Japanese economy now in recession

I thought this article was an intersting read. As America goes through this recession it was surprising to see that one of our big product-supplying countries is going through similar economic peril.

Japan's economy has entered its first recession since 2001 after shrinking by 0.1% in the third quarter.
The world's second-biggest economy had previous shrunk by 0.9% in the April to June quarter.
"The downtrend in the economy will continue for the time being as global growth slows," said Japanese Economy Minister Kaoru Yosano.
The eurozone officially slipped into recession last week, and the US is expected to follow.
"We need to bear in mind that economic conditions could worsen further as the US and European financial crisis deepens, worries of economic downturn heighten and stock and foreign exchange markets make big swings," Mr Yosano added.
In Osaka, Japan's second biggest city, some companies are looking to the heavens for help
Duncan Bartlett, BBC correspondent
Osaka puts economic hope in new ideas
The benchmark Nikkei share index fell on opening after the growth data was released, but it later rebounded and closed up 0.7%. The Nikkei has lost a quarter of its value since the beginning of October.
Growth in Japan has been hit by the global economic slowdown which has curbed demand for Japanese exports.
"The risk of Japan posting a third or fourth straight quarterly contraction is growing, given the fact that we can no longer rely on exports," said Takeshi Minami, chief economist at Norinchukin Research Institute.
Japan's economy had experienced its longest period of economic growth since World War II until the sub-prime crisis started a year ago.

Eurozone slips into recession

Hey guys, it's not my time for a post, but I stumbled across this interesting article on Al-Jazeera's website. Apparently things are rough in markets all over the world. Germany, the mainstay of the European market, is thought to be the main cause of this, but other countries are struggling as well. It also mentions that Hong Kong recently announced a recession too. It even said that the US did better this past quarter than the Eurozone. Can we expect our economy to improve if the European economy does, and vice versa?

Eurozone slips into recession

The eurozone has officially slippped into recession after European Union (EU) statisticians estimated the economy of its 15-member states shrank by 0.2 per cent in the third quarter. Eurostat, the European Union's statistics office, released the figures on Friday. The fall follows a 0.2 per cent economic contraction in April-June. Two consecutive quarters of shrinking growth is a widely accepted definition of technical recession. Year-on-year economic output grew by 0.7 per cent in the third quarter - half of its growth rate in the second quarter. The eurozone performance was weaker than that of the US, where output fell 0.1 per cent on the quarter and grew by 0.8 per cent in annual terms. German decline Traders believe the eurozone's decline was prompted largely by a technical recession in Germany, Europe's biggest economy. Italy, the eurozone's third-biggest economy, is also classified as being formally in recession. France, Europe's second largest economy, defied expectations on Friday by posting a 0.1 per cent growth in the third quarter. Howard Wheeldon, financial analyst at BGC International based in London, told Al Jazeera: "It means confidence in the economy is going out the door. We have moved from a period of growth into a period of decline. "Germany is the economic engine of the eurozone and it is the most powerful within the eurozone. It is the one we will all be watching to see when that decline halts. "I think it will be 2009 ... we have got to baton down the hatches." Troubled forecast The news came as Hong Kong announced it too had formally tipped over into recession. The announcements will serve to deepen fears that a global recession is unavoidable and also follows a bleak assessment of the financial crisis released by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The OECD on Thursday slashed its economic output forecasts for major economies and said its 30-strong membership appeared to have entered a recession. The news that more major economies have slipped into recession will put further pressure on the G20 - the world's top 20 economic powers - to find a way of avoiding all-out global financial meltdown. The G20 leaders are holding an emergency summit in Washington this weekend to discuss the financial crisis. George Bush, the US president, said the talks would focus on the following five objectives: understanding the causes of the crisis, reviewing the effectiveness of responses, developing principles for reform, launching a specific plan and assuring the world that free-market principles were the only way to reach propsperity. Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, said on Friday that Russian and EU positions ahead of the G20 summit were very close. Sarkozy made the comment during a joint press conference with Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, following an EU-Russia summit in the French city of Nice. Immediately after the meeting, Sarkozy and Medvedev will fly directly to the G20 meeting in Washington.

Aids panademic in Africa

Hello everyone

I'm the blog leader for this week. With the class having prior class discussions on Africa and their various forms of media coverage there, I can across an interesting article from BBC. More than one in five adults in the small mountain kingdom of Lesotho is HIV-positive, making it one of the countries worst hit by the Aids pandemic. You hear about the continent of Africa battling with the AIDS epidemic, but you rarely hear about what part is being effected specifically. We haven't disused much about Lesotho in class so I thought this would be an interesting topic to be brought up for discussion. In this article BBC stated that each year an estimated 23,000 people die of HIV-related causes, from a population of less than two million. The average life expectancy at birth is estimated to have dropped to levels last seen in the 1950s. It is now below 50 years for the region as a whole, 35.2 years for Lesotho. Over the next six months, the BBC will follow the lives of seven people from the community of St Rodrigue, 40km south of the capital, Maseru, as they struggle to live with the HIV crisis.

