1 Egypt erupts again (Hamza Hendawi, Sarah El Deeb & Maggie Michael in San Francisco Chronicle) Hundreds of thousands thronged the streets of Cairo and cities around the country Sunday and marched on the presidential palace, filling a broad avenue for blocks, in an attempt to force out the Islamist president with the most massive protests Egypt has seen in 2½ years of turmoil.
In a sign of the explosive volatility of the country's divisions, a hard core of young opponents broke away from the rallies and attacked the main headquarters of President Mohammed Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood. Fears were widespread that the two sides could be heading to a violent collision in coming days. Morsi made clear through a spokesman that he would not step down and his Islamist supporters vowed not to allow protesters to remove one of their own, brought to office in a legitimate vote.
The protesters aimed to show by sheer numbers that the country has irrevocably turned against Morsi, a year to the day after he was inaugurated as Egypt's first freely elected president. "Mubarak took only 18 days although he had behind him the security, intelligence and a large sector of Egyptians," said Amr Tawfeeq, an oil company employee marching toward Ittihadiya with a Christian friend. Morsi "won't take long. We want him out and we are ready to pay the price." Protesters believe the military would throw its weight behind them, tipping the balance against Morsi. The country's police, meanwhile, were hardly to be seen Sunday.
2 How US is bugging European allies (Ewen MacAskill &Julian Borger in The Guardian) US intelligence services are spying on the European Union mission in New York and its embassy in Washington, according to the latest top secret US National Security Agency documents leaked by the whistleblower Edward Snowden. One document lists 38 embassies and missions, describing them as "targets". It details an extraordinary range of spying methods used against each target, from bugs implanted in electronic communications gear to taps into cables to the collection of transmissions with specialised antennae.
Along with traditional ideological adversaries and sensitive Middle Eastern countries, the list of targets includes the EU missions and the French, Italian and Greek embassies, as well as a number of other American allies, including Japan, Mexico, South Korea, India and Turkey. The list in the September 2010 document does not mention the UK, Germany or other western European states.
The documents suggest the aim of the bugging exercise against the EU embassy in central Washington is to gather inside knowledge of policy disagreements on global issues and other rifts between member states. Germany's justice minister, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, demanded an explanation from Washington, saying that if confirmed, US behaviour "was reminiscent of the actions of enemies during the cold war".
3 Chinese bank tops global ranking (BBC) A Chinese bank
has topped a list of the world's top 1,000 banks for the first time, according
to a survey. ICBC moved up from third, switching places with last year's
winner, Bank of America. JP Morgan remained second. The closely watched annual
report by The Banker is based on a firm's Tier 1 capital, a key measurement of
a bank's strength.
The UK bank sector as a whole ranked
10th, behind France, Brazil and Russia, and down from second in 2008. The
Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) moved into pole position on the
back of a 15% increase in capital to $160.6bn. China Construction Bank, the
country's second largest, also grew its capital by 15%, to $137.6bn, and
dislodged Citigroup from fifth place.
The UK's only bank in the top 10 is
fourth-placed HSBC, with capital of $151bn, which gains significant earnings
from its Asian operations. China now has
96 banks in the top 1000 ranking and holds four places in the top 10. Its big
four banks ICBC, CCB, Bank of China and Agricultural Bank of China also head
the table for the largest profits. All but one of the 25 global banks with the
greatest losses are European banks, and six of the top 10 losses were from
Spanish banks. However, the report showed that total profits of the top 1,000
banks are now back to their pre-crisis levels.
4 Education in a global world (Dominic
Sachsenmaier in Khaleej Times) Nations and education must stress cultural
interactions. During the past few decades, the global economy and global
culture have changed much faster than our mental maps. It’s troubling that
entire education systems have not yet caught up with the new global realities.
For instance, in Europe entire cohorts of students are still graduating from
high schools and universities without having acquired even basic knowledge of
outside world regions.
In terms of their monocultural
horizons, many European students more closely resemble their predecessors from
a century ago than their present-day peers in numerous states outside of the
West. In China, for example, educated elites for generations have been forced
to systematically travel beyond their own cultural horizons. In most of Europe
Asian literature and art remain a niche for aficionados and there is little
broad societal interest in the non-Western world.
The source of this interest,
education and knowledge gap between Europe and China is largely a carryover
from the 19th and 20th centuries, a time of European and American dominance.
During that period European elites regarded their own cultural habitat as a
global center and the engine of the world’s development. For, many leaders and
educators it seemed pointless to make serious efforts at understanding Chinese,
Indian and Arabic societies.
The challenge for Europe becomes
more pressing because the US is not in a similar position. To be sure, large
parts of US society are not characterised by their deep interest in other parts
of the world. Yet at the same time, the country has a large pool of
well-qualified, college-educated first-, second- and third-generation
immigrants from Asia and elsewhere who can indeed serve as much needed
bridge-builders in a global age. Moreover, for a number of global and local
reasons, leading US universities have systematically strengthened their
expertise on Asia and other world regions, and have done so for decades. Widespread
cultural ignorance no longer fits into a shifting world in which Chinese and
other non-Western countries are themselves going global.
The demand for universal suffrage, a widening income gap and soaring property prices are expected to drive the march as protesters focus their anger on unpopular Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying. "The main goal of the rally is to push through for genuine democracy and to ask for Leung Chun-ying to step down," Jackie Hung of the Civil Human Rights Front, which is organising the march, said.
No comments:
Post a Comment