Feed aggregator

Idén tizenöt nyílt forráskódú szoftver védelmét erősítené.

Nearly three out of four members of the British Labour Party want their leader, Jeremy Corbyn, to back a second referendum on Brexit, a new survey has found.

In my last post, I wrote about the Democracy Index for 2017, compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit. Looking at its evaluation of Israel gave an opportunity to contrast 2 very different views of what the index revealed about Israel.

But the Democracy Index also evaluates "Palestine" and Iran, for example

Which raises the question: How do those two jive with this description of "democracy," from the report?

most observers today would agree that, at a minimum, the fundamental features of a democracy include government based on majority rule and the consent of the governed; the existence of free and fair elections; the protection of minority rights; and respect for basic human rights. Democracy presupposes equality before the law, due process and political pluralism.Looking at how the report evaluates those countries reminds us of the bias of the West when it comes to the Middle East in general, and these states in particular.

Here is a composite of the scores for Israel as compared with "Palestine" and Iran.

The Middle East and North African (MENA) section consists of 20 countries. Not surprisingly, Israel ranks first.

And guess who ranks 5th out of 20 countries.


In the area of Electoral Process and Pluralism, they rank low --  as you would expect.
But when you read the report, you find that of the 12 questions used to determine the ranking in that category, 9 relate to having elections.

Now we all know that tracking how long Abbas has been president after his 4-year term ended in 2009 is practically a spectator sport. There have been no elections, neither for president nor Parliament. Of the remaining questions about the freedom to form political parties, by no stretch of the imagination would they get full credit.

Also, "Palestine" is classified as a "hybrid" as opposed to a Democracy or Authoritarian. Hybrids are countries where:
Elections have substantial irregularities that often prevent them from being both free and fair. Government pressure on opposition parties and candidates may be common. Serious weaknesses are more prevalent than in flawed democracies—in political culture, functioning of government and political participation. Corruption tends to be widespread and the rule of law is weak. Civil society is weak. Typically, there is harassment of and pressure on journalists, and the judiciary is not independent.But in the West Bank, they don't have "election irregularities" -- they don't have elections at all!

Contrast the definition of 'hybrid' with the definition of 'authoritarian' government:
In these states, state political pluralism is absent or heavily circumscribed. Many countries in this category are outright dictatorships. Some formal institutions of democracy may exist, but these have little substance. Elections, if they do occur, are not free and fair. There is disregard for abuses and infringements of civil liberties. Media are typically state-owned or controlled by groups connected to the ruling regime. There is repression of criticism of the government and pervasive censorship. There is no independent judiciary.And in the category of "Political Participation," "Palestine" comes in with a score of 7.78, tied for second place with Tunisia behind Israel. Add to that how the Palestinian score of 7.78 in Political Participation ties with Canada and exceeds the US score of 7.22 and it appears clear that different standards apply to different areas of the world -- the soft bigotry of low expectations.

As it turns out, the Index uses criteria that The Economist has decided are not really all that important:
The Economist Intelligence Unit’s index is based on the view that measures of democracy which reflect the state of political freedoms and civil liberties are not thick enough. They do not encompass sufficiently, or, in some cases, at all, the features that determine how substantive democracy is. Freedom is an essential component of democracy, but not, in itself, sufficient. In existing measures, the elements of political participation and functioning of government are taken into account only in a marginal and formal way.Yet the report claims that "the condition of holding free and fair competitive
elections, and satisfying related aspects of political freedom, is clearly the sine qua non of all definitions [of Democracy]."

The report also claims "freedom of expression is a sine qua non of democracy"

We have 2 areas that constitute a "sine qua non" of democracy, areas where "Palestine" is clearly deficient, yet it ranks 5th in the Middle East.

This mirrors how Europe bends over backward trying to find excuses not to label Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations and why a corrupt terrorism-sponsoring dictator like Abbas is always welcome in Europe and gets standing ovations.

Apparently, some elements of Democracy are judged to be less important than others when it comes to the Middle East, provided that the country is Muslim or Arab.

