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http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/my-secret-shame/476415/ What do you think the situation is for Singaporeans?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-24618701 US drone strike killings in Pakistan and Yemen 'unlawful' CIA drone attacks in Pakistan are responsible for unlawful killings, some of which could amount to war crimes, Amnesty International says. Amnesty said it reviewed nine recent drone strikes in North Waziristan and found a number of victims were unarmed. In a separate report looking at six US attacks in Yemen, Human Rights Watch says two of them killed civilians at random, violating international law. Drone warfare has become common in the US pursuit of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Few details are known about the covert US drone operation. Senior al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders have been killed in drone strikes in Pakistan, but civilians have also died. These attacks cause outrage in Pakistan, where many assert that the strikes cause indiscriminate deaths and injuries. Last week, a UN investigation found that US drone strikes had killed at least 400 civilians in Pakistan, far more than the US has ever acknowledged. UN special rapporteur Ben Emmerson accused the US of challenging international legal norms by advocating the use of lethal force outside war zones. Establishing precise casualty figures and identifying the dead in such attacks is virtually impossible as independent media are barred from tribal areas near the Afghan border. 'Very tight leash' Amnesty said it had investigated nine of 45 recently reported attacks by US drones, unmanned aircraft operated remotely in control rooms, often on other continents. The group called on the US to disclose information and the legal basis for strikes carried out in Pakistan. In the report, Will I Be Next? US Drone Strikes in Pakistan, the rights group named several victims who, it says, had been unarmed and "posed no threat to life". In October 2012, 68-year-old grandmother Mamana Bibi was killed in a double strike as she picked vegetables in the family's fields while surrounded by her grandchildren, said the report. It said US President Barack Obama's pledge earlier this year to increase transparency around drone strikes had not been fulfilled. "This secrecy has enabled the USA to act with impunity and block victims from receiving justice or compensation. As far as Amnesty is aware, no US official has ever been held to account for unlawful killings by drones in Pakistan," the report said. It called on the governments of Pakistan, Australia, Germany and the UK to investigate drone strikes or other abuses that may constitute human rights violations. Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch said in its report that six US drone attacks in Yemen killed 82 people, including at least 57 civilians. It added that two of the strikes killed innocent people indiscriminately. A controversial aspect of the US policy is that drone attacks are carried out not by the military but by the Central Intelligence Agency. US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta has argued in favour of the policy, saying that the US will continue to defend itself. President Obama has insisted the strategy was "kept on a very tight leash" and that without the drones, the US would have had to resort to "more intrusive military action".

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If you thought your car was dirty with layers and layers of dust or sand on it and never bothered to clean it off, that would be this man's ideal canvas. His name is Scott Wade and he's from the USA, in San Marcos or wherever that is. I have never seen anything like it before and I doubt there's anything more astonishing that what this man can do. If a normal human being sees a dusty car and decides that he's a bit bored, the most he'd do is probably write some vulgarities or draw a smiley face on a car bonnet or on the rear window. But Scott Wade begs to differ. He turns your unwashed, filthy, dusty possibly piece-of-junk car into a work of art. His medium? The dust that has collected on your windscreen or rear windshield. His work is simply amazing and I think you should see to believe..

