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Banyan: The year of killing with impunity

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com



AMONG those watching nervously as Tinseltown celebrates its Academy Awards on March 2nd will be Indonesia’s leaders. They will be hoping that, when it comes to the best documentary category, the Oscar does not go to “The Act of Killing”, a brilliant if deeply disturbing film about the slaughter in 1965-66 that accompanied the birth of the 32-year Suharto dictatorship. Of course, 16 years after the fall of Suharto, no one is suggesting the present government was complicit in the atrocities. But they cast Indonesia in a bad light at a time when it hopes to be cheered as a model emerging democracy. A spokesman for President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono accused the film of “simplifying a dark, complicated period of history” and of being one-sided. More pertinently, perhaps, it highlights Indonesia’s own failure even now fully to confront events still shrouded in mystery, ignorance and fear.


The film, directed by an American, Joshua Oppenheimer, follows the now elderly members of 1960s death squads as they recall, re-enact and boast about the killing. Nobody knows how many died. Half a million is a common estimate. Some say many more. Of Asia’s modern killing fields, only Bangladesh and Cambodia compare in the scale of the carnage. In both those places flawed judicial processes at least raise questions about the horrors. Even in China the show-trial of the Gang of Four served to hold a few responsible for the many crimes committed in the Cultural Revolution. In Indonesia no one has been held to account.


The slaughter was a purge of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), accused of attempting a coup, providing the pretext for Suharto’s power-grab. At the time it was the third-largest communist party in the world. It and its ideology were eradicated. The West, watching Asian “dominoes” fall to communism, was largely silent as hundreds of thousands were killed or detained, and welcomed Suharto as an ally. Under Suharto the killings were taboo within Indonesia. History lessons in school skated over them; foreign books on them were banned; the families of victims and political detainees became, says Katherine McGregor of Melbourne University, Indonesia’s “untouchables”. People lived in what Mr Oppenheimer calls a “precarious coexistence” with their families’ murderers.


Any thirst for revenge was tempered by fear and a culture of silence. Take one of Mr Oppenheimer’s Indonesian collaborators (all of whom have remained anonymous for fear of reprisals). He was himself unaware until getting involved with the film of how the terror had affected his own family. The boyfriend of a mysteriously unmarried aunt had disappeared for ever in 1965. A great-uncle had been a PKI member as a student. In 1965 he burned his student card and anything that linked him to this subversive past, including half his books. The man’s own father, a journalist, was tormented by guilt that he did not do enough to protect his leftist friends and in the 1970s sought redemption, helping launch a newspaper that exposed later mass killings.


Amid the turmoil surrounding Suharto’s downfall in 1998, many assumed that the veil of secrecy over the massacres would be lifted. At the time the late Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Indonesia's greatest 20th-century novelist and a leftist prison-camp veteran, enjoyed a rare moment of optimism. Now that Suharto had gone, there was no reason the truth had to lie buried with the many dead. But Pramoedya would have been disappointed.


He himself headed a foundation that investigated the killings, exhuming some mass graves, for example. In 2000, a few months into his brief, chaotic presidency, Abdurrahman Wahid (who died in 2009) offered an apology to the victims of the violence, recognising the involvement of members of the huge Muslim social organisation he headed.


It was 12 years, however, before another apology came and it was a local one—from the mayor of the town of Palu on the island of Sulawesi, who had led the local wing of Pemuda Pancasila (PP), a loutish right-wing youth organisation that played a big role in 1965. Also in 2012 Indonesia’s human-rights commission published its own investigation into 1965. It concluded that the campaign, led by the army, amounted to a gross violation of human rights. It urged the government to prosecute perpetrators and compensate survivors, and the president to issue a formal apology. The report was largely ignored. The government rejected it, and hints that Mr Yudhoyono would make an apology for past abuses by the state came to nothing after the very suggestion prompted outraged protests from groups such as PP.


It was around that time that “The Act of Killing” began to be shown at festivals and, online or in small screenings, in Indonesia itself. In October 2012 Tempo, a current-affairs magazine, produced a special issue devoted to a nationwide investigation of the killings. It sold out. A number of books since have tackled the period, including “Pulang” (“Homecoming”), a prize-winning novel by Leila Chudori, a Tempo journalist. But none of this amounts to a national coming-to-terms with the past.


Still buried


That failure to confront the past is not just because it is too terrible. It is also because, for all the transformation of Indonesian politics, some aspects of 1965 still seem too close for comfort. President Yudhoyono, a former general, is the son-in-law of Sarwo Edhie Wibowo who, as head of the army’s special forces, was deeply implicated in the slaughter. The president’s party wants him to be awarded posthumous “national hero” status. The army has neither faced up to its past crimes nor lost influence; PP and other groups still engage in thuggish vigilantism.


Moreover, as “The Act of Killing” shows, the perpetrators of the massacres, though in some cases privately racked by guilt, still present themselves as heroes; and some of the families of the victims still live in fear. As one former killer in the film puts it: “War crimes are defined by the winners. And I am a winner.”





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Japan’s right wing: Mission accomplished?

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com


Dulce et decorum est


ONE young filmgoer in Tokyo was clear about why he was queuing up for a third viewing of “Eien no Zero”, or “The Eternal Zero”. The message for him in the film, which is about a group of kamikaze pilots attacking American ships at the end of the second world war, was that young men in those times were manly and purposeful in contrast to today’s “herbivorous” youth. The tokkotai, or “special attack force”, as the pilots are known, have long been controversial but never has their story been so popular at home. “The Eternal Zero” (named after the type of plane flown by the kamikaze) is likely to become one of the most watched Japanese films ever.


Another viewer, Shinzo Abe, the prime minister, declared himself “moved” by the film. Naoki Hyakuta, the author of the best-selling novel on which it is based, is close to Mr Abe. Last year Mr Abe chose Mr Hyakuta as a governor of NHK, the public broadcaster. Mr Hyakuta’s beliefs are right-wing even for a conservative and, while campaigning for another right-winger, Toshio Tamogami, in the race for the governorship of Tokyo this month, he declared that the massacre of Chinese civilians by Japanese soldiers in Nanjing in 1937 “never happened”.


As “The Eternal Zero” has packed cinemas, Minamikyushu, a city in southern Japan, has also been doing its bit to rile the neighbours. It has submitted documents from kamikaze pilots to UNESCO for inclusion in its “Memory of the World” register of important papers and manuscripts, which includes Magna Carta and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Among the artefacts are pilots’ farewell letters, diaries and poems from the city’s Chiran peace museum, a memorial at a former airbase from which hundreds of kamikaze sorties departed.


Both the film and the collection of documents misrepresent the pilots. The right wing seeks to present them as willing fighters who died heroically for their country. In “The Eternal Zero”, the message is at first subtle, as the protagonist, an elite pilot, tries to subvert the military by trying to survive. Yet he becomes a true hero only when he accepts his mission and dies in a blaze of supposed glory. The museum and its collection of documents also broadly support this interpretation. But Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, a historian, says most recruits were in fact forced to volunteer. She wonders whether the pilots’ letters in Minamikyushu’s submission were censored by their superiors at the time of writing, or written under duress.