The report also expresses its concern numerous times that "anti-terror laws have also been widely criticised for curbing the exercise of freedom of expression in the name of protecting public order and national security." Oddly, there is no indication in the report that those states which commit acts of terrorism lose points at all, which mirrors the EU's general lack of an outcry in response to Abbas's habit of paying stipends to terrorists.

Also, while "Palestine" is included in the list, nowhere is there any indication how "Palestine" is being defined -- does it include Gaza with its Hamas terrorist leadership -- an issue that those calling for a two-state solution never get around to addressing.

Another example of the superficial nature of the evaluations in the report is its rating for Iran, which claims:
an improvement in Iran’s score in 2017, which saw it climb four places to 150th globally as a result of consistently high voter turnout in recent elections.But according to the American Enterprise Institute, the reason for the large turnout may have nothing at all to do with political participation:
One correspondent explained that the government also stamps birth certificates at polling stations when the presidential ballot is collected. Those stamps are necessary for university admission, bank loans, or state employment. What reportedly happens is that many voters outside the capital and major cities pick up the presidential ballot in order to qualify for such benefits. The state counts the ballot, and the “voter” spoils the presidential ballot since their interest is local only and they do not wish to legitimize the broader regime.At a time when the media, traditional as well as social, is understood to have its own biases and agenda, their reports and articles require a critical eye, now more than ever.



-----
If you found this post interesting or informative, please it below. Thanks!

As China's growth seems to be slowing, some observers see the country amid what the New York Times called a "severe downturn". As they mistake China's secular deceleration with cyclical fluctuations, they miss the rapid increase in Chinese living standards.

Peter Pellegrini kormányfő szerint a kötelező sorkatonai szolgálat bevezetéséhez össztársadalmi megegyezésre van szükség. Szlovákiának gondot okozhatna egy komoly válsághelyzet kezelése.

ALGER – Le parc national automobile comptait  6.162.542 véhicules à fin 2017, contre 5.986.181 véhicules à fin 2016, en hausse de 2,94% correspondant à une augmentation de 176.361 unités, a appris l’APS auprès de l’Office national des statistiques (ONS).

Concernant le nombre de véhicules qui ont été immatriculés et réimmatriculés en 2017, il a atteint 1.564.348 (contre 1.856.150 en 2016) dont 176.362 véhicules neufs (contre 192.171 véhicules neufs en 2016), soit

une baisse globale de 291.802 unités des immatriculations et réimmatriculations par rapport à 2016 (-15,72%).

Concernant les véhicules neufs, l’ONS relève la poursuite de la baisse des immatriculations de 15.809 véhicules en 2017 par rapport à 2016 (-8,23%).

Les immatriculations définitives des véhicules neufs renseignent sur les mises en circulation des véhicules vendus, explique l’Office qui précise que l’examen de ces immatriculations définitives, au regard des importations, fait apparaître qu’une bonne partie des véhicules n’est pas immatriculée au cours de l’année d’importation.

Dans ce sens, l’ONS note une tendance baissière pour l’évolution des importations des véhicules neufs, tous genres confondus, par les concessionnaires, durant 2017, soit une diminution de 77%.

Concernant la répartition du parc national automobile par catégories de véhicules, il se compose de plus de 3,98 millions de véhicules de tourisme (64,6% du parc global), de près de 1,2 million de camionnettes (19,3%), de 417.286 camions (6,8%), de 161.885 tracteurs agricoles (2,6%), de 151.503 remorques (2,4%), de 86.741 autocars-autobus (1,41%), de 85.504 tracteurs routiers (1,39%) et de 7.164 véhicules spéciaux (0,12%).

Pour ce qui concerne la répartition régionale, les cinq premières wilayas qui ont compté le plus grand nombre d’opérations d’immatriculation et de réimmatriculation en 2017 sont celles d’Alger avec 151.722 unités (9,7% de la totalité), suivie de Mila avec 80.441 (5,14%), de Blida avec 76.274 unités (4,88%), de Constantine avec 66.320 (4,24%) et de Tébessa  avec 63.746 (4,07%).

