The Internet Can’t Replace Real Human Interaction - TIME

September 17, 2015 at 7:08pm

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http://time.com/4036310/rosh-hashana-internet-sacred-spaces/

The Internet Can’t Replace Real Human Interaction
Rabbi David Wolpe Sept. 16, 2015   


David Wolpe is the Max Webb Senior Rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles.
A Rosh Hashana reminder of the power of sacred spaces


Watching people assemble for services on Rosh Hashana, I was struck anew by a powerful reality of houses of worship: They remain that rare place in American society where people of different ages sit together in common cause. Yes, people gather at a sports arena or concert, but that is to watch, not to participate. Besides, the baby in the stroller and the 93-year-old are not usually found at the same concert. In a world where community is increasingly difficult, and atomization is becoming the norm, Prayer is a moment of togetherness.

Sociologist Robert Putnam famously wrote about the shrinking of social capital more than a decade ago. Observing that bowling leagues declined as more and more people chose to bowl alone, he cast his eye about society and saw the fragmentation in almost every sphere of public life. Political parties are less attractive, social clubs and groups less cohesive and prevalent. Now more than ever in history we can function autonomously, sitting at home, watching TV, getting our news from the Internet, paying our bills online, and ordering up everything from food to books to videos to lawn furniture, all without moving from one spot.

Not so if you attend a Synagogue or Church or Mosque. Many houses of worship now stream their services, yet they are still designed as places for people to come and join together. The inevitable frictions and joys of human contact are central to prayer. Each year after the holidays I receive letters of complaint about people who were talking, disturbing those who sat near them. But I get far more letters of appreciation as people renew acquaintances, see children grow from year to year, feel the mysterious, sad tug of realizing that certain faces are no longer there, and remembering that a video screen cannot match the anxious thrill and warm spark of human contact.

An old Jewish story has it that two men, Schwartz and Goldberg, were walking to the synagogue. A neighbor, spotting them traveling together, stops and asks: “Hey Goldberg, I understand why you are going to synagogue—you are a believer. But Schwartz, you aren’t religious. Why are you going?” And Schwartz answers, “Goldberg goes to talk to God. I go to talk to Goldberg.”

I long ago learned that most people do not come to the synagogue for doctrine. They come for one another. In the hallway encounters, in the catching up—yes, even in the gossip—there is the tie of community that runs deep in our nature.

The decline in attendance at churches and synagogues is sad for those of us who care for religion, of course. But it is also sad to see the waning of one of the last great institutions that brings people together. Yes, the synagogue is full of problems and politics, but that is just another way of saying it is full of people. Here is a place that welcomes us, sublime and sinful as we are, and asks us to share together with others who are no better and no worse. The Internet will be humming when you get home. The news will be ready at a moment’s notice. In the meantime, you will have interacted with other human beings, and perhaps, had a moment to encounter God.

For U.S. Pilots, the Real War on ISIS is a Far Cry From ‘Top Gun’ - New York Times

September 17, 2015 at 12:33am

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For U.S. Pilots, the Real War on ISIS is a Far Cry From ‘Top Gun’
By HELENE COOPERSEPT. 16, 2015



ABOARD THE U.S.S. THEODORE ROOSEVELT, in the Persian Gulf — Soon after this aircraft carrier arrived here for its Middle East deployment, two F/A-18 Super Hornets catapulted off its deck for a six-and-a-half-hour bombing run toward Islamic State targets in Iraq. In one of the fighter jets was Navy Lt. Michael Smallwood, 28, call sign Bones, and in the other was his friend and roommate, Navy Lt. Nick Smith, also 28, call sign Yip Yip.

For a minute or two that day in May, the Hornets were right next to each other in the sky, but then Lieutenant Smith’s plane had engine trouble and began to lose altitude. Over the radio, Lieutenant Smallwood could hear his friend turn around, try to land back on the carrier and then eject into the Persian Gulf. The $60 million Hornet crashed into the sea.

Lieutenant Smallwood found himself fighting to keep his mind off the fate of his friend, but his orders were to continue climbing and fly on to Iraq. On many such missions, he simply loitered in the skies, dropped no munitions and headed back to the carrier.


The Pilots Fighting ISIS
In the year since the American air offensive against the Islamic State began, fighter pilots have assumed a huge bulk of the war effort. Here are some of the American pilots carrying out those operations.



This is the life of the modern day American fighter pilot — long periods of monotony, combat missions that end with bombs still intact to avoid hitting civilians, occasional moments of fear. It is a long way from “Top Gun,” the iconic 1986 Hollywood blockbuster that made Tom Cruise a household name and Navy fighter pilots the heroes of adolescent boys everywhere.

But these real-life pilots — the elite of the elite, trained to routinely land on moving aircraft carriers and to refuel in midair, two of the most difficult maneuvers in aviation — are some of America’s main warriors against the Islamic State. In the year since airstrikes against Islamic State militants began, American pilots have assumed a huge bulk of the war effort. They have conducted more than 4,700 airstrikes since August 2014 — 87 percent of the manned flights by the American-led coalition — and provided air support for Iraqi security forces and Kurdish pesh merga fighters on the ground.

The Islamic State may have shoulder-fired, heat-seeking missiles, commonly known as Manpads for Man-Portable Air Defense Systems. But at the moment, the militant Sunni group does not appear to have the capability to bring down American fighter jets. A Jordanian plane that crashed in Syria in December, leading to the capture of the pilot and his eventual immolation by the Islamic State, is widely believed to have gone down because of mechanical failure or pilot error, and not because it was shot down.

“Quite honestly, the U.S. Air Force, Navy and Marines own the skies,” said Maj. Anthony Bourke, a former Air Force fighter pilot. “So even though pilots dream of dogfights, the biggest risk now is small-arms fire, and if you stay above 10,000 feet, you’re not going to be hit.”

The risks are different. As Lieutenant Smallwood’s plane flew toward Iraq in May after his friend had ejected from his own jet, he could hear from the chatter on the radio that a recovery effort was underway. But Lieutenant Smallwood knew better than to clog up the frequency asking if Lieutenant Smith and his weapons officer on the plane had been found alive.


Five more hours to go. Arriving in the skies over Iraq, Lieutenant Smallwood’s Super Hornet connected with a refueling tanker to get gas, then continued with the task at hand. But whenever there was a lull in the flight, “all I could think about was my roommate and his W.S.O.,” Lieutenant Smallwood said, using the military term for weapons officer.

Engine troubles are not the only risk at 25,000 feet. The F/A-18s today require more G-forces than the planes of the “Top Gun” era, and pilots today pull nine G’s instead of four and five G’s. It is the difference, they say, between feeling that your head weighs 90 pounds instead of 40 pounds. (Most people’s heads weigh around 10 pounds.) So pilots have to be physically fit — not dehydrated or hungover from drinking and crooning the Righteous Brothers to Kelly McGillis at a bar the night before.

Beyond that, Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria are often in heavily populated civilian areas, which limits the air war to small, remote targets: single trucks, weapons caches and even individual machine guns.

