1 Obama opts for
soft-power foreign policy (David Nakamura in The Washington Post) President
Obama has laid out his vision for a comprehensive post-9/11 foreign policy
after more than a decade of war overseas, arguing for a new form of American
leadership that strikes a balance between interventionism and “foreign
entanglements.”
Obama stressed the
importance of nonmilitary options in addressing the world’s challenges, as well
as collective international action. Coming more than six years into a
presidency devoted to winding down the wars, the speech featured a firm defense
of his administration’s handling of foreign crises — including those in
Nigeria, Syria and Ukraine — and a suggestion that many critics are out of step
with a nation tired from 13 years of war.
“Here’s my bottom line:
America must always lead,” Obama said. “If we don’t, no one else will. The
military that you have joined is and always will be the backbone of that
leadership. But US military action cannot be the only — or even the primary —
component of our leadership in every instance.”
Obama acknowledged that
the odds of a nuclear deal with Iran “are still long,” but he said there
remained “a very real chance of a breakthrough agreement” for the first time in
a decade, “one that is more effective and durable than what we could have achieved
through the use of force.” The point, Obama added, “is this is American
leadership. This is American strength.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/obama-wants-to-set-up-new-5-billion-counterterrorism-fund/2014/05/28/c5ee3362-e662-11e3-a86b-362fd5443d19_story.html
2 China’s tumult within (Khaleej Times) At least 180
people have been killed in attacks across China over the past year as the
Communist Party of China’s seniormost committees warned that separatist groups
in Xinjiang are seeking to form their own state, called East Turkestan.
Xinjiang is a resource-rich region bordering central Asia, whose Uighur Muslim
minority speak a Turkic language and several of whose constituents have
complained of discrimination.
In the Party’s own words, China’s state security has
its “domestic and foreign elements that are more complicated than at any other
period in history”. Given China’s long and turbulent history, this is an
assessment of unusual gravity that China’s neighbours must study in equal
measure.
http://khaleejtimes.com/kt-article-display-1.asp?xfile=/data/editorial/2014/May/editorial_May54.xml§ion=editorial
3 Google axes the steering wheel, Samsung makes
watch smarter (Stephanie M Lee & Associated Press in San Francisco
Chronicle) Google CEO Sergey Brin has announced the next step in the company’s
driverless car project. The new prototype has no steering wheel or driver
pedals, it’s completely self-driving. And the prototype’s squat design of
course inspired some to poke fun: Google is building a car without a steering
wheel. Brin said Google will make 100 prototype cars that drive themselves —
and therefore do not need a wheel. Or brake and gas pedals.
Instead, there are buttons for go and stop. A
combination of sensors and computing power takes the driving from there. To
date, Google has driven hundreds of thousands of miles on public roads with
Lexus SUVs and Toyota Priuses outfitted with the special equipment. This
prototype is the first Google will have built for itself. It won’t be for sale,
and Google is unlikely to go deeply into auto manufacturing. In a blog post,
the company emphasized partnering with other firms.
The Samsung watch: Electronics giant Samsung has
taken its biggest step yet into the rapidly growing field of “wearable” health
devices, unveiling a prototype for a smartwatch that can track key vital signs
and a software platform that will allow researchers to analyze the massive
amounts of data generated by wearers.
Samsung has introduced the Simband, a watch that
isn’t for sale but an example, the company said, of products still to come. It
can track key vital signs: heart rate, heart rate regularity, skin temperature,
oxygen levels and carbon dioxide levels. And thanks to an attachable battery,
the watch does not need to be taken off to be recharged, allowing it to monitor
a user’s body 24/7.
4 When instant gratification comes to banking (Anne
Perkins in The Guardian) Being greedy about the present is part of the human
condition, and waiting for a better future can cut both ways. It might mean
fairness and shared prosperity, but usually it is just another way of
entrenching privilege.
What's for sure is that hope alone is not enough.
But taking a risk – by regulating for fair markets now in order to get a more
sustainable City operation in the future – is a harder case to make when the
rules that used to constrain behaviour have been eroded by the ease with which
most of us, most of the time, can get some degree of instant gratification;
when getting what you want, when you want it, is the measure of success.
As governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney pointed
out, most banks do now have codes of ethics and business principles, it's just
that their traders don't observe them. It's like corporate social
responsibility, a convenient myth behind which business can continue as usual.
But the behaviour of the bankers would be that bit
harder for them to sustain – and the politicians might be a bit more eager to
take action to curtail it – if the way they carry on was something other than
an extreme example of the way most of us live now.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/28/instant-gratification-bankers-abuse-mark-carney
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