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Tshering Tobgay is a Member of Parliament representing Sombaykha Constitutency in Haa. He is the Leader of the Opposition Party in the National Assembly of Bhutan.
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High Frequency Economics has been providing institutional investors with independent analysis of the global economy and markets for over 20 years. Our comprehensive daily research is read by investment managers, analysts, asset allocators and traders at 350 institutions in over 25 countries. The firm is widely quoted as an expert source by policy makers, investors, academics and journalists worldwide. Our team is headed by well-known and respected economists Dr. Carl Weinberg and Dr. Ian Shepherdson, who track and analyze high-frequency economic data and policy developments in the United States, Euroland, France, Germany, Canada, Australia, China, Japan and the United Kingdom. Our analysis focuses on the outlook for the economy, inflation, yield curves, exchange rates and other factors affecting day-to-day financial market decisions. High Frequency is known for its unbiased, unfiltered and provocative analysis, for its clearly stated views and for boiling down…
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Drivers of Hummer SUVs were 4.63 times more likely to get a traffic ticket than the average driver, concludes a yearlong study by a company that helps insurers identify risks. ISO Quality Planning, the San Francisco company that studied the records of 1.7 million drivers, compiled a list of ticket magnets that confirmed some long-held notions: Owners of the 507-horsepower Mercedes-Benz CLS63 AMG and similarly muscular CLK63 AMG received outsized numbers of tickets, as did the generally young owners of the relatively inexpensive Scion tC, xB and xA, and the Audi A4 sports sedan. But also on that most-ticketed list were the Subaru Outback and the Toyota Camry Solara and Matrix, three cars not known for great speed or expressing the rebellious nature of their owners. Meanwhile, the Chevrolet Tahoe and Suburban, virtually identical mechanically to their General Motors sibling Hummer, appeared on the least-ticketed list. Sharing the bottom of the list? Buicks, minivans and pickups.
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Accompanied by his photographer and his personal assistant, Li Yang stepped into a Beijing classroom and shouted, “Hello, everyone!” The students applauded. Li, the founder, head teacher, and editor-in-chief of Li Yang Crazy English, wore a dove-gray turtleneck and a black car coat. His hair was set off by a faint silver streak. It was January, and Day Five of China’s first official English-language intensive-training camp for volunteers to the 2008 Summer Olympics, and Li was making the rounds. The classes were part of a campaign that is more ambitious than anything previous Olympic host cities have attempted. China intends to teach itself as much English as possible by the time the guests arrive, and Li has been brought in by the Beijing Organizing Committee to make that happen. He is China’s Elvis of English, perhaps the world’s only language teacher known to bring students to tears of excitement. He has built an empire out of his country’s deepening devotion to a language…
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FRONTLINE/World reporter Serene Fang visits a remote Chinese province, Xinjiang, to investigate growing tensions between the government and the Muslim people known as the Uighurs. Her clandestine interview with a Uighur man turns into a reporter's nightmare when Chinese authorities arrest Fang and her source, confiscate her videotape, interrogate her for 24 hours, and take the Uighur man away to an unknown fate. In her story, Fang reveals the name of the man in an effort to bring attention to his plight.
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Sauri must be the luckiest village in Africa. The maize is taller, the water cleaner, and the schoolchildren better fed than almost anywhere else south of the Sahara. Just two years ago, Sauri was an ordinary Kenyan village where poverty, hunger, and illness were facts of everyday life. Now it is an experiment, a prototype “Millennium Village.” The idea is simple: Every year for five years, invest roughly $100 for each of the village’s 5,000 inhabitants, and see what happens. The Millennium Villages Project is the brainchild of economist Jeffrey Sachs, the principal architect of the transition from state-owned to market economies in Poland and Russia. His critics and supporters disagree about the success of those efforts, often referred to as “shock therapy,” but his role in radical economic reform in the two countries vaulted him to fame. Now he has a new mission: to end poverty in Africa.
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We step inside Nyamata church and my guide, Josh Ruxin, points out the wall where babies were smashed up against the brick. "You can still see the blood," he says. More blood, wide dry brown stains, covers the altar cloth. Against a side wall, I find two new-looking closed coffins covered in cloth, a stack of 20 more, empty and expectant, and an open sack scattered with ribs, femurs and broken skulls. "Oh yeah," says Ruxin, looking over. "Thirteen years later, they're still finding new bodies round here every day." We walk around to the front of the church where a raised white-tiled plinth is scattered with dead flowers and plastic wrap. In its center is another stairwell. "If you want the full tour … ," Ruxin trails off. I descend. At the foot of the stairs is a narrow corridor. The walls are lined with shelves, floor to the ceiling, stacked with neat piles of bones and skulls. "There's 50,000 people down there," says Ruxin, when I emerge.
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Orhan Pamuk, a leading Turkish novelist, found himself in the international spotlight last year, not for his writing but for insulting the Turkish nation. He faced criminal charges for comments he'd made to a Swiss newspaper about the Armenian genocide and the treatment of Kurds in Turkey. It was highly embarrassing to the Turkish government as his trial date coincided with key meetings concerning Turkey's attempt to join the EU. The case was dropped. So what does his story tell us about modern day Turkey? Orhan Pamuk talks to Stephen Sackur.
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To most outsiders, the autonomous region of Xinjiang in remote western China is best known for the spectacular dunes of the Taklamakan desert and the long-running struggle for independence among the region's Muslim Uighur people. China's Communist Party took over the oil-rich territory in 1949, and sent 200,000 troops there to settle permanently in the region. Thousands of Han Chinese women soon followed to help propagate the Han Chinese bloodline. Today, half a century later, the Han Chinese settlers in Xinjiang are seen by many of their counterparts in the east as ignorant desert dwellers — country bumpkins living as farmers and cotton pickers far from civilization, and considered as unruly and maligned as their Uighur neighbors. Jake Yong, a Han Chinese who grew up in Xinjiang, told me that the social stigma of being born in the province is a handicap in China's fast-moving culture, where Western influence continues to spread. I met the 27-year-old while reporting another story…
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My Uncle Sam Ohannessian was quirky. He was a short man, a tailor by trade, who seemed unable to sit still — always nervous, always moving. Some people said that he was overly protective of his kids, for not letting them outside to play sometimes for fear they would get hurt. The family rarely if ever spoke about Uncle Sam's childhood history. But everybody knew. Setrak Ohannessian, or "Uncle Sam," was born in historic Armenia at a very bad time. When he was 14 years old, the Turkish government raided his village and murdered his father, along with all other male ages 15 to 62. The first genocide of the 21st century had begun and my uncle found himself on a forced migration (a.k.a. death march) into the Syrian Desert. The journey would claim the lives of his mother, little brother, and grandmother who, as my family tells it, offered Sam her last hidden morsels of food. "In the 60 years I knew him," my father told me, "[Sam] mentioned [the genocide] only once — when I asked him…
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