Six In The Morning

Rise of an economic superpower: What does China want?

 Other countries unnerved, despite Beijing’s efforts to assuage their fears

By Peter Ford

Staff writer

It had been billed as a friendly exhibition game in basketball-crazy Beijing, between the Georgetown University Hoyas from Washington, D.C., and the Chinese Army’s Bayi Rockets. But after some blatantly biased Chinese refereeing and unashamedly aggressive play by Bayi, it ended in a bench-clearing brawl, with Chinese fans in the Olympic stadium throwing chairs and bottles of water at the Americans.

Some foreigners in the crowd that hot night in August were tempted to see the melee as nothing less than a metaphor for China’s role in the world today: contempt for the rules and fair play, crowned by a resort to brute strength in pursuit of narrow self-interest.

  Cubans hail a private property revolution

 State controls are whittled back as Raúl Castro abolishes the ban on buying and selling houses

 Andrew Hamilton

The Observer, Sunday 6 November 2011

 “I almost feel rich!” says Yeni, 26, speaking from her dilapidated two-bedroom apartment in Havana’s Vedado district. Her surroundings are not those of a wealthy woman. The home she shares with an infant cousin and two aunts was built in the 1940s. It has no hot water and has not been renovated in 70 years – but it is hers. And from Thursday she will be able to sell it.

Shortly after the Cuban revolution brought Fidel Castro to power in 1959, all homes effectively became the property of the state. Cubans who remained on the island were given the right to live in the homes they occupied and pass them on to friends or relatives. They were also permitted to swap houses. However, selling or buying was prohibited.

Rupert Cornwell: Is the American Dream at an end?

The US goes to the presidential polls a year from today, but there is little faith in the political system as recession bites

RUPERT CORNWELL    SUNDAY 06 NOVEMBER 2011  

‘Ten years ago we had Johnny Cash, Bob Hope and Steve Jobs,” runs a sour joke that has been doing the rounds since Silicon Valley lost its most famous son. “Now there’s no cash, no hope and no jobs.” Perhaps not a contender for the Nobel Prize in side-splitters, but it catches America’s dark mood – a year to the day before the country delivers its verdict on whether Barack Obama merits a second term in the White House.

Before every presidential election, there is talk that this one will be historic, a “watershed” to match the two that truly qualified for that title during the previous century: 1932, which ushered in Franklin Roosevelt and five decades of Democratic domination, and the Reagan landslide of 1980 that made official a conservative shift in national politics that continues to this day.

Beijing elite breathes easy as proletariat sucks in smog



Andrew Jacobs, Beijing

November 6, 2011

MEMBERSHIP of the upper ranks of the Chinese Communist Party has always had a few advantages: state-supplied luxury sedans, special schools and organic produce grown on well-guarded, government-run farms.

But even in their most addled moments of envy, ordinary Beijingers could take some comfort in the knowledge that the soupy air they breathe on especially polluted days also finds its way into the lungs of the privileged and pampered. Such assumptions are not entirely accurate.

 African farmers battle to break into carbon credit market

 

CLAUDINE RENAUD JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA – Nov 06 2011

The continent’s farmers were meant to be among the main beneficiaries of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which lets industrialised countries and their companies fund green projects in the developing world in exchange for credits toward their emission-cutting targets under the Kyoto Protocol.

But as climate negotiators prepare for a tough round of talks on the future of Kyoto — the only deal to date with legally binding commitments to cut greenhouse gases — farmers in Africa complain the CDM’s complicated paperwork puts the emissions trading programme out of their reach.

Why Colombia’s FARC rebels remain a threat after Cano’s killing

Colombian forces bombed the jungle camp where FARC chief Cano was hiding. But while Colombia’s FARC rebels are half the size they were a decade ago, they still are capable of major attacks.

By Sibylla Brodzinsky, Correspondent  

Colombia forces have killed the top leader of the country’s most powerful guerrilla army after a bomb raid on his jungle camp, officials said, calling it the “most resounding blow” to the FARC in its nearly 50-year struggle against the government.

Guillermo Leon Saenz, whose nom de guerre was Alfonso Cano, was killed in combat Friday evening after an air raid earlier in the day in a remote region of Cauca Province. Cano’s body was  was identified through fingerprinting.  A photograph released to the media showed he had shaved off his trademark beard.

While Cano is the most senior commander of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia ever to be killed in combat, his death does not mean the imminent demise of the FARC.