South Korea has objected to the move and China has reacted with predictable fury. The authorities in Nanjing say they will again send documents which prove the massacre of 1937 to the same UNESCO register. And there is good reason for China to pay attention to Mr Hyakuta’s view of history: it is succeeding beyond the box office. With Mr Hyakuta’s backing, Mr Tamogami, who has also denied Japan’s historic aggression, did surprisingly well in the Tokyo election, winning nearly a third as many votes as the winner. Asahi Shimbun, a newspaper, reported that about one in four 20-somethings, especially young men, voted for him.





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South Korean politics: Spying trouble

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com


AS PARK GEUN-HYE marked her first year in office on February 25th, her approval rating, at around 56%, was higher than when she came to power: a first for a South Korean president. Polls show that the public is chiefly impressed with her policy towards North Korea. She ended her first year on a high with reunions of families separated for decades. She was also boosted by the reopening last September of the Kaesong industrial complex, where South Korean companies employ North Koreans. For Ms Park and her supporters this is all vindication of her signature approach towards the North: “trustpolitik”, a fuzzy term that doles out carrots and wields sticks according to behaviour.


Ms Park has enjoyed other foreign-policy kudos. She held successful summits in America in May and China in June. And talking tough at Japan, as its prime minister, Shinzo Abe, tacks to the right on history, has earned her points, too.


But her trust-building has worked less well at home, where she has allowed political scandal to fester. Her biggest setback took place before South Koreans even went to the polls in December 2012: in the year before the election, agents of the National Intelligence Service (NIS) were alleged to have posted 1.2m tweets and thousands of political messages on blogs, smearing left-wing candidates as North Korean sympathisers in order to manipulate the presidential election.


Three days before the election, police said they had found no evidence of wrongdoing. But a few months later, under pressure from the opposition, they reversed their findings. It was not until last November that the scale of the meddling became clear. It breached the political neutrality of the NIS and a law prohibiting officials from using their influence to sway voters.


Though Ms Park won by only three percentage points, few think she benefited from the illegal electioneering; even fewer believe she was involved (she has denied receiving any such help). But the saga has prompted awkward questions about South Korea’s powerful government agencies. A former police chief, charged with soft-pedalling the inquiry, was acquitted on February 6th. An activist group of lawyers accuses the government of pressuring the state prosecutor. The NIS has argued that its actions were “routine” psychological operations against North Korea. But the arrest of a leftist MP on conspiracy charges has led some to suspect the renewed vigour in catching “pro-North leftists” is to mask the election-meddling.


The stand-off has blocked the passage of bills, including those for creating jobs and expanding welfare programmes, both campaign pledges. In November Ms Park made a rare direct appeal to parliament to pass a string of bills aimed at revitalising the economy. That imperative has replaced another election promise: “economic democratisation”, to encourage start-ups by reining in the power of the country’s powerful corporations, or chaebol. She has done little of this, passing only mild corporate-governance measures. Ms Park has also scaled back promises to halve tuition fees and boost pensions, riling young and old alike. If she is to maintain her popularity, she will need to do more at home.





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India’s election and the economy: A useful campaign

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com



IS THE ghost of Margaret Thatcher lurking in Indian politics? Rahul Gandhi, a leader of Congress party, which is best known for promoting welfare, has taken to saying that “poverty cannot be fought without growth” and praising markets for creating wealth. Last week Arvind Kejriwal, head of AAP, a left-leaning party of urban, anti-corruption types, told business leaders he now likes capitalism, just not cronyism. He says an end to the “inspector raj and licence raj” would cut graft and free business to create jobs.


That was perhaps mostly posturing. More outspoken is the front-runner to be prime minister, Narendra Modi of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In Delhi on February 27th he and Arun Jaitley, a potential finance minister, hosted liberal-leaning economists, business leaders, bankers and investors for a daylong seminar on raising growth. That marked the start of the BJP spelling out its economic policies. Mr Modi (some of whose supporters are pictured above) has long talked up his pro-business record as Gujarat’s chief minister.


Such rhetoric suggests a welcome shift in Indian politics—notable given a general election due by May. For years Congress dominated nationally by ignoring how growth is sustained, but promising handouts, especially to villagers, through make-work schemes, subsidies on food, fuel and fertiliser and cash transfers. That approach now brings shrinking electoral returns, ironically, as rural voters get less poor. After a decade in power, Congress has a rotten reputation at economic management: debts, high inflation and joblessness, combined with dire performances by manufacturers, leave many gloomy.


Voters crave a change. Polls (even if you set aside chronically corrupt Indian ones) point to a BJP victory, perhaps a big one. Few now seem bothered by Mr Modi’s controversial past, presiding over communal riots in Gujarat, in 2002, when over 1,000 people died. A national survey released on February 26th by the Pew Research Center, an American body, suggests voters favour a government run by the BJP over Congress by a startling 63% to 19%. For the first time, the BJP could win more votes (and more seats) than Congress, a powerful national mandate.


Indians are fed up: 70% say they are dissatisfied, says Pew. Alarmingly for Congress, rural voters are as surly as town dwellers, despite successive gushing monsoons and bumper government prices for their rice and wheat. Respondents everywhere (by a ratio of at least two to one) say the BJP would do better than Congress at cutting inflation and corruption, helping the poor and creating jobs.


“I’ve rarely before seen this profound yearning for change”, says Ravi Shankar Prasad, the BJP’s deputy leader in the upper house of parliament, arguing that poor leadership is behind India’s current economic “disaster”, as growth has weakened from 8.5% a decade ago to less than 5%. At rallies Mr Modi sneers that a feeble “economist prime minister”, Manmohan Singh, is to blame. By implication: a strong, decisive leader—himself—would turn everything for the better.



Congress’s Harvard-educated finance minister, Palaniappan Chidambaram, who presented his interim budget last week, says derisively that what Mr Modi knows about economics “can be written on the back of a postage stamp”. Such sniping sets a tone for what may be a bitter campaign. But the criticism may not matter. Mr Modi lacks formal economic education, but points instead to Gujarat’s rapid economic growth in his dozen years of rule (see chart), implying he could pull off something similar for all of India.


Could he? So far, he is short on detail. BJP leaders, and a growing army of gushing commentators and economists, say there would be an immediate boost in confidence if Mr Modi wins. Better administration alone, they say, would see investors enthused and animal spirits racing. A powerful prime minister’s office would have the authority to get bureaucrats to take decisions quickly. That could end a big reason for today’s painful delays: civil servants who dread later corruption investigations, blocking investors’ projects. In theory, such fears will disappear under new political masters.


