1 Full genomes of 30,000 people mapped (San Francisco Chronicle) Thirty thousand people have had their full genomes sequenced, up from just one in 2003. Since the cost to map your DNA can exceed $10,000 and is rarely covered by insurance, most is done for research. After signing consent forms waiving their rights to the information, thousands of Americans who have undergone testing for such purposes aren't receiving the results, even when they have life-or-death consequences. That's prompting an ethical debate among scientists and doctors.
2 What if Greece defaults (Gwynne Dyer in The Guardian) What will happen to Greece if it defaults on its debts and crashes out of the euro? More importantly, what will then happen to the common currency, and to the European Union itself? Countries that default on their debts have a very hard time. When Argentina defaulted in 2001, there was a 60% fall in domestic consumption. Bank accounts were frozen, supermarkets emptied, and imported goods disappeared from the market. Inflation soared, jobs disappeared, and by 2003 more than half the population was living below the poverty line.
On the other hand, Greece is experiencing a good deal of this misery already. But in a few years, freed from its burden of debt, Argentina’s economy took off. Many Greek voters think they can renegotiate the deal with the EU and stay in the euro. That is almost certainly untrue. But in the end default may turn out to be better for them than staying in the euro and suffering endless austerity while trying to pay off an impossible load of debt.
The bigger question is: what happens to the euro if Greece leaves? The common currency was conceived as a vehicle for achieving the ‘ever closer union’, but that was putting the cart before the horse. Without a single authority that can enforce the necessary fiscal and budgetary disciplines, such a currency is bound to fail. Jacques Attali, former adviser to the late French president, François Mitterand, said that the euro will not last five more years “unless there is a single European state”. He’s probably right, but there is obviously not going to be a single European state in five years’ time. Therefore, by Attali’s own logic, the euro as we know it is doomed. But Angela Merkel is probably wrong: that is unlikely to spell the end of the European Union itself. The EU survived perfectly well for 40 years without a single currency.
3 If Greece were to withdraw from Euro (Robert Peston on BBC) I am mildly bemused that central bank governors seem to be talking with some equanimity about Greece leaving the euro. The point is that the eurozone crisis is a sovereign debt crisis and an inextricably connected banking crisis. And for Europe's banking system, once the Rubicon has been crossed of a country leaving the euro, once it is demonstrated that there is an exit, all sorts of horrible things follow. Any business of any nationality will find it extremely difficult to leave its money in euros in a bank in a country perceived to be at risk of following Greece out the door.
Let's say Greece withdraws from the euro and is unable or unwilling to settle the 100bn euros or so it owes the other eurozone central banks under the Target2 payments system. And on top of that there would be a huge write-off of the separate 50bn euros of Greek government bonds held by the ECB and eurozone national central banks. At that point it would become obvious to the citizens of Germany that they have been lending rather more to the eurozone's weaker economies than the eurozone's leaders have been telling them.
What would be the impact on German public opinion of finding out that German taxpayers had lost tens of billions of euros on loans to Greece that they did not know they had made? Would they feel a rush of solidarity with the other weaker eurozone economies and feel that Germany would redouble its financial support for Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ireland? There must be a danger that, in those circumstances, there would be such a backlash of public anger that it would be even harder for Germany's leaders to provide the scale and kind of financial succour essential to the eurozone's survival.
4 Welcome to the social media revolution (Marc Benioff on BBC) The world is changing at a speed we could never have imagined before. Social web and mobile technologies have accelerated the rate at which relationships develop, information is shared and influence takes hold. We've also seen the impact of the social revolution on business. When Netflix announced it was changing its pricing structure, its customers revolted, posting 82,000 negative comments across its blogs and on Facebook and Twitter. Within months the company lost 800,000 customers and two-thirds of its market value. That's the speed of social - everything happens faster than ever before.
New graduates entering the workforce are frequently appalled by the technology their employers use to run their companies. They are frustrated by antiquated software systems that were built long before Mark Zuckerberg was even born. They want to collaborate with the best people across their organisation and to have real-time access to information, just like they have in their personal lives. Work itself is fundamentally social, so why can't our business apps be social, as collaborative as Facebook, as transparent as Twitter, and as engaging as Zynga's social games?