The link to the article is listed below
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7703032.stm

Lead blogging, once again, aren't we all excited. I came across this article and thought, how perfect...blogging. Read through this with this one thought, what if we could change the way things worked around here by blogging?? That is power that I would love to have. :)

Malay Blogger Fights a System He Perfected

By SETH MYDANS

Published: November 5, 2008

(nytimes.com)

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — In a vast office at the top of one of the world’s tallest buildings, former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad sits at a broad, glass-topped desk, scribbling his thoughts on a pad of unlined paper.

For 22 years, Mr. Mahathir was the most powerful person in this land, and his thoughts were commands as he reshaped the country in his own image.

But he has become an irritant and a spoiler five years after stepping down, turning against his handpicked successor, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, and falling victim to the press controls he perfected as prime minister.

“Where is the press freedom?” he asked two years ago, apparently surprised at being suddenly ignored. “Broadcast what I have to say! What I say is not even accurately published in the press!”

This May, though, he discovered the power of the Internet. Like many other inconvenient critics, he joined what seemed to be a political wave of the future, creating his own blog — www.chedet.com — where he vents in English and Malay several times a week.

Around the region bloggers are becoming a Fifth Estate, challenging the government’s monopoly on information in Singapore, evading censors in Vietnam, and influencing events in places like Thailand, Cambodia and China.

In March, political experts said, Malaysia’s bloggers helped influence elections, contributing to the biggest upset that the governing party, the United Malays National Organization, had suffered since independence in 1957. For the first time in decades, it held fewer than two-thirds of the seats in Parliament, and it lost control of 5 of the 13 states.

Among the opposition winners in the national and state governments were several bloggers, most prominently Jeff Ooi, who claimed to have prodded Mr. Mahathir into starting his own blog.

“The government doesn’t have a clue how to handle bloggers,” Mr. Ooi said in an interview. “If I were a dictator, I would be despairing. What do you do against this?”

The Internet has become the main battleground against censorship in Malaysia, where a system of self-censorship in an atmosphere of government pressure and intimidation has produced a constricted press.

Mr. Mahathir, 82, seems to be reveling now in challenging the system he once controlled, and he is as acerbic as he was during his days as prime minister.

“It is time the so-called intellectuals realize they were being duped by the Master of Spin,” he wrote on Aug. 21, referring to his bitter enemy, Anwar Ibrahim, who was his deputy prime minister and now leads the main opposition party. He also accused Mr. Anwar of being “the pious Muslim, who is also the bosom pal of Paul Wolfowitz, the neo-con Jew,” referring to the former United States deputy secretary of defense.

Blogging on Sept. 3, he offered a sort of mission statement. Many are with him as he harasses the government, he asserted. “But they are not prepared to say it openly,” he wrote. “That was why I started my blog. About six million had visited my blog site, and tens of thousands have commented and supported me.”

In case anyone doubts this, he posts comments to his blog by the dozens and hundreds, page after page, day after day. It turns out he has a lot of fans.

“Amazingly brilliant!” reads one comment. “I can’t stop laughing...you made my day Sir!”

And just to clear up any possible misunderstanding, another writes, “You, sir, are the most brilliant politician Malaysia has ever been blessed with.”

Mr. Ooi, 52, a former advertising copywriter who was one of Malaysia’s first political bloggers, started in 2003 and built a loyal following at www.jeffooi.com.

The government began an assault on Mr. Ooi that included threats of imprisonment without trial, attacks in the government-friendly press and defamation lawsuits, which are popular among leaders in Southeast Asia.

But that seemed only to make him a hero, and when he decided to run for Parliament as an opposition candidate, he already had a big head start.

“As a person that has consistently faced threats as a blogger, I had a kind of iconism and imagery that this is someone you can trust, someone the government fears, someone you need to put into Parliament,” Mr. Ooi said.

But he said it was much harder to blog from the inside. “The trade-off is that I have to write with measured words,” he said.

Earlier this year, Mr. Ooi said, he attended a public forum with Mr. Mahathir. It was there that he claimed he persuaded Mr. Mahathir to begin a blog.

“I threw him a challenge,” Mr. Ooi said. “A blogger shares a few prerequisites. One, he is strongly opinionated. Two, he could be controversial. And, thirdly, he is an agent provocateur on issues.

“I thought Mahathir fulfilled all three.”

The result, Mr. Ooi said, was “a miracle, he scored about 10 million visitors within months.”

Now, a convert to free speech, Mr. Mahathir is using his blog to champion the most recent victim of government censorship, Raja Petra Kamaruddin, the country’s most prominent blogger, who posts on www.malaysia-today.net, his Web site. The site has been blocked, but readers are redirected to another Web site, which continues to be updated.