Far more useful would be details of how Mr Modi would slash regulation, taking opaque, discretionary powers from civil servants and politicians. For example: to boost job creation, a BJP government could return to earlier plans to ease industrial-dispute rules. These require any firm with 100 or more workers to get government permission to close. No wonder investors prefer to build factories anywhere but India. So far Mr Modi has been vague on the topic, though he talks of devolving labour laws to individual states which in theory could see them eased.


Liberal-minded BJP supporters now predict other reforms. In office, the party is likely to take up pro-business policies it has resisted while in opposition. Among the first is a plan to replace existing state levies on goods and services with a standard, national tax, to create a single Indian market for the first time. That alone could give a big boost to the economy. The BJP’s hostility to foreigners investing in Indian shops is likelier to persist but it should grow readier to see outsiders involved in insurance and other financial services.


Sameer Kochhar, author of “Modinomics”, one of many new books claiming insight into Mr Modi’s economic plans, foresees a big increase in spending on infrastructure, just as Gujarat has seen better roads, power and ports. The desire is certainly there. The BJP leader himself talks grandly, but with few convincing details, of building 100 “smart” cities, a national network of Japanese-style bullet trains, and irrigation works to link up large rivers. It is unclear, however, how he would pay for this.


Mr Modi also says his government would be better at doing less. During the BJP’s last spell in office, from 1999 to 2004, it set up a privatisation ministry and oversaw the boom in private investment in telecoms. Observers talk next of selling off the ailing state carrier, Air India, or reducing government holdings in various banks.


So far, sadly, the BJP offers far too few details to judge how comprehensive a reform programme it would follow. Still, it is encouraging that politicians of various parties talk of creating conditions for restoring high economic growth, not just spending the proceeds of it. “India has recognised that we have to be a market-based economy”, argues Gurcharan Das, a writer and former local head of Procter and Gamble, calling Mr Modi “the best chance we have of getting back to high growth”. In India, it was long said, the left has no viable economics, but the right has no viable route to power. Mr Modi may be changing that, too.





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Pakistan and the Taliban: To fight or not to fight

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com



PAKISTAN’S prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, has long been caught between hawks demanding a decisive military confrontation with the Pakistani Taliban and doves adamant the militants can be talked into abandoning their bloody campaign against the government. Four weeks after Mr Sharif announced that he wanted to give peace talks another chance, he appears to have settled for a little of each.


The country's army, and many civilian critics, say that, with almost 500 people killed since September, Pakistan's domestic terrorism is out of hand, and that he must take a hard line. The prime minister's hopes of reviving the economy with the help of foreign investment will also be jeopardised by continued violence, they warn. And yet Mr Sharif and many members of his party fear confrontation will trigger horrific retaliation in their political heartland of Punjab, the rich, populous province so far relatively unscathed by militant attacks. They may be right.


Since February 20th the Pakistani Army has been bombing from the air what it claims are militant “hideouts” in the tribal areas of the country's restive north-west. On February 25th alone they claimed to have killed 30 terrorists in North and South Waziristan. At the same time the government clings to the forlorn hope that stalled negotiations with Taliban intermediaries could yet spark into life. On Monday the interior minister even suggested the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), as the country's largest terrorist group calls itself, might like to participate in a cricket match to foster peace. (A TTP spokesman demurred, saying they did not approve of the game.)


Making matters trickier, Mr Sharif's main political threat in Punjab, Imran Khan, a popular former cricketer, is an unbending opponent of military action, claiming peace can be found simply by Pakistan distancing itself from the “US war” in the region.


Last month Mr Sharif appointed four go-betweens to act as negotiators with three extremist clerics invited to represent the TTP. The two sides held some meetings but stumbled, as critics had predicted, from the very beginning. The TTP, a movement committed to turning Pakistan into a strict Islamic state, balked at government demands that they negotiate within the framework of a constitution they regard as insufficiently divine. And on February 17th a faction of the TTP announced in a grisly video that it had executed 23 kidnapped Frontier Corps soldiers. Mr Sharif was unable to restrain the military in the face of such savagery (and the killing soon after of a senior officer in Peshawar), giving the generals permission to unleash air strikes. He may be tempted to continue indefinitely with the compromise, while shying away from the ground operation that would be required to obliterate the TTP's safe havens. But the mood is shifting.


Hasan Askari Rizvi, an analyst, expects a full ground invasion of North Waziristan by April. He says Pakistani military leaders fear the TTP will be greatly strengthened in the wake of the NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan, which they predict will give the group’s Afghan Taliban allies greater control of the east of the country. It is a prophecy even more likely to be realised if there were a complete American withdrawal this year. On February 25th Barack Obama warned his Afghan counterpart, Hamid Karzai, that is exactly what could happen if Mr Karzai still refuses to sign a long-term security agreement. Mr Rizvi says that Pakistan’s civilian government will not be able to stand in the way of an army determined to seize back North Waziristan. “They know better than to be on the wrong side of the army,” he says.





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Will Rogers

Nguồn tin: tieng anh vui

"I'm not a real movie star. I've still got the same wife I started out with twenty-eight years ago."

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George Carlin

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"Well, if crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight? They never mention that part to us, do they?"

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Robertson Davies

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"A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight. "

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Lee Iacocca

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"People want economy and they will pay any price to get it."

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Laura Moncur

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com

"Better to look weak and be strong than to look strong and be weak."

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Ann Richards

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"The here and now is all we have, and if we play it right it's all we'll need."

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Evan Esar

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"The mint makes it first, it is up to you to make it last."

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Oprah Winfrey

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"Getting my lifelong weight struggle under control has come from a process of treating myself as well as I treat others in every way."

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Wednesday 26 February 2014

Groucho Marx

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"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it."

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Ed Meese

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"You couldn't even prove the White House staff sane beyond a reasonable doubt."

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George Jackson

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"Patience has its limits. Take it too far, and it's cowardice."

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James Thurber

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"Human Dignity has gleamed only now and then and here and there, in lonely splendor, throughout the ages, a hope of the better men, never an achievement of the majority."

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Jennifer Aniston

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"I guess we'd be living in a boring, perfect world if everybody wished everybody else well."

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Lois McMaster Bujold

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"I take it as a man's duty to restrain himself."

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Plutarch

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"Know how to listen, and you will profit even from those who talk badly."

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Albert Guerard

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"Doubt 'til thou canst doubt no more...doubt is thought and thought is life. Systems which end doubt are devices for drugging thought."

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Tuesday 25 February 2014

Jerkwater town

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com

A jerwater town is a small and insignificant town without many amenities.




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Ali Vincent

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"Big, sweeping life changes really boil down to small, everyday decisions."

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Bob Ross

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"You do your best work if you do a job that makes you happy."

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Aristotle

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"Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work."

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Socrates

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"Thou shouldst eat to live; not live to eat."

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Alexander Pope

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"Some people will never learn anything because they understand everything too soon."