Managing and motivating employees is maybe the most important job for a management team. Yet today's HR systems were built with a command-and-control framework of the past. They don't represent how today's workforce wants to be managed. According to McKinsey, companies that adopt social technologies can see a 50% increase in customer satisfaction, 48% increase in business leads, and 24% increase in revenue. With these kinds of results, the social revolution will become the biggest paradigm shift that we have ever seen. Welcome to the social revolution.
5 Somaliland: Africa’s unofficial country (BBC) In most countries you need a passport to exchange foreign money for local currency. In Somaliland, an unrecognised country in the Horn of Africa, you need a wheelbarrow. Most local banknotes in Somaliland are only worth pennies, so a brick of money is usually needed to buy a meal of camel hump or goat meat.
Somaliland is fundamentally different from the other countries in the region -- and almost anywhere else on the planet. According to the rest of the world, Somaliland is, officially, just a part of Somalia, located in the northern area along the Gulf of Aden. Somalia has endured appalling suffering during recent decades and has become the classic example of a failed state. Somaliland, by contrast, is an unrecognised state larger than England and home to 3.5 million people, but it has an independent, democratically elected government and its own army, flag, media and border control, but must rely on an uneasy relationship with Somalia for matters like international diplomacy and large scale public works.
Britain was the former colonial power in Somaliland from 1888-1960. After separating from the shrinking British empire, Somaliland voluntarily joined with Somalia for economic and security reasons. But when a dictator came to power in Somalia the relationship soured in the 1980s. Somalilanders fought a bitter war to reclaim their independence which was ultimately successful, by default, as Somalia collapsed in internal turmoil.
6 Fault lines divide Sudan (Johannesburg Times) South Sudan was never going to have it easy as an independent state, but no one foresaw how difficult its birth would be. Africa's 54th state emerged with high hopes and near unanimous international support on July 9 last year, when Sudan formally split in two after a long, devastating civil war. For decades the black, Christian-animist population in the south had been marginalised by the regime in Khartoum, dominated by Muslim Arabs. Such was the level of underdevelopment in the south that, by the war's official end in 2005, there were only three surgeons to serve a population of about 10,000 and only 4km of tarred road in a territory the size of France.
By dividing Sudan along a North-South "fault line" it was hoped that many of the conflicts that had historically pitted northerners against southerners would abate. The south's economy was also expected to finally emerge from the doldrums. Approaching the first anniversary of South Sudan's independence, the list of problems is almost endless. Sudan and South Sudan are locked in a number of increasingly bitter clashes over oil, security and borders that threaten to ignite a full-blown war. The country is also riven by internal fault lines that have arguably become more rather than less volatile since independence.
We can say one thing for certain: today it is less likely that new borders will be drawn in Africa to address intractable fault lines in societies than it was 10 months ago. South Sudan's troubles have hardened international opinion against any further "Balkanisation" of Africa. This is bad news for places such as Somaliland, which craves international recognition and has done nearly everything right in pursuit of independent statehood.
7 Parents at their worst (Khaleej Times) The real culprits are parents who give their children expensive toys to play with like fast cars and dune buggies, who buy five-year-olds bikes with gears and send them on the main road, who purchase skateboards but do not teach them road courtesy, who risk their lives because they believe they are invincible. Parents who compensate for a lack of time by giving their children so much money that all they learn is arrogance and bad manners and no respect for money except what it can buy them. Parents born to power so that they teach their children they can get away with anything and can, therefore, do anything and the children learn that from petty nuisance to crime is but a gentle step. Parents so busy in their own rat race, so imbued by their social status that their children are being exposed to the seamier side of life, that drugs and other unpleasant influences are holding sway.
Yet, the shattered mother who didn’t switch off the gas cylinder, the poor father who drove his car in reverse, the parents who left that window sill open, they get so much blame that can hardly stand under the weight of it. Yet these parents who happily and with no sense of concern create little monsters and teach them everything wrong get away with it and not enough people say stop and be accountable.