The government has fallen back on the kind of tactics that Mr. Ooi faced. It charged Mr. Petra with sedition and jailed him for two years without trial for comments he had posted.

Mr. Mahathir sounded almost like Che Guevara when he said in his blog that the arrest showed “a degree of oppressive arrogance worthy of a totalitarian state.”

Furthermore, jailing people is futile, he said in an interview in his office. There is no way the government can arrest all the bloggers, even if it wants to.

At least, he said, “I hope so. Otherwise I’ll be in, too.”

Kenya Erupts in Ecstasy at Obama Election

Nation Erupts in Ecstasy at Obama Election

allAfrica.com

NEWS
5 November 2008
Posted to the web 5 November 2008

By Katy Gabel
Kogelo Village, Western Kenya

Kenya is ecstatic at the news of Barack Obama's historic election as president of the United States. Upon hearing news of their beloved "son's" win Wednesday morning (East African time), residents of Kogelo village burst into song and cheers of joy.

Kogelo, about 50 kilometres from Kisumu, the capital of Nyanza Province, is home to Barack Obama's Kenyan relatives, and is where his father, Barack Obama Sr. was born.

About 50 foreign journalists have been reporting from the village over the past week in hopes of capturing just such a moment. However, the Obama family has kept relatively quiet, choosing to make statements to the press through their elected family spokesperson for the week, Obama's half-brother, Malik Abango .

Following today's announcement, journalists were invited to a section of the Obama homestead to join some members of the family to view Obama's acceptance speech. The relatives, along with some neighbors, cheered, sang and gave the "thumbs- up" sign at Obama's words.

In a brief press conference following the speech, Abango told journalists the family wants to express "extreme gratitude and appreciation of the American people."

This "gratitude" is evident outside the homestead as well. American flags, stars-and-stripes-themed clothing and slogans praising America are highly visible today. One very small, sleepy restaurant in Siaya town, the nearest town to Kogelo, was playing CNN International to a small but rapturous audience, one of whom was wearing an American flag hat.

The Obama family's life in Kenya will be different from here out. Beyond being the center of international media attention, the family will have new responsibilities in their village.

"Things are going to change [for us]... We have projects... We have to provide for our people," Abango said. As for the rumors of a Kenyan-style Obama homecoming to Kogelo, Abango said: "I know right now that if you check his appointment book, I bet you he'll get here as soon as he can."

But what will will an Obama presidency really mean for Kenya, where Obama, who scarcely knew his Kogelo-born father, is held in such esteem?

Abango said that Kenyans can take away the values of "true democracy, and what humility is all about."

The Kenyan government has declared a national holiday this week in honor of Obama.

---

Copyright © 2008 allAfrica.com. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com).

License to Scribble

Matt Harris here yet again. As I am studying Brazil for my final paper I ran across this article on Brazilian journalism. Brazil is beginning to consider a change in the way that people are allowed to become journalist. This is all in an effort to help prevent corruption, but many say that the old system works. This article shows a country that is trying to provide a better media system for it's consumers

I have added a link to a music video by Sergio Mendez( a famed Brazilian musician) and the Black Eyed peas to also show how American musicians cross over to work with musician from other countries. This song is one of my favorites, so I hope you like it too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwWhnudZ5Nk

DON'T FORGET THE ARTICLE.

Licensed to scribble

Oct 23rd 2008 | SÃO PAULO
From The Economist print edition

An end to journalism’s closed shop?

ONE of the many things that remained the same in Brazil when military rule went in 1985 was the need for journalists to obtain a diploma and register with the labour ministry. When the law stipulating this was introduced in 1967, it provided a useful way to prevent troublemakers from voicing their opinions. It has survived because Brazil is often slow to undo such anachronisms, but also because it suits the journalists’ union to keep a closed shop.

Now the Supreme Court is considering whether to strike out the law. At the same time, the ministry of education is pondering whether any Brazilian with a university degree should be granted a diploma that would permit them to scribble (a requirement that would still exclude the president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, for a start).

“The quality of journalism in Brazil would suffer if the rules are changed,” asserts Celso Schröder of the National Federation of Journalists. That is questionable. Much of Brazil’s journalism is good and robustly independent, particularly when compared with the media in Mexico or Argentina. But this has less to do with the diplomas that hacks wield than with the competitiveness of the newspaper and magazine market. Though there are only a few widely-available television channels, they too do a fairly good job of reporting what is going on to those who watch the news rather than read it.

The biggest flaw in the Brazilian media concerns the ownership of radio stations and provincial newspapers. According to Donos da Mídia, a monitoring group, 271 politicians (defined as state or federal legislators or mayors) are either directors or partners in media companies. Surprisingly, the two states with the highest incidence of politician-proprietors are Minas Gerais and São Paulo in the developed south-east. No diploma can guarantee reporting that is independent of these mini-Berlusconis.