Par ailleurs, les 5 premières wilayas qui comptent le plus grand nombre de véhicules sont Alger avec plus de 1,6 millions d’unités (26,07% de la totalité du parc), Blida avec 334.042 (5,42%), Oran avec 316.197 (5,13%), Constantine avec 225.442 (3,66%) et Tizi-Ouzou avec 207.628 (3,37%).

The post Parc national automobile : plus de 6,16 millions de véhicules à fin 2017 appeared first on .

CLTM - La CLTM (Confédération Libre des Travailleurs de Mauritanie) s’inquiète de la dérive autoritaire et dictatoriale du régime et de son...

Eine junge Frau aus der Schweiz hat einen Afghanen, der sie während der Silvesterfeier in Wien am Hintern betatscht haben soll, spitalreif geschlagen.

Le beau temps a souri aux stations de ski, en ce début d'hiver.

Paris – Der französische Präsident Emmanuel Macron will sich Mitte Januar im Zuge der "nationalen Debatte" zur Beruhigung der "Gelbwesten"-Proteste schriftlich an die Bürger wenden. Gemäss einer Umfrage haben die Frankzose wenig Vertrauen in Macrons Reformpläne.

C’est un peu inattendu venant de deux concurrents, mais BMW et Daimler vont unir leurs forces pour offrir, dès 2019, plus de 20 000 voitures partagées dans le monde.
Les offres d’autopartage de ces deux gigantesques entreprises seront rassemblées sous le même toit. «BMW et Daimler planifient les étapes suivantes après l’approbation des autorités de la concurrence pour leur entreprise de mobilité commune», indiquait le communiqué. Car, annoncée en mars, cette collaboration a été approuvée mardi 18 décembre 2018 par le dernier intervenant, le gendarme américain des marchés. L’Europe avait, elle, déjà donné son feu vert en novembre 2018.
Les Car2Go (Daimler) et DriveNow (BMW) vont donc totaliser plus de 20 000 voitures en circulation dans 31 villes pour plus de 4 millions de clients. Le but de la manœuvre est de rendre les sociétés plus fortes sur ce secteur d’avenir et de développer l’offre électrique plus largement car il s’agit aussi d’un moyen pour ces deux constructeurs de réduire les taux d’émissions en mettant en circulation plus de voitures à électrons (zéro émission donc).
Cela dit, outre Car2Go et DriveNow, l’offre commune de Daimler et BMW va aussi concerner plusieurs plateformes. On compte parmi elles la commande de taxis — comme Mytaxi, Chauffeur privé, Clever Taxi — la localisation et le paiement en ligne de son parking ou de sa charge pour sa voiture électrique. Daimler et BMW détiendront chacun 50% des parts de la société commune valorisée vraisemblablement autour du milliard d’euros et qui verra le jour ce 31 janvier 2019.

The post Voiture partagée: BMW et Daimler se concertent appeared first on .

2 personnes, 300 g de tagliatelles, 150 g de fromage bleu type roquefort, 20 cl de crème liquide, 10 cl de lait, sel et poivre du moulin, cernaux de noix à volonté (100 g).

1 – Cuire les pâtes dans de l’eau bouillante salée.
2 – Dans une autre casserole faire fondre le fromage, la crème et le lait. Saler et poivrer. Laisser épaissir quelques minutes à petits bouillons.
3 – Concasser la moitié des noix et les ajouter à la sauce.

Pour finir
Verser la sauce sur les pâtes et garnir des cerneaux restants.

The post Recette: Tagliatelles au fromage bleu et aux noix appeared first on .

190g de beurre, 75g de sucre glace, 1 blanc d’œuf, 200g de farine, 1 cuillère à soupe de cacao en poudre, 1 pincée de sel, pâte à tartiner ou confiture.