8 Britain and binge drinking (Associated Press/Dawn) The legal drinking age in Britain is 18, compared to 21 in the US, but many drinkers start younger. Social workers say lax control of retail sales and cheap alcohol make it easy for young people to experiment with liquor. Prime Minister David Cameron has declared binge drinking a national “scandal,” and the government is seeking to curb the excess by introducing a minimum price for each unit of alcohol sold. Scotland, which has long struggled with a dire alcohol abuse problem, announced it wants to set a minimum price of 50 pence per unit — which would mean an average bottle of wine could cost no less than about 4.70 pounds.
9 India’s statue myths (The Wall Street Journal) The man facing blasphemy charges after he claimed water dripping from a statue of Christ in Mumbai was not miraculous but the result of a badly plumbed toilet is preparing to ask India’s Supreme Court to abolish the blasphemy law. Sanal Edamaruku is accused by Catholic groups in Mumbai of breaking the Indian Penal Code, which outlaws “deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings.” Mr. Edamaruku, a rationalist who has spent 30 years debunking miracles and exposing fraudulent faith healers, denies the offense and claims the law is being misused in order to silence him.
“I see this as an opportunity to make sure this law isn’t misused any more against anybody,” said Mr. Edamaruku who is president of Rationalist International, a group working to promote science and reason in place of religious belief and superstition. The blasphemy law, created in 1860, goes against the fundamental right of freedom of expression and should be abolished, he says. Those invoking it against him said they were offended by Mr. Edamaruku’s comments that clergy at Velankanni Church in Mumbai were using the sight of water dripping from the feet of a Christ statue to make money from visiting pilgrims. The Catholic Bishop of Mumbai Agnelo Gracias has called on Mr. Edamaruku to apologize for “hurting” the Catholic community and said that no money had been collected at the shrine.
Some in the Catholic media have come out in support of Mr. Edamaruku, including Deepika, a Catholic newspaper based in the southern state of Kerala. “India is a very fast developing country, we have a very serious interest in science and we are going around the world serving people with our IT and science knowledge,” Mr. Edamaruku said. “That’s one India that is in the 20th century. We have another India that’s in the 16th century – we are in constant conflict and it is 16th century India that is pulling us back.”
2 What if Greece defaults (Gwynne Dyer in The Guardian) What will happen to Greece if it defaults on its debts and crashes out of the euro? More importantly, what will then happen to the common currency, and to the European Union itself? Countries that default on their debts have a very hard time. When Argentina defaulted in 2001, there was a 60% fall in domestic consumption. Bank accounts were frozen, supermarkets emptied, and imported goods disappeared from the market. Inflation soared, jobs disappeared, and by 2003 more than half the population was living below the poverty line.
On the other hand, Greece is experiencing a good deal of this misery already. But in a few years, freed from its burden of debt, Argentina’s economy took off. Many Greek voters think they can renegotiate the deal with the EU and stay in the euro. That is almost certainly untrue. But in the end default may turn out to be better for them than staying in the euro and suffering endless austerity while trying to pay off an impossible load of debt.
The bigger question is: what happens to the euro if Greece leaves? The common currency was conceived as a vehicle for achieving the ‘ever closer union’, but that was putting the cart before the horse. Without a single authority that can enforce the necessary fiscal and budgetary disciplines, such a currency is bound to fail. Jacques Attali, former adviser to the late French president, François Mitterand, said that the euro will not last five more years “unless there is a single European state”. He’s probably right, but there is obviously not going to be a single European state in five years’ time. Therefore, by Attali’s own logic, the euro as we know it is doomed. But Angela Merkel is probably wrong: that is unlikely to spell the end of the European Union itself. The EU survived perfectly well for 40 years without a single currency.
3 If Greece were to withdraw from Euro (Robert Peston on BBC) I am mildly bemused that central bank governors seem to be talking with some equanimity about Greece leaving the euro. The point is that the eurozone crisis is a sovereign debt crisis and an inextricably connected banking crisis. And for Europe's banking system, once the Rubicon has been crossed of a country leaving the euro, once it is demonstrated that there is an exit, all sorts of horrible things follow. Any business of any nationality will find it extremely difficult to leave its money in euros in a bank in a country perceived to be at risk of following Greece out the door.
