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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on July 4th, 2008 We received an e-mail showing how little costs to buy gasoline (in German called Benzin) and diesel fuel if you live in a so called developing oil-exporting country or in the USA Date: July 4, 2008 1 Liter = 0.264174 gal (US Liq) The Austrian e-mail evokes the following list. We went then and looked up other countries and found that Austria is actually a bargain when compared to other developed economies. The Austrian 1.32 Euro/liter is 2.16 times what the complaining American sissies are paying, but only 78.7% of what Norwegians are paying or 80.7% of what the Dutch are paying. On the other hand Japan at 0.99 Euro/liter is another chaeap-shot so is Canada at 0.88 Euro/liter. And you know already what we think? Those that pay more for their gasoline have also decreased their dependence on oil by efficiency methods and conservation - they also developed alternatives to oil and have started building the economy of the future. So, it is actually the US that is falling behind while it transfers its funds to the Gulf States hoping that the increased National Debt will devalue the US$ to the point that it remains valueless paper in their hand.The problem is that they do not sit on the money anymore. They actually buy assets with that money - among that buying spree they also buy up chunks of America. So what then? Will they agree to American taxation without representation - or the US will eventually find out that Bush made a Faustian Deal with the US oil companies and with his Arab friends. Our advice to our Austrian readers is thus - DO NOT COMPLAIN ABOUT THE TAX ON FUEL - BUT MAKE SURE THE MONEY IS USED SO THAT EVENTUALLY YOU WILL HAVE TO BUY LESS OF IT. The following is what we got in the mail - then look at what we added for the sake of analysis. if our other readers want to get the actual numbers in US dollars, please use the above conversion factors. BENZINPREISE INTERNATIONAL Benzin that is Gasoline - but much of the posting is about Diesel - this because in Europe the motor-fuel of choice is high quality Diesel. Afghanistan Normalbenzin € 0,43 Algerien Diesel € 0,11 Aserbaidschan Diesel € 0,31 Ägypten Diesel € 0,14 Ãthiopien Super € 0,24 Bahamas Diesel € 0,25 Bolivien Super € 0,25 Brasilien Diesel € 0,54 China Normal € 0,45 Ecuador Normal € 0,24 Ghana Normal € 0,09 !!!!!!! Grönland Super € 0,50 Guyana Normal € 0,67 Hong Kong Diesel € 0,84 Indien Diesel € 0,62 Indonesien Diesel € 0,32 Irak Super € 0,60 Kasachstan Diesel € 0,44 Katar Super € 0,15 Kuwait Super € 0,18 Kuba Normal € 0,62 Libyen Diesel € 0,08 !!!!!!! Malaysia Super € 0,55 Mexico Diesel € 0,41 Moldau Normal € 0,25 Oman Super plus € 0,20 Peru Diesel € 0,22 Philippinen Diesel € 0,69 Russland Super € 0,64 Saudi Arabien Diesel € 0,07 !!!!!! Südafrika Diesel € 0,66 Swasiland Super € 0,10 !!!!!! Syrien Diesel € 0,10 !!!!! Trinidad Super € 0,33 Thailand Super € 0,65 Tunesien Diesel € 0,49 USA Diesel € 0,61 Venezuela Diesel € 0,07 !!!!! Vereinigte Arabische Emirate Diesel € 0,18 Vietnam Diesel € 0,55 Weißrussland Diesel € 0,51 EU und dem Finanzminister sei dank ist der Österreicher bzw. Europäer dumm Bitte dieses E-Mail weiter zu schicken damit wenigstens einige Leute Benzinpreise auf der eigenen Webseite And looking at international prices for July 4, 2008 at - http://benzinpreis.de/international.phtm… Land Normalbenzin in € Superbenzin in € SuperPlus in € Diesel in € Österreich 1,26 1,29 * 1,28 1,32 * UK 1,40 1,46 1,50 1,58 Finnland 1,47 1,50 1,50 1,36 Frankreich 1,39 1,34 * 1,44 1,37 * Irland 1,26 1,26 1,15 1,43 Island 1,35 1,40 1,47 1,50 Israel - 1,05 - - Italien 1,36 1,46 1,34 1,45 Japan 0,99 1,08 - 0,79 Kanada 0,88 0.87 0.82 0.90 Neuseeland 1,03 0,97 - 1,46 Niederlande 1,56 1,61 1,69 1,31 ** Norwegen 1,60 1,61 1,46 1,56 Schweden 1,37 1,39 1,36 1,47 Schweiz 1,24 1,21 * 1,23 1,37 * Ungarn 1,29 1,26 1,20 1,31 Permalink | ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on July 3rd, 2008 For this year’s summit, the G8 has invited China, India, Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa, Mexico, Australia and South Korea to its “outreach” session on climate change. Apart from the G8’s inability to come up with anything on global warming, some world leaders have questioned the value of the summit’s current framework. During a meeting with Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda on June 3, French President Nicolas Sarkozy vehemently argued that the G8 forum should be expanded to include such countries as China and India, according to Japanese diplomats. