By Shibani Mahtani

Singapore’s lawmakers have always worried their city-state’s growth is unsustainable given its lack of water, energy and other natural resources. But a new study says matters may be worse than they know, with the country’s current “ecological deficit” leaving it last out of 150 countries ranked for their overall economic and ecological health.
The Eco2 Index, crafted by researchers at the University of British Columbia, looks at both the economic and ecological security of a country and how fast countries are using up resources at their disposal – an initiative they say was promoted by the threat of climate change, a growing world population and mounting financial problems.
“We hear that countries are suffering financially every day in the news, but that only tells half the story,” said Rashid Sumaila, director of the university’s Fisheries Centre, in a statement. “Piling up ecological deficits is just as concerning as piling up financial deficits.”
Singapore was joined by other high-income countries at the bottom of the list, with many sharing similar land and resource scarcity problems. The five “unhealthiest” countries according to the index besides Singapore were Jordan, South Korea, Israel and Kuwait. The researchers hope that this list will be able to better prepare these countries in planning their consumption and future resource needs.
Coming out top on the list were Bolivia, Angola, Namibia, Paraguay and Argentina, even though they may have relatively weaker economies. Researchers say are better prepared to offer future generations the financial, food, water and energy security they require.
The Southeast Asian country coming out on top in the index was Myanmar, ranked 32 out of the 150 countries. Resource-rich Indonesia was ranked at 42, despite having significant pollution problems, with Malaysia and Thailand at No. 80 and 96 respectively.
Researchers from the University of British Columbia partnered with a non-governmental organization focused on ecological sustainability, known as the Global Footprint Network, in compiling the list, using figures and data from the World Bank.
Though Singapore has a huge trade and budget surplus, Mr. Sumaila said that the country’s “ecological deficits” are the worst in the world. This means that Singapore’s consumption – which includes its giant, air-conditioned shopping malls – and the waste produced by its citizens heavily outweigh locally-available resources such as agricultural land and energy.
Singapore imports much of its energy, and is mostly reliant on natural gas. It also must import most of its food, and despite talk by government leaders of expanding local agricultural production, property developers have carved up all but a few tiny slivers of farm land, mostly located near the border with Malaysia. Other crucial resources like water are scarce, and since land is at a premium, water catchment areas have to be built without taking up space that’s needed for condominiums and other living spaces.
Multiple treaties concerning water have been signed, and two of these still hold, assuring Malaysia will provide Singapore with water until 2061. Driven to achieve self-sufficiency when possible for at least some of its crucial resources, Singapore’s Public Utilities Board treats and reclaims wastewater (known under its brand name NEWater) – a process that is expected to supply 80% of the country’s water needs by 2060.
Indeed, many residents may scratch their heads when contemplating Singapore’s lowly ranking. Despite environmentalists’ concerns that consumption patterns there are unsustainable, many expatriate families have moved to Singapore in large part to escape the unhealthy conditions –including unclean air – in other Asian cities such as Jakarta and Hong Kong; if anything, some residents feel Singapore is too sanitized. It has also has earned kudos globally for its innovative responses to its water needs.
http://blogs.wsj.com/searealtime/2012/02/22/singapore-the-worlds-unhealthiest-country/
 

A tornado as big as the Earth? Yep, and there's video...

 