Despite the precautions the pilots say they take, there are civilian casualties from airstrikes, although the number is in deep dispute. Officials with United States Central Command, which overseas American military operations in the Middle East, recently said that they had received reports of 31 episodes involving civilian casualties since the airstrikes began, and had dismissed 17 as not credible, with six still under investigation. One report, investigated for more than six months, led Centcom officials to conclude that two children were probably killed by a coalition airstrike.

Monitoring groups say the command’s figures are a gross understatement.

“When you’re called in to deliver a weapon, general world opinion swings very violently against you when you start killing the wrong people,” said Capt. Benjamin Hewlett, 46, call sign Pizza, who is the commander of air wing aboard the Roosevelt. He said that in the war against the Islamic State, bombs hit their intended targets almost all of the time. A big part of the reason, Captain Hewlett said, is that there are no American troops on the ground.

“So we don’t feel that we have to rush in,” he said. “The natural tendency is, our guys are under fire, I’ve got to get in there. But when you rush a bad delivery, people get hurt.”

Pilots and weapons officers spend a lot of their time in the air watching patterns of civilian life, to determine whether a movement on a road just outside of Ramadi is a truck full of Islamic State fighters or a pickup with civilians. They fly over designated grid areas, typically 60 square miles, searching for fighters, artillery and other signs of the enemy. They very often return to the Roosevelt with all of their bombs still strapped to the planes.

Certainly there are no Mavericks in the sky conducting barrel rolls over suspicious-looking enemy pilots in MiG fighters. “That is not tactically viable,” said Capt. Kyle Wilson, 29, call sign Betty, a Marine pilot on the Roosevelt.


It was late at night, and he and other members of his squadron were in the “ready room,” an eight-floors-deep clubroom/classroom that fighter pilots use when they are not in the air. The men — there is only one female pilot aboard the Roosevelt for this deployment — had been up at least since the shipwide reveille at dawn.

“If you do that, I’m just going to shoot you,” Captain Wilson said about the barrel rolls. The Pentagon in fact condemns them. When a Chinese fighter jet did one last August over an American Navy spy plane near Hainan Island, China, the Pentagon called it “unsafe and unprofessional” and the Obama administration issued a stern protest to the Chinese authorities.

Still, there was a lot of machismo on display. There is plenty of drinking at bars (although no alcohol is allowed on the Roosevelt), and plenty of attitude. Many of the men sport Breitling watches, the go-to expensive accessory of pilots around the world.

The big question in the ready room was the rumor that Hollywood was making “Top Gun 2.” So what would take the place of the beach volleyball scene with all the “Top Gun” pilots sweating under the California sun?

“Crud,” said Capt. Lanier Bishop, 31, call sign Pope. He flashed a quick look at his commanding officer and fellow pilot, Maj. William Mitchell, 39, call sign Skull. “It’s got to be Crud, right?”

Crud, the two said, is a combination of pool and rugby that fighter pilots play. At pool tables in officers’ clubs across the world, pilots use their hands, instead of pool cues, to whip the ball across the table, and then bodily tackle each other for some reason. One pilot said he had broken someone’s ribs playing Crud.

There remains a lot of camaraderie. Back in May, Lieutenant Smallwood did not know the fate of his roommate when he finally landed back on the Roosevelt just after 11 p.m., after his six-and-a-half-hour strike mission.

As he bolted out of his plane, Lieutenant Smallwood was told that his friend had survived, fished out of the water by rescuers.

“But I still had to run down to the room to see for myself,” Lieutenant Smallwood recalled. “First thing I did was hug him.”

‘Kissinger’, by Niall Ferguson - A review by Chris Patten - Financial Times

September 23, 2015 at 11:38pm

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http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/0a69b8b8-5c73-11e5-9846-de406ccb37f2.html

September 18, 2015 1:27 pm
‘Kissinger’, by Niall Ferguson
Chris Patten

In his account of a journey from Bavaria to the heart of power in Washington, Niall Ferguson portrays his subject as a man driven by principle more than pragmatism

Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist, by Niall Ferguson, Allen Lane, RRP£35 / Penguin Press, RRP$39.95, 1,008 pages
The All Souls historian Rohan Butler concluded the first volume of his biography of the French statesman Choiseul with this sentence on page 1,078: “The diplomatic and political career of the Duke of Choiseul had begun.”
Alas, Butler died before he was able to continue the story. We must hope that the same fate does not befall Niall Ferguson, the author of this huge biography of a great international public servant and scholar. Weighing in at close to 1,000 pages, it ends at the moment in 1968 when Henry Kissinger gets his first big job in a Washington administration, as national security adviser to President Richard Nixon. The runway to take-off stretches a very long way.
This is not to contest Kissinger’s importance and notoriety in 20th-century history. Now 92, he is one of the giants of America’s years of global pre-eminence. No wonder he appeared 15 times on the cover of Time magazine during his period as national security adviser and then secretary of state. Moreover, he continued to attract celebrity attention for decades after leaving office in 1977. This is partly because of his record in government, which made him the dark darling of conspiracy theorists; the next volume of this biography will presumably cover some of these controversies. Kissinger has also been kept in the spotlight by his regular and authoritative interventions in public debate, which continue to this day.
He offers his views not just as an experienced diplomat but also as a fine historian. This perhaps lured Ferguson — a professor of history at Harvard University and a ubiquitous contributor to the written and electronic media — into extensive analysis of and quotation from his subject’s early academic work, as if it all pointed the way inexorably to what he would do when transformed by presidential authority into a policymaker at the heart of the most powerful government in the world. What these passages admittedly do is to remind us that Kissinger’s life is not a value-free zone; he was clearly shaped more by Spinoza and Kant than by Machiavelli.