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown also appears to be positive about expanding the group, although he has not explicitly discussed it, they said. Fukuda strongly disagrees, saying the G8 should remain a forum for a small number of states bearing a large responsibility for the international community. Tokyo fears expanding the meeting would diminish Japan’s clout on the world stage. “Japan, Germany and Italy are reluctant about expansion. They do not want to weaken the power of the G8 to send out political messages,” said a senior Foreign Ministry in charge of European affairs. “President Sarkozy is of the opinion that the G8 was originally started as a forum for economic discussions, and talking about economic issues without the participation of the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) is meaningless. He believes noneconomic issues should be discussed at the U.N. Security Council,” the official said. But Japan, Germany and Italy are not permanent members of the Security Council and attach greater political value to the G8 forum, the official said. Another senior Foreign Ministry official argued that expanding the G8 membership would only increase political taboos that member states can’t touch on during the closed-door summit. For example, adding China would make it impossible to discuss human rights issues and world currency issues related to the yuan, the official said. Despite speculation that the G8 leaders may discuss the expansion issue in Hokkaido, Japanese officials insist it will not be a formal topic. “I guarantee that will never be on the formal agenda,” Foreign Minister Masahiko Komura said Tuesday. “None of (the foreign ministers) of the G8 has discussed the issue yet. At least Japan has not said it wants to expand the G8.” —– Really, if they want relevancy, why not create first the United European Group of States Federation or whatever they want to call it, so little States like Italy are not allowed to interfere with the work of the big ones. So - EU, US, Russia, China, India, Japan, Brazil are a good start for a relevant compact G7. Candidates-in-waiting or whatever you want to call it are then - Australia, South Africa, Canada, Indonesia, Korea. OK, not to have another upset State - probably the inclusion of Canada could give us the new starting G8. In any case, it seems that unless Japan gets a seat on the UN Security Council, the G8 will continue to show its irrelevancy for all to see. Permalink | ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on July 2nd, 2008 From: luca.taschini at unibg.it The emergence of markets for carbon-dioxide emissions, signalled by the European Union’s launch of an emission-trading scheme in 2005, has had a knock-on effect for executive education courses on anticipated trade. We are pleased to announce that the University of Zurich (Switzerland) now offers a one-semester course designed to give graduate students the knowledge and the theoretical tools for investigating the economic, financial and managerial impacts of market-based environmental policies such as the European Emission Trading Scheme and the Kyoto protocol. The course will be a combination of theory, case studies and informal seminars with representatives from industry, the financial sector (such as banks and (re)-insurance companies), governmental We would really appreciate to receive any comment and suggestion that could help in improving the course (course description and course outline are available at http://www.isb.uzh.ch/studium/courses08-… ) ___________________________________ Luca Taschini New email address: taschini at isb.uzh.ch Permalink | ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on July 2nd, 2008 From: “Brazilian-American Chamber of Commerce, Inc.” <conference@brazilcham.com> Subject: 2008 Brazil Economic Conference in Washington DC, October 13, 2008