ကိုးရီးယား ပညာေရး ေရာဂါ၊ အေရွ႕ေတာင္အာရွ ဆင္ျခင္စရာ

အေရွ႕ေတာင္အာရွ ႏိုင္ငံမ်ားသည္ ကိုးရီးယားယဥ္ေက်းမႈ အႏုပညာကို ပိုမိုစိတ္၀င္စား လာသည္ကို ေတြ႔ရွိရသည္။ ကိုးရီးယား ရုပ္သံ TVXB၊ DBSK ႏွင့္ Tohoshinmi တို႔သည္ ကမၻာတ၀ွမ္းတြင္ လူႀကိဳက္မ်ားေသာ ေျဖေဖ်ာ္ေရး လုပ္ငန္းႀကီးမ်ား ျဖစ္သည္။
ကိုးရီးယားႏိုင္ငံ၏ စီးပြားေရး ေအာင္ျမင္မႈႏွင့္ ပညာေရး အဆက္အစပ္ကို သိရွိမႈ နည္းပါးသည္။ က်ေနာ္ ၁၉၆၉ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ ကိုးရီးယားႏိုင္ငံကို သြားေရာက္ လည္ပတ္စဥ္က ေတာင္ကိုးရီးယားမွာ စစ္ပြဲၿပီးခါစ ပ်က္စီးမႈၾကားက ရုန္းကန္ေနရသည့္ ဆင္းရဲေသာ ႏိုင္ငံျဖစ္သည္။ ႏွစ္ေပါင္း ၃၅ ႏွစ္အတြင္း ကိုးရီးယားႏိုင္ငံသည္ ကမၻာ့ အခ်မ္းသာဆုံး ႏိုင္ငံအဆင့္ကို ေရာက္ရွိလာေသာ ႏိုင္ငံ ျဖစ္သည္။
၂၀၀၉ ခုႏွစ္က စစ္ေဆးခဲ့သည့္ Program for International Student Assessment-PISA တြင္ စာဖတ္မႈစြမ္းရည္ႏွင့္ သခ်ၤာတြင္ ပထမ၊ သိပၸံတြင္ တတိယ အဆင့္ရရွိခဲ့သည္။
ကိုးရီးယား၏ ပညာေရး ကမၻာ့အဆင့္မွီ မည္ကဲ့သို႔ျဖစ္လာသနည္။
ပထမအခ်က္က အေတာ္ဆုံး ကုိးရီးယား ေက်ာင္းသားမ်ား ဆရာျဖစ္လိုျခင္း၊ ထိုင္းႏိုင္ငံတြင္ ဤကဲ့သို႔ မရွိေခ်။ ကိုးရီးယားဆရာမ်ားသည္ လစာေကာင္းေကာင္း ရရွိျခင္း အျပင္၊ ဆရာမ်ာအေပၚ ရိုေသေလးစားမႈမွာ အျမင့္ဆုံး အေနအထားတြင္ ရွိသည္။ ဥပမာအားျဖင့္ အိမ္ေထာင္ဖက္ ေရြးခ်ယ္ရာတြင္လည္း ပထမ ဦးစားေပးအျဖစ္ စဥ္းစားၾကသည္။
ဒုတိယ အခ်က္မွာ ကိုးရီယား ကေလးေမြးဖြားႏႈန္း ျဖစ္သည္။ OECD ႏိုင္ငံမ်ားတြင္ ကေလးေမြးဖြားႏႈန္းမွာ ၁.၁၃ ရွိသည့္အတြက္ မိဘမ်ားမွ ကေလးမ်ားအား ပညာေရး ဘက္တြင္ ပိုမိုအာရုံစိုက္ႏိုင္ျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္။
တတိယအခ်က္မွာ ကိုးရီးယား၏ Shadow Education ပညာေရးစနစ္ ျဖစ္သည္။ ဤစနစ္အရ ေက်ာင္းသားမ်ားသည္ ေက်ာင္းခ်ိန္အျပင္ ေက်ာင္းခ်ိန္အပ၌လည္း အခ်ိန္ေပးၿပီး အသည္းအသန္ ေလ့လာရေသာ စနစ္ျဖစ္သည္။
ဤကဲ့သို႔ ႀကိဳးစား အားထုတ္မႈျဖင့္ ကိုးရီးယား၏ စီးပြားေရးကို စဥ္ပင္ဖြဲ႔ၿဖိဳး ေစခဲ့သည္။ ကိုးရီးႏိုင္ငံသည္ သိပၸံႏွင့္ နည္းပညာတြင္ ပါရမီရွင္ မ်ားေမြးထုတ္ ေပးသည့္ႏိုင္ငံ တစ္ခုျဖစ္သည္။ က်ေနာ္ေတြ႔ခဲ့ေသာ ကိုးရီးယား လူ႔အဖြ႔ဲအစည္းသည္ စာေပကို ခ်စ္ျမတ္ႏိုးေသာလူမ်ိဳး ျဖစ္သည္။
