Monday, 28 May 2012

Chinese Currencies Manipulating is an issue for the U.S .

                    IT   IS   NOT  GOOD   FOR   each   other  .  
In 2010, the pressure for action on the renminbi began early in the year, when President Obama spoke harshly in February about China’s economic policies, stopping short of saying that China manipulates its currency. The following month, 130 members of Congress sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Geithner, demanding that the Obama administration designate China as a currency manipulator in a report due to Congress in April. A bipartisan group of senators introduced a bill aimed to force the administration’s hand, by making it easier to impose retaliatory trade barriers against Chinese goods. And the World Bank issued a report calling the renminbi overvalued.
Economists agree with that assessment. They said at the time that the Chinese currency was undervalued by 25 to 40 percent compared with the dollar and other currencies, and that the imbalance was hurting not only the United States but economies around the world, including the European Union, Brazil and India. Mr. Obama has held repeated conversations with President Hu Jintao since 2009.
The Chinese government has denied that the currency is overvalued or manipulated, and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao rejected American complaints as “a kind of trade protectionism,” making no plans for reform.
In June, China announced that it would allow greater flexibility in the value of its currency. But by September the renminbi had risen less than 2 percent against the dollar and actually fallen slightly against the trade-weighted averages of its trading partners’ currencies. Mr. Geithner went before Congress to urge China to allow “significant, sustained appreciation” of its undervalued currency; senators of both parties called for tougher measures.
During the annual gathering of heads of states at the United Nations in September, Mr. Obama devoted most of a two-hour meeting with China’s prime minister, Wen Jiabao, to the issue. In October, the head of the International Monetary Fund urged China to allow its currency to rise in value. And at the Group of 20 summit in South Korea in November, a meeting that revolved around trade and currency disputes, Mr. Obama used his sharpest language yet, stating bluntly that the renminbi “is undervalued. And China spends enormous amounts of money intervening in the market to keep it undervalued.”
By early 2011, it also appeared to many economists that the effort to keep the renminbi low was feeding China’s growing problems with inflation.
The central bank had been pumping out currency at an ever-accelerating pace over the past decade to limit the renminbi’s appreciation against the dollar. That strategy helped preserve a competitive advantage of Chinese exporters by keeping their prices relatively low on global markets — while also protecting the jobs of tens of millions of Chinese workers in export factories
                       

Sunday, 27 May 2012

The European Parliment's Liberal Group , said that it is a Political Crisis .

                       It  is   a   big   problem  for   Europe  to   find  a   solution  of   Euro-crisis .
Europe is facing a political crisis of "unseen magnitude" because of EU leaders' failure to get to grips with the economic situation in the eurozone, the leader of the European Parliament's liberal group has said.
Guy Verhofstadt said that two months ago a number of Europe's leaders told the Parliament the crisis was over, but they were "dramatically wrong".
He said the euro crisis had spread from Greece, an economy representing just 2% of Europe's GDP, to the eurozone's third and fourth largest economies - Italy and Spain.
"It is not a crisis about Greece. It is not a crisis about Portugal, Ireland, Italy or Spain. In my opinion it is not even an economic crisis, or a financial crisis.
"It is simply a political crisis today, what we are facing in Europe, because our leaders are not able to take the right decisions at the right times."
The Belgian MEP urged EU leaders to establish a full economic and fiscal union, a debt mutualisation fund and a pact for growth, to steer the European economy to safety.
He said the ball was in the Commission's court, asking: "What are you waiting for?"
"Use your right of initiative, only you have it, and put on the table [at the summit] a real proposal for... a real growth package for Europe," he urged.
Mr Verhofstadt was speaking during a debate on preparations for the forthcoming informal EU growth summit on 23 May.
Useful links:
Democracy Live's guide to how the plenary sessions work.
A disclaimer on the use of simultaneous interpretations, on the European Parliament's website.

SEE ALSO

Wednesday, 23 May 2012

Who , What , Why : Is it legal to hide in an Embassy ?

    China   dissident   Chen  Guang-cheng  is   unstable  minded  activist   !   He  is  not   a 
political  prisonal   who   escaped   from   House  Arrest  .  
                
This states that local police and security forces are not permitted to enter, unless they have the express permission of the ambassador - even though the embassy remains the territory of the host nation.
The convention is widely adhered to and is regarded as a basic pre-requisite for diplomatic relations.
"Embassies are privileged areas. The local authorities have no rights to enter," says Colin Warbrick, a specialist in international law and honorary professor at Birmingham University.