But we can understand more about Kissinger’s tactics and strategy from what he wrote after his years in office. You learn about his preoccupations as a policymaker, for example, by reading his masterly Diplomacy (1994). This draws significant parallels between the two international systems that have brought the modern world the greatest stability: the Concert of Europe that existed between 1815 and 1914, and the system dominated by the US after the second world war. Today the route to world order is more difficult to discern and navigate.
Kissinger’s personal journey from the industrial town of Fürth in Bavaria, whose Jewish community was terrorised by Nazi gangs, to the “Happy Days Are Here Again” years of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New York tells us much about his own values and fortitude. He was initially quite ambivalent about his new home. Writing to a friend in 1939 he noted, as have many other Europeans on their first encounter with the US, that he had to balance things he admired against things he deplored: “Alongside excessive wealth, unspeakable poverty. And then this individualism! You stand completely on your own, no one cares about you, you have to make your own way upwards.”
That is exactly what he did, first as a soldier-citizen fighting in Europe, then as one of those who managed the denazification campaign after the war’s end and the discovery in the concentration camps of what Nazism had meant for millions of Jews, homosexuals and other minorities. He explained thoughtfully to his parents why his job should not involve the pursuit of vengeance. It was vital to be fair as well as tough; nor did he lose his profound sense of the centrality of Germany to European civilisation. He had instructed those who worked for him to “lose no opportunity to prove by word and deed the virility of our ideals”.
Returning to America, Kissinger, like 2m other American servicemen, took advantage of the GI Bill to go to university on a Harvard scholarship — in his case accompanied by a cocker spaniel, Smoky. His peer group was rich in talent that took many of its members to the top in politics, journalism and public service. He majored in government but wrote his immensely long thesis on “The Meaning of History”. Then began the years of hand-to-hand combat common to so many competitive academic careers, where the ferocity of the argument is often in inverse proportion to the importance of the subject.
Kissinger was initially quite ambivalent about the US. ‘Alongside excessive wealth, unspeakable poverty,’ he wrote. ‘And then this individualism!’
Like other ambitious academics, Kissinger pitched his tent in “BosWash”, travelling backwards and forwards from Harvard to Washington to give his advice to any who would listen, regardless of their political affiliations. He was deeply hostile to the Soviet Union’s scheme for exerting its power and influence on Europe, for example by its proposal for a reunification of Germany on the basis of that country’s neutrality. He had a deep knowledge of German politics, as well as of the country’s strategic importance to the rest of its continent, and was always inclined to give precedence in his transatlantic travels to Bonn and Berlin, and even Paris, over London.
Ferguson argues that for all Kissinger’s expertise in German affairs, his problem was that he knew more about his country of birth than he did about the country of his citizenship. As late as 1959, the biographer suggests, Kissinger had probably visited fewer than 10 of America’s 50 states. This must have contributed to one of his major blind spots: his inability to understand that the aristocratic Governor Nelson Rockefeller, to whom he hitched his wagon, was increasingly unlikely to attract majority support in a Republican party that was moving at a canter to the right. He was horrified by the rabid intolerance of rightwing Barry Goldwater supporters at the 1964 Republican convention, just as he was later shocked by the antics of the anti-Vietnam war left on university campuses.
Kissinger became notorious for the first time through his writings on the tactics of nuclear warfare, which left him with the unjust reputation of a Dr Strangelove. To be fair to him, he was wrestling with what seemed to many to be the implausible basis of America’s security policy, namely that if its interests or those of an ally such as Germany were seriously threatened then massive nuclear retaliation would be the inevitable response. At an intellectual level it was impossible to imagine that anyone could seriously contemplate visiting Armageddon on the planet if, say, Moscow pushed too hard on Berlin. Kissinger argued that each threat should be dealt with at an appropriate level; the response to a smaller threat could be a smaller nuclear device. But it was not convincing that you could use smaller so-called tactical nuclear weapons without catastrophic consequences. The fallout in every sense could not be contained.
As it happened, it was possible to conduct a policy of flexible response, as President John F Kennedy did, combining credible military threats with imaginative diplomacy to end the Cuban missile crisis without blowing up the world. As for the other crises of the cold war, they were contained by the realisation, in Moscow as in Washington, that mutually assured destruction would follow any attempt to overplay a security hand. The policy was turned suitably enough into the acronym “MAD”, which it was. In recent years, Kissinger has joined other former American foreign policy and security officials to advocate beginning the elimination of all nuclear weapons.

Ferguson is particularly convincing in arguing against the popular view that Kissinger is the ultimate pragmatic realist, a polar opposite to those whose ideals shape and infuse their actions. It is of course possible and sensible to be pragmatic at one moment and an idealist the next, according to circumstance. Indeed as Tony Blair’s career demonstrated, it is even possible, if confusing, sometimes to be motivated by both sentiments at the same time. That was the case with the former British prime minister’s arguments for intervention in states that abused their citizens’ human rights. For Ferguson, Kissinger is a mainstream European conservative, moulded by Kant’s realism about humanity and by Burke’s respect for historical forces. “It is the dilemma of conservatism,” Kissinger once wrote, “that it must fight revolution anonymously, by what it is, not by what it says.” Kissinger’s views on how to handle postwar Germany, how to hold at bay Soviet ambitions, and how to articulate American foreign and security policy all had a moral and idealistic as well as a practical core.
As noted earlier, Kissinger’s blind spots included knowledge of American democratic politics, which certainly contributed to his unlikely alliance with Nixon. He had previously worked for both Kennedy and Johnson, in the latter case being led up the garden path by wily Vietnamese diplomacy in the honourable pursuit of a peace deal that would enable the US to escape from a terrible and divisive war. He would have liked to work for a Rockefeller administration, and contributed much good sense to the governor up to and beyond the point at which the billionaire politician’s presidential ambitions were finally sunk. A more cynically ambitious man might have abandoned the Rockefeller ship long before that. And then Nixon — tricky, but pretty clever, Dicky — almost accidentally made him an offer which he could not possibly refuse. The contingent factor in history took another bow.
Nixon shared Kissinger’s admiration for big historical figures. Kissinger himself rather exaggerated, in my view, the geopolitical wisdom of Charles de Gaulle. He was surely correct, like his new master, to see the huge significance of Mao, an appalling tyrant but the leader of a vast country that had held together after the war partly thanks to the ruthlessness of its leadership. China had mighty potential and promise. Nixon probably saw its economic significance more clearly than Kissinger, who never seems quite at home in the world of gross domestic product extrapolations, export figures and demography. The president understood that Vietnam was an appallingly damaging diversion for the US, since capitalism was inevitably going to trump communism and since globalisation would create a different and less polarised world. How best to get out of Vietnam and draw China into a changing global order? These were to be dominant subjects for the partnership of the “odd couple” formed in Washington in 1968.
This is where Ferguson leaves us. His last paragraph tells us that “the time of becoming was over” for Kissinger; “the time of being had at last begun”. The sentiment echoes Rohan Butler on Choiseul. What we can be sure of is that future volumes about “the time of being” will excite a lot more controversy than this one. Kissingerphobes must be counting the days. So next time passions will run much higher; knives will be out; judgment will be reached and simplistically demanded about the career in office of a very remarkable statesman, who like the rest of us (but on a global scale) tried to wrestle with the predicament of what it is to be human.
Lord Patten is chancellor of the University of Oxford. He is a former European commissioner for external relations and was the last governor of Hong Kong

Volkswagen’s deception is a warning to every company - Financial Times

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/9e4a72a2-2f8c-11e5-91ac-a5e17d9b4cff.html#axzz3mPGibw7b

September 23, 2015 5:42 pm
Volkswagen’s deception is a warning to every company
John GapperJohn Gapper

Suddenly, behaviour that was common practice is judged to be improper and possibly illegal

The most dangerous three-word phrase in business is: “Everyone does it.”
However conventional it is to bend the industry’s regulations, however great an advantage your rivals gain, however much pressure you face to do so too, there is a simple test for deciding whether to succumb to temptation. What would happen if the world found out? How great would the damage be?

