By Evan Osnos, Letter from China blog @ newyorker.com, Jan. 3, 2013

It’s time for the State Department to take up the matter of American reporters in China, and Chinese reporters in America.

The work of the American press in China has become so contentious, and so central to our understanding of China’s political picture, that it’s worth stepping back, for a moment, to put a remarkable year in perspective: in the span of twelve months, foreign news organizations including the Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg News have ratcheted up their scrutiny of China’s politicians to a level of forensic detail that we have rarely, if ever, seen in foreign correspondence [....]

Aren’t these news organizations just pawns in a Chinese political drama, being fed tips and transcribing “dossiers” of juicy information? That is a common theory among Chinese readers, and it’s understandable, given the sudden profusion of reports, and the way they tend to damage one faction or another. But that’s more fantasy than reality. [....]

Of course it takes 60+ votes; but I think we got it!

Supposedly we are out of money as of today; although the powers that be will cheat with cheat sheets and I should get SS on Thursday!

This is HISTORY.

We may not like particular events in HISTORY.

But this IS HISTORY!

Boehner cannot escape this.

Wednesday the House will somehow have a chance to vote on this.

We shall postpone further cliffs for two months.

Hell, I am so old I do not purchase green bananas as they say!

Oh, and I must add, I am in love with many, many Senators.

the end

Blow for François Hollande as constitutional council vetoes Socialist policy at the 11th hour

By Kim Willsher in Paris, The Observer, 29 Dec 2012

France's constitutional council has dealt a blow to beleaguered Socialist president François Hollande by rejecting the new 75% rate of income tax due to come into effect on Tuesday.

It declared the measure, the backbone of the French leader's successful presidential election campaign earlier this year, to be unfair and therefore unconstitutional. Immediately after the surprise legal ruling on Saturday, the French government pledged to redraft and resubmit the proposal.

The so-called "supertax" rate of 75% on individual incomes over €1m a year had provoked anger and angst in recent weeks after French national hero Gérard Depardieu announced he was moving just over the border into Belgium, reportedly for tax reasons [.....]

By Salman Masood, New York Times,

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A ban on YouTube, which Pakistan imposed after an anti-Islam video caused riots in much of the Muslim world, was lifted Saturday, only to be reinstated — after three minutes — when it was discovered that blasphemous material was still available on the site.

After months of criticism of the ban, the government decided to allow Pakistanis to have access to YouTube again, saying steps had been taken to ensure that offensive content would not be visible. But those efforts apparently failed, and the authorities quickly backtracked.[....]

Comment: As I see it, they have one of two choices; they can either:

1) be part of the world

or

2) get their knickers all in a twist over "blasphemy" by people who don't believe in their religion and don't live in their country

Case is one of 12.2 million adults of working age, with no children at home, who were living below the poverty level in 2011. That’s up nearly double from two decades ago. And of those, 5.6 million received no assistance from any of the major five federal programs, a Reuters analysis of Current Population Survey data found. That’s the highest number since 1992, the first year for which comparable records are available. Then, there were 4.3 million unaided poor adults.

BEIJING — Visit your parents. That's an order.

So says China, whose national legislature on Friday amended its law on the elderly to require that adult children visit their aged parents "often" — or risk being sued by them.

The amendment does not specify how frequently such visits should occur.

State media say the new clause will allow elderly parents who feel neglected by their children to take them to court. The move comes as reports abound of elderly parents being abandoned or ignored by their children.

BBC News, Dec. 27, 2012

The US says it has evacuated its embassy in the Central African Republic as rebels threaten to advance towards the capital, Bangui. The state department said it had not broken off diplomatic ties with the government but warned US citizens not to travel to CAR during the unrest.

Earlier, CAR President Francois Bozize appealed to the US and France to help block the rebel advance.

The UN has said it is evacuating its non-essential staff from the country. US state department spokesman Patrick Ventrell said the embassy had suspended operations and that the ambassador and other staff had left the country on Thursday. "This decision is solely due to concerns about the security of our personnel and has no relation to our continuing and long-standing diplomatic relations with the CAR," he said in a statement.

The BBC's Junior Lingangue in Bangui says resident are stockpiling food amid fears that the rebels - known as the Seleka coalition - could launch an assault in the next few days.[....]

Also see:

Rebels Are Advancing Toward Capital of Central African Republic
By Lydia Polgreen and Josh Kron, New York Times, Dec 27/28, 2012

By Alok Jha, science correspondent, The Guardian, 26 Dec 2012

Lede: Higgs boson theorist says he agrees with those who find Dawkins' approach to dealing with believers 'embarrassing'

[....] On one side is Richard Dawkins, the celebrated biologist who has made a second career demonstrating his epic disdain for religion. On the other is the theoretical physicist Peter Higgs, who this year became a shoo-in for a future Nobel prize after scientists at Cern in Geneva showed that his theory about how fundamental particles get their mass was correct.

Their argument is over nothing less than the coexistence of religion and science. [....] "What Dawkins does too often is to concentrate his attack on fundamentalists. But there are many believers who are just not fundamentalists," Higgs said in an interview with the Spanish newspaper El Mundo. "Fundamentalism is another problem. I mean, Dawkins in a way is almost a fundamentalist himself, of another kind." [....]

In the El Mundo interview, Higgs argued that although he was not a believer, he thought science and religion were not incompatible [....]

He said a lot of scientists in his field were religious believers. "I don't happen to be one myself, but maybe that's just more a matter of my family background than that there's any fundamental difficulty about reconciling the two."[....]

By Kirk Johnson, New York Times/Statehouse Journal, Dec. 26/27, 2012

Home page lede: One of the creators of a new majority coalition in the state Capitol in Olympia said politics had become too liberal to be representative of Washington as a whole.

Excerpt: [....] Two Democrats in the State Senate, in bolting from the party’s ranks this month to join with Republicans in creating a new majority coalition, say yes.

True representation of state residents — republican government with a small “r” — demanded a broader discussion and a larger voice, they said, for marginalized segments of the electorate.

“Seattle-centric,” said Senator Tim Sheldon, a two-decade veteran lawmaker and Democrat from a district west of Olympia, summing up the combination of forces that alienated him: safe seats in Seattle, campaign money raised in safe seats but spread around, and a caucus that rewards and reinforces the safe-seat equation with powerful leadership posts. “They’re not representative of the state,” he said. [....]