Dans un saladier, travailler à l’aide d’une spatule en bois le beurre ramolli puis incorporer le sucre glace et le sel. Ajouter le blanc d’œuf puis la farine tamisée avec le cacao en poudre. Mélanger jusqu’à obtention d’une pâte lisse et homogène. A l’aide d’une poche à douille cannelée, former des rosaces sur une feuille de papier sulfurisé disposée sur la plaque du four. Cuire 15 minutes dans un four préchauffé à 180°C (350 F) (thermostat 6). A la sortie du four, laisser refroidir.
A l’aide d’une cuillère, coller les sablés deux à deux avec de la pâte à tartiner.

The post Recette: Sablés «rosace» au chocolat appeared first on .

L’Algérie a remporté la première place par équipes messieurs du championnat arabe de gymnastique rythmique et artistique qui vient de prendre fin à Marrakech (Maroc). Avec 235,901 points, la sélection algérienne a devancé son homologue marocaine (231,667 pts) lors des six épreuves disputées, alors que la troisième place est revenue à la sélection jordanienne (228,701 points) suivie de l’Arabie Saoudite (4e/186,238 pts).

De son côté, la sélection marocaine féminine de gymnastique a été sacrée championne arabe lors de l’édition 2018 en totalisant neuf médailles (cinq en or, une en argent et trois en bronze) et quatre médailles en gymnastique artistique (deux en or et deux en argent). Organisée par la Fédération royale marocaine de gymnastique sous l’égide de l’Union arabe de la discipline, cette édition a connu la participation de douze nations dont l’Algérie et le Maroc, pays hôte.

The post Gymnastique – Championnat arabe: L’Algérie sacrée par équipes messieurs appeared first on .

Le Président camerounais a déclaré lundi dans son discours de fin d’année accepter la décision de la Confédération africaine de football (CAF) de retirer l’organisation de la Coupe d’Afrique des nations de football (CAN) au Cameroun. «Comme vous le savez, notre pays était engagé à accueillir le grand rendez-vous du football africain en 2019.
La Confédération africaine de football, au regard de certaines données, a pensé qu’il fallait procéder à un glissement de date. Nous en avons pris acte», a dit M. Biya. La CAF a retiré fin novembre l’organisation de l’édition 2019 au Cameroun, en raison de retards dans les travaux d’infrastructures et de la situation sécuritaire. Le Cameroun a accepté depuis le 10 décembre devenir l’hôte de l’édition 2021 de la CAN de football, au détriment de la Côte d’Ivoire qui devra accueillir l’édition 2023. Le chef de l’Etat camerounais a promis que son pays continuerait de se préparer pour abriter le championnat, et que «tous les investissements liés à l’organisation de la CAN seront réalisés». Le Président camerounais s’est également exprimé, lors de son discours, sur la situation sécuritaire du pays. Paul Biya estime que la situation est «stabilisée» dans l’Extrême-Nord, région touchée par le groupe jihadiste Boko Haram.

The post CAN-2019: Paul Biya prend acte du retrait de l’organisation au Cameroun appeared first on .

RIM Sport - Le directeur de partie Mohamed Abdelaziz Ould Bouh (né en 1992), Meriem Cheikh Chedah (arbitre assistante, née en 1995-CRA de...

Credit: IMF

By Chris Wellisz
WASHINGTON DC, Jan 2 2019 (IPS)

It happened again and again in a career punctuated by upheavals: the peso crisis of 1994, the Asian crisis of 1997, and finally, the big one—the global financial crisis of 2008.

Each time he started a new government job, Timothy Geithner hoped to find a letter from his predecessor, explaining what to do and whom to call if things fell apart. The desk drawer was always empty.

“Financial crises are probably the most devastating economic events that can happen to a country,” says Geithner, who fought the last conflagration as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and later US Treasury secretary. “I’d like our successors to have a better base of knowledge.”

So every summer, Geithner takes time off from his job as president of Warburg Pincus, a private equity firm, to help teach a two-week crisis management workshop for regulators from around the world.

It’s one part of the Yale Program on Financial Stability, which also offers a master’s degree and is undertaking an ambitious project to create, on a very large scale, what Geithner never found in that desk drawer—a manual for crisis managers.

