Partners in Health’s New Year’s Resolution
Here is your evening/overnight short news roundup from around the world. I will start with checking the sources I did not use on Sunday. Looking for about 5 stories.
On Israel’s Election, from our own Volleyboy1
BLOGGING THE ISRAELI ELECTION (WITH UPDATES)
WAPO has a 2-hour old update
News
Not Kurds, terrorists are bombed, says Turkish PM
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has sought to distinguish between Kurdish people and militants of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), claiming that his army was only bombing “terrorists,” not ordinary Kurds.
“We have opened our hearts to our Kurdish brothers. We are sending bombs to terrorists. Our fight against the terror will continue today and tomorrow,” Erdoğan said in his address to his Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) parliamentary group on Jan. 22. “It is not true [that we are bombing Kurds].”
Erdoğan was responding to the Peace and Democracy Party’s (BDP) criticism after the Turkish Armed Forces started an operation against the PKK following the killing of a police officer in a gun attack by suspected members of the PKK on Jan. 16 in Mardin. Six PKK militants were killed in the southeastern province on Jan. 22.
The Falklands people decision in March should be the final word
In March, Falkland Islanders will vote in a referendum asking whether they want to retain their status as an overseas territory of the United Kingdom. It is expected that every single one of them will say yes.
If so, Argentina should respect their wishes. It should be for the Island’s 3100 residents to determine their political and sovereign status, no-one else.
The sabre-rattling in recent weeks over the Falklands has stirred memories of the bloody war fought over two months after Argentina invaded and occupied them in April 1982. More than 250 British servicemen, about 650 Argentines and three Islanders died before Britain regained control.
Source of editorial is New Zealand’s Dominion Post. Mercopress’s main issue seems to be the Falklands/Maldives. This editorial attracted my attention as I thought of so many other land disputes, even here in our times. If they could only all be settled by a vote. Further information on the coming vote is here.
Philippines takes China maritime dispute to UN tribunal
The Philippines plans to challenge China’s maritime claims before a United Nations-endorsed tribunal, a move that may raise tensions as the two nations vie for oil, gas and fish resources in contested waters.
“The Philippines has exhausted almost all political and diplomatic avenues for a peaceful negotiated settlement of its maritime dispute with China,” Foreign Affairs Secretary Albert del Rosario told reporters in Manila Tuesday. “To this day, a solution is elusive. We hope the arbitral proceedings shall bring this dispute to a durable solution.”
The Philippines is challenging China’s “nine-dash” map of the sea, first published in 1947, that extends hundreds of miles south from China’s Hainan Island to the equatorial waters off the coast of Borneo. China claims “indisputable sovereignty” over more than 100 small islands, atolls and reefs that form the Paracel and Spratly Islands.
I follow China in general, and this island/resource issue, as closely as I can. 1/3 of the world’s population and more right there. So many nations involved.
World economic forum kicks off in Davos
Around 700 chief executives will be attending the annual meetings alongside some 40 prime ministers and heads of state. There will also be a fair amount of journalists.
Some participants have travelled thousands of miles and some of the businessmen and women have paid a healthy sum to attend.
“In the next 2-3 days I will have meetings with the chief executives and marketing directors of our 10 biggest customers […] In 24-48 hours I can have a string of meetings that otherwise would have taken 6 months “, says David Jones, the chief executive of advertising group Havas.
The World Economic Forum has its critics, and this year is no exception. The Davos event is labelled as elitist and as a place where powerful people go to carve up the world with little or no scrutiny.
Liveblog from France’s 24news.
California death penalty: Will state follow Arizona, which has resumed executions after a long hiatus?
When Arizona prison officials injected condemned rapist and murderer Richard Stokley with a single, fatal drug dose last month, it marked the state’s sixth execution of the year in the nation’s second busiest death chamber.
Now that California voters in November narrowly preserved the death penalty, Arizona’s path could foreshadow the future for this state, where not a single one of the 729 death row inmates have marched to execution in seven years.
As in California, interminable legal tangles once shut down Arizona’s death penalty system as the state executed only one inmate, who volunteered to die, from 2001 to 2010. But Arizona emerged from numerous court battles that removed all of the legal roadblocks
The view a condemned inmate would have from a table inside the death chamber is shown during a tour of the lethal injection facility at San Quentin State Prison in San Quentin, Calif. (Associated Press) ( Eric Risberg )
that remain in California.
The result has been 11 executions since October 2010, nearly the number California has carried out since it restored the death penalty in 1978. Significantly, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, often the last word for death penalty appeals in the Western states, has not intervened.
Book Review
The 17 Equations That Changed The Course Of Humanity
Mathematician Ian Stewart’s recent book “In Pursuit of the Unknown: 17 Equations That Changed the World” takes a close look at some of the most important equations of all time.
A great example of the human impact of math is the financial crisis. Black Scholes, number 17 on this list, is a derivative pricing equation that played a role.
“It’s actually a fairly simple equation, mathematically speaking,” Professor Stewart told Business Insider. “What caused trouble was the complexity of the system the mathematics was intended to model.”