High-profile embassy cases

US soldiers outside the Vatican embassy in Panama City in 1989
  • Manuel Noriega, President of Panama. Took refuge in the Vatican embassy in December 1989 (above). The US bombarded him with loud rock music 24/7 until he could no longer stand it, walked out, and was arrested
  • Jozsef Mindszenty, Hungarian Catholic cardinal. He spent 15 years in the US embassy in Budapest from 1956-1971
  • Morgan Tsvangirai, Zimbabwe's opposition leader took refuge in the Dutch embassy in Harare in June 2008. In 2009 he was sworn in as prime minister in a power-sharing government
Human rights law provides a further layer of protection, in the form of the European Convention on Human Rights and - in the case of the US - the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
This means that the embassy is obliged to consider whether there is a real risk that the person could be killed or seriously injured if they were handed over to the local authorities. And if there is, then they could be held accountable if they give the person up.
How Chen gained entry to the embassy is unknown - whether he walked in by himself or was smuggled in by diplomats past Chinese security guards on the street outside. If he had been a fugitive from justice and had been smuggled in, then the US diplomats would be guilty of breaking Chinese law, Warbrick says.
Diplomats are obliged to comply with local law, he points out, even though they enjoy immunity from prosecution.
However, correspondents say Chen's house arrest, or "soft detention" in Chinese, was an unofficial measure imposed by the local authorities, not by a court, so he was not a fugitive
             

Tuesday, 22 May 2012

The Chronical of the R.O.C.

                             
DateHistorical Event
1895Treaty of Shimonoseki
1912Republic of China is founded
1937.07.07Marco Polo Bridge Incident
1941.08.14Atlantic Charter
1941.12 - 1945.08World War II in the Pacific
1943.12.01Cairo Declaration
1945.07.26Potsdam Proclamation
1945.08.15Japan's Emperor Surrenders
1945.09.02Gen. MacArthur directs "representatives of Chiang Kai-shek" to come to Taiwan to accept Japanese surrender
1945.10.24United Nations is founded
1945.10.25Japanese troops in Taiwan surrender
1947.02.28 - 1950.04.30The 228 Incident
1949.10.01People's Republic of China is founded
1949.12Republic of China personnel flee to Taiwan
1952.04.28San Francisco Peace Treaty comes into force
1952.08.05Treaty of Taipei comes into force
1955.03.03ROC - USA Mutual Defense Treaty comes into force
1971.10.25Republic of China is expelled from United Nations
1972.02.28PRC & USA promulgate "Shanghai Communique"
1978.12.16ROC is notified by USA of impending break in diplomatic relations
1979.01.01PRC & USA promulgate Second Communique
1979.01.01Taiwan Relations Act takes force
1980.01.01ROC - USA Mutual Defense Treaty is cancelled
1982.08.17PRC & USA promulgate Third Communique
2000.05.20Democratic Progressive Party comes to power

                  The   U.N.  General  Assembly  505   was  adopted  on   February   ,1  1952  .  
                        Your   answes   are   right  !   God  bless   with  you   !  

Monday, 21 May 2012

Would the Taiwan Solidarity Union ( T.S.U. ) MEAN the Day of Potsdam ?

                       It   was  Ugly  activity  of   T.S.U.   in  a   Democratic  country  . It    has   no   relevant   issue   of  this     inauguration    day  .   Think  clearly   and   do   clearly  !  
  

Day of Potsdam and the Enabling Act

On 21 March 1933 the new Reichstag was constituted with an opening ceremony at the Garrison Church in Potsdam. This "Day of Potsdam" was held to demonstrate unity between the Nazi movement and the old Prussian elite and military. Hitler appeared in a morning coat and humbly greeted President von Hindenburg.[149][150]
Paul von Hindenburg and Adolf Hitler on the Day of Potsdam, 21 March 1933
To achieve full political control despite not having an absolute majority in parliament, Hitler's government brought the Ermächtigungsgesetz (Enabling Act) to a vote in the newly elected Reichstag. The act gave Hitler's cabinet full legislative powers for a period of four years and (with certain exceptions) allowed deviations from the constitution.[151] The bill required a two-thirds majority to pass. Leaving nothing to chance, the Nazis used the provisions of the Reichstag Fire Decree to keep several Social Democratic deputies from attending; the Communists had already been banned.[152]
On 23 March, the Reichstag assembled at the Kroll Opera House under turbulent circumstances. Ranks of SA men served as guards inside the building, while large groups outside opposing the proposed legislation shouted slogans and threats toward the arriving members of parliament.[153] The position of the Centre Party, the third largest party in the Reichstag, turned out to be decisive. After Hitler verbally promised party leader Ludwig Kaas that President von Hindenburg would retain his power of veto, Kaas announced the Centre Party would support the Enabling Act. Ultimately, the Enabling Act passed by a vote of 441–84, with all parties except the Social Democrats voting in favour. The Enabling Act, along with the Reichstag Fire Decree, transformed Hitler's government into a de facto legal dictatorship.[154]
                              

Saturday, 19 May 2012

G 8 Summit Ends with unclear consensus .