www.brazilcham.com
“…Brazil, the B in the BRIC economies – Brazil, Russia, India and China – today’s version of economic tigers… is projecting a period of sustained growth, with the gross domestic product increasing 5 percent a year, from now to 2010, and about 3 to 4 percent annually for the decade after.” (The New York Times, July 2, 2008) October 13, 2008 The Mayflower Hotel, Washington, D.C. Please click here to download the registration form or click here to register online. For sponsorship information, please contact the Chamber Executive Director, Sueli Bonaparte, at (212) 751-4691 or e-mail: Sueli at brazilcham.com Brazilian-American Chamber of Commerce, Inc. Permalink | ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on July 1st, 2008 We saw His “Replika” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1976, and himself, and excerpts from his work on Dante, at La Mama that year. When we visited years later Warshaw, we made it as an important part of that visit to see his Teatr Studio, in that Stalinist Wedding-Cake of a building in the “Palace of Culture.” Also, reading his obituary, we understand a little better his background. He was born in Rzeszow, a place we visited to see the ruins of what was once a tremendous Rabbinic Court. Though not Jewish, Szaina, with a name that might have shown Jewish influence, knew because of his youth experiences about the terrible loss, not only to Jewry, but to Poland itself. After the war he studied theater in Krakow - the main city of what was once Western Galizzia. A place full of memories from what was once a flourishing Jewish culture center. Though Nazis destroyed the Synagogues and killed the people, they did not touch the tomb of the Remuh - Rabbi Moshe Iserless - that survived thus, and is still to be seen with the 400 year old tree that sprouted from under the tombstone. Even the Catholics in town regard the place as holly - so no-one, not even the Nazis, dared to destroy that part of the cemetery that was the center of the Jewish part of town. Five Catholic Priests, Professors at the Jagelonian University, established a Hebraic studies department in this city that had no Jews left. It was for the locals to study Hebrew in order to try to revive some of the past glory. When I visited there for a three week stay with a group of students from NYU, one of the professors gave me a new book that was a compilation of the archives of the old Krakow headquarter of the local Bnei Brith organization. I delivered the material to the Washington DC headquarters. It is these Professors that helped create a row of Jewish style restaurant in that Kazimiresz part of town - on the Street where there are the remains of the Remuh. The local Poles played there Jewish Klezmer music. I was one evening astonished seeing Elie Wiesel “Kibitzing” a game of chess in one of these restaurants - the one called Ariel. The theater revival had also to do with an attempt at revival of the Jewish culture. Krakow has thus what was seen as a strong innovative streak of theater. Very dark in its content but quite lively and spirited in the way it is staged. It was this sort of theater, some based in Krakow and some in Warshaw, that brought into existence the modern theater of the seventies. Grotowski, Kantor, Sjaina were very different pillars of this phenomenon. The obituary also mentions the town of Nowa Hutta, and Sjaina’s Teatr Ludowy. We were there, and what was even more interesting, at a festival in Krakow, I remember a performing visit from that place. Another theater was Crikot. So, please read the obituary, and be inspired that from all that darkness sprouted unbelievable art. This was the pain that had to find an outlet - and if you like it or not - that was real theater and real self sacrificing performance. Further, as the UN deals now with the question of what is Genocide, and we just had an event at the UN on the topic on June 26th, with the UnderSecretary-General Kiyotaka Akasaka making the opening introduction, it should indeed be considered as educational imperative the viewing of the filmed performance of Szajna’s Replika, as he suggested himself.
