World News Items

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3 Women share the Nobel Peace Prize.
A Liberian women's rights peace activist, Liberia's president and Yemen's "Mother of the Revolution"

A Liberian peace activist (Leymah Gbowee), Africa's first democratically elected female president (Ellen Johnson Sirleaf) and a woman who stood up to Yemen's authoritarian regime (Tawakkul Karman - the first Arab woman to win the prize) won the Nobel Peace Prize for their work to secure women's rights, which the prize committee described as fundamental to advancing world peace. "We cannot achieve democracy and lasting peace in the world unless women obtain the same opportuinites as men," Thorbjoern Jagland, the committee chairman said.
:)By citing Karman, the committee also appeared to be acknowledging the effects of the Arab Spring, which has challenged authoritarian regimes across the region. "I am very very happy about this prize," said Karman, a 32-year-old mother of three who heads the human rights group Women Journalists without Chains. She has been a leading figure in organizing protests against President Ali Abdullah Saleh that began in late January as part of a wave of anti-authoritarian revolts that have convulsed the Arab world. "I give the prize to the youth of revolution in Yemen and the Yemeni people," Karman told The Associated Press.
:)Sirleaf, age 72, became Africa's first democratically elected female president in 2005. She has a master's degree in public administration from Harvard University and has held top regional jobs at the World Bank, the United Nations and within the Liberian government. Sirleaf said Friday the award was recognition of the West African state's "many years of struggle for justice, peace, and promotion of development" since a brutal civil war, Reuters reported. Sirleaf was seen as a reformer and peacemaker in Liberia when she took office. She is running for re-election Tuesday and opponents in the presidential campaign have accused her of buying votes and using government funds to campaign. Her camp denies the charges. The committee cited Sirleaf's efforts to secure peace in her country, promote economic and social development and strengthen the position of women.
:)Gbowee organized a group of Christian and Muslim women to challenge Liberia's warlords. In 2009 she won a Profile in Courage Award, an honor named for a 1957 Pulitzer Prize-winning book written by John F. Kennedy, for her work in emboldening women in Liberia. Gbowee was honored for mobilizing women "across ethnic and religious dividing lines to bring an end to the long war in Liberia, and to ensure women's participation in elections." Gbowee works in Ghana's capital as the director of Women Peace and Security Network Africa. The group's website says she also won a 2007 Blue Ribbon Award from Harvard University and was the central character of an award-winning documentary called Pray the Devil Back to Hell.
www.msnhiddenemoticons.com/Library/extra_large/large_mix/default/clap.gif [/img]Bravo to three remarkable women and to the Nobel Peace Prize committee for recognizing their efforts in the world. Three women who can serve as very definite role models for women the world over.

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NOT AGAIN!!
China coal mine gas blast kills 29 workers.

A gas explosion at a coal mine in central China has killed 29 workers, Chinese authorities said. Six other miners survived Saturday evening's blast at a state-owned coal mine in Hengyang city in Hunan province, China's State Administration of Work Safety said in a statement on its website. Five of the workers were rescued, while one climbed out of an air shaft, the statement said. The work safety administration said rescue work was complete as no other miners were working at the time of the explosion. It did not mention a cause for the blast. Such explosions are usually caused by the ignition of methane and other gases that accumulate in the shaft because of poor ventilation.
China's coal mines are the most dangerous in the world. Demand for coal induces many producers to sidestep safety regulations, although conditions have improved and a number of small, illegal mines have been shut. Annual fatalities are now about one-third of the high of nearly 7,000 in 2002. The one in Hunan — the Xialiuchong Coal Mine — is a legally operating mine with more than 160 miners that has been around for 40 years, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

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Rise of a superpower. What does China want?

