JAKARTA, Indonesia ”” The bang of a ceremonial gong opens festivities in a cavernous downtown office building here, where representatives from 56 U.S. colleges stand ready to peddle their wares.
The University of Cincinnati passes out pennants. At a booth for Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, three young Indonesians talk up their alma mater. And U.S. Embassy officials tout the 95% approval rate in Indonesia for student visas.
(ENS) As agriculture ministers from the Group of 20 (G20) nations meet in Paris, France, this week to discuss how to combat food shortage and soaring prices, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori has written to U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, urging “consideration of the needs of people in developing countries most affected by food insecurity.”
Jefferts Schori, noting that most of the Anglican Communion’s 80 million members live in developing countries, said: “The focus on food at this year’s G20 represents an important recognition by the world’s leaders that rising food prices present a potential crisis for areas of the world most affected by hunger and malnutrition, especially Africa and South and Southeast Asia.”
The international basketball federation has decided to permit an Orthodox Jewish basketball player to cover her arms during competitions in accordance with her religious beliefs.
FIBA made the decision several weeks after point guard Naama Shafir, a member of the Israeli national women’s basketball team, said she would be unable to play in the sleeveless regulation jerseys worn by all players
Providing aid to those in need, wherever they live, is not about feeling good about ourselves. It is not about pretending we are a global superpower or a moral policeman either, it is about justice. Yes, 0.7% of GDP is more than most other developed nations provide in international aid, but it is still woefully short of what is needed.
I can remember the days when Britain would lead and the rest of the world would follow. We should be proud that we are doing the right thing in the face of selfish opportunism elsewhere. We should allow ourselves to be motivated and guided by the British values of justice and fair play ”“ and may those ideals shine around the globe for all to see.
When it comes to international development, I believe we should unite behind what Andrew Mitchell, the Secretary of State for International Development, is attempting to do in the face of widespread opposition. Regardless of which side of the political divide we may traditionally sit, the battle to end poverty is too important to be sidetracked by the cynicism of others.
Anglican church leaders have written to G20 agriculture ministers to press for measures to combat high food prices ahead of the ministers’ meeting next week.
Control of the speculation in commodity trading that has pushed up food prices for the poorest people in the world, and more support for women farmers who form the majority of subsistence farmers are some of the measures that archbishops from G20 countries have urged their agriculture ministers to support.
The moves have come amidst mounting concern over the price spikes and food insecurity that have left 900 million people around the world hungry. The French President has put food on the agenda for the G20 meeting in November, and next week’s agriculture ministers meeting will seek an agreement on the way forward.
The current battle over raising the federal government’s debt ceiling is driven not by careful consideration of the economics but by ideology and brinkmanship. Democrats refuse to consider serious spending reform. Republicans reject higher taxes. Many tea-party types would rather see America’s government default than compromise on spending. The result is a perilous stand-off””and a growing danger that America will have to make drastic short-term spending cuts, or even find itself forced into a technical default.
A parallel dynamic is playing out in the euro zone, where the debate about how to deal with Greece’s debt crisis has descended into a high-stakes stand-off between Germany, which wants the maturities on Greek bonds to be extended, and the ECB, which resists any debt restructuring… The hope is still that Europe’s leaders will come up with a face-saving compromise at their summit on June 23rd-24th. But the longer the confrontation continues, the greater the risk of an accident: a chaotic Greek default and exit from the euro.
General Ratko Mladic is now on trial in the Hague charged with war crimes, following the horrors nearly 20years ago in Srebrenica with the massacre of 8,000 boys and men.
This is in marked contrast to the discovery and subsequent shooting of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. There may have been very good reasons why he, too, could not have been arrested and put on trial for his crimes, but we are not told them in any clear or persuasive way.
For a guy who is only 35 and lives in a walk-up apartment, Eboo Patel has already racked up some impressive accomplishments.
A Rhodes scholar with a doctorate in the sociology of religion from Oxford University, he has four honorary degrees. His autobiography is required freshman reading on 11 college campuses. He runs a nonprofit organization ”” the Interfaith Youth Core ”” with 31 employees and a budget of $4 million. And he was tapped by the White House as a key architect of an initiative announced in April by President Obama.
