A 64-year-old man suspected of attempting to set a fire died on Jan. 19, 2017, while in custody at a detention center in Xinning Police Bureau, Hunan Province, the local police confirmed on Feb. 8. According to the police, the suspect Xu Yunbo, died f… read more
A new tomb without a tombstone chills the festive air of a family in Yanxi Village, Zhenxiong Town, Yunnan Province. The family lost a son to suicide on the Eve of Spring Festival, which fell on Jan. 27 this year.
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Xiao Bao’s father collects his son’s effects. [Photo:China Youth Daily] |
The boy was named Xiao Bao (pseudonym), a left-behind child growing up with his paternal grandparents in the village while his parents worked odd jobs in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province.
In his last words, Bao claimed, “I was still young and I didn’t want to die, but I can’t handle the complaints. Dad, you must be happy when I die. It is you rather than anyone else to be blamed for my death.”
In a dilapidated house, Bao’s grandmother couldn’t help shedding tears when talking about the tragedy of her eldest grandson, who was raised up by her and her husband since he was one year old.
Despite his rare opportunities to be reunited with his parents, Bao never ignored his responsibilities at the family farm.
His grandparents never imagined that their eldest grandson would have swallowed pesticide to end his life.
The two recalled that after dinner on that particular day, Bao shut himself alone in his room, where the ceiling is spotted with cobwebs. Later in the night, his grandma heard him vomiting. When she opened the door she was shocked by a strong smell of pesticides – the boy had drunk down half a bottle of dichlorvos.
The grandparents, who tried to send the agonized boy to hospital, were only informed by the doctor through a phone call that it was too late.
Some villagers later recalled that they had spotted Bao buying pesticides and even two chicken legs.
read moreThe IFS tells us in their latest forecasts that we can look forward to more years of tax rises and spending cuts. They expect the UK economy to slow this year, and slow again next year. They are out of touch with the mood to banish austerity and go for growth.
They are more pessimistic about the Eurozone than about the UK. They have lowered their 2017 growth forecast to 1.5% for the Euro area, whilst proposing 1.6% for the UK. They run one scenario which looks at what weak European banks and Brexit could do to their forecast – an unusual pairing with no explanation of why they are lumped togather or the relative contributions to their extra gloom on this basis.
They do confess that there are “increasing chances that the forecasts may be too pessimistic”. They accept that the UK consumer carried on spending post the referendum when most forecasters said they would not. They admit that business investment rose a little faster after the vote, instead of falling off the cliff as in many forecasts. They agree that trade which had performed disappointingly last year might add a bit to our economy in 2017.
They confess that “real levels of day to day public service spending have actually fallen very little overall in the last three years”. If they checked the Red Book figures they would see the cash growth in overall public spending actually rose faster than inflation over that time period. They now think removing the deficit should be the priority, which leads them to conclude political parties have to offer some combination of higher taxes and lower spending.
Politically it is much more attractive to square the circle with more growth. More growth brings in more tax revenue without tax rate rises. It cuts the costs of benefits as people move from no pay to low pay, and from low pay to better pay. The issue before us should be what more can we do to promote growth.
I do not accept that growth will be as low as they say in 2017 or 2018. That still makes me keen to find more measures which can promote more growth. A tax rate cutting budget could help, especially if we cut those tax rates that are damaging the revenue collected. Spending enough on social care and health is a cross party priority, and we have to accept these services will continue to need more cash in the future. Investing more when long term interest rates are still so low should make sense, though the state needs to show commonsense over projects chosen and where possible harness the private sector to ensure a proper profit test on the project.
read more11 February 2017 – United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres today urged greater investments in teaching science, technology, engineering and math to all women and girls as well as equal access to these opportunities.
“For too long, discriminatory stereotypes have prevented women and girls from having equal access to education in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM),” said Mr. Guterres in his message for International Day of Women and Girls in Science, marked annually on 11 February.
“As a trained engineer and former teacher, I know that these stereotypes are flat wrong,” he said, explaining that they deny women and girls the chance to realize their potential – and deprive the world of the ingenuity and innovation of half the population.
“On this International Day, I urge commitment to end bias, greater investments in STEM education for all women and girls as well as opportunities for their careers and longer-term professional advancement so that all can benefit from their ground-breaking future contributions,” he said.
Earlier this week, the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization released its UNESCO Science Report: Towards 2030.
‘Female engineers and computer programmers wanted,’ is the main message of the report, which shows that women are increasingly graduating with life science degrees, but still rare in engineering and computer science, especially in developed economies.
“An analysis of computer science shows a steady decrease in female graduates since 2000 that is particularly marked in high-income countries,” it states.
The share of women graduates in computer science between 2000 and 2012 slipped in Australia, New Zealand, the Republic of Korea and the United States, as well as in Latin America and the Caribbean.
“This should be a wake-up call,” UNESCO said. “Female participation is falling in a field that is expanding globally as its importance for national economies grows, penetrating every aspect of daily life.”
