Latest News Clips 2013.03.14

                       Bengo’s Latest News Clips                      2013.03.14

1.      A Polarizing Figure Who Led a Movement

The New York Times   March 5, 2013

CARACAS, Venezuela — Hugo Chávez, who died on Tuesday at 58, rose from poverty in a dirt-floor adobe house to unrivaled influence in Venezuela as its president, consolidating power and wielding the country’s oil reserves as a tool for his Socialist-inspired change.

With a televangelist’s gift for oratory, Mr. Chávez led a nationalist movement that lashed out at the United States government, moneyed Venezuelans and his own disaffected followers, whom he often branded as traitors.

He was a dreamer with a common touch and enormous ambition. He maintained an almost visceral connection with the poor, tapping into their resentments, while strutting like the strongman in a caudillo novel. His followers called him Comandante.

But he was not a stock figure. He grew up a have-not in an oil-rich country that prized ostentatious consumption. He was a man of mixed ancestry — African, indigenous and Spanish — who despised a power structure dominated by Europeanized elites. As a soldier he hated hunting down guerrillas, but had no qualms about using weapons to seize power, as he and a group of military co-conspirators tried but failed to do in 1992. Even so, he rose to power in democratic elections, in 1998.

In office, he upended the political order at home and used oil revenues to finance client states in Latin America, notably Bolivia and Nicaragua. Inspired by Simón Bolívar, the mercurial Venezuelan aristocrat who led South America’s 19th-century wars of independence, Mr. Chávez sought to unite the region and erode Washington’s influence.

“The hegemonic pretensions of the American empire are placing at risk the very survival of the human species,” he said in a 2006 speech at the United Nations. In the same speech he called President George W. Bush “the devil.”

For years, he succeeded in curbing American influence. He breathed life into Cuba, the hemisphere’s only Communist nation, with economic assistance; its revolutionary leader, Fidel Castro, was not only an ally but also an inspiration. He forged a Bolivarian alliance with some of Latin America’s energy-exporting nations, like Ecuador and Bolivia, and applauded when they expelled American ambassadors, as he had done. He asserted greater state control over Venezuela’s economy by nationalizing dozens of foreign-owned assets, including oil projects controlled by Exxon Mobil and other large American corporations.

2.      Eat Your Heart Out

The New York Times    MARCH 7, 2013

    

Over the last several decades, it has become accepted wisdom that consuming saturated fat, the type found in meat and butter, is bad for you. Starting in the 1960s, studies showed convincingly that saturated fat raises cholesterol levels and that these elevated levels, especially of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, or LDL (the so-called bad cholesterol), increase heart disease. Studies also showed that consuming polyunsaturated fats — safflower, corn and soybean oils — reduced people’s levels of overall cholesterol and LDL and should be encouraged.

But new studies may be upending those assumptions. Researchers with the National Institutes of Health and other organizations recently resurrected the results of a long-overlooked Australian study conducted from 1966 to 1973, in which one group of men with heart disease increased omega-6-rich polyunsaturated fat intake to 15 percent of calories, while reducing saturated fat intake to less than 10 percent. Another group of men with heart disease continued their normal diets.

The men were followed for an average of 39 months, and those on the polyunsaturated-rich diet lowered their cholesterol levels by an average of 13 percent. But they also were more likely to die, and in particular to die of a heart attack, than those who stuck with their usual diet, which consisted of about 15 percent saturated fat.

This study — the results of which weren’t fully analyzed when it was conducted in the early days of enthusiasm for polyunsaturated oils — adds to a small but unsettling body of data suggesting that consuming polyunsaturated oils, even though they reliably lower cholesterol, may nevertheless increase your risk of heart disease.

In broader terms, the new analysis muddies the already murky issue of just how diet affects heart-disease risk and health in general. Polyunsaturated oils, while decreasing cholesterol, may simultaneously promote inflammation throughout the body, says Philip C. Calder, a professor of nutritional immunology at the University of Southampton, in England, who wrote an editorial accompanying the new analysis. This inflammation may initiate heart disease and “outweigh any possible good effect” of the oils.

3.      Taiwan Presidential Office confirms Lesley Ma's marriage

Want China Times      2013-03-12

      

Taiwan's Presidential Office has confirmed that Lesley Ma, the eldest daughter of president Ma Ying-jeou, married her longtime boyfriend and Harvard classmate Allen Pei-Jan Tsai last year, reports our Chinese-language sister paper China Times.

Despite speculation that a banquet held at the Grand Hotel in Taipei on March 9 was to celebrate the wedding of the president's eldest daughter, the Presidential Office confirmed on Monday night that Lesley and Allen actually registered their marriage in New York last year and have since moved to Hong Kong.

Allen Pei-Jan Tsai was born in Aug. 5, 1980 in Taiwan but moved to the United States at a young age. He previously worked for the RREEF real estate affiliate of Deutsche Bank AG in Hong Kong between 2006 and 2008.

During a trip to Europe, Tsai was discovered by a model agent of an Italian friend and signed a two-year contract with US model agency NEXT in 2008. He has modeled for major brands such as Levi's, GAP, Esprit and Calvin Klein.

Tsai was touted as a rising star with his long hair, oriental features and muscular figure during the Milan Fashion show in June 2009. His friends were surprised to learn that he had become a model and said he might have been wanting to try something different while he is still young, according to Taiwanese media outlet NOWnews.

The Presidential Office refused to disclose whether Tsai holds a Taiwan or US passport or which Taiwanese city or county he was born in. The office also urged the media to allow the couple to have some privacy.

Presidential Office spokesperson Lee Chia-fei insisted that the banquet held last week was a reunion party for Lesley Ma's Harvard classmates. She and her sister Kelly Ma reportedly held the party because the classmates were interested in Taiwan. The President also stood firm with the story when officials congratulated him during party activities on Sunday morning.

4.      Ideology and reality: what Germany's anti-nuclear stance tells us

The Asahi Shimbun   February 24, 2013

Germany and Japan have much in common. Both lost wars but went on to achieve stunning economic growth. Both have a reputation of being skilled in the art of “making things.” Both have low birthrates and rapidly aging populations.

On a visceral level, I felt quite at home during the time I spent in Germany. The trains were relatively punctual, if not quite to the same degree as in Japan. There was little garbage on the streets and, overall, there was the sense that everything was being managed in an orderly fashion.

On the other hand, I could go on and on listing the differences between Japan and Germany. Take, for example, Germany’s relations with its neighbors and its financial circumstances--both considerably better than Japan’s. Another conspicuous example is the difference between the two countries’ reactions to Japan's nuclear disaster.

Of all the developed nations, Germany was the most responsive to the accident at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.

Day after day, the German media gave the accident prominent coverage. The German Embassy shifted its operational base to Osaka, and Japan-based German company executives returned home, one after another.

Observing the comparatively calm reaction to the accident of many U.S. and British residents, a Japanese Cabinet official was compelled to utter, “It goes to show that we can rely on Britain and the U.S. in times of crisis.”

The accident in Fukushima also transformed Germany's domestic policies. In the wake of the disaster, the administration of Chancellor Angela Merkel exerted its "pragmatism" and resolved to shut down all of the country's nuclear plants by 2022.

WHY GERMANS ARE PASSIONATE ABOUT PROTECTING THE ENVIRONMENT

Germany’s phase-out decision sent shock waves around the world. Even so, its anti-nuclear inclination was predetermined. Germany has always taken the risks posed by nuclear accidents and waste very seriously, and has been actively engaged as well in the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions. Merkel's change of direction was also a judgment call based on the tenor of domestic public opinion.