Volkswagen’s installation of software to make its diesel cars emit more pollution on the road than in official tests is a disaster that has forced the resignation of Martin Winterkorn, chief executive. It could tarnish the entire European auto industry, which has invested heavily in diesel technology. But it is hardly the first time that a vehicle manufacturer has behaved sneakily.
It has become so common to game European fuel efficiency tests with tricks such as taping up doors and overinflating tyres to curb drag that most diesel cars are less fuel-efficient and environmentally friendly than claimed. In the US, Ford was found to have fitted an illegal “defeat device” — the charge facing VW — to vans in 1997, and Hyundai and Kia were fined $100m last year for fixing their tests.
The car industry is not alone in such behaviour. The same thing happens in many industries, from banking to pharmaceuticals. A few companies decide gently to bend the rules and stretch regulations and others soon follow. They know it is a little dodgy but it becomes normal practice and regulators turn a blind eye. Then, one day, someone goes too far and scandal erupts.
“Although I was operating within a system . . . in which it was commonplace, I was someone who was a serial offender,” Tom Hayes, the former UBS banker jailed for 14 years last month for rigging Libor benchmark rates, told the UK Serious Fraud Office. Mr Hayes was talented at it and at enlisting other traders to co-operate. An official investigation eventually ensued.
When the backlash comes, it comes with a vengeance. Suddenly, behaviour that was common practice, passed over with a nod and a wink, or secretly condoned to keep up with rivals, is judged to be improper and perhaps illegal. “Everyone did it” is no defence. Once it has been exposed to public gaze, and regulators have been shamed for failing to stop it, there is no forgiveness.
Amid an angry search for who was responsible within a company, senior executives are hastily drilled to face official inquiries and media briefings and answer the question: “Why did you do it?” There is no good response to it, although Michael Horn, VW’s US chief executive, had an accurate one: “We have totally screwed up.”
The key to getting away with bending rules is that it needs to be done subtly and discreetly. Abuse may be common but it cannot become too blatant, or it will alert regulators that tolerate some grey areas. The car industry is a prime example: it was public knowledge that the gap between the official fuel economy data and actual performance was wide but VW stupidly took the deception to a higher level.

Frauds often start in laboratories, where the outcome is bound to be artificial. A certificate attesting that a product works a certain way in a company’s laboratory — even if no one has cheated — cannot guarantee the same of its real-world performance. Inevitably, companies tend to focus on hitting the laboratory targets they are set, just as students cram for examinations.
The gap between a well-designed test and reality need not be huge. But bright minds will soon work out how to arbitrage the two, just as banks calculated how to meet regulatory capital standards with the minimum amount of equity capital in the run-up to the 2008 crisis. Hyundai and Kia cherry-picked the best mileage tests, achieved with a following wind and special tyres.
Crowd psychology rapidly takes hold. Company X knows what Company Y is doing to game its results without being punished by the regulator, and realises it cannot compete if it does not do the same. The tests are officially sanctioned, after all, and customers are not likely to question them. Any executive or engineer who tries to resist is overruled as naive or difficult.
Rivalry creates evermore ambitious attempts to gain an advantage, and greater reputational risk. VW contrived to fit its rule-breaking gadget to 11m cars under the noses of regulators before it was discovered. Even researchers at the International Council on Clean Transportation, which identified the deception in Europe, did not believe that it would be so blatant.
Sooner or later, one company goes too far. There is bound to be a Libor super-rigger, a VW, or a GlaxoSmithKline in China, which flouts the law to such an extent that it cannot be concealed. Many companies had paid bribes to doctors and hospitals in China, but its government was bound one day to make an example of a western company doing it so systematically.
The head of a Wall Street bank once told me the lesson he had learned from financial scandals was that ethics are absolute, not comparative. “We don’t behave as badly as our rivals” was a tempting but dangerous attitude. Many companies imperil themselves by clinging to this mantra.
Volkswagen wins the dubious honour of being the worst-behaved company in its industry, but it was a contest.
john.gapper@ft.com

Russia to deploy 2,000 in Syria air base mission’s ‘first phase’ - Financial Times

September 22, 2015 at 9:17pm

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September 21, 2015 9:08 pm
Russia to deploy 2,000 in Syria air base mission’s ‘first phase’
Kathrin Hille in Moscow and John Reed in Jerusalem

Russia is to deploy 2,000 military personnel to its new air base near the Syrian port city of Latakia, signalling the scale of Moscow’s involvement in the war-torn country.
The deployment “forms the first phase of the mission there”, according to an adviser on Syria policy in Moscow.

The force will include fighter aircraft crews, engineers and troops to secure the facility, said another person briefed on the matter.
The pair declined to confirm whether Moscow had sent surface-to-air missiles and fighter jets, as alleged by Washington at the weekend.
But Russian and western military experts said surface-to-air missiles were an integral part of the defences of any air base.
The comments are unlikely to allay fears in the US-led coalition fighting the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis), that Russia’s military involvement in Syria could escalate the country’s bloody civil war or risk incidents between Russian and other forces active in the country.
A Russian official on Monday dismissed as “disingenuous” comments by John Kerry, US secretary of state, that the presence of Russian air-to-air combat capacity and surface-to-air missiles in Syria “raises serious questions”, since the capabilities are of little military use against jihadi groups such as Isis, which is Moscow’s stated reason for its increased intervention in the Syrian conflict.
“You know as well as we do that anyone building an air base will put in such air defences, so there’s no reason to use this to cast doubt on our initiative to fight the Islamic State,” he said.
Three western defence officials agreed that the Russian deployment tallied with the numbers needed to establish a forward air base similar to those built by western militaries in Afghanistan.
Podcast

Benjamin Netanyahu is on a lightning visit to Moscow to discuss Russia’s military deployments in Syria in a sign of Israel’s growing unease over arms transfers in the region. Siona Jenkins talks to John Reed, Financial Times Jerusalem correspondent, about the Israeli prime minister’s concerns.
Fears that Russia’s ramped up military presence could further complicate the balance of forces in Syria prompted Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to travel to Moscow for a meeting with President Vladimir Putin on Monday.
After the meeting, Mr Netanyahu told Israeli media that he and Mr Putin had agreed on a mechanism to co-ordinate the two countries’ military actions in Syria and prevent Israeli and Russian troops from accidentally exchanging fire.
“Israel and Russia share a common interest to ensure stability in the Middle East,” Mr Netanyahu said.
Mr Putin condemned attacks against Israel but said they were carried out by “internal elements” rather than the Syrian army, which he described as incapable of opening a new front.
“Our main goal is to defend the Syrian state,” Mr Putin said.
We must compromise with evil in Syria
Daniel Pudles illustration
Overriding goal must be to end the war and persuade outside forces to back a peace settlement
Read more
The Israelis have warned repeatedly about the transfer of what they call “game-changing” weapons to Hizbollah. The Iran-backed militant group — which supports Moscow’s ally, Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad — has shelled Israel in the past. Israel has targeted suspected weapons convoys or caches inside Syria in several unacknowledged air strikes since 2013.
In a sign of the risks this could entail, Moscow on Monday accused Syrian rebel forces of shelling its embassy in Damascus and demanded that their western and regional allies take steps to rein them in.
The Russian foreign ministry said a shell, which landed near its embassy on Sunday but caused no casualties, came from Jobar, which is held by anti-Assad fighters who were not allied with Isis and had “external sponsors”.
“We expect a clear position with regard to this terrorist act from all members of the international community, including regional players,” the ministry said. “This requires not just words but concrete action.”
It added that the fighters’ “foreign sponsors” were responsible for using their influence on “illegal armed formations”.