                           Growth   and   Austerity  can   not   be   balanced   in   concurrence  .   It  should  be   happened  only   in   one   stops      and   one   goes     . 
   WHITE HOUSE - U.S. President Barack Obama says the leaders of the world’s biggest economies are beginning to agree that more jobs and more growth will help reverse Europe’s economic crisis.  The president spoke Saturday at the end of the Group of Eight economic summit.

 After two days of talks at the Camp David presidential retreat outside Washington, Obama said the eight leaders acknowledge that budget cuts alone will not restore Europe’s economy.

“And there is now an emerging consensus that more must be done to promote growth and job creation right now, in the context of these fiscal and structural reforms,” the president said.

A statement from the G8 leaders called for a balance between growth and austerity to fight the economic woes.

Obama said the leaders discussed the need for the troubled European countries to continue shrinking their deficits while stimulating economic growth.

“Today we agreed that we must take steps to boost confidence and to promote growth and demand while getting our fiscal houses in order," he said. "We agreed upon the importance of a strong and cohesive Eurozone, and affirmed our interest in Greece staying in the Eurozone while respecting its commitments.”

Political impact

The decisions the leaders make could have political consequences.

The main advocate of European austerity, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, recently saw her party defeated in a local election.

Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who also favored budget cuts, was voted out of office, in favor of Francois Hollande, who offered a pro-growth policy.

Many U.S. political analysts say a stagnant economy, blamed partly on Europe’s economic woes, is the biggest obstacle to Obama’s re-election in November.

“The leaders here understand the stakes," Obama noted.  "They know the magnitude of the choices they have to make, and the enormous political, economic and social costs if they do not.”

Dr. Robert L. Spitze and Gay Cure .

                             
Dr. Robert L. Spitzer, considered by some to be the father of modern psychiatry, lay awake at 4 o’clock on a recent morning knowing he had to do the one thing that comes least naturally to him.
He pushed himself up and staggered into the dark. His desk seemed impossibly far away; Dr. Spitzer, who turns 80 next week, suffers from Parkinson’s disease and has trouble walking, sitting, even holding his head upright.
The word he sometimes uses to describe these limitations — pathetic — is the same one that for decades he wielded like an ax to strike down dumb ideas, empty theorizing and junk studies.
Now here he was at his computer, ready to recant a study he had done himself, a poorly conceived 2003 investigation that supported the use of so-called reparative therapy to “cure” homosexuality for people strongly motivated to change.
What to say? The issue of gay marriage was rocking national politics yet again. The California State Legislature was debating a bill to ban the therapy outright as being dangerous. A magazine writer who had been through the therapy as a teenager recently visited his house, to explain how miserably disorienting the experience was.
And he would later learn that a World Health Organization report, released on Thursday, calls the therapy “a serious threat to the health and well-being — even the lives — of affected people.”
Dr. Spitzer’s fingers jerked over the keys, unreliably, as if choking on the words. And then it was done: a short letter to be published this month, in the same journal where the original study appeared.
“I believe,” it concludes, “I owe the gay community an apology.”
Disturber of the Peace
The idea to study reparative therapy at all was pure Spitzer, say those who know him, an effort to stick a finger in the eye of an orthodoxy that he himself had helped establish.
In the late 1990s as today, the psychiatric establishment considered the therapy to be a nonstarter. Few therapists thought of homosexuality as a disorder.
It was not always so. Up into the 1970s, the field’s diagnostic manual classified homosexuality as an illness, calling it a “sociopathic personality disturbance.” Many therapists offered treatment, including Freudian analysts who dominated the field at the time.
Advocates for gay people objected furiously, and in 1970, one year after the landmark Stonewall protests to stop police raids at a New York bar, a team of gay rights protesters heckled a meeting of behavioral therapists in New York to discuss the topic. The meeting broke up, but not before a young Columbia University professor sat down with the protesters to hear their case.
“I’ve always been drawn to controversy, and what I was hearing made sense,” said Dr. Spitzer, in an interview at his Princeton home last week. “And I began to think, well, if it is a mental disorder, then what makes it one?”
He compared homosexuality with other conditions defined as disorders, like depression and alcohol dependence, and saw immediately that the latter caused marked distress or impairment, while homosexuality often did not.
He also saw an opportunity to do something about it. Dr. Spitzer was then a junior member of on an American Psychiatric Association committee helping to rewrite the field’s diagnostic manual, and he promptly organized a symposium to discuss the place of homosexuality.
That kicked off a series of bitter debates, pitting Dr. Spitzer against a pair of influential senior psychiatrists who would not budge. In the end, the psychiatric association in 1973 sided with Dr. Spitzer, deciding to drop homosexuality from its manual and replace it with his alternative, “sexual orientation disturbance,” to identify people whose sexual orientation, gay or straight, caused them distress.
The arcane language notwithstanding, homosexuality was no longer a “disorder.” Dr. Spitzer achieved a civil rights breakthrough in record time.
“I wouldn’t say that Robert Spitzer became a household name among the broader gay movement, but the declassification of homosexuality was widely celebrated as a victory,” said Ronald Bayer of the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health at Columbia. “ ‘Sick No More’ was a headline in some gay newspapers.”