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Samuel Butler

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"The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore."

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Nora Ephron

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"Insane people are always sure that they are fine. It is only the sane people who are willing to admit that they are crazy."

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Monday 24 February 2014

Nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com

This means that someone is very nerfvous or jumpy.




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Grabel's Law

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"2 is not equal to 3, not even for large values of 2."

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Iris Murdoch

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"Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real."

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John Clarke

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"Who is more busy than he who hath least to do?"

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Sidney J. Harris

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"Nothing can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own."

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Olga Ilyin

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"It had only been my repeated experience that when you said to life calmly and firmly... 'I trust you; do what you must,' life had an uncanny way of responding to your need."

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Cicero

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"Freedom is a possession of inestimable value."

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English Proverb

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"Use soft words and hard arguments."

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Antoine de Saint-Exupery

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"What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step. It is always the same step, but you have to take it."

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Sunday 23 February 2014

Oscar Wilde

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"When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers."

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Douglas Adams

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"Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws."

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George Burns

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"This is the sixth book I've written, which isn't bad for a guy who's only read two."

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W. H. Auden

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"No opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible."

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Jay Leno

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"Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime. Teach a man to create an artificial shortage of fish and he will eat steak."

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J. K. Rowling

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"You will never truly know yourself or the strength of your relationships until both have been tested by adversity."

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Jeffrey Rowland

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"We've always been here and we'll always be here. We are a specific arrangement of particles and this instant is infinite. Did we luck out, or didn't we? The odds against this sentence having ever being typed, much less the odds against you reading it were inconceivable. Smile, because the fact that you're able to is almost impossible to comprehend."

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Bonnie Prudden

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"You can't turn back the clock. But you can wind it up again."

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Oscar Wilde

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"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much."

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Saturday 22 February 2014

Walt Disney

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"It's kind of fun to do the impossible."

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From the 1985 movie "Bliss"

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"The entire economy of the Western world is built on things that cause cancer."

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Randall Jarrell

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"I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry."

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John Scalzi

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com

"When you're a teenager and you're in love, it's obvious to everyone but you and the person you're in love with."

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Lawana Blackwell

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"He had learned over the years that poor people did not feel so poor when allowed to give occasionally."

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Andre Gide

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"Obtain from yourself all that makes complaining useless. No longer implore from others what you yourself can obtain."

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W. Somerset Maugham

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"Life wouldn't be worth living if I worried over the future as well as the present."

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Friday 21 February 2014

Rode hard and put away wet

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com

Someone who's been rode hard and put away wet has had a very hard life. When a horse is ridden hard and sweaty, it needs to be walked and cooled down before being stabled.




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Dan Rather

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"An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger."

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Alvin Toffler

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"The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn."

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Ellen Goodman

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"Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for - in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it."

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Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

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"I never guess. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts."

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Real Live Preacher

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"Dignity comes not from control, but from understanding who you are and taking your rightful place in the world."

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Donald H. Rumsfeld

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"If you are not criticized, you may not be doing much."

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Jane Austen

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"In every power, of which taste is the foundation, excellence is pretty fairly divided between the sexes."

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John Howard Payne

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com

"Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam, / Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home."

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Thursday 20 February 2014

North Korea: Humanity at its very worst

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com



THE gruesome sketches need little explanation. They are based on the memories of Kim Gwang-il, a North Korean who spent more than two years in a prison camp before eventually escaping through China and Thailand to South Korea. The pictures show prisoners held in stress positions, skeletal bodies eating snakes and mice, and prisoners pulling a cart laden with rotting bodies. But none of the pictures, he says, was nearly as graphic as the reality of being forced to live in the camp.


Mr Kim was one of over 80 defectors, refugees and abductees who publicly testified before a commission of inquiry (COI) set up by the UN’s Human Rights Council in March 2013 to investigate systematic human-rights violations in North Korea. It interviewed another 240 victims confidentially (many fear reprisals on family members still in North Korea). After a year-long investigation, on February 17th the commission delivered its 400-page report.


The report, written by a three-member UN panel headed by Michael Kirby, an Australian former judge, is extraordinary in its detail and breadth. It includes a catalogue of cruelties meted out by the North Korean regime to its main targets: those who try to flee the country; Christians and those promoting other “subversive” beliefs; and political prisoners, estimated to number between 80,000 and 120,000. The regime is accused of crimes that include execution, enslavement, starvation, rape and forced abortion.


The report is also remarkable for the fierceness of its condemnation. It describes a totalitarian state that is without parallel in the contemporary world. Mr Kirby told journalists it was comparable to Nazi Germany. It urges the UN to refer the situation to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. In a letter sent directly to Kim Jong Un, the North’s dictator, the commission warned that he could be held accountable for crimes against humanity.


North Korea has flatly rejected the UN’s accusations, just as it continues to deny the existence of its network of prison camps. It did not allow the commission to enter the country. Yet the hope is that the report marks a turning-point in the outside world’s approach to North Korea.


The COI says the international community “must accept its responsibility to protect the people” of North Korea. Although sceptics argue that the report amounts to little more than a call for more engagement (including inter-Korean dialogue and humanitarian aid), it may help to push human rights higher up the agenda. The commission says it does not support sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council (in a bid to curb North Korea’s nuclear-weapons development), due to the dire social and economic state of the population. If the six-party talks on denuclearising the Korean peninsula are ever resumed, it would be harder for them to take place without some discussion of the regime’s brutality. The American government will now no longer be able to prioritise one issue over the other, says Victor Cha of Georgetown University.


Equally striking is the indictment directed by the COI at China. Chinese leaders refused to let the commission visit its border provinces with North Korea and have opposed the commission’s inquiry from the start. They too received a critical letter from the commission, suggesting that they are “aiding and abetting crimes against humanity”. Refugees are routinely rounded up inside China and returned to North Korea, often to face imprisonment, torture and even execution.


China has a visceral dislike of human-rights investigations. It fears that condoning the exposure of other countries’ abuses might invite scrutiny of its own. It was therefore quick to dismiss the report as “unreasonable criticism”. Yet the language of the report, as much as the terrible detail within it, is likely to unsettle Chinese leaders, whose support in the form of oil and food shipments is considered by many observers to be vital to the survival of Mr Kim’s government.


Many assume that China would use its right of veto, as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, to block referral to the ICC. Adam Cathcart of the University of Leeds says that the impact of the commission’s report “hangs on China”. Yet China rarely vetoes a resolution alone. It would want to win Russia’s backing if the case reached the security council. And there are a few glimmers of hope: in 2012 China allowed to pass without a vote (rather than vetoing) a UN resolution condemning human-rights violations in North Korea. It is well aware that the price of supporting a regime that has committed crimes against humanity is high, especially for a country that wants to be a global actor. And though China says it has little leverage on North Korea, the report hands it more by raising the threat of the ICC.