Russia Has Added Dozens of Aircraft to Its Growing Military Presence in Syria - TIME

September 22, 2015 at 9:00pm

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http://time.com/4043955/russia-syria-latakia-28-aircraft-assad-isis/

Russia Has Added Dozens of Aircraft to Its Growing Military Presence in Syria: Reports
Rishi Iyengar @Iyengarish 2:37 AM ET   
Vladimir Putin has reportedly added drones, attack helicopters and aircraft to its force in Syria in recent weeks

Russia rapidly increased its aerial attack capabilities in Syria over the weekend, U.S. officials told Agence France-Presse on Monday, including 28 combat planes that have been sighted at a new Russian air base in the Syrian province of Latakia.

The fleet includes 12 SU-24 attack aircraft, 12 SU-25 ground attack aircraft and four Flanker fighter jets, the officials told the news agency on condition of anonymity. An influx of new weaponry was also reported separately by the New York Times and CNN.

One of the officials told AFP of the additional presence of around 20 combat helicopters and said Russian forces are flying surveillance drones over the Middle Eastern nation’s airspace.

According to the Times, Russia’s military presence in Syria also includes at least three surface-to-air missiles, nine tanks and around 500 marines.

“The equipment and personnel just keep flowing in,” another official told the Times. “They were very busy over the weekend.”

Reports of the new aircraft emerged soon after U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter held talks with his Russian counterpart Sergei Shoigu on Friday. They discussed concerns that the two forces might inadvertently clash with each other as a U.S.-led coalition continues its air strikes against the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) militant group.

The U.S. and other Western powers fundamentally differ with Moscow on the role of Syria’s President Bashar Assad, believing he must step down in order for his country to emerge from civil war. Russia, on the other hand, is one of the Assad regime’s most prominent allies and has defended its military assistance to the Syrian army.

U.S. State Department spokesperson John Kirby said during a press briefing on Monday that he was “not in a position to independently verify” the reports of Russian aircraft and drones.

“If Russia looks to play a constructive role against [ISIS], that’s one thing, but if what they’re doing is, in fact, propping up the Assad regime, then that’s an entirely different issue altogether,” Kirby added, “because it is the Assad regime that has been a magnet for extremists inside Syria.”

Plan on Migrants Strains the Limits of Europe’s Unity - New York Times

September 24, 2015 at 2:31pm

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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/23/world/europe/european-union-ministers-migrants-refugees.html?emc=edit_th_20150923&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=56381892&_r=0

Plan on Migrants Strains the Limits of Europe’s Unity
By STEVEN ERLANGER and JAMES KANTERSEPT. 22, 2015


LONDON — After weeks of indecision, the European Union voted on Tuesday to distribute 120,000 asylum seekers among member states, a plan meant to display unity in the face of the largest movement of refugees on the Continent since World War II.

Instead, the decision — forced through by a majority vote, over the bitter objections of four eastern members — did as much to underline the bloc’s widening divisions, even over a modest step that barely addresses the crisis.

Nearly half a million migrants and refugees have arrived in Europe this year, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, a number that is only expected to rise.

The crisis has tested the limits of Europe’s ability to forge consensus on one of the most divisive issues to confront the union since the fall of Communism. It has set right-wing nationalist and populist politicians against Pan-European humanitarians, who have portrayed the crisis in stark moral terms.

Walid Lebad with his family outside their trailer at the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan. Mr. Lebad started a garden seven months ago using soil from a construction project on the camp's outskirts and water recycled from his family's bathing and cooking.As Others Flee to West, Most Syrian Refugees Remain in RegionSEPT. 22, 2015
Migrants on Monday at the Schwarzlsee reception camp in Graz, Austria, where they receive food, shelter and health care before they move on to Germany.Austria Takes Role of Distribution Center for Germany-Bound MigrantsSEPT. 21, 2015
Migrants in Bregana, Croatia, near the border with Slovenia. Authorities in Slovenia on Sunday were halting migrants at its border with Croatia to the south and allowing them to pass in small groups.U.S. Will Accept More Refugees as Crisis GrowsSEPT. 20, 2015
Police officers directed migrants to buses at a camp near the village of Roszke, Hungary, on Monday.Austria, Slovakia and the Netherlands Introduce Border ControlsSEPT. 14, 2015
“We would have preferred to have adoption by consensus, but we did not manage to achieve that,” Jean Asselborn, the foreign minister of Luxembourg, said after a meeting of home affairs and interior ministers.


Leaders from across the 28-member bloc will meet in Brussels on Wednesday for further discussions on how to respond to the crisis.

Mr. Asselborn said even countries that voted against the distribution of asylum seekers — the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia — must comply. “I have no doubt they will implement these decisions fully,” he said.

But with the prime minister of Slovakia immediately threatening to defy the plan, the outcome was more than an example of the bloc’s inability to coordinate its policies — formidable enough through the long crisis over the euro and Greece’s debt.

The response to the refugee crisis so far has also raised profound questions about a failure of European principles, a trembling of the pillars on which the bloc was founded more than 20 years ago.

The European Union’s reputation, and its faith in Brussels, have suffered in the past few months, with sharp and vocal divisions among member states and continuing doubts about Greek economic sustainability.

The migrant crisis “risks bursting the E.U. at its weak seams,” said Stefano Stefanini, a former senior Italian ambassador now based in Brussels. “It’s more dangerous than the Greek drama and more serious than the euro, because it challenges fundamental European accomplishments and beliefs.”

With Tuesday’s vote, he said, “the cleavages only get deeper.”

In practical terms, those achievements are most manifest in the bloc’s single currency and the freedom of movement within the borderless, passport-free zone known as the Schengen area. Both are being put to the test as never before.

As with the euro, borderless travel was pushed ahead by the European Union as an essentially political idea, without Brussels having created the rules and institutions capable of coherently maintaining and enforcing it.



And as with the euro, the chaos over the refugees has raised questions about not only how the European Union functions but what it stands for, not least its aspirations to balance justice and security.


“People want to see both compassion and competence from the E.U., and those two things should not be at odds,” said David Miliband, a former British foreign minister and now director of the International Rescue Committee, a nongovernmental agency that helps refugees. “If the E.U. is incompetent, compassion is not enough.”

Formed as a peaceful, humane response to the blood bath of World War II, the bloc has always prided itself on its commitment to decency, including a traditional welcome among member states to accepting refugees.

But the surge of migrants has shredded that welcome and challenged the principles — and many of the practical benefits — of the Schengen zone. Austria, Germany, Hungary and Slovenia have all re-established border controls, at least temporarily, in recent weeks.

There is a growing recognition that Schengen can function only if its outermost borders are secure — as well as mounting evidence that they are not. Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council and a former prime minister of Poland, wrote European Union leaders last weekend that “we as Europeans are currently not able to manage our common external borders.”

Piled atop existing European concerns about low growth, high unemployment and high deficits, the migrant crisis is only more fodder for growing nationalist, populist and anti-European Union parties in countries like Britain, Denmark, France and Sweden.

