Record trade deficit for Japan; The problem with online college; What happened on April 13, 1919

1 Record trade deficit for Japan (BBC) Japan's monthly trade deficit hit a record in January after its recent aggressive monetary policy stance weakened its currency sharply. Exports rose in January, the first jump in eight months, as its goods became more affordable to foreign buyers. However, a weak currency also pushed up its import bill resulting in a monthly trade deficit of 1.6tn yen ($17.1bn), a 10% jump from a year ago. Japan's deficit has also been impacted by an increase in fuel imports.

The world's third-largest economy has seen a rise in fuel imports, as most of Japan's nuclear reactors continue to remain closed. Japan's imports rose 7.3% in January, from a year earlier. One of the biggest jumps was in the import of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), which surged more than 28%. Meanwhile, exports rose 6.4%, driven up mainly by shipments of manufactured goods.

Japan's exports, one of the key drivers of its economic growth, have been hurt by a variety of factors. Demand from the eurozone, one of Japan's biggest markets, has been hurt by the region's ongoing debt crisis. A territorial dispute with China has hit sales of Japanese goods to the country, Japan's biggest trading partner, over the past few months.

2 The problem with online college (The New York Times) Student attrition rates — around 90% for some huge online courses — appear to be a problem even in small-scale online courses when compared with traditional face-to-face classes. Also, courses delivered solely online may be fine for highly skilled, highly motivated people, but they are inappropriate for struggling students who make up a significant portion of college enrollment and who need close contact with instructors to succeed.

Online classes are already common in colleges, and, on the whole, the record is not encouraging. According to Columbia University’s Community College Research Center, for example, about seven million students — about a third of all those enrolled in college — are enrolled in what the center describes as traditional online courses. These typically have about 25 students and are run by professors who often have little interaction with students.

Research has shown over and over again that community college students who enroll in online courses are significantly more likely to fail or withdraw than those in traditional classes, which means that they spend hard-earned tuition dollars and get nothing in return. Worse still, low-performing students who may be just barely hanging on in traditional classes tend to fall even further behind in online courses.

A five-year study, issued in 2011, tracked 51,000 students enrolled in Washington State community and technical colleges. It found that those who took higher proportions of online courses were less likely to earn degrees or transfer to four-year colleges. The reasons for such failures are well known. Many students, for example, show up at college (or junior college) unprepared to learn, unable to manage time and having failed to master basics like math and English.

3 What happened on April 13, 1919 (Margherita Stancati in The Wall Street Journal) David Cameron on Wednesday became the first British prime minister to visit the site of the 1919 massacre in Amritsar that is remembered as one of the darkest episodes in colonial history, one that gave momentum to India’s independence movement. In a note written in the visitors’ book at Jallianwala Bagh – a walled garden where the killings took place– Mr. Cameron described it as “a deeply shameful event in British history”. At the time of the mass shooting, ordered by a British general, colonial rulers were grappling with rising unrest from their Indian subjects.

Despite a ban on freedom of assembly, on April 13, 1919, thousands of Sikhs gathered in a walled garden in Amritsar, Jallianwala Bagh, for the religious festival of Vaisakhi. It was an Indian-born British general – Brigadier General Reginald Dyer – who ordered troops to fire on the crowd as punishment. Unable to leave the enclosed area, in a shooting spree that lasted up to 15 minutes some 379 people were killed and thousands injured, according to British government figures. Among them were many women and children.
The killings sparked widespread outrage, and most of Punjab was kept under martial law for several months.

Restrictive policies included Dyer’s infamous “crawling order,” which forced people who wished to go down a road where a British woman had been assaulted to crawl instead of walk. “What it did was discredit British rule, which is why even Churchill distanced himself from it,” historian Ramachandra Guha said. In the aftermath of the massacre, Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, one of India’s most celebrated authors, renounced a knighthood granted to him by the British Crown four years earlier.

The Jallianwala Bagh massacre was only one of many atrocities committed under British rule, argues writer and historian William Dalrymple. It was a “crucial tipping point in the story of the freedom struggle but it was by no means the worst thing the British did in India,” he said in an interview. For Mr. Guha, the massacre, while important, was not as key in advancing India’s independence movement as other events. “The Salt March would be much more important,” says Mr. Guha, a reference to the mass civil disobedience campaign led by Gandhi in 1930 to oppose a tax on salt.