Even if China itself does not come out well in the report, Chinese leaders may still feel a sense of Schadenfreude that North Korea is being described in this way. They have been intensely irritated by the behaviour of their ally in recent years, particularly by its testing of nuclear devices, most recently in February 2013. Mr Kim annoyed them further by hastily executing his uncle, Jang Sung Taek, in December. Jang had been an important interlocutor with China. Xinhua, the Chinese government’s news agency, posted a slide show on its website in December 2012 titled “The world’s 11 most brutal prisons”. North Korea’s Hoeryong prison camp featured as number one. Chinese censors have allowed some of the UN report’s findings to be discussed on social media.


But China has two big worries. One is that the Chinese public might step up criticism of their government’s support for the North. There have been signs of this on Chinese microblogs. Hu Xijin, who edits Global Times, a normally pro-party newspaper, wrote to his nearly 4.4m followers on Sina Weibo, a Twitter-like service, that the international community should “put pressure” on North Korea to pay greater respect to human rights. China’s leaders, however, still believe that confronting North Korea on such issues might prompt Mr Kim to become more bellicose. Avoiding war and the collapse of North Korea are China’s priorities.


Its other concern is that it might face more international pressure to halt the repatriation of North Korean refugees. This, it fears, could trigger an exodus that would overwhelm China’s border areas, attract involvement by meddling foreigners and an angry backlash by North Korea that could destabilise the peninsula. For China, North Korea is a headache. For its unlucky inhabitants, the country is something far, far more sinister.





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Kazakhstan’s economy: Tenge fever

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com


Knickers in a twist


A FEW protesters brandishing lacy underwear may not look like a threat to the stability of the state. But the authorities of oil-rich Kazakhstan took no chances on February 16th when a group of demonstrators waving their knickers appeared on the streets of the financial capital, Almaty. The “pantie protesters” were rounded up and led away.


Their demonstration was ostensibly prompted by a rule regulating synthetic underwear due to come into force this summer under a new customs union between Kazakhstan, Russia and Belarus. The restrictions (which have been compared to the EU’s famous rulebook supposedly regulating the curvature of bananas) have sparked widespread ridicule. Yet the protest was not really about lingerie at all, says Yevgeniya Plakhina, a demonstrator, but about the “absurdity” of the system presided over by the country’s 73-year-old president, Nursultan Nazarbayev.


The particular source of anger was the devaluation of the Kazakh currency, the tenge, on February 11th. It plunged by 19%, causing fears of a spike in inflation and a dip in living standards in a country that imports many consumer goods. The following day 50 demonstrators gathered at the central bank to air their grievances; 35 peaceful protesters were arrested at other rallies in Almaty over the weekend for breaching Kazakhstan’s draconian public-assembly laws. Most were fined. One was jailed for ten days.


The protests are small but they hint that Mr Nazarbayev’s unspoken social contract—in which citizens trade political freedoms for relative prosperity and social stability—is becoming fragile. Tensions surfaced in 2011, when 15 people were shot dead as striking oil workers clashed with police in Zhanaozhen in the west of the country. Now the devaluation has reminded many ordinary people—maxed out on credit and exasperated by the growing rich-poor divide—that they are not living the “Kazakh dream”.


Mr Nazarbayev likes to play the elder statesman, taking credit for Kazakhstan’s achievements—from sustained, albeit oil-fuelled, economic growth (6% last year) to apparent social cohesion in a state fashioned from many ethnic groups. Yet when things go awry, the president is conspicuously absent, in this case spotted hobnobbing at the Winter Olympics in Sochi when his central-bank chief, Kayrat Kelimbetov, announced the devaluation.


Mr Kelimbetov said that Kazakhstan could no longer afford to spend billions propping up the tenge (which is pegged to a basket of the dollar, the euro and the Russian rouble) and needed to make exports more competitive. He cited fallout from the “tapering” of quantitative easing in America, capital flight from emerging markets and a falling rouble (whose trajectory the tenge tends to mirror, since Russia is a close trading partner).


The timing of this economic turmoil is awkward for the president as he contemplates his legacy after more than two decades in power. His term runs for nearly three more years, but he is keeping the public and investors guessing about whether he will stay on or step down. With organised opposition groups long emasculated, the nascent anti-devaluation movement (pants-waving or not) lacks political leadership. The state propaganda machine still ensures a large measure of public acclaim for Mr Nazarbayev, however forced. Yet the sight of young protesters in Almaty gleefully taking up the slogan “Old man out!” may give him pause for thought.





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Kazakhstan’s name: Don’t call me Stan

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com



OUTSIDE Central Asia, Kazakhstan is mainly known for its oil wealth, its wide open spaces and the portrayal of its people as hopelessly backward in a satirical film from 2006, “Borat”. The aspiring middle-income country is also often lumped together with its economically less-developed neighbours—Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan – and is referred to as one of the “stans” (“stan” means “place of” in Persian and “settlement” in Russian.)


This has long needled the nation´s leadership, which puts itself in a different league from its neighbours. Comparisons to other, volatile “stans”—Afghanistan and Pakistan—also grate. So much so that on February 6th Nursultan Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan’s president, suggested that the country’s name be changed to “Kazakh Yeli”, or “Land of the Kazakhs”.


Mr Nazarbayev cited the example of nearby Mongolia. “Foreigners show interest in Mongolia, whose population is just two million people, but its name does not end in ‘stan’,” he said, straining facts as well as logic. Mongolia’s investment volumes have sharply increased over the past decade, but they still do not come close to investment levels in Kazakhstan (population: 17m). The number of tourists who visit Mongolia each year is also only a fraction of the foreigners who travel to Kazakhstan.


Mr Nazarbayev called for a public discussion of his proposal, which obediently ensued in newspapers, on television and on social-media networks. Renaming streets and cities has been a common occurrence since independence in 1991, allowing the authorities to distance themselves from their Soviet and, before that, Russian colonial pasts, and to foster a new national identity. But the idea of renaming the country has touched a nerve. The cost would be high. And the name “Kazakh Yeli” has not met with much approval so far. One popular alternative is “Kazakhiya”, reminiscent of Mongolia or Malaysia. But to some nationalists that sounds a little too much like Rossiya, the Russian name for Russia.


In any case, most Kazakhs have more to worry about than the name of their country: the poor quality of health care, the high cost of education, widespread corruption and the shrinking value of the currency. Finding a solution to those issues might be a better way to burnish the country’s image.





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Banyan: Preparing for opposition

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com



TO HIS critics, nothing in Arvind Kejriwal’s brief tenure as chief minister of Delhi became him like the leaving it on February 14th. A theatrical resignation, during which he flung wild allegations of conspiracy and corruption, seemed to vindicate charges that Mr Kejriwal and his 15-month-old Aam Aadmi (“Common Man”) Party (AAP) were feckless agitators rather than political leaders. In this analysis, AAP’s hopes of emerging as a national force in the general election due by May have been dented. Yet this underestimates both the extent of Indian disgust with mainstream politicians, seen as part of a self-serving, hereditary elite, and the shrewdness with which AAP is exploiting this sentiment. The upstart party is changing the rules of Indian politics.


