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| Chinese-American academics on edge |
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Posted by: superadmin - 06-09-2021, 11:42 AM - Forum: Politics
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No letup in pressures on campuses as security program leads to demonization
Two-and-a-half years after the US launched a program targeting researchers with ties to China, Chinese-American academics are still living in fear, according to professors.
"From the vantage point of those who have been targeted, there's been tremendous damage already, and I think there's tremendous fear among Asian-American communities and Chinese-American communities in particular," Gordon Chang, professor of history and vice-provost at Stanford University, told a recent webinar.
He said many of his colleagues have been reticent to speak out against the anti-China and anti-Chinese rhetoric whipped up since the China Initiative was established by the Justice Department amid so-called security concerns during the US' trade conflict with China.
"From the standpoint of many of my colleagues, this is a very, very sensitive line to walk even if they want to say the demonization of China is wrong for all sorts of reasons," he told the webinar, which was hosted by the 1990 Institute, a US-based research organization.
"They know they immediately… will be suspected. Some of them have already been demonized in social media and other platforms for their ancestry and for even the mild comments they made about the danger of demonizing China."
Chang cited the suicide of a former colleague, Shoucheng Zhang. Zhang, originally from China, was a physics professor at Stanford before he killed himself at age 55 in December 2018.
Around that time, the Hoover Institution at Stanford came out with a report called "China's Influence and American Interests". The report targeted many Chinese Americans as agents of China's efforts to affect US ways of life, politics and economics, said Chang, who called the report "scurrilous".
In the early draft of that report, Zhang was mentioned as one of those agents, and within days of the release of the report, he jumped from his condominium in San Francisco, said Chang.
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| Can we have democracy without political parties? |
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Posted by: superadmin - 06-09-2021, 10:44 AM - Forum: Politics
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Around the world, voters appear to be turning away from traditional political organisations, but can democracy survive without them?
In 1796, President George Washington lambasted political parties for allowing "cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men" to "subvert the power of the people".
His indictment seems brutally timely today, just a few months after 147 Republican US congress members publicly challenged results of the most recent US presidential election. But even long before then, many Americans shared Washington's concern.
The popularity of parties is at a nadir, with both the Democratic and Republican parties in the US widely condemned as not only unrepresentative but also hijacked by elites. Indeed, a steadily increasing share of US voters – 38% in 2018 – identify as unaffiliated with either party. That proportion is now larger than the share of voters identifying with either Republicans or Democrats.
It seems to be an international phenomenon. In Europe, for example, traditionally powerful centre-left parties are being accused of ignoring their voters, potentially contributing to a backlash that helped push the United Kingdom into Brexit.
The mounting animosity toward the parties has inspired debate among political scientists. Defenders of the traditional party system contend that democracy depends on strong, organised and trustworthy political factions. "People in politics often try to go around parties, to go directly to the people. But without the parties, we'd have chaos," says Harvard University political scientist Nancy Rosenblum, who explores the challenges facing political parties today.
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| Senate passes bill to boost US tech industry, counter rivals |
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Posted by: superadmin - 06-09-2021, 10:14 AM - Forum: Politics
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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate overwhelmingly approved a bill Tuesday that aims to boost U.S. semiconductor production and the development of artificial intelligence and other technology in the face of growing international competition, most notably from China.
The 68-32 vote for the bill demonstrates how confronting China economically is an issue that unites both parties in Congress. That’s a rarity in an era of division as pressure grows on Democrats to change Senate rules to push past Republican opposition and gridlock.
The centerpiece of the bill is a $50 billion emergency allotment to the Commerce Department to stand up semiconductor development and manufacturing through research and incentive programs previously authorized by Congress. The bill’s overall cost would increase spending by about $250 billion with most of the spending occurring in the first five years.
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| science-based party moves closer to reality with application to RoS today |
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Posted by: superadmin - 06-09-2021, 08:40 AM - Forum: Politics
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Started as a joke on PAS, science-based party moves closer to reality with application to RoS today
KUALA LUMPUR, June 9 ― Parti Aspirasi Sains Malaysia was initially a creation on Twitter merely meant to mock Islamist party PAS, but the party may end up a reality as it seeks to register with the Registrar of Societies (RoS) today.
With its creator and founding executive committee now taking a more serious tone, the party which touts itself as prioritising evidence-based policies backed by science and data, said it will focus on an anti-poverty nation, a human-centered economy and sustainable development.
