1 China imports fall 19% in Oct (BBC) China saw
imports drop for the twelfth month in a row in October giving further cause for
concern over the Chinese economy. Imports by the world's biggest trader of
goods fell 18.8% from a year earlier to $130.8bn, a slight improvement on
September's 20.4% decline.
Exports dropped 6.9% to $192.4bn, the fourth
consecutive monthly fall, as foreign demand waned. That left China with its
highest trade surplus on record at $61.6bn. Chinese authorities have been
trying to make the economy more consumer-led and less reliant on exports, but
the continuing fall in imports suggests domestic demand is not as strong as
Beijing would like.
The ruling Communist party set a target of 6% trade
growth at the start of the year, but total trade for the world's second largest
economy has now fallen by 8% in the first ten months. Last week Chinese
President Xi Jinping signalled that policymakers would accept slower economic
growth than the current 7% target. Last month China revealed its economy
slipped to 6.9% growth in the third quarter, the weakest rate since the global
financial crisis.
2 Why Bihar state rejected India PM Modi (Lata Rani
in Gulf News) India’s Bihar state has awarded the performer. And punished
negativity and needless aggression. This is the dominant feeling of most
political analysts and voters from the state.
The stunning victory of Bihar Chief Minister Nitish
Kumar’s Grand Alliance is widely viewed as a vote for his good governance, his
innately soft nature and the “social engineering” he achieved with friend-turned-foe-turned-ally
Lalu Prasad. Joining hands with Lalu Prasad was obviously a risky decision, but
Nitish Kumar went ahead calculating that the caste combinations it would bring
about would deliver the results. It did.
Many also felt that the personal attacks mounted on
the soft-spoken Nitish Kumar by prime minister Narendra Modi and Bharatiya
Janata Party president Amit Shah had backfired. Nitish Kumar used all the jibes
directed at him to remind voters about Bihari pride — just the way Modi used to
do during his tenure as Gujarat chief minister.
Many voters both during the campaign and after the
results came out on Sunday made it clear that they did not approve of the
language and style of the prime minister. Observers cite three major reasons
for the defeat of BJP-led National Democratic Alliance in Bihar.
The first is the observation by the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief Mohan Bhagwat to review country’s reservation
process right in the middle of the poll process. The Grand Secular Alliance
went to the masses, extensively raising the matter in every election rally,
telling them how the BJP’s ideological head was conspiring to scrap reservation
of the socially poor castes.
The second factor was the “negative campaigning” by
Modi and his allies. Instead of focusing on his “development agenda” and his
plan for the state, the Prime Minister went too aggressive against the rival
alliance at every rally. The third factor was Modi’s failure to fulfil the
promises he made to the voters during last year’s Lok Sabha poll campaign. One
of them was bringing back black money stashed in foreign banks and crediting
Rs1.5 million in the bank account of every Indians.
3 Privacy seems a 20th century anomaly
(David Shariatmadari in The Guardian) Medieval villagers couldn’t afford to be
too proud. In Montaillou, home to some 200 souls, people would often sleep
several to a bed. That meant that they were constantly picking up lice. No
matter: in 14th-century France, delousing was a just another opportunity to
socialise.
A world without privacy still seems alien to us. I
say still, because there are growing parallels between the medieval village and
its modern, global counterpart. This week, the government published a draft
bill to enable it to track citizens’ internet use.
This is not quite the “global village” of Marshall
McLuhan’s imagination: “These new media of ours,” he said in 1964, “have made
our world into a single unit. The world is now like a continually sounding
tribal drum, where everybody gets the message all the time.
In 2015, the villagers answer back to communication.
The result is arguably a more censorious environment, one in which your
movements and behaviour are more strictly policed, officially and unofficially.
And it replaces a period of “privacy” that is beginning to look like a bit of
an anomaly.
If privacy had a golden age, it was after moral
strictures had loosened, but before the age of mass chronicling and
surveillance: the time when cities in the west offered the opportunity to start
again, to disappear and re-emerge transformed, stretching perhaps from the
1960s to the end of the century.
Now we live with a different kind of anonymity. If
you know someone’s real name, it doesn’t take much to find out where they live,
who they like to sleep with and what their sister’s name is. On the other hand,
legions of internet users adopt false identities. The freedom this affords them
is sometimes the wonderful freedom of the city, to leave old things behind and
connect with other like-minded souls. But it’s often the freedom to intimidate
or threaten, with no cost to the real self.
The new normal, is where everyone knows your
business. But as we tramp back to the village, it’s worth mourning that golden
age of privacy, and the city that allowed people to reinvent themselves like
the characters in Lou Reed’s Walk on the Wild Side. Life may never be as
mysterious again.