ကိုးရီးယားႏိုင္ငံ၏ ပညာေရး ေအာင္ျမင္ရျခင္းအေၾကာင္း တစ္ခ်က္မွာ ကြန္ျဖဴးရွပ္၀ါဒကို အေလးအနက္ ထားတဲ႔ လူ႔အဖြဲ႔အစည္း ျဖစ္ေသာေၾကာင္႔ပင္။ ေက်ာင္သားမ်ား၊ အလုပ္သမားမ်ားမွာလည္း လုပ္ငန္းအေပၚတြင္ စိတ္၀င္စားမႈ အထူးျမင့္မားေသာလူမ်ိဳး ျဖစ္သည္။ က်ေနာ္၏ ဆယ္စုႏွစ္မ်ားစြာ သင္ၾကားေရး အေတြ႔အၾကဳံအရ ကိုးရီးယား ေက်ာင္းသားမ်ားမွာ အာရုံစူးစိုက္မႈ အရွိဆုံးေသာသူမ်ား ျဖစ္သည္။
ကိုးရီးယား ေက်ာင္းသားမ်ားသည္ ကမၻာေပၚ၌ အေတာ္ဆုံးစာရင္းထဲတြင္ ပါ၀င္ေသာ္လည္း မိဘာမ်ားမွာ ကိုးရီးယား ပညာေရးအေပၚ သေဘာမေတြ႔မႈ ပိုမိုမ်ားျပားလာသည္။ တင္းက်ပ္ေသာ ပညာေရး စနစ္ေၾကာင့္ ကိုးရီးယားေက်ာင္းသားမ်ား သည္ မိမိကိုယ္ကို ေသေၾကာင္းႀကံသည့္ႏႈန္း အဆမတန္ ျမင့္မားလာခဲ့သည္။
ဤကဲ့သို႔ အေျခအေနမ်ားေၾကာင့္ ကိုးရီးယားမိဘမ်ားသည္ စိတ္ပိုင္းဆုိင္ရာ ဖိစီးမႈ နည္းပါးသည့္ အေမရိကားႏွင့္ ဥေရာပႏိုင္ငံမ်ားရွိ ေက်ာင္းမ်ားတြင္ သားသမီးမ်ား ပညာသင္ၾကားေရးကို ေရြးခ်ယ္လာၾကသည္။
ထိုင္းႏိုင္ငံအေနျဖင့္ ကိုရီးယားႏိုင္ငံမွ မည္သည့္ သင္ခန္းစာမ်ားကို သင္ယူ လိုက္နာရမည္နည္း။
မထမအခ်က္မွာ ပညာေရးက႑ တြင္အေတာ္ဆုံး ေက်ာင္းသားမ်ား ပါ၀င္လာရန္ ေဆာင္ရြက္ ရပါမည္။ ဒုတိယ အခ်က္မွာ စိတ္ပါ၀င္စားမႈ ကိုအေလးထားရန္ႏွင့္ တတိယအခ်က္မွာ ထိုင္းလူ႔အဖြဲ႔အစည္းအတြင္း သုေတသနႏွင့္ ဖြံ႔ၿဖိဳးမႈ ပိုမိုခိုင္မာ လာေရးအတြက္ လူမႈေဗဒ၊ လူမႈေရးသိပၸံ၊ အင္ဂ်င္နီယာ ႏွင့္သိပၸံနယ္ပယ္မ်ားတြင္ မွ်တမႈရွိရန္ လိုအပ္သည္။
သို႔ရာတြင္ ကိုးရီးယားႏိုင္ငံတြင္ ျဖစ္ေပၚေနသည့္ ပညာေရး အားနည္းခ်က္ အခ်ဳိ႕ကို အထူးအေလးထားကာ ေရွာင္သင့္ေပသည္။ လူသားမ်ား၏ ေပ်ာ္ရြင္မႈသည္သာ အေရးႀကီးေပသည္။ ယေန႔ ထိုင္းေက်ာင္းသားမ်ားသည္ ကိုးရီးယားေက်ာင္းသားမ်ားထက္ ေပ်ာ္ရြင္မႈ ပုိရွိေပသည္။
သို႔ရာတြင္ ဗုဒၶ၏ အလယ္အလတ္ လမ္းစဥ္သည္သာ ပိုမိုသင့္ေတာ္မည္ဟု ယူဆမိပါသည္။ ကိုးရီးယား၏ ေအာင္ျမင္ေသာပညာေရးစနစ္ႏွင့္ ထိုင္းနိုင္ငံ၏ လက္ရွိပညာေရးစနစ္သည္ မတူညီႏိုင္သလို ေက်ာင္းသားမ်ား၏ တီထြင္မႈႏွင့္ ပညာအရည္ အေသြးမွာလည္း ထပ္တူမက်ႏိုင္ေပ။
Sources: The Korea Paradox by Professor Gerald W fry ( The Nation)
လွေရႊ