Mr. Patel got there by identifying a sticky problem in American civic life and proposing a concrete solution. The problem? Increased religious diversity is causing increasing religious conflict. And too often, religious extremists are driving events
You probably missed the recent special issue of China Newsweek, so let me bring you up to date. Who do you think was on the cover ”” named the “most influential foreign figure” of the year in China? Barack Obama? No. Bill Gates? No. Warren Buffett? No. O.K., I’ll give you a hint: He’s a rock star in Asia, and people in China, Japan and South Korea scalp tickets to hear him. Give up?
It was Michael J. Sandel, the Harvard University political philosopher.
This news will not come as a surprise to Harvard students, some 15,000 of whom have taken Sandel’s legendary “Justice” class….
(It also will not come as a surprise to close readers of this blog, since we featured this amazing resource last September–KSH).
Harold Macmillan, the prime minister who watched US power rise as the British empire crumbled, used to say that Britain would play ancient Greece to America’s Rome.
These days it looks as if Rome is declining too. The US finds it increasingly hard to drive forward its vision of international trade and economics over the objections of big emerging-market countries.
The Visigoths and the Vandals who sacked Rome and undermined its empire, though far more cultured and sophisticated than their popular reputation, were unable to replicate the Pax Romana order it had established. European territories previously under Roman rule fractured into an unstable array of weak kingdoms and embattled city-states. Similarly, the vacuum created today by the erosion of US hegemony and the turmoil in the eurozone is resulting in stasis rather than a new direction.
Much of the public focus is on the nation’s public debt, which is $14.3 trillion. But that doesn’t include money guaranteed for Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, which comes to close to $50 trillion, according to government figures.
The government also is on the hook for other debts such as the programs related to the bailout of the financial system following the crisis of 2008 and 2009, government figures show.
Taken together, Gross puts the total at “nearly $100 trillion,” that while perhaps a bit on the high side, places the country in a highly unenviable fiscal position that he said won’t find a solution overnight.
Companies that are looking for a good deal aren’t seeing one in new workers.
Workers are getting more expensive while equipment is getting cheaper, and the combination is encouraging companies to spend on machines rather than people.
“I want to have as few people touching our products as possible,” said Dan Mishek, managing director of Vista Technologies in Vadnais Heights, Minn. “Everything should be as automated as it can be. We just can’t afford to compete with countries like China on labor costs, especially when workers are getting even more expensive.”
The UN nuclear watchdog is to report Syria to the Security Council over its alleged covert nuclear programme.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) voted to rebuke Syria on claims of an undeclared nuclear reactor.
The structure, which Syria has maintained was a non-nuclear military site, was destroyed by Israel in 2007.
Already, in nine major cities tracked by Rosealea Yao, an analyst at market-research firm Dragonomics, real-estate prices fell 4.9% in April from a year earlier. Last year, prices in those nine cities rose 21.5%; in 2009, the increase was about 10%, as China started to recover from the global economic crisis, with much steeper increases toward the end of that year.
A downturn in property and apartment prices would harm Chinese industry and investment, and crimp consumer spending. China is a “housing-led economy,” says UBS economist Jonathan Anderson, who estimates that property construction alone accounted for 13% of gross domestic product in 2010, twice the share of the 1990s.
While China’s anticipated growth is still well above that of other large economies, any reduction could have deep consequences. The global economy is now even more dependent on China for demand for anything from commodities to luxury goods, given the tepid recovery in the U.S. and Europe’s continuing sovereign-debt problems.
The Anglican Alliance launches a food campaign targeting G20 and African governments in the run-up to this month’s meetings on the global food crisis.
Support for women farmers will be a focal point for the campaign which will also call for action to control speculation, improve market access for developing country farmers, and increase spending on agriculture.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton defended her new ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom on Thursday (June 2), calling the Rev. Suzan Johnson Cook a bridge-builder who is right for the job.
Speaking at Cook’s ceremonial swearing-in, Clinton cited Cook’s firsts as an African-American Baptist minister and New York police chaplain, as well as her involvement in international activities.
