Tuesday, August 23, 2005
What's going on with NZ First? Its party list, released today, will put six sitting MPs out of Parliament if the party scores around its current polling percentage in the Election. Newcomer Susan Baragwanath (wife of High Court judge David Baragwanath) was one to be placed ahead of several sitting MPs.
A new poll reveals that almost three quarters of the British public believe it is right to give up civil liberties to boost security against the terrorist threat. The Guardian/ICM poll shows that 73 per cent of respondents back feel it is a price worth paying, with only 17 per cent rejecting the trade-off outright. [Trouble is, once you give civil liberties away, it just about takes a civil war to get them back.]
Former Polish communist strongman, Wojciech Jaruzelski, has apologised to the Czech Republic and Slovakia for Poland's role in the Soviet-led invasion in August 1968 that crushed a pro-democracy movement. "I have felt bad, I have been tormented by that," said Jaruzelski during a broadcast on Czech public television, 37 years to the day after the invasion of then Czechoslovakia. Troops from the Soviet Union and four former Warsaw Pact countries squashed the so-called "Prague Spring", a movement led by Slovak reformer Alexander Dubcek that tried to put "a human face on socialism" through democratic reforms to the totalitarian regime in power in Prague. "It was a stupid political act," said Jaruzelski, 82, who was Poland's defence minister at the time.
"Let there be no mistake; the struggle is on for human nature. And while the barbarous bioethics of the People's Republic of China is well known, the 'kinder, gentler' path into the Brave New World, led by the United Kingdom, is the gravest threat we face." Nigel M. de S. Cameron explains what's going on in the complex world of bioethics.
China risks social meltdown within five years because of the stresses provoked by its economic boom, government officials were warned yesterday. The country was now in a "yellow-light" zone, the second most serious indicator of "social instability", according to an official report focusing on the growing gap between rich and poor. "We are going to hit the red-light scenario after 2010 if there are no effective solutions in the next few years," said the report, commissioned by the labour and social security ministry. As if to bear out its warnings, police admitted that rioting had broken out in a town in the eastern province of Zhejiang, the latest in a wave of violent protests in the region. Buildings and police cars were set alight in clashes led by parents who accused a battery factory of giving their children lead poisoning. Such unrest is now common in many Chinese towns, often triggered by protests against the mixture of corruption and environmental degradation that the dash for development has brought.
68% of “born again” or “evangelical” Christians say that a “good person who isn’t of your religious faith” can gain salvation, according to a new Newsweek/Beliefnet poll. "This is pretty amazing. Evangelicals are among the most churchgoing and religiously attentive people in the United States, and one of the ideas they’re most likely to hear from the minister at church on a given Sunday is that the path to salvation is through Jesus. Apparently, rank-and-file evangelicals have a different view. Nationally, 79% of those surveyed said the same thing, and the figure is 73% for non-Christians and an astounding 91% among Catholics. The Catholics surveyed seemed more inclined to listen to the Catechism's precept that those who 'seek the truth' may gain salvation—rather than, say, St. Augustine's view that being 'separated from the Church' will damn you to hell 'no matter how estimable a life he may imagine he is living.' "
Search giant Google's ambitions to make the Web more international got a slight boost from a US government-run test in which its machine translation software beat out competitors from IBM and academia. Google scored the highest in Arabic-to-English and Chinese-to-English translation tests conducted by the National Institute of Science and Technology. Each test consisted of translating 100 articles from Agence France Presse and the Xinhua News Agency.
A new poll reveals that almost three quarters of the British public believe it is right to give up civil liberties to boost security against the terrorist threat. The Guardian/ICM poll shows that 73 per cent of respondents back feel it is a price worth paying, with only 17 per cent rejecting the trade-off outright. [Trouble is, once you give civil liberties away, it just about takes a civil war to get them back.]
Former Polish communist strongman, Wojciech Jaruzelski, has apologised to the Czech Republic and Slovakia for Poland's role in the Soviet-led invasion in August 1968 that crushed a pro-democracy movement. "I have felt bad, I have been tormented by that," said Jaruzelski during a broadcast on Czech public television, 37 years to the day after the invasion of then Czechoslovakia. Troops from the Soviet Union and four former Warsaw Pact countries squashed the so-called "Prague Spring", a movement led by Slovak reformer Alexander Dubcek that tried to put "a human face on socialism" through democratic reforms to the totalitarian regime in power in Prague. "It was a stupid political act," said Jaruzelski, 82, who was Poland's defence minister at the time.
"Let there be no mistake; the struggle is on for human nature. And while the barbarous bioethics of the People's Republic of China is well known, the 'kinder, gentler' path into the Brave New World, led by the United Kingdom, is the gravest threat we face." Nigel M. de S. Cameron explains what's going on in the complex world of bioethics.
China risks social meltdown within five years because of the stresses provoked by its economic boom, government officials were warned yesterday. The country was now in a "yellow-light" zone, the second most serious indicator of "social instability", according to an official report focusing on the growing gap between rich and poor. "We are going to hit the red-light scenario after 2010 if there are no effective solutions in the next few years," said the report, commissioned by the labour and social security ministry. As if to bear out its warnings, police admitted that rioting had broken out in a town in the eastern province of Zhejiang, the latest in a wave of violent protests in the region. Buildings and police cars were set alight in clashes led by parents who accused a battery factory of giving their children lead poisoning. Such unrest is now common in many Chinese towns, often triggered by protests against the mixture of corruption and environmental degradation that the dash for development has brought.
68% of “born again” or “evangelical” Christians say that a “good person who isn’t of your religious faith” can gain salvation, according to a new Newsweek/Beliefnet poll. "This is pretty amazing. Evangelicals are among the most churchgoing and religiously attentive people in the United States, and one of the ideas they’re most likely to hear from the minister at church on a given Sunday is that the path to salvation is through Jesus. Apparently, rank-and-file evangelicals have a different view. Nationally, 79% of those surveyed said the same thing, and the figure is 73% for non-Christians and an astounding 91% among Catholics. The Catholics surveyed seemed more inclined to listen to the Catechism's precept that those who 'seek the truth' may gain salvation—rather than, say, St. Augustine's view that being 'separated from the Church' will damn you to hell 'no matter how estimable a life he may imagine he is living.' "
Search giant Google's ambitions to make the Web more international got a slight boost from a US government-run test in which its machine translation software beat out competitors from IBM and academia. Google scored the highest in Arabic-to-English and Chinese-to-English translation tests conducted by the National Institute of Science and Technology. Each test consisted of translating 100 articles from Agence France Presse and the Xinhua News Agency.
