1 UK economy poised to stay on A-list (Phillip Inman
in The Guardian) Forecasters have good news for those fearing that Britain
faces a long, slow decline into economic mediocrity: the UK will still stand
tall among the world's biggest economies in 2030, having overtaken France and
even made progress on closing the gap with Germany.
Only India will leapfrog the UK on the rich list of
nations, according to the report by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), as the
previously fast-growing countries Russia and Brazil struggle to make ground on
the global league table. According to the report, the youthful vigour of the UK
economy, with its high birthrate and flexible labour market, will contrast
markedly with the ageing populations of mainland Europe.
Ignoring the potential for Scotland to spoil the
party by voting to separate in September, the report forecasts that Britain
will remain "a significant member of the global economic A-list".
Only a couple of years ago there were forecasts that
Britain would rapidly become a second-class economic power and would need to
defer to the BRIC countries of Brazil, Russia, India and China in the near
future. China has ranked above Japan for a decade as the world's second-biggest
economy. By some calculations Brazil leapfrogged the UK in 2012, with Russia
and India close behind.
2 Culture war aids Hong Kong democracy move (Adam
Minter in Straits Times) Political freedom is not the only impetus for the
hundreds of thousands of pro-democracy protesters who this week marched through
central Hong Kong. True, the immediate cause was the Chinese government's
recent efforts to assert greater control over Hong Kong. But that is not all of
it, by any means.
Tension between citizens of Hong Kong and mainland
China has been increasing for several years now, metastasising into
cross-border online shouting matches that have made strong impressions on
people - and governments - in both places. Earlier this year, mainland Chinese
were shocked by a deplorable incident in which Hong Kong locals sprayed
mainland tourists with water from bottles labelled "locust
insecticide".
As almost every mainland Chinese knows by now,
"locust" is what tens of millions of Chinese tourists who visit Hong
Kong annually were labelled in a notorious 2012 advertisement in Hong Kong's
most ardent pro-democracy newspaper, the Apple Daily. (It was paid for by 800
donors responding to a Facebook campaign.) It was an ugly message, and it
served little purpose beyond highlighting an intractable cross-border culture
war - all the while convincing many Chinese that to be pro-democracy is to be
anti-Chinese.
The contrast of world views, and the hate it
engenders, is profound. In the eyes of many Hong Kong residents, mainland
Chinese are uncouth buffoons with bulging wallets, no manners and no deference
to Hong Kong's status as a more highly developed and cultured gem. For
mainlanders, Hong Kong residents are snobs who fail to accept that they belong
to One China.
3 Prince, FB in effort to bridge digital divide (Joe
Garofoli in San Francisco Chronicle) Prince is headlining the 20th annual
Essence Festival in New Orleans this weekend — but he only agreed to do so if
the organizers held a hackathon to call attention to the digital divide.
Only 6 percent of US tech workers are African
American and 7 percent are Latino; 15 percent are Asian American and 71 percent
are white, according to 2011 census data. Despite its claims of meritocracy,
tech’s demographic breakdown is comparable to the white-collar finance and
insurance industries, according to 2012 data from the US Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission.
The biggest challenge to diversifying the tech world
is creating a pipeline from low-income communities to Silicon Valley. But how
do low opportunity kids find out where they can learn how to code? On Saturday,
Facebook will roll out a new searchable database of all the organizations
nationwide teaching low-opportunity youth to code. So far, 70 nonprofits are in
the mix. The Prince-ordered hackathon starts Friday night — co-sponsored by
Facebook — and will end Sunday with $10,000 worth of prizes for the winning
team.
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