Latest News Clips 2016.03.28

                   Bengo’s Latest News Clips                   2016.03.28

1.      Brussels explosions: Why has Belgium's capital been attacked?

BBC   23 March 2016

A CCTV image of three men said to be suspected of being behind the airport attacks has emerged

These are the darkest days Belgium has known since World War Two, according to one Belgian politician.

The attacks, claimed by jihadist group Islamic State (IS), murdered people at Brussels international airport and on a metro train in the heart of the Belgian capital.

And the targets were among the most sensitive in Europe. Brussels is home to the EU, Nato, international agencies and companies, as well as Belgium's own government.

Why has Brussels been attacked?

Not only is Brussels a high-profile target for Islamists, Belgium has struggled with Islamist groups for years and some 500 of its citizens have been lured into fighting for IS in Syria and Iraq.

Several cities have housed Islamist cells, but the most active have been in Brussels and in the south-western suburb of Molenbeek in particular - an area with a high ethnic Moroccan population and a high rate of unemployment.

Several of the bombers and gunmen who targeted Paris last November, killing 130 people, had been living in Molenbeek. The main suspect not to die in the Paris attacks, Salah Abdeslam, returned to Belgium the day afterwards and managed to evade police until 18 March. He and an accomplice were captured alive, again in Molenbeek.

Many Belgians were expecting a response from jihadists. "I had certainly expected something else would take place, but not that it would happen on this scale," says Belgian jihadism expert Pieter Van Ostaeyen.

Why have so many Belgian Muslims been attracted to jihadist violence?

More Belgian Islamists have gone to fight for IS than from any other European country per capita. Almost half have come from Brussels.

But it is not just Brussels, and Molenbeek in particular, that has had a problem with jihadism.

Islamists have also emerged from other Belgian cities, including Verviers and Vilvoorde and most significantly Antwerp, where the now disbanded group, Sharia4Belgium, recruited the first Belgian fighters for Syria.

Many trace Belgium's problem with Islamism to its decision in the 1970s to allow Saudi Arabia to construct the city's Great Mosque.

The Saudis also sent over a large number of imams to preach a hardline, Salafist form of Islam to a recently arrived Muslim population.

Critics believe the Salafist influence, combined with a lax approach by authorities over a 20-year period, helped jihadism to spread.

And then there was anger when the government changed tack, banning women from wearing a full Islamic veil in public.

Pre-planned attacks or revenge?

So were Tuesday's bombings retaliation for last Friday's success in capturing two Islamists alive? The arrests were clearly a blow to IS and Belgian jihadists.

Abdeslam has been described as the logistics expert in the Paris attacks. He rented flats, drove militants across Europe and bought bomb-making equipment. Days before his arrest, an accomplice who had been hiding with him, Mohamed Belkaid, was shot dead by police. He had been wrapped in an IS flag.

"What seems likely is that attacks were already being planned and due to specific arrests they were accelerated because the terrorists knew they were being hunted," says Prof Dave Sinardet of Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Free University Brussels).

In fact Brussels had already tried to guard against multiple attacks following an apparent threat 10 days after the Paris attacks. For several days the city went into lockdown, much as it did on Tuesday, with public transport at a standstill and people told to avoid travelling around.

2.      The New Generation Gap

The Project Syndicate   MAR 16, 2016

NEW YORK – Something interesting has emerged in voting patterns on both sides of the Atlantic: Young people are voting in ways that are markedly different from their elders. A great divide appears to have opened up, based not so much on income, education, or gender as on the voters’ generation.

    

There are good reasons for this divide. The lives of both old and young, as they are now lived, are different. Their pasts are different, and so are their prospects.

The Cold War, for example, was over even before some were born and while others were still children. Words like socialism do not convey the meaning they once did. If socialism means creating a society where shared concerns are not given short shrift – where people care about other people and the environment in which they live – so be it. Yes, there may have been failed experiments under that rubric a quarter- or half-century ago; but today’s experiments bear no resemblance to those of the past. So the failure of those past experiments says nothing about the new ones.

Older upper-middle-class Americans and Europeans have had a good life. When they entered the labor force, well-compensated jobs were waiting for them. The question they asked was what they wanted to do, not how long they would have to live with their parents before they got a job that enabled them to move out.

That generation expected to have job security, to marry young, to buy a house – perhaps a summer house, too – and finally retire with reasonable security. Overall, they expected to be better off than their parents.

While today’s older generation encountered bumps along the way, for the most part, their expectations were met. They may have made more on capital gains on their homes than from working. They almost surely found that strange, but they willingly accepted the gift of our speculative markets, and often gave themselves credit for buying in the right place at the right time.

