school-age children attend classes hungry.
The church leaders cited G-8 plans to address tax evasion by wealthy individuals and large corporations in a world facing severe financial shortfalls to address poverty.
Citing the Catechism of the Catholic Church and the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, the prelates wrote that “it is a moral obligation for citizens to pay their fair share of taxes for the common good, including the good of poor and vulnerable communities.”