Born out of a street movement against corruption, AAP made a stunning electoral debut in Delhi last December. It won 28 of the 70 seats in the state assembly. The Congress party, which leads the federal government and had ruled Delhi for 15 years, came third, with just eight seats. The main national opposition, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), won 31 seats. After consulting its members, AAP somewhat reluctantly agreed to form a government with the support of Congress.


At the time, its appeal transcended class and caste. The poor loved its simple populist message and its giveaways of water and electricity. Many middle-class liberals, fed up with Congress, were chary of the BJP’s leader, Narendra Modi, with his strongman, right-wing image and controversial record. A politician tells of a straw poll just before the state election at the India International Centre, a hangout for the city’s intelligentsia. The chatterers at the bar were all going to vote AAP; so were their drivers in the car park; so were the rickshaw-drivers and chai-wallahs outside on the street. But after 49 days of a government led by Mr Kejriwal the voters at the bar are probably having second thoughts.


Civil servants have been alarmed by its anti-corruption zeal, which involved a hotline offering tips on how to mount stings. Liberals deplored a raid led by AAP’s law minister on Ugandan women accused of prostitution. Commuters were irked when a sit-in by Mr Kejriwal and colleagues disrupted traffic. And some of AAP’s supporters felt betrayed by his resignation, dodging the tough, messy work of real politics, and leaving the capital temporarily under unelected “president’s rule”.


Mr Kejriwal quit when the assembly failed to support an anti-corruption law on which he had staked his government. No matter that the way the law was introduced may have been unconstitutional; Mr Kejriwal alleged a conspiracy. His government had just made a police complaint accusing Reliance Industries, a big energy company, and its boss, Mukesh Ambani, of colluding with the government to fix gas prices, which are to double in April. Reliance denied the charge and threatened legal action. But Mr Kejriwal, who portrays Mr Ambani as “running” both Congress and BJP policy, accused him of being behind the blocking of the law.


For less well-off gas consumers, this is an attractive theory. Yogendra Yadav, who was one of India’s leading psephologists before helping to found AAP, concedes the party may have lost support “among the educated, discerning, TV-watching class”, but plausibly suggests its standing has actually gone up among other, more numerous, poor voters who admire it for keeping its word, and for self-sacrifice. Many have seen real benefits from its short rule—not just the handouts, but a noticeable reduction in the petty bribery that seemed an unavoidable part of daily life.


AAP may also be trying quietly to mend fences with the bar-room intellectuals and with business. Mr Yadav rejects the charge of illiberalism. AAP has spoken out, for example, against the recent recriminalisation of homosexuality. Its economic policy has been “populist” but he rejects both “pre-1989 leftism” and “market fundamentalism”. Talking this week to the Economic Times, Mr Kejriwal was hardly the “Stalinist” some of his critics describe. Government, he said, should stay out of business.


Preparing for the general election will be tough, however. AAP must expand beyond the capital—and manage the expectations of its grassroots enthusiasts (it enrolled nearly 10m members in just two weeks in January). Its leaders would prefer to concentrate on a few dozen (out of 543) parliamentary seats the party has some chance of winning. Some members, however, have other ideas. Already there are complaints about the leadership’s plans to parachute star candidates into high-profile contests.


Most observers expect the election to result in the worst Congress performance ever, and the BJP to emerge as the largest single party. If the past few elections are any guide, around a half of the vote will go to smaller regional, caste-based and communist parties, which often play an important role as coalitions are forged. Polls taken before the Delhi government’s resignation suggested that AAP commanded just 4-6% of the vote nationwide. Even if it did win enough seats to give it negotiating clout as a coalition partner, its leaders argue against its joining government. Their ambition is to be the opposition.


Whales afraid of minnows


Even so, they fear the party is not ready to capitalise on the enormous opportunity offered by India’s disillusionment with politics-as-usual; an election in a year’s time might have been better. In reality this one is the party’s best chance of changing India. It has momentum behind it, and the political agenda is now dominated by the issue that defines it: corruption. AAP threatens not just Congress, whose administration is seen as mired in sleaze, but the BJP as well. Compared with Mr Kejriwal and his colleagues, Mr Modi, who makes much of his poor origins and clean reputation, also looks like an old-style political insider. AAP is small, young, idealistic, hotheaded and underfunded, with its platform still evolving. Yet, harping on the rottenness of Indian politics, it has the two big parties running scared.





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Helicopter safety measures announced

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William Arthur Wood

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"Leadership is based on inspiration, not domination; on cooperation, not intimidation."

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Brittany Murphy

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"Everybody has difficult years, but a lot of times the difficult years end up being the greatest years of your whole entire life, if you survive them."

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Joseph Addison

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"Content thyself to be obscurely good. When vice prevails, and impious men bear sway, the post of honor is a private station."

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Elizabeth Janeway

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"We don't get offered crises, they arrive."

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George Saunders

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"Good-bye. I am leaving because I am bored."

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George Price

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"Correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't the fine line between sanity and madness gotten finer?"

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Howard Scott

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"Criminal: A person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation."

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Abraham Lincoln

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"When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad, and that is my religion."

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Wednesday 19 February 2014

William H. Borah

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"The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments."

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Henry David Thoreau

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"Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk."

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G. K. Chesterton

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"There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read."

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Rodney Dangerfield

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"A girl phoned me the other day and said "Come on over, there's nobody home." I went over. Nobody was home."

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Francois de La Rochefoucauld

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"When we are unable to find tranquility within ourselves, it is useless to seek it elsewhere."

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Philip Adams

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"It seems to me that people have vast potential. Most people can do extraordinary things if they have the confidence or take the risks. Yet most people don't. They sit in front of the telly and treat life as if it goes on forever."

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Arab Proverb

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"Examine what is said, not him who speaks."

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Edna Ferber

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"Perhaps too much of everything is as bad as too little."

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Tuesday 18 February 2014

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"At 18 our convictions are hills from which we look; At 45 they are caves in which we hide."

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Sir Winston Churchill

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"Although prepared for martyrdom, I preferred that it be postponed."

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Gail Godwin

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"Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater."

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Peter Ustinov

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"The point of living and of being an optimist, is to be foolish enough to believe the best is yet to come."

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William Shakespeare

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"For aught that I could ever read, could ever hear by tale or history, the course of true love never did run smooth."

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Betty Friedan

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"Aging is not 'lost youth' but a new stage of opportunity and strength."

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Mahatma Gandhi

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"I want freedom for the full expression of my personality."

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Wilson Mizner

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"Always be nice to people on the way up; because you'll meet the same people on the way down."

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Henry Ford

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"If you think you can do a thing or think you can't do a thing, you're right."