Today, the expectations of young people, wherever they are in the income distribution, are the opposite. They face job insecurity throughout their lives. On average, many college graduates will search for months before they find a job – often only after having taken one or two unpaid internships. And they count themselves lucky, because they know that their poorer counterparts, some of whom did better in school, cannot afford to spend a year or two without income, and do not have the connections to get an internship in the first place.

Today’s young university graduates are burdened with debt – the poorer they are, the more they owe. So they do not ask what job they would like; they simply ask what job will enable them to pay their college loans, which often will burden them for 20 years or more. Likewise, buying a home is a distant dream.

These struggles mean that young people are not thinking much about retirement. If they did, they would only be frightened by how much they will need to accumulate to live a decent life (beyond bare social security), given the likely persistence of rock-bottom interest rates.

3.      Wong financed OBI stocks for daughter

The China Post    March 25, 2016

 

TAIPEI, Taiwan -- President of Academia Sinica (中央研究院) Wong Chi-huey (翁啟惠) admitted in a public statement on Thursday that he and his wife financed their daughter Wong Yu-shioh's (翁郁琇) stock holdings in OBI Pharma (台灣浩鼎) in accordance with United States law.

In his statement, Wong wrote that Wong Yu-shioh had decided to invest in OBI Pharma after her aunt (the Academia Sinica president's sister in law) succumbed to breast cancer, in order to "support the development of cancer treatments."

On Wednesday, Kuomintang (KMT) legislators demanded that Wong provide an explanation regarding his daughter's stock holdings and step down from his position, after Next Magazine alleged that Wong Yu-shioh had bought 3 million shares of the company's stock at NT$31 per share, and is currently one of its ten largest shareholders. The company revealed that she still held close to 2 million shares in 2014. The pharmaceutical firm's closing price on Thursday was NT$413.5 per share.

While apologizing for the controversy, Wong also stated that his earlier comments regarding OBI Pharma were made "purely from a professional standpoint based on enthusiasm for the sciences and the nation's development in the field of biotechnology." Wong himself does not hold any of the company's stock.

Wong, a world renowned chemist who has been a key figure in the development of the nation's biotechnology industry, has been recently criticized for speaking in favor of the company despite having eventually declared its breast cancer treatment a bust. Those revelations caused a major selloff of the stock earlier in the month, leading to allegations of insider trading.

Meanwhile, four members of the nation's highest watchdog agency, the Control Yuan, have made moves to begin an investigation into whether Wong's actions constituted a conflict of interest.

Members of the KMT continued to apply pressure on Wong, not only reiterating their demands he step down, but also that he submit to a full investigation.

KMT Legislator Wang Yu-min (王育敏) found it suspicious that OBI Pharma's stock prices almost tripled to NT$90 per share one week following her 3 million share purchase.

"How did Wong's daughter get the money to purchase the stocks in the first place? Did it have anything to do with Wong?" asked Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Hsu Chih-chieh (許智傑). Wong had remarked in September 2012 that his daughter was "a poor artist."

4.      Ban Ki-moon warns extreme weather becoming new normal

UN secretary-general warns nations to transform the global economy for low-emissions growth - or else.

Aljazeera   23 Mar 2016

The Arctic continues to rapidly melt, raising concerns about the effects on the planet [James Balog/AP]

Time is running for humanity to tackle rapid climate change that is threatening to make extreme weather the new normal, the UN's general-secretary said.

In a message to mark World Meteorological Day on Wednesday, Ban Ki-moon warned the window of opportunity for meeting the temperature goal agreed upon by nations in Paris last December "is narrow and rapidly shrinking".

"Climate change is accelerating at an alarming rate," said Ban. "The effects of a warming planet will be felt by all. Sea levels are rising and extreme weather is becoming the new normal."

Earlier this week, the World Meteorological Organization confirmed that temperatures in 2015 were about 1C above the pre-industrial era for the first time on record.

The record temperatures over both land and the ocean surface in 2015 - due to an exceptionally strong El Nino weather phenomenon and global warming caused by greenhouse gases - were accompanied by many extreme weather events such as heatwaves, flooding, and severe drought, the agency said.

"The world must act now to transform the global economy for low-emissions growth and to strengthen resilience to the inevitable changes to come, especially in less well-developed countries," Ban said.

February 2016 was the warmest month ever recorded, but it was also the warmest by an extremely large margin.

February was 1.35C above the long-term average. October 2015 was the first month since records began in 1880 that had been more than 1.0C above that average.

The +1.35 margin was 0.2C above the previous record set in January - meaning two huge, successive record-breaking months out of a record of more than 1,600 months of data.

Scientists released a report earlier this week saying the rate of carbon emissions being pumped into the atmosphere is higher than at any time in fossil records stretching back 66 million years - to the age of the dinosaurs.

UN studies project that temperatures could rise by up to 4.8C this century, causing massive floods, deadly droughts, and more powerful storms if emissions rise unchecked.