Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Fresh crisis warning from World Bank; Israel civilisations clash; Rise of corruption in South Africa; Syrian nail bombs; Citigroup to cut 5,000 jobs

1 World Bank’s crisis warning (Sydney Morning Herald) The World Bank says the global economy is on the edge of a new financial crisis, deeper and more damaging than the one that followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008. Its latest six-monthly assessment of global economic prospects halves its forecast for growth among high-income countries, and pushes its forecast for countries using the euro into negative territory. It has slashed its global growth forecast for 2012 from 3.6% to 2.5%. High-income nations are forecast to grow at 1.4% rather than 2.7%. The euro area's economy will shrink 0.3%. However, the bank warns "even achieving these much weaker outcomes is very uncertain".

"The downturn in Europe and weaker growth in developing countries raises the risk that the two developments reinforce one another, resulting in an even weaker outcome." Although contained for the moment, there is a risk of a "much broader freezing up of capital markets and a global crisis similar in magnitude to the Lehman crisis". In the event of such a crisis, "activity is unlikely to bounce back as quickly as it did in 2008/09, in part because high-income countries will not have the fiscal resources to launch as strong a countercyclical policy response or to offer the same level of support to troubled financial institutions".

The World Bank said the financial turmoil caused by the escalation of the sovereign debt crisis in Europe was spreading to both developing and high-income nations and was generating ‘‘significant headwinds’’. It said capital investment to developing nations had fallen by nearly half compared with a year ago. Europe appeared to be in recession and growth in several major developing nations (Brazil, India, Russia, South Africa and Turkey) had slowed, partly as a result of a tightening in domestic policy.

2 Israel’s clash of civilizations (The New York Times) Women carefully guarded. Women scientists barred from speaking at a podium. Ultra-Orthodox men spitting on an 8-year-old girl deemed immodestly dressed. In Israel, which gave the world a very special woman leader in Golda Meir, and where young women are drafted like their male counterparts, and women played a significant role in the success of early Zionist settlements, the rise of the ultra-Orthodox is posing a huge challenge at the very core of society. Moshe Halbertal, a professor of Jewish philosophy at Hebrew University, says that whereas a century ago secular nationalism and socialism challenged the religious establishment, “today the issue is feminism.’” Rabbis are losing sleep over this, he added, just as the Islamic world – particularly post-Arab spring – ponders the place of women. Where do you see this going? The Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches, too, relegate women to second place. Is this just a sign that traditional structures have yet to adapt to the 21st century?

3 Kim Jong-un won’t last, says brother (The Guardian) The eldest son of North Korea’s late leader Kim Jong-il has predicted the regime would soon fail, with or without reforms, according to a new book that the author says is based on emails and interviews with Kim Jong-nam. The book says that Kim Jong-nam – who has never met the new leader, his half-brother Kim Jong-un – described the dynastic succession as "a joke to the outside world", and said even his father had originally opposed the hereditary transfer of power. "The Kim Jong-un regime will not last long," Kim Jong-nam is said to have written, forecasting a power struggle. "Without reforms, North Korea will collapse, and when such changes take place, the regime will collapse."

4 Rising corruption worries South Africa auditor general (The Sowetan) Investigations into corruption and financial mismanagement involving provincial government departments are piling up. Provincial departments throughout the country face a collective 1,640 investigations as a result of irregular activity, particularly in supply-chain management - a division through which contracts and tenders are awarded to national and provincial departments. Auditor-General Terence Nombembe this week revealed a shocking number of probes into these departments, hinting that corruption might be spiralling out of control. The auditor-general's report notes that "the extent of investigations commissioned suggests a control environment where fraud and financial misconduct are not prevented". President Jacob Zuma's home province is listed in the report as one of the places with high rates of unauthorised expenditure.

5 Beggar, thief and clerk (The Dawn) In the beginning there were beggars, one or two or four folded on sidewalks at traffic lights or lingering in alleys and outside bazaars, hands spread before shaved and showered men going to work, housewives carrying bags of tomatoes and potatoes. Those were the slightly better days of old, when beggary was a recourse and not a profession. Now, as reams of newspaper articles and media exposés have told us, beggary is a business with all the sophistications of revenue projections and market shares.

In Karachi, in the area behind Boat Basin, training schools can be found where children ‘purchased’ from hapless villages afflicted by floods or fighting are brought for instruction. They are taught the speedy calculations of money and manipulation, who will give and not give. The beggar is the most benevolent of Pakistan’s new agents of redistribution. His arsenal is emotion, persistence, guilt — small, sly dramas of filth, suffering and destitution played out in parts before his targets.