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on June 30th, 2008
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on June 30th, 2008 June 30, 2008 Upcoming Events THE CARNEGIE COUNCIL July 1, 2008
Location: (212) 838-4120 Description: The panel will address the potential threats and foreign policy innovations that could direct the rise of the rest. This Workshop builds on a panel discussion held at the Nixon Center last summer titled “A World Without the West.” Panelists will include Nick Gvosdev, Editor of The National Interest and Senior Fellow in Strategic Studies at The Nixon Center; Harry Harding (SPEAKER ADDED), George Washington University Professor of International Affairs; Flynt Leverett, Senior Fellow and Director of the Geopolitics of Energy Initiative at the New America Foundation; and David Speedie, Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Council. (Steve Weber cannot attend). The discussion will be moderated by GPI Program Director Devin Stewart. This event is part of the Carnegie Council’s Workshop for Ethics in Business, sponsored by Booz & Company’s strategy+business magazine and Merck & Co., Inc. Support also comes from New York University’s Center for Global Affairs. ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on June 30th, 2008 From: UNDP-newsroom at undp.org Corruption Hits Poor the Hardest. UNDP Report Examines Priority Areas for Tackling Corruption in Asia-Pacific Jakarta, Indonesia, 12 June 2008—Cleaning up the police, health, education and environment sectors should be a top political priority in the Asia-Pacific region, in order to loosen the stranglehold of corruption on the lives of the poor, according to a new United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report released here today. The Report, entitled Tackling Corruption, Transforming Lives, vividly illustrates how the region’s pervasive ‘petty’ corruption smothers opportunities for the most vulnerable people, limiting their access to education and compromising basic health services. It also provides innovative ways in which communities and governments are striving to fight corruption in Asia, including Indonesia. The Report was launched by the President of Indonesia, His Excellency Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, United Nations Assistant Secretary-General and UNDP Director of the Bureau for Policy Development, Olav Kjørven, and the Minister of Development Planning, His Excellency Paskah Suzetta. The publication quotes President Yudhoyono shortly after his election in 2004: “The eradication of corruption will be my priority over the next five years. We have to eradicate it structurally and culturally…This country will be destroyed if we do not stop the growth of corruption. There needs to be some shock therapy so that the people know that this government is serious about corruption.” Tackling Corruption, Transforming Lives stresses that while anti-corruption efforts too often focus on exposing the ‘big fish’, it is ‘small fry’ corruption —from the salaries of fictitious ‘ghost teachers’ funnelled into the pockets of corrupt officials, to doctors demanding cash payments from poor, pregnant women to deliver their babies, which causes more day-to-day suffering and could severely hamper the Region’s goal of achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)— the eight internationally-agreed targets aimed at halving poverty by 2015. “Hauling the rich and powerful before the courts may grab the headlines, but the poor will benefit more from efforts to eliminate the corruption that plagues their everyday lives,” says Anuradha Rajivan, Head of the UNDP Regional Human Development Report Unit. “Petty corruption is a misnomer. Dollar amounts may be relatively small but the demands are incessant, the number of people affected is enormous and the share of poor people’s income diverted to corruption is high,” she said. “Corruption does not grease the wheels; it is a spanner in the works,” says Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, the Head of the Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Agency for Aceh and Nias, Indonesia in the Report. Teten Masduki, the head of Indonesia Corruption Watch calls “for a grand coalition between government and non-government reform forces” to fight corruption in bureaucracy and formal politics in his contribution to the publication. Greed vs. need in social services Giving bribes for admission to a hospital —or for new mothers even to see their babies in a maternity ward— is common in South Asia. “One survey of Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka found that health workers often demanded bribes for admission to hospital, to provide a bed, or to give subsidized medications,” says the Report. At the same time, up to one-third of drugs supplied in some countries of the region may be expired or counterfeit and the poor often shoulder a significant burden to buy bandages or syringes when hospitals run short of supplies. “Some cross-national studies have indeed suggested that in countries where levels of corruption are higher, some health inputs such as immunization are lower,” says the Report. According to a global study, child mortality could be halved with a two-point increase in the World Bank’s