“The European norm that is challenged is the idea of one for all, all for one, under the rubric of solidarity,” Mr. Miliband said. “There is a significant question about whether Europe pulls together in the face of a fundamental challenge, or it cleaves apart.”

A Europe “defined by a beggar-my-neighbor race to the bottom was precisely what the E.U. was created to prevent,” he said.

Volker Stanzel, a former German ambassador and senior official, said the migrant crisis was “a fundamental challenge, but not an existential one.” At the moment, “the internal fighting is ever more heated by the day,” he said.

“We’re in a process that is ugly, that some people call ‘refugee poker,’ with everyone horse trading and fighting for their own skin, but doing so in the framework of existing European mechanisms,” Mr. Stanzel said.

That is true even in Germany, Europe’s most European-minded power, he said.




At first, Chancellor Angela Merkel was criticized for her silence on the refugees. She then won praise for humanitarian generosity by ignoring European Union rules and throwing open Germany’s borders to Syrian asylum seekers. But that commitment faded once she was challenged by the Christian Socialists, her party’s partners in Bavaria, which was bearing the brunt of the flow.

“Then the decision comes that Germany will have to reintroduce border controls, even on the border with France, and then all the other countries follow suit,” Mr. Stanzel said.

Solidarity is at risk, Mr. Stefanini, the former Italian ambassador, agreed.

“We talk about how when you join the E.U., you accept that you have to share responsibilities as well as advantages,” he said. “Countries like Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary and some others react as if when they joined they didn’t sign up to share thousands of asylum seekers, or impose collective sanctions on Russia over Ukraine.”

“Once you join, all of a sudden you realize you can’t make all decisions on your own as before,” he said, “and that Schengen is great, but that you also lose control over your borders.”

The European Union “is not particularly good at dealing with the sort of crisis that demands quick action,” Mr. Stefanini said.

“The old European method is negotiations to seek consensus, and that takes time,” he said. “But here, as with Greece, you need quick decisions, you need to decide whether you do or you don’t. Instead, we’re wobbling along from the Greek crisis to this one, which is even more fundamental.”

Mr. Stanzel, the former German ambassador, said he was convinced that Europe would work out an arrangement, which will probably include reception centers in front-line countries like Greece, Hungary and Italy to feed, house and screen migrants and asylum seekers, and then distribute legitimate refugees to member countries.

Though forced to accept quotas for refugees, Eastern countries know that most of them will later travel to Germany or other countries in the Schengen area. Even if the Czechs are forced to take 5,000, “they know 3,000 of them will leave anyway — it’s cynical but it will work,” Mr. Stanzel said.

But in the longer term, he said, “it will be a big challenge to security over time, and to the police agencies, and to those who must integrate the refugees.”


There will also be a boon for the populist far-right, Mr. Stefanini said.

The National Front in France and the Northern League in Italy are “biding their time,” he said. To come out now against refugees in the face of German and public generosity would be a mistake, which the populists realize.

“So they say they’re for legitimate refugees but against an open door to Europe,” Mr. Stefanini said. “But there will be incidents and backlash, and then they will come out, and it will play into their hands.”

Steven Erlanger reported from London, and James Kanter from Brussels.

Let’s Face It, China Runs U.S. Monetary Policy Now - TIME

September 23, 2015 at 1:35am

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http://time.com/4043067/china-us-monetary-policy/

Let’s Face It, China Runs U.S. Monetary Policy Now

Rana Foroohar @RanaForoohar Sept. 21, 2015   

China's President Xi Jinping attends a signing ceremony with King of Jordan Abdullah II (not pictured) at he Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Sept. 9, 2015
At least that's what it looks like for the time being

As Chinese President Xi Jinping begins his long awaited visit to the U.S., there will be plenty for him to discuss with President Obama–trade issues, cyber-security, conflict in the South China Seas, and so on. One topic that has gotten less attention, but should be top of mind: monetary policy. That’s because what’s happening in China right now has limited the ability of the Federal Reserve Bank to do what’s right for the American economy.

In important ways, China now controls U.S. monetary policy. What happens in the Middle Kingdom affects the decisions that Fed chair Janet Yellen can make about whether to raise or lower interest rates. We saw this just a few days ago when the Fed held fire on a long awaited hike in rates (despite the fact that the U.S. is at full employment) because of global economic headwinds emanating from China, most particularly the disinflationary effect that slower Chinese growth has on the world. Yellen needs inflation to be higher–and in particular, she’d like to see wage inflation be higher–before raising rates. Yet there’s no indication that will happen anytime soon, and China is a big reason why.

As I wrote a couple of weeks back, the economic slowdown in China and the crash of the Chinese equity market (which is a symptom of the former, not a cause) is really the echo of 2008. When American consumers stopped buying stuff after the subprime crisis, China tried to take up the slack in the form of a massive government stimulus program. This meant a major run up in debt. A few years back, it took a dollar of debt to create every dollar of growth in China. Now it takes four times that. The debt-to-GDP ratio in China is a nauseating 300%. (American debt hawks worry about our rate, which is less than a third of that.)

A couple of years ago, that bubble started to burst. The Chinese government tried to stop it, by propping up one market after another, from housing to stocks. But what they really need to do is orchestrate a major shift in the country’s economy. China needs to stop being a place that makes cheap shoes, and start being a place in which consumers prop up the economy, not just at home, but around the rest of the world. It’s not just China’s job to rebalance–the US and Europe have to do so as well–but if China doesn’t, nobody else can. The global economy is a closed loop. What’s more, the shift China needs to make is a very tough act (only three other Asian nations have managed it) particularly for an autocracy. It’s not at all clear yet that China can pull it off.

That’s why, in lieu of the kind of major global rebalancing, central bankers have been left holding the bag. The core reasons we had a financial crisis in 2008 (over-consumption by the West, under consumption in the East) never got fixed and so central bankers were forced to brew up a huge credit bubble that has both sowed the seeds of the next crisis and locked them into low interest rates which further increase market risk without actually helping the real economy. As one of my favorite sources, Bank of England chief economist Andy Haldane, said in a recent speech, “Over the past few months, debate on the global economy has been dominated by news from Greece and China. In my view, these should not been seen as independent events, as lightning bolts from the blue. Rather, they are part of a connected sequence of financial disturbances that have hit the global economic and financial system over the past decade.”

Xi and Obama need a game plan on how to fix those imbalances together. Until then, look for rates to stay low–and for Main Street to be increasingly (and riskily) disconnected from Wall Street.

Despite Slump, China’s Xi Jinping Pledges Economic Reforms - Wall Street Journal

September 22, 2015 at 5:26pm

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http://www.wsj.com/articles/despite-slump-chinas-xi-pledges-economic-reforms-1442894460?mod=e2fb

Despite Slump, China’s Xi Jinping Pledges Economic Reforms
Chinese president defends stewardship of economy ahead of first state visit to the U.S.

By CHARLES HUTZLER
Updated Sept. 22, 2015 12:08 a.m. ET

BEIJING—Chinese President Xi Jinping defended his government’s economic stewardship and said that China’s slowing growth and market fluctuations won’t deter needed reforms.