“A lot of times we’ve made the same mistakes in fighting financial crises over time simply because there was no body of knowledge that people had jointly studied and debated,” says Andrew Metrick, a professor of finance at Yale who founded and runs the program. “It’s almost like you show up at the emergency room and the doctor says, ‘It looks like a broken arm. I think I’ve seen someone once do something for a broken arm.’”

Metrick was one of those emergency room financial doctors. Six months after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, he got a call from the Obama administration.

They desperately needed a financial economist. So Metrick moved to Washington to work for the Council of Economic Advisers. There, as chief staff economist, he helped develop programs to revive housing and financial markets.

When it came time to propose legislation, he discovered that academic research wasn’t very useful.

“There was no real great connection between academic knowledge, economic intuition, and what we actually could put in the law because there just wasn’t a good body of research there,” Metrick says. “I was determined that when I came back to the academy I would try to be part of something that would help to fill that gap.”

That was the genesis of the Yale Program on Financial Stability, which got off the ground in 2014 with donations from organizations including the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Geithner joined soon after, teaching, raising money, and chairing the advisory board, which includes former central bankers such as the Federal Reserve’s Ben Bernanke, Mexico’s Agustín Carstens, and Malaysia’s Zeti Akhtar Aziz.

Geithner brought a practical focus to what became known as the New Bagehot Crisis-Response Project, named for Walter Bagehot, a 19th century British economist and author of Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market, a bible of sorts for the guardians of financial stability.

The project’s 14 researchers compile case studies of responses to the global financial crisis and the euro crisis that followed it. Eventually, they plan to study manias and panics going back to the South Sea Bubble in the 18th century.

While the global crisis spawned countless books, articles, and memoirs, the Bagehot project seeks to analyze it in a systematic way—and determine what kinds of government actions worked, what kinds didn’t, and why. The architects of crisis-fighting programs in various countries are consultants on the project.

“Our focus is really on the technical details of the interventions,” Metrick says.

Their plan is to create an online tool that crisis managers can turn to in real time, in case they need to recapitalize a bank, say, or set up an emergency liquidity facility. They will also learn what to avoid, like Ireland’s decision to guarantee the liabilities of its banks, which transformed a bank run into a far more serious sovereign debt crisis.

“Because the classic panic happens pretty rarely in the same country, even though it happens around the world with pretty appalling frequency, there’s not actually that much institutional memory, and there certainly wasn’t at the Treasury or the Fed, about how you deal with a systemic financial crisis,” Geithner says in an interview.

The summer symposium—Geithner called it a “war college”—was a two-week workshop for central bankers and regulators. The central banks of China, Europe, Japan, and the United States all sent participants, along with agencies like the Bank for International Settlements and the European Stability Mechanism.

Another piece of the Yale program is the two-day Financial Crisis Forum, where veterans including former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson offer their insights on subjects from capital injections to frozen money markets.

“For the current generation of officials, especially the younger ones who attend the conference, learning from history is vital,” says Paul Tucker, deputy governor of the Bank of England from 2009 to 2013. “Going forward, current officials also need to learn from the crises that, believe it or not, were averted or successfully contained.”

Finally, there is Yale’s one-year master’s degree in systemic risk, which offers early career professionals a chance to hone their skills and develop new ones. A recent graduate is Özgü Özen Çavuşoğlu, who returned to her job in the financial stability division of Turkey’s central bank and is now researching an early-warning system for the country’s economy.

Just as important, she says, was the opportunity to forge bonds with colleagues from across the globe.

“We are living in an interconnected world,” Özen Çavuşoğlu says. “That’s why the network of people with the same understanding will play an important role in having a stable global economy.”

The link to the original article: https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2018/12/tim-geithner-yale-program-financial-stability-wellisz.htm?utm_medium=email&utm_source=govdelivery

The post Veterans of the Global Financial Crisis Pass their Wisdom on to the Next Generation appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Chris Wellisz is on the staff of Finance & Development at the International Monetary Fund (IMF)

The post Veterans of the Global Financial Crisis Pass their Wisdom on to the Next Generation appeared first on Inter Press Service.