terrifying http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33929262/ns/world_news-washington_post/ The Chinese are 'changing us' Rising global power reshapes how Americans do business, live their lives By John Pomfret updated 7:54 a.m. ET Nov. 14, 2009 WAUSAU, WIS. - In a cavernous warehouse amid rolling hills and dairy farms, a group of farmers recently gathered around a buyer in a conversation heralding a sea change in the United States. "I don't think you Americans get it," said the buyer, dressed casually in designer brands and sporting a watch worth as much as the mud-splattered GM trucks in the parking lot outside. "We need quality. We demand quality. Top quality. If you work with me, we can win together. But if you don't, there's nothing I can do." Being harangued by a pharmaceutical company executive from China was new for these burly farmers, but no one complained. These tough men from the American Midwest treated their Chinese guest as a savior of sorts, in an important economic and cultural reality that will confront President Obama on his first visit to China, starting Sunday. On visits to Shanghai and Beijing, Obama will encounter not simply a rising global power but a nation that is transforming and challenging the way Americans live overseas and at home, from college classrooms to real estate offices to the ginseng farms of central Wisconsin. Americans have been selling Panax quinquefolius to China since 1784 when the first China-bound trading ship sailed from New York to Canton, today's Guangzhou, weighed down with 30 tons of the root, prized in Asia for medicinal properties. But today the U.S. ginseng industry, centered here in Wisconsin, is on its back, kicked down by bogus imitations from Chinese competitors and state-subsidized crops from Canada. Twenty years ago, 1,500 farmers grew ginseng in Wisconsin for the China market; now the number is down to 150. Prices have dropped from $60 a pound to $24. The farmers around the ginseng barrels on this rainy fall night looked for an answer from Chun Yu, a Chinese businessman dangling his company's chain of 1,000 retail stores throughout China as the ultimate prize. "Years ago, it didn't matter what we grew. They bought everything we had," said Randy Ross, a 54-year-old former dairy farmer who has been growing ginseng since 1978. "Now we've got to learn how to satisfy them. They are changing us." Catching China fever While it's not exactly the People's Republic of Wisconsin, this state has been seized with a China fever of sorts. Throughout the United States, old notions of China have been replaced with a deeper understanding that China is a force that must be reckoned with. Hate it or love it, China is a major player in American life. China is now Wisconsin's (and the country's) third-biggest export market, buying more American soybeans, oil seeds, hides and animal skins, raw cotton, copper, nonferrous metals, wood pulp, semiconductors and miscellaneous chicken parts (a.k.a. chicken feet) than anyone else. At the University of Wisconsin, as at college campuses across the United States, mainland Chinese dominate the study of science and technology and form the backbone of the engineering, chemistry and pharmacy departments. They receive twice as many doctorates in this country as students from India, the next-closest foreign competitor. And among foreigners, they register by far the most patents in the United States. Chinese investors have snapped up pieces of distressed real estate in Milwaukee, as they have in other crumbling Midwestern industrial cities, not to mention in Florida, California and Arizona. Last year, a group from Germantown, Md., and China bought an empty mall on Milwaukee's depressed northwest side for $6 million, down from its $8 million list price. In July, a Chinese steelmaker bought 54 acres in an industrial park off Interstate 94 between Milwaukee and Chicago. A team of Midwestern businessmen, including the former CIA station chief in Beijing, has recently established, in cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security, a special zone in Wisconsin that would grant U.S. citizenship in exchange for a $1 million investment. Meanwhile, in a state that has lost more than 160,000 (or one-third) of its manufacturing jobs in a decade, local newspapers have been running editorials praising the People's Republic and blasting those who oppose closer trade ties or Chinese investment. "China is a friend to Wisconsin and its businesses, not an enemy in a trade war," the Wisconsin State Journal said in an editorial. Seeking out business Wisconsin's governor, Jim Doyle (D), has been to China to promote Wisconsin three times since he took office in 2003. When he first went, he said, fellow governors in other states worried about the appearance of an American governor going to China seeking business. Now, it's commonplace. More than 14 of his counterparts have visited China in the past two years. "China is incredibly important to us," he said in an interview. "Even in these difficult times, some of the industries getting by are the ones selling to China. If we didn't have the Chinese, we would have been in much, much tougher shape." One of those firms is Bucyrus International, based in South Milwaukee, which has exported coal-mining equipment to China since trade relations were opened in the 1970s. In the past three years, it has doubled its workforce, in part because of the China trade. "We were still skeptical seven or eight years ago that these guys were for real," said Bucyrus chief executive Tim Sullivan. "Now we know." The boosterism about China sometimes reaches a fever pitch. One of the businessmen who helped set up the special investment zone, Robert Kraft, said China in the future will do what the Germans did for Milwaukee in the past. "The Chinese are coming," Kraft said in a telephone interview from China, where he was scouting for Chinese investors. "We're just trying to get a piece of it for Wisconsin." "The Chinese Are Coming" was the title of a session in late September in Baltimore at the annual meeting of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. There educators spoke about skyrocketing numbers of Chinese high school graduates applying for admission at U.S. colleges. That's new. For the last 20 years, Chinese have been at or near the top of the number of foreign students in the United States -- but most were in grad school. In all, about 89,000 are currently in the United States, according the Chinese Embassy. China has also helped establish 61 Confucius Institutes across the United States, including one in Wisconsin, to teach Chinese and undertake "cultural dialogues," the embassy said. At the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Chinese undergraduates now account for more than half of the 1,109 Chinese students there. That increase is another sign that China is coming because Wisconsin, like many state schools, doesn't provide scholarships for international undergrads. Last year, Chinese students paid out $2 billion in tuition nationwide. "That money is keeping some American colleges alive," said Laurie Cox, who runs the international student center at the Madison campus. "Every time I turn around, another campus has signed a memorandum of understanding with another Chinese university," said Kevin Reilly, the president of the university's 26 campuses. Reilly recently joined Doyle on a trip to China. "I came away thinking, if the 20th century was the American century . . . you have to believe that the 21st century will be the Chinese century." Difficulties and disputes Wisconsin is not immune to troubles with China. For years, until they were stopped in 2004, two Chinese nationals used Milwaukee as a base from which they exported restricted electronics and computer chips to Chinese institutes that make missiles. Quality problems with China's imports have also bedeviled Wisconsin firms -- as they have American consumers who purchased deadly pet food, lead-laden toys, and defective drywall that is believed to have rendered thousands of homes in the South almost uninhabitable. One Wisconsin company, Scientific Protein Laboratories, was in the center of a supply chain making the blood-thinner heparin. Hundreds of allergic reactions to the drug, including 81 reported deaths, led to a nationwide recall that was linked to tainted raw materials from China in 2007 and 2008. These days Wisconsin is at the center of a new trade dispute with China. Appleton Coated of Kimberly was one of three paper companies to join with the United Steelworkers to file a petition with the government alleging that China was dumping certain types of paper products in the U.S. market. On Nov. 6, the U.S. International Trade Commission decided to investigate allegations of unfair subsidies. Jon Geenan, international vice president for the United Steelworkers, grew up near the Kimberly plant. He estimates that Chinese and Indonesian imports have cost the state more than 5,000 jobs in its paper mills. That means dozens of foreclosed homes and hundreds of people who are behind on their property taxes. "Even the churches say that donations are down," he said. "They are definitely challenging the way we live." In Marathon County, where the glaciated soil makes for a bitter ginseng, the way many Chinese like it, Yu, the ginseng buyer, appears content with his new role as big shot. He recently met Gov. Doyle and signed a deal to become China's exclusive importer of Wisconsin's prized root. "But only if the quality is good," he said. "The student has become the teacher!"