From Ambiga to the Obedient Wives Club, we take a look back at news involving Malaysian women

It has indeed been a newsworthy year for Malaysian women. Both encouraging news like Ambiga’s continuous fight for a better election system in Malaysia and frowned upon ones like the Obedient Wives Club, it was a year to learn and reflect. Here, we present you the roundup of high and low lights on Malaysian women when they make the headlines.
1. Malaysia to Introduce Female-Only Cab Service
Following the implementation of female coach on trains and female buses, Malaysian government started running female-only taxi service in November 2011. While gender segregation might not be the long-time solution for sexual harassment in public transport, it is undeniably a relief for women who commute everyday.

In light of the death of North Korean’s inscrutable leader, Kim Jong Il, who died of a heart attack last Saturday, we take a look into the lives of women in the democratic country that we hear so little about.
Regarded as one of the world’s most-repressive leaders abroad, Kim Jong Il is strangely revered by the people of North Korea.
Of the most poignant and widely publicised accounts of women exploitation and brutality in North Korea; where women were made sex slaves for the Japanese military – a notorious practice carried out by Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. These women suffered at the hands of the Japanese troops and many did not survive the ordeal while others suffered profound psychological effects.
In traditional Korean society, many women are illiterate and have never received formal education. Things began to change in the late 19th century when Korea was open to foreign contact. Christian missionaries started settling in and establishing girls’ schools, hence giving Korean girls an opportunity for education.
Historically, back in the Chosn Dynasty, women were typically given the role to ensure the continuation of the family line. They are expected to give birth to and raise male heirs for the household. Women had few opportunities to participate in the social, economic, or political life of society. However, there were a few exceptions to boundaries imposed on women’s positions. For example, female shamans were engaged to cure illnesses by exorcising evil spirits, to pray for rain during droughts, or to perform divination and fortune telling.
North Korea underwent several significant reforms, which totally changed the social and family structures after the liberation from Japan in 1945. On July 30, 1946, authorities from north of the 38th parallel passed a Sex Equality Law. The 1972 constitution declared “women hold equal social status and rights with men.”
Fast forward to the modern-day North Korea, women are fully expected to participate in the work force outside the home. In view of the nation’s labour shortage, women’s employment was considered an essential asset to the country’s economy.
Despite such positive examples, however, it appears that women are far from being fully liberated. Sons are still clearly favoured over daughters. Women are still expected to contribute to the labour force whilst taking care of the household and raising of children.
With the passing of Kim Jong Il, his youngest son, Kim Jong Un will succeed his father as the country’s leader. The question here therefore lies on everyone’s mind: what will happen next?
Only time will tell.
source;
http://www.venusbuzz.com/archives/2681/women-in-north-korea/