Thursday, 17 May 2012

The Head of Syria's Main opposition offered to resign.

      It  is   either   a   good   news   for   Syria  or   The   U.N   .   Troops.  
                
Mr. Assad this week appeared to belittle the SNC in his first television interview since December. "I don't think that they have any kind of weight or significance within Syria," he told a Russian state television channel, the Associated Press reported.
Meanwhile, hundreds of students protested at Aleppo University in the presence of U.N. observers who are in Syria to monitor the terms of the April 12 cease-fire. That came two weeks after an on-campus raid by security forces left four students dead and shut the university.
On Thursday, some activists said pro-regime students and regime forces attacked demonstrators, but it wasn't clear whether the monitors witnessed the fight.
Mr. Ghalioun, a 67-year-old Paris-based academic, offered to resign after one of the earliest and broadest grassroots activist networks in the uprising, the Local Coordination Committees, threatened to pull out of the coalition.
[SYROP2] European Pressphoto Agency
Burhan Ghalioun offered to step down as head of the opposition.
That threat signals a widening divide between the opposition's exiled leadership abroad, led by the SNC in Istanbul, and activists leading protests inside Syria, many who feel they are facing the brunt of the risk.
Many activists say the council has lost touch with the uprising on the ground, failed to meet protester pleas for humanitarian aid or arms and only in vain lobbied foreign governments for help to stem the bloodshed.
"The SNC doesn't mean anything to me," a 33-year-old protester in Damascus, Syria's capital, said by Skype. "They don't own this revolution. If they can help us get to the end, fine. If not, we'll get there anyway."
Some allege an outsize role for one of the SNC's seven main political factions, the Muslim Brotherhood, whose backing for the secular and liberal Mr. Ghalioun has helped cement his leadership but has alienated other secular factions.
Samir Nachar, a member of the council's top leadership committee, said the council now faced "a real crisis." Members met on Skype on Thursday evening to plan their next moves, he said.
Molham al-Droubi, a Brotherhood member on the council, said the group would have to restructure to become more inclusive to other opposition coalitions and recruit qualified technocrats from outside the council "who can do the job."
"If this happens, we will save the SNC," Mr. Droubi said by telephone. "Otherwise, I think the SNC will no longer exist."
He said the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood was aware of allegations it was monopolizing decision-making in the council, which he acknowledged but said was due to it superior organizational abilities. Brotherhood members had reached out to other opposition members and Western diplomats to address these concerns, he said.
A 10-member panel appointed in April to restructure the SNC's leadership bodies and broaden the council failed to do so amid disagreements, panel members said.
But other activists warn that the bickering in the opposition is setting back efforts to form a united front against Mr. Assad, allowing him to defy the cease-fire.
On Tuesday, Mr. Ghalioun's competitor in elections was George Sabra, a Christian whose candidacy was backed by another longtime opposition group called the Damascus Declaration.
Analysts and some activists say a council under Mr. Sabra would send an important message to Syria's religious minorities in an uprising that has pitted the majority-Sunni protest movement—a reflection of Syria's Sunni-majority population—against a regime dominated by Alawites, an offshoote Muslim sect associated with Shiism.
  .  

Monday, 14 May 2012

Homosexuality and Psychology .

Psychology was one of the first disciplines to study homosexuality as a discrete phenomenon. Prior to and throughout most of the 20th century, common standard psychology viewed homosexuality in terms of pathological models as a mental illness. That classification began to be subjected to critical scrutiny in the research, which consistently failed to produce any empirical or scientific basis for regarding homosexuality as a disorder or abnormality. As a result of such accumulated research, professionals in medicine, mental health, and the behavioral and social sciences, opposing the classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder, claimed the conclusion that it was inaccurate, and that the DSM classification reflected untested assumptions that were based on once-prevalent social norms and clinical impressions from unrepresentative samples which consisted of patients seeking therapy and individuals whose conduct brought them into the criminal justice system.[1]
Since the 1970s, the consensus of the behavioral and social sciences and the health and mental health professions globally is that homosexuality is a normal variation of human sexual orientation, while there remain those who maintain that it is a disorder.[2] In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder. The American Psychological Association Council of Representatives followed in 1975.[3] Consequently, while some still believe homosexuality is a mental disorder, the current research and clinical literature demonstrate that same-sex sexual and romantic attractions, feelings, and behaviors are normal and positive variations of human sexuality, reflecting the official positions of the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association.