Let's say Greece withdraws from the euro and is unable or unwilling to settle the 100bn euros or so it owes the other eurozone central banks under the Target2 payments system. And on top of that there would be a huge write-off of the separate 50bn euros of Greek government bonds held by the ECB and eurozone national central banks. At that point it would become obvious to the citizens of Germany that they have been lending rather more to the eurozone's weaker economies than the eurozone's leaders have been telling them.
What would be the impact on German public opinion of finding out that German taxpayers had lost tens of billions of euros on loans to Greece that they did not know they had made? Would they feel a rush of solidarity with the other weaker eurozone economies and feel that Germany would redouble its financial support for Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ireland? There must be a danger that, in those circumstances, there would be such a backlash of public anger that it would be even harder for Germany's leaders to provide the scale and kind of financial succour essential to the eurozone's survival.
4 Welcome to the social media revolution (Marc Benioff on BBC) The world is changing at a speed we could never have imagined before. Social web and mobile technologies have accelerated the rate at which relationships develop, information is shared and influence takes hold. We've also seen the impact of the social revolution on business. When Netflix announced it was changing its pricing structure, its customers revolted, posting 82,000 negative comments across its blogs and on Facebook and Twitter. Within months the company lost 800,000 customers and two-thirds of its market value. That's the speed of social - everything happens faster than ever before.
New graduates entering the workforce are frequently appalled by the technology their employers use to run their companies. They are frustrated by antiquated software systems that were built long before Mark Zuckerberg was even born. They want to collaborate with the best people across their organisation and to have real-time access to information, just like they have in their personal lives. Work itself is fundamentally social, so why can't our business apps be social, as collaborative as Facebook, as transparent as Twitter, and as engaging as Zynga's social games?
Managing and motivating employees is maybe the most important job for a management team. Yet today's HR systems were built with a command-and-control framework of the past. They don't represent how today's workforce wants to be managed. According to McKinsey, companies that adopt social technologies can see a 50% increase in customer satisfaction, 48% increase in business leads, and 24% increase in revenue. With these kinds of results, the social revolution will become the biggest paradigm shift that we have ever seen. Welcome to the social revolution.
5 Somaliland: Africa’s unofficial country (BBC) In most countries you need a passport to exchange foreign money for local currency. In Somaliland, an unrecognised country in the Horn of Africa, you need a wheelbarrow. Most local banknotes in Somaliland are only worth pennies, so a brick of money is usually needed to buy a meal of camel hump or goat meat.
Somaliland is fundamentally different from the other countries in the region -- and almost anywhere else on the planet. According to the rest of the world, Somaliland is, officially, just a part of Somalia, located in the northern area along the Gulf of Aden. Somalia has endured appalling suffering during recent decades and has become the classic example of a failed state. Somaliland, by contrast, is an unrecognised state larger than England and home to 3.5 million people, but it has an independent, democratically elected government and its own army, flag, media and border control, but must rely on an uneasy relationship with Somalia for matters like international diplomacy and large scale public works.
Britain was the former colonial power in Somaliland from 1888-1960. After separating from the shrinking British empire, Somaliland voluntarily joined with Somalia for economic and security reasons. But when a dictator came to power in Somalia the relationship soured in the 1980s. Somalilanders fought a bitter war to reclaim their independence which was ultimately successful, by default, as Somalia collapsed in internal turmoil.
6 Fault lines divide Sudan (Johannesburg Times) South Sudan was never going to have it easy as an independent state, but no one foresaw how difficult its birth would be. Africa's 54th state emerged with high hopes and near unanimous international support on July 9 last year, when Sudan formally split in two after a long, devastating civil war. For decades the black, Christian-animist population in the south had been marginalised by the regime in Khartoum, dominated by Muslim Arabs. Such was the level of underdevelopment in the south that, by the war's official end in 2005, there were only three surgeons to serve a population of about 10,000 and only 4km of tarred road in a territory the size of France.