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Monday 17 February 2014

Swallow up

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com

Destroy, make disappear

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Swallow up

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Consume or take a lot of time, money, etc

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Swallow up

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com

Take control of something much smaller, like a company or state

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Charles De Gaulle

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"How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?"

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George Bernard Shaw

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"Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history."

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Samuel Goldwyn

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"I had a monumental idea this morning, but I didn't like it."

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Sophocles

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"A short saying oft contains much wisdom."

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M. C. Richards

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"Poetry often enters through the window of irrelevance."

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Ice T

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"Passion makes the world go round. Love just makes it a safer place."

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William Butler Yeats

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"Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people."

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Thomas Fuller

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"Enquire not what boils in another's pot."

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Sunday 16 February 2014

Sylvia Plath

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"I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket."

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Leon Wieseltier

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"No great deed, private or public, had ever been undertaken in a bliss of certainty."

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Julian Jaynes

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"Civilization is the art of living in towns of such size the everyone does not know everyone else."

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George Washington

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"Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence. True friendship is a plant of slow growth, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation."

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Lillian Carter

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"Sure I'm for helping the elderly. I'm going to be old myself some day."

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Bertrand Russell

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"There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it."

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Yogi Berra

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"When you come to a fork in the road, take it."

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Saturday 15 February 2014

Herman Melville

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"A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things."

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H. L. Mencken

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"It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office."

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Laurence J. Peter

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"The incompetent with nothing to do can still make a mess of it."

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Aldous Huxley

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"That all men are equal is a proposition which, at ordinary times, no sane individual has ever given his assent."

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Joe Brown and David Brown

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"Everyone has his burden; what counts is how you carry it."

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Hugh Macleod

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"You have to find a way of working that makes it dead easy to take full advantage of your inspired moments. They never hit at a convenient time, nor do they last long."

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Edith Sitwell

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"The aim of flattery is to soothe and encourage us by assuring us of the truth of an opinion we have already formed about ourselves."

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Frederick William Robertson

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"This world is given as the prize for the men in earnest; and that which is true of this world, is truer still of the world to come."

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Friday 14 February 2014

Yesterday's news

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com

Someone or something that is yesterday's news is no longer interesting.




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Kanye West

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"Nothing in life is promised except death."

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C. Kent Wright

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"To sway an audience, you must watch them as you speak."

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Oriental Proverb

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"If you wish your merit to be known, acknowledge that of other people."

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Bob Dylan

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"If the point is sharp, and the arrow is swift, it can pierce through the dust no matter how thick."

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Isaac Asimov

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"I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them."

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Rudyard Kipling

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"He wrapped himself in quotations- as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors."

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James Branch Cabell

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"There is not any memory with less satisfaction than the memory of some temptation we resisted."

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Elbert Hubbard

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"No man needs a vacation so much as the man who has just had one."

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Thursday 13 February 2014

Banyan: Losing its rebalance

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com


JOHN KERRY, America’s secretary of state, set off this week on a tour that takes him to China, South Korea, Indonesia and Abu Dhabi. Rightly sensitive to the charge that Barack Obama’s administration is neglectful of Asia, officials are keen to remind the world that this is Mr Kerry’s fifth trip to North-East and South-East Asia in a year. He in particular has been criticised in the region for being too preoccupied with peacemaking in the Middle East to pursue the “pivot” or “rebalancing” to Asia announced in the president’s first term. And despite his air miles, American diplomacy in Asia is not going well. Relations with the emerging power, China, remain fraught; the United States is at odds on important issues with its biggest regional ally, Japan; and its efforts to forge a new regional trade agreement have missed deadlines.


Some Asian diplomats blame the perception of American disengagement for China’s recent assertiveness in pressing its claims in territorial disputes in the region. Mr Obama sent the wrong signal, they say, by pulling out of two summits in South-East Asia last October because his government was partly shut down. Whatever the cause, one effect of China’s alleged assertiveness is to stymie the broad-based, co-operative relationship that America and China say they want. Instead, meetings are overshadowed by regional tensions, and in particular the worry that Japan and China may clash as both patrol around the disputed Senkaku or Diaoyu islands by sea and air. America says it takes no position on the islands’ sovereignty, but regards them as under Japanese administration and so covered by its security treaty with Japan.


This month a senior American official again criticised China’s unilateral declaration in November of an Air Defence Identification Zone (ADIZ) over a part of the East China Sea that includes the disputed islands. He warned China that declaring another ADIZ over the South China Sea, where it also disputes territory with Taiwan and four South-East Asian countries, might prompt a redeployment of American forces. And Daniel Russel, an assistant secretary of state, laid into the “nine-dashed line”, which China points to in maps from the 1940s as giving it sovereignty over almost the whole of the South China Sea. He said it has no legal status under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. (Chinese officials may think this a bit rich, since America, unlike China, has never ratified the convention, but then China seems not to want to limit its claim by citing the law.)


China rejects American criticism, which it believes emboldens the countries that challenge its claims. It was outraged earlier this month when Benigno Aquino, the Philippines’ president, compared the world’s passivity in the face of Chinese encroachments in the South China Sea to the territorial appeasement of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. The Philippines is another American treaty ally, though in contrast to its promises to Japan, America has made clear its guarantee does not cover areas under dispute with China (and others).


Similarly, China’s official news agency, Xinhua, has accused America of continuing “to spoil troublemaking Japan”. For China the decision by Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister, to visit Tokyo’s Yasukuni shrine in December, where war criminals are among those honoured, was proof of his government’s unrepentant attitude to Japan’s imperialist past and of its intention to revive Japanese military glory. Then this month one of Mr Abe’s appointments as a governor of the state broadcaster, NHK, claimed that the Nanjing massacre, an atrocity perpetrated by Japanese soldiers in 1937, was a fabrication.


For America, all of this is a headache. It would like Japan to bear more of the burden of regional security, and it applauds Mr Abe’s wish to reinterpret Japan’s pacifist constitution to allow the country more military latitude. America also needs Mr Abe’s support in a years-long effort to relocate a controversial American airbase on the island of Okinawa. But it deplores the tendency of the Japanese right to dismiss any criticism of Japan’s war record as “victors’ justice”. Mr Obama is to visit Japan (as well as Malaysia, the Philippines and South Korea) in April. In Japan, he will have to find a way to distance America from Mr Abe’s revisionism. If he is too hard on Mr Abe, however, America could hand China the diplomatic prize of an open rift between the treaty allies.


Already American strategy in the region is undermined by the terrible relations between Japan and South Korea, which is even more sensitive to Japanese attempts to rewrite history. Yet North Korea, despite a little flurry of friendly gestures this week, is an ever-present, nuclear-armed threat to regional security. Indeed, worries about the stability of its regime are mounting. It would be in the interests of America, China, Japan and South Korea alike to agree on a strategy for dealing with the North. But they are too busy disagreeing among themselves.