In general terms, most China watchers in the West agree. What China wants is pretty straightforward and unexceptionable: to be prosperous, secure, and respected.
BUT - it had been billed as a friendly exhibition game in basketball-crazy Beijing, between the Georgetown University Hoyas from Washington, D.C., and the Chinese Army's Bayi Rockets. But after some blatantly biased Chinese refereeing and unashamedly aggressive play by Bayi, it ended in a bench-clearing brawl, with Chinese fans in the Olympic stadium throwing chairs and bottles of water at the Americans. Some foreigners in the crowd that hot night in August were tempted to see the melee as nothing less than a metaphor for China's role in the world today: contempt for the rules and fair play, crowned by a resort to brute strength in pursuit of narrow self-interest.
You certainly don't have to look far for examples of China doing things its own blunt way no matter how much Western sensibilities are offended. Just in recent months, Chinese state firms were caught negotiating arms deals with Col. Muammar Qaddafi's besieged regime in defiance of a UN embargo, Beijing leaned heavily on South Africa not to give the Dalai Lama the visa he needed to attend Desmond Tutu's 80th birthday party, and Chinese diplomats vetoed a UN Security Council resolution condemning the deaths of nearly 3,000 civilians at the hands of Syrian troops. And that's not to mention the Chinese government's habit at home of locking up lawyers, human rights activists, artists, even Nobel Peace Prize laureates for speaking their minds in ways that would be quite normal in most of the world.
Ordinary Chinese – from unschooled peasant farmers tending rural rice paddies to get-ahead young computer engineers in Beijing – have been brought up to see their country as benign, and genuinely don't understand how foreigners can see China as a threat. China is the most populous country and the second-biggest economy in the world, they know, but they point out that the average person here makes only 1/10th of what the average American makes. And most of the country is decidedly third-world.
China is modernizing its military but still finds it a strain to keep a destroyer, a frigate, and a supply ship on international antipirate duty in the Gulf of Aden. Compared with the ability of the United States to fight two major wars and keep six full-scale fleets afloat at the same time, China's military power – even with the world's largest standing army – is puny.
Rarely in its history has China looked very hard or long at the rest of the world. "We'd like to be an equal partner on the world stage, and we want the Chinese people to enjoy prosperity," says Wu Jianmin, a former ambassador to Paris and now an adviser to the Foreign Ministry. "For that, international cooperation is indispensable; China is not so arrogant as to say that it's our turn now to run the world our way." Only with its newfound wealth has Beijing found itself with a major role on the world stage. "It's a very big challenge to restructure our relations with the world while retaining its trust," worries Zhu Feng, a professor at the School of International Studies at Peking University.
"There have been misunderstandings about China's foreign policy," said Wang Yajun, the Communist Party's top foreign-policy wonk. "There have indeed been suspicions. China does not want to, nor will China, challenge the international order or challenge other countries," insisted Mr. Wang, pointing to a white paper declaration that China has "broken away from the traditional pattern where a rising power was bound to seek hegemony." Not everyone believes this, even in China. "Humanity is making progress," argues Wang Xiaodong, a prominent nationalist ideologue whose views are proving increasingly influential among the Chinese public, "but not so much that China will be unique in human history. The idea that China will develop its power but not use it is diplomatic verbiage."
China's Southeast Asian neighbors might well agree. Until earlier this year Beijing had been unusually assertive in pushing its competing territorial claims in the South China Sea, worrying smaller nations. But the way it has eased off in recent months in the face of complaints suggests it cannot do just as it likes. "China tests the water constantly, and when they don't get what they want they tend to back down," says Bonnie Glaser, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "As they develop their military capacities, they have to be very careful not to use them in ways that scare the neighbors."
"They don't have a clear and well-defined road map of how to achieve their goals long term other than to pursue development as they have done," says Michael Swaine, a China watcher at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. Nor, frankly, do foreign affairs seem to figure very high on Chinese leaders' agendas. "International questions are an afterthought," says Francois Godement, founder of the Asia Centre, a Paris-based think tank. Instead, for a Communist Party whose overriding priority is to stay in power, domestic problems threatening social stability at home are infinitely more important.
China's financial muscle has been key to its growing influence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where Beijing signed a $6 billion minerals-for-infrastructure deal in 2009. Congo's traditional Western partners don't have the ready cash for the mammoth task of rebuilding the war-ravaged country, says Congo's communications minister, Lambert Mende, so "China is very important." In return for 10 million tons of copper and 600,000 tons of cobalt, China will build roads, schools, hydroelectric dams, and hospitals. Half the deal is a barter, which means that it adds less to the country's foreign debt burden.
China has fewer opportunities to exert international political influence commensurate with its economic clout. That's partly because few governments around the world, and even fewer electorates, regard China's repressive, authoritarian one-party system as a model to be admired or imitated, regardless of its economic achievements. "China is a power in terms of its resources, but it's not a power in terms of its appeal," adds David Shambaugh, director of the China Policy program at George Washington University. Deficient in soft power, "it's not a model, not a magnet others want to follow." Their hands-off approach also steers the country clear of alliances that might enmesh Beijing in the costly defense of other people's interests. Even those Pakistani officials who would like to play Beijing off against Washington recall that not once has Beijing stepped in to help Pakistan in any of its wars with India, all of which Pakistan lost. "China wants to make the deals but not to shoulder responsibilities," says Zhu, the Peking University international relations scholar. "We are far from ready, psychologically, to make ourselves a dependable power." "China's diplomacy is cost-benefit-oriented, not dealing in terms of global public goods," argues Professor Shambaugh. "It's a very self-interested country, looking after themselves."
Chinese overseas investment is growing by leaps and bounds, doubling annually, and high-profile deals such as Lenovo's purchase of IBM's personal computer division grab headlines. But China's total foreign direct investment remains low – about the same as Denmark's (1% of the global total compared with the 22% US share). And 60% of overseas deals are for resources, such as stakes in oil-shale fields in Canada, coal mines in Australia, gas fields in Argentina, and copper mines in Zambia. Very few Chinese firms have the skills and experience needed to become competitive multinationals, says Thilo Hanemann of the Rhodium Group in New York and author of a recent study of Chinese foreign investment. "What corporate China is doing at the moment is catching up," he explains. "Chinese companies are disadvantaged in technology, staff, human resources, brands, and intangible value." They also have to learn new ways of doing business, very different from their habits in China, where the key to success is often a close relationship with the government officials who can offer easy credit and light regulation — for a consideration.
China is a "shallow power" for the time being, argues Shambaugh. "China is strong in the economic realm but very weak in the security realm, and without much soft power" such as cultural influence, or the ability to persuade other countries to imitate it. "As long as the Western democracies remain reasonably strong and prosperous," adds Mr. Swaine at the Carnegie En­dowment, "China will not drive the world economy sufficiently to make other countries align themselves with it. In any foreseeable time frame I do not see China becoming the sort of global superpower that the US became after the war." And anyway, he points out, such questions will be moot for many decades. "The generation of Chinese leaders that will decide whether they want to be that kind of superpower," Swaine believes, "has not been born yet."