After venting out their ire against Sony PlayStation Network and Sony Pictures, hackers have pointed their guns at the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The group LulzSec has hacked an FBI-affiliated website called InfraGard and siphoned off with the details of around 180 users. The attack was on their Atlanta chapter.
InfraGard is a government and private sector alliance which provides actionable intelligence to protect critical national information infrastructure. The website defines its role as: “InfraGard is an association of businesses, academic institutions, state and local law enforcement agencies, and other participants dedicated to sharing information and intelligence to prevent hostile acts against the United States.”
The Pentagon has concluded that computer sabotage coming from another country can constitute an act of war, a finding that for the first time opens the door for the U.S. to respond using traditional military force.
The Pentagon’s first formal cyber strategy, unclassified portions of which are expected to become public next month, represents an early attempt to grapple with a changing world in which a hacker could pose as significant a threat to U.S. nuclear reactors, subways or pipelines as a hostile country’s military.
Twenty-eight religious leaders will converge on Canberra on 2 June to pressure the federal government to act on climate change.
Representatives from many different faiths, acting under the banner of the Australian Religious Response to Climate Change (ARRCC), will meet with Julia Gillard, Greg Hunt, Andrew Wilkie and around twenty other Members of Parliament.
Bishop George Browning, a member of the delegation, said the time to act is now.
Contrary to what some headlines might have suggested, [President Obama’s speech to Parliament]’s central theme was not division and weakness, but strength ”“ the strength of what has traditionally been seen as the Western way, but is really something much broader. As such, it offered an upbeat prelude to the G8 summit which concludes in Deauville today, a prelude as fitting as it was unfashionable.
Unfashionable, because the prevailing transatlantic mood is pessimism. The philosophical consensus has been that the West, as embodied by the US, is in terminal decline and the future belongs to the emerging economies, chief among them China, with India snapping at its heels. Viewed from this perspective, the only realistic task for the “old” countries is to slow their decline and use the last years of their ascendancy to fix international rules to guard their way of life….
In almost every part of the world, long-festering problems can be solved through closer cooperation among neighboring countries. The European Union provides the best model for how neighbors that have long fought each other can come together for mutual benefit. Ironically, today’s decline in American global power may lead to more effective regional cooperation.
This may seem an odd time to praise the EU, given the economic crises in Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland. Europe has not solved the problem of balancing the interests of strong economies in the North and those of weaker economies in the South. Still, the EU’s accomplishments vastly outweigh its current difficulties….
If it wasn’t already clear, India’s announcement of $5 billion in development deals in Africa should certainly put to rest any question of whether India is dedicated to doing business on the African continent over the long haul.
The pledge of development aid to African countries ”“ essentially a fund to help African countries to meet their development goals ”“ stands in stark contrast to Africa’s largest single trading partner, China.
While China trades large infrastructure projects (built mostly by Chinese labor) for access to African raw materials, India spends money on training Africans to develop their own countries. And while Indian countries certainly have come into Africa as investors, Indian diplomats are quick to stress that the relationship between India and African countries is more one of equal partners.
All in all, Canadians are a pretty comfortable and happy lot.
The country ranks at or near the top in many of 11 well-being indicators in a new quality of life index, unveiled Tuesday by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Only Australia topped Canada.
“Overall, I think Canada seems to be a pretty good place to be,” said Matthias Rumpf, an OECD spokesman in Washington. “But,” he cautioned, “it shouldn’t make them complacent about everything.”
The Episcopal Church in the United States (EC), like other denominations, has been in crisis over human sexuality. What is different for the EC is that it faces, in its debates, the question of whether or not its vocation is to be an American Protestant denomination or to be part of the worldwide Anglican Communion in which national particularity is submerged for the sake of common witness.