In his first interview with foreign media since Chinese stocks skidded this summer, Mr. Xi told The Wall Street Journal that this summer’s government intervention to arrest the plunge was necessary to “defuse systemic risks.” The rescue was akin to acts taken by governments in “some mature foreign markets,” the president said in written responses to questions submitted by the Journal ahead of his first official state visit to the U.S.

On the slowdown that has appeared sharper than both global markets and Beijing expected, Mr. Xi urged foreign investors to take the long view and compared the world’s second-largest economy to a vessel in rough seas.



Full Transcript: Interview With Chinese President Xi Jinping
“Any ship, however large, may occasionally get unstable sailing on the high sea,” he said.

Mr. Xi, who starts his visit in Seattle on Tuesday, played down differences that have unsteadied relations with the U.S., including cybersecurity and China’s island-building in the South China Sea, saying China isn’t militarily adventurous and wants to work with Washington to address world challenges. Added to the agenda in recent weeks for Mr. Xi’s summit with President Barack Obama are concerns about China’s wobbly economy—and whether that’s dented the leadership’s appetite for economic liberalization.

So far, with China’s manufacturing-driven growth model flagging, the shift to consumer spending and services that the government is trying to engineer hasn’t picked up the slack.

Mr. Xi sought to dispel any concern that China is faltering in its transition toward more sustainable growth: “Like an arrow shot that cannot be brought back, we will forge ahead against all odds to meet our goals of reform.”

On another move that surprised global markets—a nearly 2% devaluation of China’s currency that fueled concerns about capital flight—Mr. Xi said the reduction in foreign reserves that followed is normal “and there’s no need to overreact to it.”

‘Facts have shown that the interests of China and the U.S. are increasingly intertwined.’
—President Xi Jinping
The lead-up to summits between the U.S. and China have become fraught in recent years, as have overall relations, as Beijing, particularly under Mr. Xi, has vigorously sought to use the country’s economic, military and diplomatic clout to further its increasingly global interests. Calls are rising for the Obama administration to develop better strategies to neutralize a more assertive China.

Still, Messrs. Xi and Obama have used their past summits to project a workmanlike relationship in public, despite friction in their behind-the-scenes discussions.

In the interview, Mr. Xi cited cooperation on pressing global issues, from agreements to reduce emissions linked to climate change and common efforts in negotiating limits to Iran’s nuclear program; rather than supplanting the U.S., he said, China wants to work with Washington on improving global order, he said.

“I don’t believe any country is capable of rearranging the architecture of global governance toward itself,” he said. He later added: “Facts have shown that the interests of China and the U.S. are increasingly intertwined.”

On issues of contention, however, Mr. Xi appeared conciliatory without giving much ground. He said his government treats all businesses fairly and brushed aside complaints by foreign business organizations that regulations are being used to hobble foreign firms, particularly U.S. technology companies, and favor Chinese competitors.

ENLARGE
Mr. Xi said reclamation and other construction work in the disputed South China Sea that has alarmed neighbors and the U.S. would serve freedom of navigation—a key U.S. concern—though he didn’t say how. He also signaled that there would be no let-up in restrictions on the Internet that have blocked several foreign media sites, including the Journal’s English and Chinese editions. He also backed a proposed law that foreign non-profit groups say would limit their ability to work with social activists.

Mr. Xi tried to counter allegations about the cybertheft of trade secrets to benefit Chinese companies—a problem the Obama administration is considering using sanctions to deter—and welcomed greater engagement.

“The Chinese government does not engage in theft of commercial secrets in any form, nor does it encourage or support Chinese companies to engage in such practices in any way,” Mr. Xi said. “We are ready to strengthen cooperation with the U.S. side on this issue.”

Mr. Xi seldom engages with the international media. For the written interview, the Journal submitted a dozen questions to China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs for Mr. Xi. While the ministry acknowledged that officials pulled together facts and research for the answers, it said Mr. Xi revised and reviewed them.

The answers at times glint with the rhetorical flair that has differentiated President Xi from his immediate predecessors and made him popular among many Chinese. His policies having met resistance from vested interests, he vows “to crack hard nuts and ford dangerous rapids” in pursuit of reforms that would rely more on market-based solutions.

Overall, though, he made it clear that the government will maintain firm regulatory hold as it allows markets broader sway in allocating resources. “That means we need to make good use of both the invisible hand and the visible hand,” he said.

His current trip to America—his first formal visit since taking office nearly three years ago—showcases China’s wider sway in the world as visits by previous Chinese leaders didn’t. In Seattle, Mr. Xi will see top executives of Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp., Boeing Co. and other U.S. business giants on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Mr. Xi will address U.N. sessions over the weekend, presiding at a panel on empowering women. In between are his discussions at the White House and with members of Congress—the optics of which, Chinese and U.S. officials say, are important for his image back home.

Troubling to some governments has been the rapidly improving capabilities of China’s military at a time when Beijing is more forcefully asserting its maritime claims. Chinese naval vessels recently sailed into U.S. waters in the Bering Sea, the first time the Pentagon had seen Chinese naval vessels there, just as President Obama was visiting Alaska.

Chinese President Xi Jinping lands in the U.S. on Tuesday and will embark on a whirlwind of meetings. Here's a quick guide to Xi's itinerary.
Mr. Xi said China needs a military commensurate –with its “vast territorial land, sea and airspace and very long borders.”

The Chinese military, he said, has benefited the world, contributing more peacekeepers to U.N. missions than other permanent Security Council members and taking part in the removal of chemical weapons from Syria.

“In strengthening our defense and military building, we are not going after some kind of military adventure. It never crosses our mind,” he said. “China has no military base in Asia and stations no troops outside its borders.”

Even as the Chinese navy operates farther from home shores, Mr. Xi has also worked to improve communications with the U.S. military. The two sides have reached several agreements, one on rules of behavior when naval surface vessels meet at sea. A similar pact on air encounters is under discussion. Mr. Xi said he’s looking for more areas of convergence and to lessen the chances for conflict.

“The Asia-Pacific should be a cooperative ground for enhanced China-U.S. coordination and collaboration rather than their Coliseum for supremacy,” Mr. Xi said.

Mr. Xi offered to extend cooperation to the infrastructure development bank that Beijing founded, joined by U.S. allies like Britain and Germany despite initial objections from Washington. Mr. Xi welcomed the U.S. to become a member.

While saying repeatedly that China remains open to foreigners and foreign businesses, he also said that the Internet must be carefully regulated to “safeguard the country’s sovereignty, security and development interests.”

Under Mr. Xi, arrests and prosecutions of people for spreading what authorities consider rumors have had the effect of subduing social media.

“Freedom and order must be upheld side by side in both cyberspace and the physical world. Freedom is the purpose of order, and order the guarantee of freedom,” he said. Though he didn’t directly address the block on foreign news sites, he said foreign companies must “do nothing to undermine China’s national interests and interests of consumers.”

Still, Mr. Xi said nations must remain open and willing to learn from other civilizations. One of Mr. Xi’s catchiest slogans has been the “Chinese dream”—the effort to restore China to what many Chinese see as the position of global primacy the Middle Kingdom held for centuries before being eclipsed by the West. The country then slipped into a century of foreign aggression, civil war and social and political upheaval.