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Rhinoceros horns seized in Hong Kong port from Cape Town shipment.

Lam Tak-fai, acting head of Ports and Maritime Command, who
seized on Tuesday a total of 33 rhino horns, 758 ivory chopsticks and 127 ivory bracelets, worth about $2.23 million, inside a container shipped from Cape Town, South Africa, according a customs press release.

Ivory chopsticks, ivory bracelets and a rhinoceros horn are displayed wrapped in a "multiple layers concealment method" in Hong Kong's Customs and Excise Department Offices on November 15.

Customs officers stand guard near smuggled ivory bracelets at the Hong Kong Customs and Excise Department in Hong Kong.

Customs agents X-rayed the container because its listed cargo — scrap plastic — raised a flag, said Acting Head of Ports and Maritime Command Lam Tak-fai. They found the rhino horns and ivory after peeling away layers of tinfoil, paper and plastic wrapped around the items. Wai-king Yik, a spokeswoman for the customs and excise department, said it was a record seizure of endangered species products for Hong Kong, topping the one in August of $1.6 million worth of African ivory.
Several rhino subspecies are believed to have recently become extinct. Rhino horns are prized by Vietnamese and Chinese who believe they can cure an array of ailments, and the horns can fetch up to $50,000 per pound. Some 190 pounds worth of rhino horns were by the Hong Kong officials, who said they would have required the deaths of around 17 rhinos.
No one has been arrested, but at least the crooks have not profited for once.