Control of Corruption Index. In education, the Report shows that higher levels of corruption are correlated with fewer children attending schools and higher dropout and illiteracy rates, blocking key routes out of poverty. An extreme type of education corruption is found in ‘ghost teachers’ who may be on a payroll but never set foot in a classroom. Even ‘ghost schools’ exist. Meanwhile, extending water, sanitation and electricity coverage is expensive, requiring large-scale investments in infrastructure —yet up to 40 percent of this is being dissipated through bid rigging and other corruption, the Report said. The poor have no choice but to pay ‘speed money’ just to get a utility connection. One survey in Bangladesh found that 60 percent of urban households either paid money or exerted influence to get water connections. Natural resources up for grabs In Indonesia, less than one-fourth of total logging operations, estimated at US$6.6 billion, is legal. Informal payments and bribes related to logging are estimated at over $1 billion annually. Illegal logging, like other corrupt natural resources management practices, is particularly damaging for the poorest communities, explains the Report. For example, small farmers and indigenous people are driven into poverty as a result of illegal land expropriations and the exhaustion of natural resources, and local communities are left to suffer the health effects of toxic waste from mining illegally dumped into nearby rivers. Keeping them honest In the rural, one-teacher schools of the region of Rajasthan, India, where teacher absentee rates have topped 40 percent, a local non-governmental organization came up with a novel solution that required teachers to take a photo of themselves with the students at the beginning and end of each day using cameras with tamper-proof date and time functions in order to get their maximum salary. As a result, the number of days that children were actually taught each month increased by one third. In Cambodia, the Phnom Penh Water Supply Authority made the decision to become transparent and to pay its staff based on their performance. Between 1999 and 2006, access to water in the city was transformed, jumping from 25 percent to 90 percent, while the number of household connections for the poorest people in the city rose from 100 to more than 13,000, the Report said. At the national level, putting the right anti-corruption legislation in place —and enforcing it— has also produced success stories. In China, for example, a law was introduced in 2006 stipulating that staff members of schools and hospitals would face criminal penalties for seeking bribes or receiving kickbacks. The former Commissioner of the State Food and Drug Administration was subsequently convicted on charges of accepting more than $850,000 in bribes. Call to an Agenda for Action · Raising salaries for doctors, teachers and other civil servants so they do not have to rely on bribes to make a living; making civil service posts more merit-based; and strengthening oversight mechanisms by local governments (bureaucracy reform) Since 2006, Asia-Pacific Human Development Reports have evolved into a regular series. Reports provide continuing analyses of critical development issues relevant at both the regional and country levels. The Asia-Pacific Human Development Report Series offers the region a forum for furthering dialogues and structuring debates to support a pro-poor agenda. For further information, please contact: Jakarta: Nina Doyle, email: nina.doyle at undp.org; mobile: +62 (0)812 105 2796 Regi Wahono, email: regi.wahono at undp.org; mobile: +62 (0)817 9900712 New York: The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is the UN’s global development network, advocating for change and connecting countries to knowledge, experience and resources to help people build better lives. UNDP works in 37 countries in Asia-Pacific. For more information, please visit www.undp.org —————– Tackling Corruption in the Asia-Pacific region: A regional UNDP Human Development Report released this month argues that cleaning up the police, health, education and environment sectors should be a top political priority in the Asia-Pacific region in order to loosen the stranglehold of corruption on the lives of the poor. The report was launched on June 12th in Jakarta by the President of Indonesia, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono; UN Assistant Secretary General and UNDP Director of the Bureau for Policy Development, Olav Kjørvan; and the Indonesian Minister of Development Planning, Paskah Suzetta. Tackling Corruption, Transforming Lives illustrates how the region’s pervasive petty corruption smothers opportunities for the most vulnerable people, limiting their access to education and compromising basic health services. The report stresses that while anti-corruption efforts too often focus on exposing the ‘big fish’, it is ‘small fry’ corruption—from the salaries of fictitious ‘ghost teachers’ funneled into the pockets of corrupt officials, to doctors demanding cash payments from poor, pregnant women to deliver their babies—which causes more day-to-day suffering and could severely hamper the region’s development. Agenda for action: To download the report, click here. |