“To understand today’s China, one needs to fully appreciate the Chinese nation’s deep suffering since modern times and the profound impact of such suffering on the Chinese minds,” he said. He added: “Every country and every nation has a dream, and dream brings hope.”

What does the dropping Australian dollar mean for you? - Commonwealth Bank Blog

September 21, 2015 at 2:18pm

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https://www.mywealth.commbank.com.au/economy/what-does-the-dropping-australian-dollar-mean-for-you--blog201503?CID=UKBZZZAEOZZ6000&GROUP=NG

What does the dropping Australian dollar mean for you?
18 MAR 2015 04:45 PM | Filed Under: Economy
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Benjamin Freeman
editor@mywealth.com.au
  

Last week the Australian dollar hit a six-year low, trading at 75.6 US cents on Wednesday morning.
Across the economy the dropping dollar has varying affects, creating opportunities for businesses in tourism, education, agriculture and manufacturing - because their products and services become cheaper for overseas buyers - but making it costlier for those importing goods, such as retailers.
But what does it mean for you?
“For the average Australian household there can be an impact in terms of lifting overseas holiday costs, increasing the cost of imported goods and buying goods online as well as fuel prices because we derive a lot of our fuel from overseas,” said CommSec economist Savanth Sebastian.
Winners and losers from a falling Australian dollar
Travel
When the dollar falls, overseas travel costs more. Mid-2014 the Australian dollar bought 94.49 US cents. That means in less than a year, you’ve lost just over US$18 for every $100 spent in US dollars.
If you’re travelling overseas, you may need to increase your budget or carefully consider how long you’ll be travelling for and what you’ll be doing. Some destinations will be more cost-effective to travel to than others. Despite the drop against the US dollar, the Australian dollar has fared better against the Yen and Euro, so Japan and Europe may still be good options.
Alternatively, some Australians will look at travelling domestically until the dollar lifts.
“When you have sluggish growth across the economy you start to see some other sectors starting to get a boost such as domestic tourism,” said Sebastian.
Australia's economy struggles to release reliance on mining
Shopping
Just as with the price of travel, the cost of online goods from overseas increases. While it may not mean too much when buying a book or DVD from Amazon or Ebay, buying clothes, electronics or other expensive items online becomes costlier.
On a broader scale, a drop in the Australian dollar can mean that local retailers have to up the prices they charge us. When it becomes more expensive to import goods, retailers have a few ways they can respond:
Increase their own prices
Absorb the loss
Make changes to products to maintain their price points.
Petrol
Over the last few months petrol prices have dropped significantly as lower global demand for oil has coincided with higher production, sending the value of the commodity down.
However, the cost of petrol could increase in the not too distant future if oil prices were to bounce back while the dollar remains weaker.
“Because Australia buys a lot of fuel from the Asian region which is all priced in US dollars, a falling Australian dollar means that we have to purchase less fuel or it becomes more expensive to make the same purchase. At this point we haven’t really noticed the falling currency in terms of impact on fuel prices because oil prices have fallen as well,” said Sebastian.
Why does the dollar drop?
The market value of a currency is essentially determined by how much demand there is for it relative to other currencies.
The combination of a strengthening US dollar and slow growth in China, which affects commodity prices here in Australia, are two contributors to the Australian dollar's recent decline. Sebastian sees the influx of cash into the US economy as the key reason for this latest drop.
“We’re actually seeing a flight of capital back to the US dollar, that’s the key driver for the drop at the moment. The US currency is the reserve currency of the globe and it’s coming back quite strong and is one of the key drivers in terms of pushing down the Australian dollar,” he said.

Facebook's new 'dislike' button shows how little it cares about the victims of online bullying - The Independent

September 17, 2015 at 12:18am

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Wednesday 16 September 2015
Facebook's new 'dislike' button shows how little it cares about the victims of online bullying
Far from expressing 'empathy', as Mark Zuckerberg hopes, the social network's new function will be abused by trolls and bullies

Ever since Facebook introduced its iconic “like” button in 2009, users have been clamouring for a matching “dislike” button. The wait is finally over. On Tuesday the social media network’s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, announced that Facebook is working on a “dislike” option to reflect the fact that, in his words, “not every moment is a good moment”.
While designed to bring more emotional nuance to Facebook, the introduction of a “dislike” button is another example of the social media platform’s failure to protect users from online harassment.

Zuckerberg was keen to stress that the button is not designed to “down vote” posts, but instead to offer a way for people to show sympathy for others when they share bad, sad or frustrating news. But with so many of us experiencing online harassment, and reports that 7 out of 10 young people in the UK have been the victim of cyber bullying, I greet the introduction of this new Facebook function with trepidation.

Facebook has a long history of failing to protect vulnerable users from cyber bullying. The platform’s unwieldy form for reporting abuse is infamous for telling users to just ignore or unfriend their harassers. Memorial pages are often bombarded by trolls mocking grieving families. A “dislike” button will now make it even easier for bullies to target their victims. It will take abusers a matter of minutes to scroll through every post on a user’s page, clicking dislike and adding to the overwhelming onslaught of negativity that many victims experience when they log into Facebook.

The introduction of a “dislike” button was originally delayed because big brands were worried about the negative impact it would have on their social media operations. Now that these worries have been dispensed with (partly due to the greater understanding that any online response - good or bad - can work in a brand’s favour), Facebook is introducing the button, and in doing so it is reaffirming its lack of interest in making the platform a safe space for users.

The failure to mention community guidelines or support reveals that protecting users from cyber bullies is simply not a priority for Facebook.


Mark Zuckerberg told a Q&A audience he doesn't like spending on "frivolous" decision and that includes his attireThe Facebook founder is often seen wearing Adidas flip flops, a gray T-shirt and a hoodieThat's Mark Zuckerberg wearing his signature gray shirt (again)...And againZuckerberg showed up for Facebook's IPO wearing his favourite hoodie Zuckerberg pictured with his wife, Priscilla, wearing THAT hoodie Zuckerberg speaking at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco Zuckerberg rings the bell to open the Nasdaq

As Zuckerberg’s comments demonstrate, it’s not fair to suggest that Facebook is unaware of the potential for this scheme to go awry. By acknowledging the potential for the “dislike” button to be misused, the social network is effectively covering itself against future accusations that it does not take online harassment seriously.

People who don’t use Facebook often, or are completely unfamiliar with the platform, can be forgiven for thinking that Zuckerberg simply saying the “dislike” button should not be abused will be enough to stop misuse. But after a decade of watching the site being subverted by hate groups, cyber bullies and sexual predators, Facebook staff know that good intentions are never enough. Words must be matched by actions.

Without stricter community guidelines and more support for victims of cyberbullying, a “dislike” button will make it easier for bullies to target vulnerable people without fear of recrimination. It might be designed to make it easier for users to express sympathy for each other online, but until Facebook finds a way to protect vulnerable users online it should stay away from the “dislike” button and start developing an “empathy” button instead