Kia carens review "donaldo : January 27th, 2008 at 2:04 pm Unfortunately, European news doesn

The presentation is impressive. Look how that presenter moves his fingers on that big screen.

Are Americans too lazy? U.S. workers can't compete globally unless they work harder, writes Fortune's Geoff Colvin. By Geoff Colvin, Fortune senior editor-at-large August 23 2007: 6:10 AM EDT (Fortune Magazine) -- We Americans pride ourselves on being a hard-working bunch, so here's a thought to spoil your Labor Day rest: By global standards, we're lazy. We've been getting lazier. And the days of the American dolce vita may be numbered. The surprising report of our relative sloth arrives in new research from the UN's International Labor Organization, which looks at working hours around the world. When it comes to what we might call hard work, meaning the proportion of workers who put in more than 48 hours a week, America is near the bottom of the heap. About 18% of our employed people work that much. We're enjoying our wealth. Sweating less and having more is the idea. GE chief Jeff Immelt is a believer in work-life balance, but wonders about America's ability to compete. More from FORTUNE Bernanke: The un-Greenspan What should I do with my 401(k)? Couch-potato nation FORTUNE 500 Current Issue Subscribe to Fortune Video More video CNN's Kitty Pilgrim looks at a growing trend where worker productivity is up yet wages are down. Play video [/color] That's a higher proportion than in a few other developed countries like Norway, the Netherlands, and even Japan. But it's actually lower than in Switzerland and Britain, and way lower than in developing countries like Mexico and Thailand. It's drastically lower than in what may be the world's two hardest-working countries, South Korea and Peru, where the proportions are about 50%. Is America falling apart? Ask Ayn Rand It's bad enough to be told we're slackers in the world economy. What many Americans really won't want to believe is separate research showing that we're working much less than we used to. I know, I know -- you're working harder than ever, and so is your spouse. But we're not talking about you; we're talking about the whole country, on average. And I'm afraid the findings are dramatic. We have increased our leisure time enormously over the past 40 years -- so much so that it "corresponds roughly to an additional five to ten weeks of vacation a year," says a study by Mark Aguiar of the Boston Fed and Erik Hurst of the University of Chicago business school, who conducted the study. People with jobs are working fewer hours. Compounding the effect, fewer of us work at all, with growing numbers of people spending more time in retirement. Of course, there's more to work than what we do on the job; there's also the work we do at home, and that too has fallen drastically. (It has fallen on average; men are actually doing a bit more work at home than they used to, but women are doing much less.) What do you think? Put it all together, and the researchers figure we're getting about 117 hours of leisure per week (including sleep), vs. 110 hours in 1965. That's more than 360 additional idle hours per year. We are a couch-potato nation. You may wonder why I seem to be putting negative spin on these findings. Why should our massively expanded leisure be cause for anything but celebration? After all, we're a much richer country than we were in 1965, and we're enjoying our wealth, just as economic theory would predict. Sweating less and having more is the whole idea. The problem isn't what has happened, unless you figure we've just explained the obesity epidemic, but rather what might happen next. Every day more of us work in a global labor market, competing for jobs with people around the world. One thing markets do really well is fix disequilibriums; when anything tradable sells for different prices in different places, those differences soon disappear. Americans and others in developed economies are selling the world's most expensive labor. In a global market, some of those prices -- our pay -- will have to stop rising and maybe even come down, while pay in China, India, and elsewhere goes up. Economists see it happening already, attributing some of the surprising flatness in Americans' real total compensation of the past few years to the presence of millions of global workers competing for jobs. A Cerberus deal goes bad ... and workers pay the price That's one way that markets equilibrate. Another way may affect how hard we work. It's obvious that if real total pay is going nowhere, we may have to work harder just to improve our living standard. More important, in the growing number of jobs not paid by the hour, people who work harder may just produce better results. General Electric chief Jeff Immelt put it bluntly while recalling a trip to Beijing last year, when he got a big order from the Transport Ministry: "The whole ministry was working all day on a Sunday. I believe in quality of life, work-life balance, all that stuff. But that's the competition. So unless we're willing to compete ..." He has identified the issue. Competing in a global labor market may require us to put in more hours just to stay in the game. As Immelt asks, "Are we willing to compete for the future?" Try to enjoy your Labor Day rest. You'll need it. Tell us what you think? Are Americans a bunch of slackers?

Because they are small they are beginning to call them Alien Go-Karts. Believe it or not, the official nickname is Alien Vehicle Experimental Operation.