ASEAN nations sign deal for economic community
Group seeks freer movement of trade and capital in SE Asia and to create the world’s seventh-largest economy.
| Politics, Asia Pacific, Malaysia, China
Southeast Asian nations have established a formal community that attempts to create freer movement of trade and capital in an area of 625 million people with a combined economic output of $2.6 trillion.
The Community Declaration was signed on Sunday by leaders of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, this year’s host of the group’s annual summit, where meetings also took place on rooting out “terrorism and extremism”.
“In practice, we have virtually eliminated tariff barriers between us,” Najib Razak, Malaysia’s prime minister, said.
“Now, we have to assure freer movements and removal of barriers that hinder growth and investment.”
Eagles of Death Metal star: ‘One kid survived by hiding under my jacket’
Jesse Hughes, lead singer of band playing at the Bataclan in Paris when terrorists opened fire, says ‘so many people put themselves in front of people’
The lead singer of rock back Eagles of Death Metal has told how the Paris terrorists killed fans hiding in the band’s dressing room at the Bataclan theatre.
In an emotional interview with Vice, Jesse Hughes, 43, described how just one person in the room survived – by hiding under the vocalist’s leather jacket.
Eighty-nine of the Paris attacks’ 130 deaths were at the band’s concert on 13 November where Islamist gunmen fired into the crowd. More than 100 more were injured.
Vice released a short clip of an interview by its founder Shane Smith with Hughes and band co-founder Josh Homme, the frontman of Queens of the Stone Age, ahead of the full interview being released.
War with Isis: To defeat the jihadists the West needs a local ally
World View: Therein lies the problem – the militants’ many regional enemies are not yet prepared to work together
The aftermath of terrorist attacks such as the massacre in Paris are a bad time to produce new policies, but they provide ideal political conditions for a government to take radical, if ill-thought-out, initiatives. Leaders are carried away by a heady sense of empowerment as a worried or frightened public demands that something be done in response to calamity and to prevent it happening again. The moment of greatest risk is not when the bombs explode or the guns fire, but when governments react to these atrocities.
Terrorism is, in the first instance, aimed at showing defiance, exacting revenge and demonstrating strength. But, to be truly successful, it needs to provoke a poorly considered overreaction by those targeted. This has always been true. The greatest success of the 9/11 hijackers was not destroying the World Trade Center, but tempting the US government into launching wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in which it failed to achieve its ends and which are still going on.
Dozens killed in landslide at Burma jade mine
At least 90 people have died in a landslide in a remote jade mining area of northern Myanmar (Burma), officials said Sunday, as search teams continued to find bodies in one of the deadliest disasters to strike the country’s shadowy jade industry.
Those killed were thought to have been scavenging through a mountain of waste rubble dumped by mechanical diggers used by mining firms in the area to extract Myanmar’s most valuable precious stone.
The massive landslide crushed dozens of flimsy shanty huts clustered on the barren landscape, where an unknown number of itinerant workers had made their homes in the hope of finding riches on the side of the secretive multi-billion dollar jade industry in war-torn Kachin state.
“We found 79 dead bodies on November 21 (and) 11 today so the total so far is 90,” said Nilar Myint an official from the local administrative authorities in Hpakant, northern Kachin, adding that the rescue operation was ongoing.
“We are seeing only dead bodies and no one knows how many people live there,” he told AFP, adding that only one person had been pulled alive from the rubble, but had died soon after.
22 Nov, 2015
To build world-class startups, girls just wanna have funds
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1. Men don’t have to make as many adjustments as we do
“The world has changed and people around me have never made me think about gender. I am fortunate to be in such a position,” says Reddy, who received funding for her startup when she was 23 from one of the top venture capital firms, Accel Partners. Her firm sells several celebrity apparel brands, apart from accessories and memorabilia.
Reddy returned to India to start her own business after interning at a boutique investment bank in London for a year. “The biological cycle makes it imperative for women to make adjustments in their careers. These are adjustments men don’t have to make, and that is why we don’t see many women at senior levels. Hence, women don’t have many inspirational entrepreneurs to look up to,” says Reddy, who believes women make better salespeople.
She is hopeful the infrastructure for women to work after childbirth will improve with companies providing flexible working hours.
Opinion: Encryption makes us more secure, not less
Instead of pushing to diminish tools that are meant to protect modern communications and safeguard speech, our leaders should work toward lasting solutions that can actually thwart terrorism.
Over the past nine days, terrorists have killed at least 200 people in Paris, Beirut, the West Bank, and Mali. Each of those people were robbed of a lifetime of possibilities. Every life should be celebrated, and every death will be mourned. These victims, and the loved ones they left behind, deserve better than the shallow reactions that many of our law and policymakers are offering in lieu of real leadership, on both sides of the Atlantic.
Terrorism cannot be tolerated. But neither should we tolerate those in power capitalizing on mass violence – and the fear it is designed to incite – to undermine our rights.
Even before the dust has settled to verify facts, several politicians have blamed the Paris attacks on citizens’ growing demands for privacy more generally, and on the use of encryption tools more specifically. Without citing evidence, some suggest that the terrorists were able to carry out these horrifying acts because they have the capacity to use encrypted channels to communicate. Their logic is that if we weaken encryption, we can stop terrorism.