The world’s most glamorous aren’t just noted for their fashion sense and classic elegance. They are also seen jet-setting around the world fronting global missions.
Angelina Jolie

One of the world’s most beautiful people, Angelina Jolie in one amazing philanthropist. It all started in 2001 when she was filming Tomb Raider in Cambodia and first came face-to-face with the plight of refugees. A new mission was set – one that would take her to the far and forgotten corners of the globe. She is also named the Goodwill Ambassador for The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR). Taking on the role, she started to use her celebrity power to highlight humanitarian causes worldwide. Since then, the mother of six has worked at a whirlwind pace. In her tenure as ambassador, she has toured extensively to UNHCR refugee operations in Balkans, Sierra Leone, Namibia, Tanzania, Kenya, Cambodia, Thailand, and Pakistan and Ecuador and has also adopted 3 children from Cambodia, Ethiopia and Vietnam along the way.
Bianca Jagger

Bianca Jagger is a prominent spokeswoman for human rights, social justice and environment protection in a wide variety of threatened locales. Mick Jagger’s first ex-wife became and prominent jet-setting celebrity of the 1970’s, known particularly as a chum of renowned artist Andy Warhol. In early 1979, she visited Nicaragua with the International Red Cross delegation and was shocked by the brutality and oppression that the Somoza regime carried out there. This persuaded her to commit herself to the issues of justice and human rights. Through many of her altruistic travel passages, she has worked unstintingly with humanitarian organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Washington Office for Latin America.
Petra Nemcova

International supermodel and survivor of the devastating tsunami that hit the Indian Ocean in 2004, Petra Nemcova has certainly come a long way. The tragic experience also took the life of her then-fiancé, Simon Atlee and has left a profound impact on her. Soon after her recovery, she started Happy Hearts Fund that helps rebuild the lives of children who have suffered loss or hardship as a result of natural, economic or health related disasters. In 2006, together with AFP Integra, she helped restored several schools in Ica, one of the region’s worst affected by the earthquake that struck Peru. Since then, she has helped built countless of schools for children in disaster stricken areas together with her team.
Queen Rania of Jordan

There are a few women in the Middle East who can summon the attention of world leaders at the drop of a hat. The Kuwait-born queen is one of them. Known for her business savvy skills and outspokenness, Queen Rania of Jordan is also widely known as a forthright advocate of the underprivileged. She has also often seen taking her children along on her global travels. Queen Rania, is also known for her impeccable style but she’s not only a pretty face. She is also noted for her vocal advocacy on women and children’s issues in a region where such rights aren’t given sufficient awareness and coverage.
Princess Diana

When it comes to woman on a mission, one lady truly stands out among the crowd. In April 1987, Lady Diana Frances Spencer, or fondly known as Princess Diana to the world, was the first high-profile public figure to be photographed knowingly touching a person infected with the HIV virus. Her mission was to change people’s perception on AIDS sufferers – often considered a stigma to the society then. She would often arrive unannounced to hospices with instructions that these visits were to be kept from the media. In another one of her most widely publicised humanitarian efforts was her visit to Angola in January 1997, when, serving as an International Red Cross VIP volunteer, she visited landmine survivors in hospitals. Pictures of Diana swapping her designer outfits for a flak jacket and ballistic helmet, touring a minefield were seen worldwide. Her interest in landmines was focused on the injuries they create, often to children. Sadly, on 31 August 1997, Princess Diana died in a tragic car crash in Paris. However her charitable legacy still lives on through her sons and memories of her kindness and generosity will forever be remembered by the world.

source; http://www.venusbuzz.com/archives/5938/famous-women-on-a-mission/