“The party will be the country’s first science political party where meritocracy is enshrined in its constitution, in tandem with a needs-based and evidence-based approach to policy making.
“Its mission is to improve equality of opportunities for all Malaysians and push the nation towards the pursuit of knowledge, for the benefit of humanity through continued application of science and reason regardless of ethnicity, gender or religion,” it said in a statement.
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| A 'Bubble Barrier' is trapping plastic waste before it can get into the sea |
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Posted by: superadmin - 06-08-2021, 09:42 PM - Forum: Environment Protection News
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(CNN)What do old televisions, street signs, motorbike helmets, windsurf boards, and Christmas trees have in common? They were all caught floating down Amsterdam's Westerdok canal -- by a curtain of bubbles.
"The Bubble Barrier" was developed as a simple way to stop plastic pollution flowing from waterways into the ocean. An air compressor sends air through a perforated tube running diagonally across the bottom of the canal, creating a stream of bubbles that traps waste and guides it to a catchment system.
It traps 86% of the trash that would otherwise flow to the River IJssel and further on to the North Sea, according to Philip Ehrhorn, co-founder and chief technology officer of The Great Bubble Barrier, the Dutch social enterprise behind the system.
Commissioned by the municipality of Amsterdam and the region's water authority, the Bubble Barrier was installed in October 2019 in under five hours.
Ehrhorn says the idea is to catch plastic without having a physical barrier like a net or boom blocking the river, which could disrupt aquatic life or interfere with shipping.
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| Dr Mahathir to meet with Agong on Thursday |
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Posted by: superadmin - 06-08-2021, 07:45 PM - Forum: Politics
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Dr Mahathir to meet with Agong on Thursday, other party leaders yet to receive invitations, says Pejuang information chief
KUALA LUMPUR, June 8 — Rumour has it that all political party leaders will be called separately for an audience with the Yang di-Pertuan Agong Al-Sultan Abdullah Ri’ayatuddin Al-Mustafa Billah Shah concerning the country’s current situation.
Parti Pejuang Tanah Air (Pejuang) Information chief Ulya Aqamah Husamudin, for one, said that the party chairman, Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, will be called for an audience with the King on Thursday.
“The official letter from the palace was received last week. However, the time for the audience has yet to be ascertained,” he told Bernama when contacted here today.
Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia (Bersatu) Information chief Datuk Wan Saiful Wan Jan and MCA secretary-general Datuk Chong Sin Woon, when asked the same question, said they had no information on the matter, while Gerakan president Datuk Dr Dominic Lau Hoe Chai and MIC president Tan Sri S. A. Vigneswaran, said they had not received any invitation from Istana Negara regarding an audience with Al-Sultan Abdullah.
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| Internet outage takes down Amazon, Reddit, Financial Times, Guardian, New York Times |
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Posted by: superadmin - 06-08-2021, 07:36 PM - Forum: Business, Economy and Investment
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Internet outage takes down Amazon, Reddit, Financial Times, Guardian, New York Times and more websites
JUNE 8 — Multiple outages hit social media, government and news websites across the globe this morning, with some reports pointing to a glitch at US-based cloud computing services provider Fastly.
Reuters could not immediately confirm the issue affecting the sites.
Fastly said it was investigating “the potential impact to performance with our CDN services,” according to its website.
Most of Fastly’s coverage areas were facing “Degraded Performance”, the website showed.
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| MCO is the result of failure, not success, says ex-deputy minister |
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Posted by: superadmin - 06-08-2021, 03:38 PM - Forum: Covid-19 Pandemic
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PETALING JAYA: The current movement control order (MCO) cannot be deemed a success because its mere existence is a product of the government’s failures, a former deputy health minister has said.
Dr Lee Boon Chye said the need for repeated nationwide MCOs during the Covid-19 pandemic reveals the shortcomings of public health measures, namely poor contact tracing, a lack of mass testing and inefficient isolation of cases.
“An MCO is the last resort when more targeted public health measures fail. It is the result of failure and not success,” he told FMT today.
He was responding to comments from Bersatu information chief Wan Saiful Wan Jan, who said yesterday that the recent decline in daily Covid-19 case numbers and the infectivity rate falling below 1.0 showed the effectiveness of the lockdown.
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