On the slow track?


The Obama administration is still struggling to convince Asia that its pivot amounts to much. The policy has entailed some lofty rhetoric about America’s Pacific destiny, much shuttling by senior officials, some modest military redeployments and—with greater emphasis in recent months as it has seemed closer to fruition—the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), an ambitious trade agreement involving America, Japan and ten other countries (not including China), together accounting for a third of global trade.


Having missed the goal of finalising the TPP in 2013, negotiators are due to gather in Singapore on February 22nd for another try. They would be given a boost if Mr Obama’s team had “fast-track” authority to reach a deal that could not then be unpicked line by line in Congress. But winning congressional approval for fast track is looking difficult. Mr Obama’s aides say he is still intent on trying. Many in Asia, still unconvinced that “America’s first Pacific president” is really committed to his country’s leading role in the region, will want to see how hard.





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Indonesia’s Aceh province: Laying down God’s law

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Here come the seclusion-exclusion police


ACEH, at the far west of the Indonesian archipelago, is proud of its reputation for piety. In 2001 it became the only province in Indonesia authorised to introduce sharia Islamic law as part of “special autonomy” aimed at ending a long-running separatist war. The provincial parliament passed laws against drinking, gambling and “seclusion”—being alone with someone from the other sex. An Islamic police force modelled on Iran’s “vice and virtue” patrols started to round up women for not covering their heads or for wearing trousers that were too tight. The first public caning took place in 2005. Now Aceh has taken another controversial step, by telling everyone to follow sharia—Muslim and non-Muslim alike.


This all follows from a criminal code which Aceh’s outgoing parliament passed back in 2009, increasing the number of offences under sharia and introducing much stiffer penalties, such as death by stoning for adulterers. Aceh’s then governor, Irwandi Yusuf, refused to sign the code. But in December the present governor, Zaini Abdullah, signed into law a revised version. This month the local authorities sent it to Jakarta, the capital, for approval. Although legislators watered down the original code—dropping the death-by-stoning penalty, for example—they insist it must be followed by everyone in Aceh, regardless of religion. Non-Muslims who are charged with offences not criminalised by national laws will be tried by sharia courts.


Aceh is a far cry from, say, the Taliban’s brutish former rule in Afghanistan. Amnesty International counted at least 45 canings in 2012—still relatively few in a province of 5m. And those flogged in Aceh are fully clothed, providing them with some protection. But the province is enforcing sharia more strictly as religious conservatives become more powerful, says Andreas Harsono of Human Rights Watch. Meanwhile, town mayors and district chiefs are passing more sharia by-laws, which often discriminate against women. Religious minorities face growing persecution, too.


Forcing Christians and followers of other non-Muslim faiths to abide by sharia seems to fly in the face of Islamic teachings. Even the secretary-general of Aceh’s own clerics association, Faisal Ali, says it shows that legislators have a poor understanding of Islam. Moreover, the code seems at odds with Indonesia’s constitutionally enshrined precept of “unity in diversity”. The 1945 constitution guarantees freedom of religion for six officially recognised faiths. The home ministry in Jakarta has 60 days to accept or reject the code.


Politics as much as religious conviction plays its part. Indonesia holds a parliamentary election in April and a presidential one in July. The five-year term of Aceh’s own parliament also ends this year. Mr Abdullah and local legislators may hope to consolidate their positions by presenting themselves as pious Muslims standing up to Jakarta, the old adversary in Aceh’s 29-year separatist struggle which ended in 2005. It would not be the first time that politicians have exploited religion for their own worldly ends.





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Japan’s cuisines: Acquired taste

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Chef Murata is getting a gaijin to make it next time


WITH three Michelin stars to his name, Master Hachiro Mizutani is one of the world’s finest sushi chefs. He is as confident of the future of Japanese cuisine as he is at manipulating the morsels of mackerel, flounder and tuna perched on rice which draw a steady flow of devotees to his restaurant in Tokyo’s Ginza district. Young Japanese may be eating more Western food, he says, but they always return to healthier home fare as they get older. Likewise, foreigners start with ersatz conveyor-belt sushi outside Japan, but soon hunger for the real thing—Tokyo’s genius take on fast food.


It is a far cry from the near-paranoia over the country’s cuisine expressed by some until recently. In 2006-07 the farm and fisheries ministry came up with a scheme to send out so-called sushi police abroad to uncover bastardisations of classic Japanese dishes. For a self-styled Japanese restaurant in Colorado to put sushi on the menu alongside Korean-style barbecued beef was seen as a particular outrage.


The government scrapped the scheme, rightly fearing a backlash. Food fascism is absurd. Much fare that is seen as quintessentially Japanese has foreign origins. Pork- and vegetable-filled gyoza dumplings, served up in massive quantities by Japanese housewives, are essentially Chinese jiaozi, popularised in Japan during its occupation of Manchuria from 1931. Japanese ramen restaurants are all the rage in London and New York, but the noodles are Chinese: lamian, meaning pulled noodles. As for that Japanese national dish, katsu kare, a deep-fried breaded pork cutlet in a slather of curry sauce on a mound of rice: it is true that the monstrosity exists in no other country, but it could not have come about had not the Chinese introduced pork to the Japanese diet, and the English curry powder.


With Tokyo restaurants now bagging more Michelin stars than London and New York together, even the bureaucrats are relaxing their vigilance. When two years ago the government applied to UNESCO for washoku, Japan’s traditional food culture, based on the seasons, to be granted the status of “intangible cultural heritage”, it acknowledged that foreigners have influenced and recreated the country’s cuisines. The era of the sushi police is over, promises Yoshihiro Murata, a Kyoto-based chef who led the effort. Just as washoku won UNESCO designation in December, Mr Murata’s restaurant, Kikunoi, was about to accept its first foreign trainee chef. Until now, Japan has granted working visas to overseas chefs only to make foreign food. Now it wants them to train in Japanese cuisine.


Only French and Mexican cuisines are similarly honoured by UNESCO, along with the Mediterranean diet and Turkish kashkek, a ceremonial dish made of meat and wheat. The new status will help Japan to export its food. Daisuke Matsuda, owner of a shop selling tamagoyaki, or egg rolls, outside Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo, expects them now to become far better known around the world.


But one change at home still worries Tokyo’s sushi chefs. They buy their ingredients at Tsukiji, the world’s biggest fish market and the city’s last tangible link with a vibrant mercantile past. The government plans to shift trading to a landfill site in Tokyo Bay that once housed a dirty gasworks, letting in the property developers once the market has moved. The chefs fear that, even after a supposed clean-up, their fish could be contaminated by the benzene that has leached into the site. The current market, with a warren of surrounding shops selling everything from sea grapes to kitchen knives, is a huge draw for visitors, further spreading Japan’s food culture. Conserving Tsukiji, says Mr Mizutani, is far more important for the future of washoku than UNESCO’s recognition.





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