The beggar and the thief are the visible assailants in an unequal society. Inside stuffy offices, up crumbling staircases are the secret thieves who enable their own acts of redistribution — some more overtly than others. The clerk at the water board office who wants a few hundred rupees to pass a paper to his boss, it seems, is complicit in small acts of thievery, practised by the righteous criminals of Pakistan. The beggar, the thief and the clerk are Pakistan’s modern-day agents of change, far from the armchair sort that march at rallies and gulp down whatever new elixir of hope is pedalled at such occasions, or are proffered on Twitter.

6 Anti-dowry game a hit in India (The Straits Times) A new online game in India called 'Angry Brides' which seeks to highlight the problem of illegal dowry demands for women has attracted more than 270,000 fans. The game by online matchmaker shaadi.com - inspired by the hugely popular 'Angry Birds' game - sees players attack prospective grooms greedy for dowry with a variety of weapons, from a brick-red stiletto to a broomstick. The three grooms - an engineer, a doctor and a pilot - dodge the attacks while demanding dowries starting at 1.5 million rupees. Each time a player hits a groom, he or she wins money towards a virtual anti-dowry fund.

7 Learning from a shoe-man (The Dawn) “They chased the dog out, lest it pollute the mosque. But they left these men inside, ignoring the filth hidden in their hearts. Who will clean the mosque now?” I looked back and saw a strange man sitting on the steps of the shrine. He did not look poor — yet he was doing a job only the poorest do. He looked after the shoes of the visitors who had to take them off before entering the shrine and the adjoining mosque. In return they threw a few coins before him. Nobody knew his name. Everybody called him “jootaywala,” the shoe-man. He saw me looking at him and smiled. “Don’t believe what you see. Seek more,” he said. I ignored him and went inside.

Someone was singing a devotional song: “What will you get from this bowing and prostrating when your heart is still attracted to sins? Clean your heart first and then come to worship. Chase the dog out of your heart,” I heard the shoe-man say to a group of people gathered around him. Then he started telling them the stories of Mullah Nasiruddin, a legendary character popular in the Muslim world.

“Mullah came to a wedding reception in his usual dress of coarse cloth and nobody took any notice of him. Nobody asked him to sit. Nobody served him food. He went back, put on his new silk coat and returned to the reception. Now he was taken to the best table and made to sit with the notables of the city. When the food came Mullah dipped his sleeve in the soup and said ‘eat, my coat, eat. The host was surprised and asked Mullah why he was doing that,” the Shoe-man said. “When I came in my usual dress, nobody welcomed me, but my new coat made all the difference. So I gather that the invitation was for the coat, not for me,” said Mullah Nasiruddin. Perhaps that’s why there is always a crowd at the shrines of the Sufi saints. They give knowledge without arrogance.

8 Syria’s nail bombs (The Dawn) For 20-year-old Mohamed, joining the Friday protests in Doma city was more of an act of adventure than support for a cause. Yet to understand the reason behind the demonstrations, he was unaware of the dangers that lay therein and the concern behind his mother’s warnings. On the first Friday of November 2011, he witnessed the horror his mother had forewarned him about. As protestors gathered after Friday prayers, chanting slogans against Bashar al-Assad, Mohamed heard a loud bang and fell on the road. Everyone suddenly panicked and rushed for cover. “I was scared when I heard people saying ‘nail bombs exploding, run away before getting hurt’,” he explains. Soon after the first wave of explosions, the protestors went back to help their injured friends. “I could not believe what I saw. People were crying helplessly with pain while others rushed to provide first-aid.”

According to witnesses, nail bombs are launched in the heart of a demonstration from a car and as bombs explode amongst the demonstrators, the vehicle disappears. Dozens of common iron-nails rocket in the air, causing injuries to people sitting as far away from the street as homes and offices. Following several reports of protestors’ disappearance from Syrian hospitals, victims prefer self-treatment in makeshift field clinics instead of seeking aid at local hospitals. The mortality rate, however, remains high. “It is difficult to take critical cases to hospitals because we know they will be killed there anyway. This way, at least we get to bury them ourselves,” says Abu Zaid.

While the use of nail bombs is prohibited internationally, Syrian security forces have been using them against protestors since last August. “Most nail bombs are fired on the left side of demonstrations for a higher possibility of damages to the heart,” says Khalid from Homs who has survived several such attacks.

9 Citigroup to cut 5,000 jobs (Mint) Citigroup Inc., the third biggest US bank by assets, on Tuesday said fourth-quarter net income dropped 11%, missing analysts’ estimates for an increase, to $1.17 billion, or 38 cents a share, from $1.31 billion, or 43 cents, a year earlier, on a slump in trading revenue. Trading declines mirrored results at JPMorgan Chase and Co., which last week said revenue in every investment banking business fell from a year earlier. Citigroup’s earnings slump capped a year for chief executive officer Vikram Pandit, 55, in which the shares slid 44% amid concern that troubled European countries would default. The New York-based bank on Tuesday in a statement said it will eliminate 5,000 employees, with about 25% coming from the securities and banking business.

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