By dividing Sudan along a North-South "fault line" it was hoped that many of the conflicts that had historically pitted northerners against southerners would abate. The south's economy was also expected to finally emerge from the doldrums. Approaching the first anniversary of South Sudan's independence, the list of problems is almost endless. Sudan and South Sudan are locked in a number of increasingly bitter clashes over oil, security and borders that threaten to ignite a full-blown war. The country is also riven by internal fault lines that have arguably become more rather than less volatile since independence.
We can say one thing for certain: today it is less likely that new borders will be drawn in Africa to address intractable fault lines in societies than it was 10 months ago. South Sudan's troubles have hardened international opinion against any further "Balkanisation" of Africa. This is bad news for places such as Somaliland, which craves international recognition and has done nearly everything right in pursuit of independent statehood.
7 Parents at their worst (Khaleej Times) The real culprits are parents who give their children expensive toys to play with like fast cars and dune buggies, who buy five-year-olds bikes with gears and send them on the main road, who purchase skateboards but do not teach them road courtesy, who risk their lives because they believe they are invincible. Parents who compensate for a lack of time by giving their children so much money that all they learn is arrogance and bad manners and no respect for money except what it can buy them. Parents born to power so that they teach their children they can get away with anything and can, therefore, do anything and the children learn that from petty nuisance to crime is but a gentle step. Parents so busy in their own rat race, so imbued by their social status that their children are being exposed to the seamier side of life, that drugs and other unpleasant influences are holding sway.
Yet, the shattered mother who didn’t switch off the gas cylinder, the poor father who drove his car in reverse, the parents who left that window sill open, they get so much blame that can hardly stand under the weight of it. Yet these parents who happily and with no sense of concern create little monsters and teach them everything wrong get away with it and not enough people say stop and be accountable.
8 Britain and binge drinking (Associated Press/Dawn) The legal drinking age in Britain is 18, compared to 21 in the US, but many drinkers start younger. Social workers say lax control of retail sales and cheap alcohol make it easy for young people to experiment with liquor. Prime Minister David Cameron has declared binge drinking a national “scandal,” and the government is seeking to curb the excess by introducing a minimum price for each unit of alcohol sold. Scotland, which has long struggled with a dire alcohol abuse problem, announced it wants to set a minimum price of 50 pence per unit — which would mean an average bottle of wine could cost no less than about 4.70 pounds.
9 India’s statue myths (The Wall Street Journal) The man facing blasphemy charges after he claimed water dripping from a statue of Christ in Mumbai was not miraculous but the result of a badly plumbed toilet is preparing to ask India’s Supreme Court to abolish the blasphemy law. Sanal Edamaruku is accused by Catholic groups in Mumbai of breaking the Indian Penal Code, which outlaws “deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings.” Mr. Edamaruku, a rationalist who has spent 30 years debunking miracles and exposing fraudulent faith healers, denies the offense and claims the law is being misused in order to silence him.
“I see this as an opportunity to make sure this law isn’t misused any more against anybody,” said Mr. Edamaruku who is president of Rationalist International, a group working to promote science and reason in place of religious belief and superstition. The blasphemy law, created in 1860, goes against the fundamental right of freedom of expression and should be abolished, he says. Those invoking it against him said they were offended by Mr. Edamaruku’s comments that clergy at Velankanni Church in Mumbai were using the sight of water dripping from the feet of a Christ statue to make money from visiting pilgrims. The Catholic Bishop of Mumbai Agnelo Gracias has called on Mr. Edamaruku to apologize for “hurting” the Catholic community and said that no money had been collected at the shrine.
Some in the Catholic media have come out in support of Mr. Edamaruku, including Deepika, a Catholic newspaper based in the southern state of Kerala. “India is a very fast developing country, we have a very serious interest in science and we are going around the world serving people with our IT and science knowledge,” Mr. Edamaruku said. “That’s one India that is in the 20th century. We have another India that’s in the 16th century – we are in constant conflict and it is 16th century India that is pulling us back.”
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