In June 2010 EC Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori issued a pastoral letter that was a direct challenge to the archbishop of Canterbury and by extension to the Anglican Communion, of which Archbishop Rowan Williams is at least titular head. At stake is whether or not his headship can, or ought, to be more than titular; and if so, what would that mean?…
In truth, some EC leaders (some bishops, cathedral deans and theology professors) have in recent years largely eschewed the heavy lifting of systematic and moral theology, preferring the more applied genres in which the key matters turn toward the psychological, therapeutic and pastoral, as well as toward calls for social justice. A few years ago a book was published with the title The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, which said that the evangelical movement in the U.S. had not so much forgotten how to think, but that it was intended to do without deep thinking. If there were a new book, “The Scandal of the Episcopal Mind,” the conclusions might be disarmingly similar. The rise to prominence of liberal theology in the EC came along with disinclination toward theological depth, as well as a desire to ally the denomination with the more “progressive” American denominations. As one senior bishop told me, in choosing “justice” as the talisman for all actions and featuring inclusiveness as the badge of this new orthodoxy, the EC had taken a thin slice of theology””and of justice.
Pension funds and other institutional investors that have poured billions of pounds into commodity index funds could be unwittingly fuelling a rise in global hunger, says a new report from Christian Aid.
Such investments in indices of commodities bundled together have become increasingly popular in recent years following deregulation and the bursting of the dot.com bubble.
Food price rises led World Bank President Robert Zoellick last month to warn: ”˜We are one shock away from a full blown crisis.’ Cereal prices, which are of crucial importance to the world’s poorest people, hit a record high in recent weeks on the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s price index. Even with inflation taken into account, the rate was 5.5 points above the previous record in mid-2008, when food riots broke out in more than 30 countries.
For more than 800 years, the University of Oxford has led the world in the study of the divine. For centuries, it has sat alongside Cambridge as the leading centre for the study of the Bible.
Now academics are considering a proposal to rebrand theology at Oxford as “religious studies” because of the growing demand from students who wish to study Islam, Hinduism and Judaism as well as Christianity.
The requirement to have an A level in religious studies to study religion at Oxford is also to be dropped.
High gasoline prices have not derailed the economic recovery, but that’s small comfort to Loraine Greene. A customer relations manager in the Hudson Valley of New York, Ms. Greene spent the weekend packing up to move to a rental house much closer to work.
At $4 a gallon, gas is too expensive to justify the 50-mile round-trip commute.
“The option was either to sell my truck and get something smaller, or to try to get closer to work,” said Ms. Greene. She chose to move. The new house is just eight miles from the office.
French voters expressed disbelief as well as imaginative plot theories Sunday after waking up to the revelation that Dominique Strauss-Kahn was being held by police in New York on charges of sexual assault.
“This is completely surreal””politics is turning into a play,” said Hakim Bouras, 24, a bank information-technology technician, who said he voted for Socialist candidate Segolene Royal in the 2007 presidential elections.
In the hours since New York City police said Mr. Strauss-Kahn had been arrested after allegedly forcing a cleaning woman onto his bed and sexually assaulting her inside his room at the Sofitel Hotel near Times Square, images of the International Monetary Fund president have flooded the airwaves in France and dominated news coverage.
Religion comes naturally, even instinctively, to human beings, a massive new study of cultures all around the world suggests.
“We tend to see purpose in the world,” Oxford University professor Roger Trigg said Thursday. “We see agency. We think that something is there even if you can’t see it. … All this tends to build up to a religious way of thinking.”
Trigg is co-director of the three-year Oxford-based project, which incorporated more than 40 different studies by dozens of researchers looking at countries from China to Poland and the United States to Micronesia.
The assault on the dignity-based vision of human rights was particularly intense at the UN’s Beijing Women’s Conference in the fall of 1995. In fact, a European-led coalition attempted to remove the word “dignity” from the Beijing documents because they suspected it might be in tension with their particular view of gender equality. They also opposed all references to the Universal Declaration’s provisions on marriage, the family, religious freedom, protection of motherhood, and parental rights. The reason, apparently, was that those provisions were regarded as obstacles to the new sexual and reproductive rights for which the coalition hoped to gain recognition.
Meanwhile, the idea of the dignity of human life was coming under attack from members of the scientific community who wished to remove obstacles to experimentation on human embryos….
Yet another offensive was launched by advocates of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide….