- The Big Challenge for Indonesia’s New President: Proving Democracy Works
Time
July 24, 2014
Indonesian
presidential candidate Joko "Jokowi" Widodo, now president
elect, sits on a bench while waiting for the announcement of election
results by the Elections Commission at Waduk Pluit in Jakarta July
22, 2014.Beawiharta Beawiharta—Reuters
Joko
Widodo’s election victory was a big win for Muslim-majority
Indonesia, the world's third largest democracy and fourth most
populous nation. Now the incoming President has to deliver
much-needed reform
When
Indonesia’s election commission announced late Tuesday that Jakarta
Governor Joko Widodo had won July’s presidential election, the
transition of the world’s fourth-most populous nation to democracy
was finally made complete.
Sixteen
years ago, when autocrat Suharto fell from power amid street riots
and a financial crisis, it seemed the sprawling archipelago nation
could break apart as politics in Jakarta descended into chaos.
However, the victory of Joko Widodo, affectionately called “Jokowi,”
shows how mature and stable
the country’s new democracy has become. Jokowi is the first leader
in Indonesia who is not affiliated with the old ruling class, but a
self-made man, who built a political career with his honesty, smart
policies and good results.
Now
he faces an entirely new challenge: Proving that new democracies in
the emerging world can govern effectively. Indonesia has become a
rising star in the global economy, propelled by its increasingly
wealthy 250 million people and government policies that are
friendlier to investment. However, Indonesia, like many other
emerging economies, is slipping. The IMF expects Indonesia’s GDP to
grow by 5.4% in 2014 — not bad, but the rate has been declining
steadily from 2011, when it was 6.5%. The problem is the same that is
dragging down developing nations everywhere, from India to Brazil:
Politicians, mired in factional fighting and lacking the necessary
will, have failed to implement the reforms critical to keep growth
going.
- After MH17 And Two Other Plane Crashes, Is It Still Safe To Fly?
International
Business Times
July 24 2014
A
boy watches a plane on the runway on the morning of the final MH17
flight arriving at Kuala Lumpur International Airport on July 25,
2014. Malaysia Airlines retired flight number MH17 after its
Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur flight was shot down over
Ukraine. Reuters/Olivia Harris
Nervous
flyers have powerful reasons to be fearful right now. Over the last
eight days alone, 462 people have been killed in three different air
crashes on three different continents. That grim toll --
from Malaysia
Airlines, TransAsia and Air
Algérie --
came just four months after the unsettling disappearance of MH370, a
Malaysia Airlines jet carrying 239 human beings. Major swaths of
airspace now seem vulnerable to missiles unleashed as part of one
violent conflict or another -- a fact underscored by the downing of
MH17 and the decision by major carriers to scrap flights into Israel.
From
the United States to Asia, people increasingly feel skittish about
boarding planes bound for international skies. Airport newsstands are
papered with grisly photos of airplane debris and corpses in body
bags. Type “never flying again” into Twitter and absorb
this flurry
of results. Overwhelming
dread seems like a perfectly sane, rational response.
Yet
for all the saturation coverage of the disasters playing out in
recent times, aviation safety data reveals a perhaps
counter-intuitive truth: Air travel is by many measures the safest it
has been in the history of aviation.
On
any given day, some 100,000 commercial flights take off and land, the
vast majority without incident, according to the International
Air Transport Association.
More than 3 billion people took to the skies last year, with only 210
fatalities. That this year has seen that number more than double is
an anomaly, say experts, one that goes against the grain of many
decades of steady declines in air crashes.
Between
1970 and 2010, the number of commercial air departures tripled from
9.4 million to 28 million, reports
the Aviation Safety Network.
Over that same 40-year span, the number of aviation accidents dropped
each decade, except for a small spike during the 1990s. The 1970s
averaged 68.1 accidents per year; by the 2000s, the average had
fallen to 39.6 per year. Fatalities in the 1970s averaged 1,676 per
year; by the 2000s that figure had halved to 831.8 per year -- not
quite double the 475 people who lost their lives in 2012.
“If
you look at the numbers of flights in one day, it’s astounding,”
said Bill Waldock, professor of aviation safety science at
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Arizona. “But the number of
accidents has gone down tremendously. The probability of getting
killed in a car wreck on the way to the airport is more than 20 times
higher than it is being on an airplane.”
What
has increased sharply is the amount of media attention devoted to air
crashes, say experts -- a factor that has shaped public perceptions.
“Twenty-five
years ago we didn’t have cell phones that could take pics and
videos in real time,” Waldock said. “We also didn’t have
24-hour news cable."
The
relentless coverage of MH370 on CNN helped fuel bizarre conspiracy
theories featuring aliens and black holes, provoking criticism from
various quarters, including Jon
Stewart’s The Daily Show.
The
wall-to-wall cable coverage is part of a wider trend over the last 30
years: A far greater amount of reporting on far fewer accidents and
deaths. For example, a LexisNexis analysis of aviation media reports
from 1985 to 2014 showed that media reporting of aviation disasters
has gone up by around 2,000 percent, while accidents and deaths have
seen a drop of about 75 percent of the same period of time,
3.
The Sixth Great Extinction Is Underway—and We’re to Blame
Time
July
25, 2014
Goodbye
to all that: millions of Earth's species, like the white rhino, are
no match for the one species that considers itself the smartestGetty
Images
The
Earth has been stripped of up to 90% of its species five times before
in the past 450 million years. Now it's happening again—and this
time there's no rogue asteroid to blame
Here’s
hoping the human species likes its own company, because at the rate
Earth is going, we might be the only ones we’ve got left.
Nobody
can say with certainty how many species there are on Earth, but the
number runs well into the millions. Many of them, of course, are on
the order of bacteria and spores. The other ones, the ones we can see
and count and interact with—to say nothing of the ones we like—are
far fewer. And, according to a new and alarming series
of papers in Science,
their numbers are falling fast, thanks mostly to us.
One
of the first great rules of terrestrial biology is that no species is
forever. The Earth has gone through five major extinction events
before—from the Ordovician-Silurian, about 350 million years ago,
to the Cretaceous-Paleogene, 65 million years back. The likely causes
included volcanism, gamma ray bursts, and, in the case of the
Cretaceous-Paleogene wipeout, an asteroid strike—the one that
killed the dinosaurs. But the result of all of the extinctions was
the same: death, a lot of it, for 70% to 90% of all species,
depending on the event.
As
increasingly accepted theories have argued—and as the Science
papers show—we are now in the midst of the sixth great extinction,
the unsettlingly-named Anthropocene, or the age of the humans.
The
numbers are sobering: Over all, there has been a human-driven decline
in the populations of all species by 25% over the past 500 years, but
not all groups have suffered equally. Up to a third of all species of
vertebrates are now considered threatened, as are 45% of most species
of invertebrates. Among the vertebrates, amphibians are getting
clobbered, with 41% of species in trouble, compared to just 17% of
birds—at least so far. The various orders of insects suffer
differently too: 35% of Lepidopteran species are in decline (goodbye
butterflies), which sounds bad enough, but it’s nothing compared to
the similar struggles of nearly 100% of Orthoptera species (crickets,
grasshoppers and katydids, look your last).
As
the authors of all this loss, we are doing our nasty work in a lot of
ways. Overexploitation—which is to say killing animals for food,
clothing or the sheer perverse pleasure of it—plays a big role,
especially among the so-called charismatic megafauna. So we get
elephants slaughtered for their tusks, rhinos poached for their horns
and tigers shot and skinned for their pelts, until oops—no more
elephants, rhinos or tigers.
4.
Ending the war on butter: Are fatty foods really OK to eat?
TODAY
June 12, 2014
Fatty
foods are good. Carbs are bad. Wait, what?
In
a provocative cover story, "Eat
Butter,"
Time
magazine says scientists were wrong to label saturated fats the enemy
— that carbs,
sugar and processed foods are
mainly to blame for obesity, diabetes and other weight-related
diseases, according to a growing body of research.
The
research doesn't specifically focus on butter, but suggests that
Americans should reconsider the role saturated fats play in our
diets. A recent study from University of Cambridge in England
questioned the link between so-called "bad" fats, such
as butter
and pork,
and heart disease. The Cambridge researcher also found no evidence
that polyunsaturated fats, or "good" fatty acids such as
salmon, walnuts and healthy oils, lower risk of heart disease.
Fats
don't hurt our hearts? What's the real deal?
Some
of the confusion comes from the decades-long war on trans fats, the
artery-clogging ingredient found in baked goods and desserts. Science
has shown that trans fats are harmful because they increase risk of
heart disease because they both raise level of bad cholesterol (LDL)
and lower levels of good cholesterol (HDL). Last year, the Food and
Drug Administration said it would require food makers to phase
out trans fats.
But
saturated fats are different from trans fats.
"I
do agree butter, along with other saturated fats like poultry skin,
coconut oil, full fat dairy and certain cuts of red meat, are no
longer the enemy," TODAY diet expert Joy Bauer said Thursday.
“But, before people go slathering butter on things like bagels,
mashed potatoes and pasta, they need to know that it's way more
complicated than that."
"We
always knew that saturated fats elevate LDL-cholesterol (also known
as the bad cholesterol)," said TODAY diet expert Joy Bauer
Thursday. "
However,
scientists now know that there are two different kinds of bad
cholesterol particles — one is small and dense (the kind linked to
heart disease) and the other is large and fluffy (the kind that seems
to be mostly benign). Saturated fat raises the level of larger
particles that don’t appear to be harmful.
On
the other hand, refined carbohydrates (white bread, bagels, crackers,
baked goods, cookies and soda), do increase the smaller, more
dangerous LDL particles.
"And
unfortunately when fat was vilified back in the 1970s, we replaced
those fats with…you guessed it…refined carbohydrates. That’s
why we’re in trouble now," Bauer said.
That's
why it's important to reduce intake of refined carbs.