The share of women working as engineers is also higher in some developing countries, with increases observed in sub-Saharan and Arab countries. Women in the United Arab Emirates, for example, have benefited from national polities that promote training and employment of Emirati citizens, and in particular women.
In her message on the Day, UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova called for empowering women and girls to learn and research.
“We must raise awareness about the work of women scientists by providing equal opportunities for their participation and leadership in a broad spectrum of high-level scientific bodies and events,” Ms. Bokova said, calling also for mentoring opportunities for women.
In 2016, UNESCO and the L’Oréal Foundation launched the manifesto For Women in Science, to engage governments and stakeholders in promoting the full participation of girls and women in science.
For its part, UN Women noted that science and technology offer unique opportunities for women and girls to overcome a number of the barriers they typically face. For example: mobile money has empowered and transformed the lives of millions of women previously thought to be “unbankable” by enabling them to directly access financial products and services.
Women with skills in science and technological fields can help improve vital infrastructure such as water and power supply, and in doing so ease the responsibilities that women and girls carry of providing unpaid care work for the household.
Similarly, Internet and mobile technology can help bridge barriers to education for the 32 million girls who are out of school at the primary level and the 29 million at the lower secondary level, explained the main UN entity on women’s empowerment and gender equality.
Source: UNESCO Institute for Statistics estimates based on data from its database, July 2015Women now account for 53 per cent of world’s bachelor’s and master’s graduates in science and 43 per cent of PhDs, according to the UNESCO report. Since 2000, there has been a steady increase in female graduates in agricultural sciences, likely driven by an emphasis on national food security and the food industry.
In sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, female graduates in agricultural science have been increasing steadily, with women comprising 40 per cent or more of graduates in Lesotho, Madagascar, Mozambique, Namibia, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Swaziland and Zimbabwe.
Medicine is also a field increasingly popular with women, with six out of 10 researchers being women in both medical and agricultural sciences in Belarus and New Zealand, for instance.
In research, however, women still lag men at 28 per cent. The figure fluctuates geographically with women in Southeast Europe are on par with men, and at 44 per cent in Central Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. According to the report, the numbers are particularly low in the European Union, sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
To encourage women and girls to study and work in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), the UN has organized a number of events around the world.
In New York, a high-level event is underway today tying gender, science and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The event was organized with support from the Government of Malta, as the president of the Council of the European Union.
AUDIO: American astronaut Peggy Whitson is making history as the first woman ever to command two missions aboard the International Space Station.
10 February 2017 – With already more than 3.5 million displaced within and outside the borders of South Sudan and thousands more driven to neighbouring countries every day, the United Nations refugee agency has appealed for an urgent peaceful resolution to what has now become Africa’s worst refugee crisis.
“Recent new arrivals report suffering inside South Sudan with intense fighting, kidnappings, rape, fears of armed groups and threats to life, as well as acute food shortage,” William Spindler, a spokesperson for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) told the media at a regular briefing in Geneva.
“More than 60 per cent of the refugees are children, many arriving with alarming levels of malnutrition – enduring devastating impact of the brutalities of the ongoing conflict,” he added.
However the crisis, third only to the displacements in Syria and Afghanistan and now in its fourth year, has received less attention and is plagued by chronic levels of underfunding.
UNHCR said that its response capacities are overstretched in the countries hosting the refugees and the lack of funds is affecting critical and life-saving efforts such as providing clean, drinking water, food, health and sanitation.
Last month, the agency revised upwards its funding requirements for 2017 to $781.8 million (some $297.9 million or 61 per cent higher than the earlier budget) in light of new needs of those who have been displaced due to renewed fighting, increased violence and resulting food insecurity since July last year.
The agency’s last year funding appeal of $649 million received only 33 per cent of the amount needed.
The period between September and December 2016 saw almost half a million South Sudanese seeking refuge in neighbouring countries – an average of almost 4,100 people every day for four months.
According to Mr. Spindler, as the global displacement trends reflect, those fleeing South Sudan are being hosted by the poorest communities in the neighbouring countries, under immense pressure with scarce resources.
Noting that the welcome South Sudan refugees received in the neighbouring countries “is encouraging” he cautioned that the lack of resources to respond is also extremely worrying.
The majority of the refugees are being hosted by Uganda (about 698,000), followed by Ethiopia (about 342,000), Sudan (305,000), Kenya (89,000), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (68,000) and the Central African Republic (4,900).
“We are working with authorities in South Sudan’s neighbouring countries to provide life-saving support and look after the basic needs of those arriving in desperate conditions,” the UNHCR spokesperson said, renewing a call on donor countries to step up support to the humanitarian efforts for the South Sudan situation.
South Sudan has faced ongoing challenges since a political face-off between President Salva Kiir and his then former Vice-President Riek Machar erupted into full blown conflict between forces loyal to each in December 2013. The crisis has produced one of the world’s worst displacement situations with immense suffering for civilians.
Despite the August 2015 peace agreement that formally ended the war, conflict and instability have also spread to previously unaffected areas.
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