Provided by Forbes, March 2011
The world has been watching and waiting for signs that the economic crisis is coming to an end. Unfortunately it's taking longer in some of the globe's richest and most socioeconomically generous nations. In these places unemployment continues to rise, with no clear signs of leveling off.
Recent data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a wealthy-country think tank, have shown that among the world's 30 richest nations, including the United States, Japan and Germany, it is European countries that have seen unemployment increase the most in the last year.
European officials may be tied up with the debt problems of Greece, but the more widespread and keenly felt problem across certain parts of Europe is that of everyday people having difficulty finding a job. Ireland's unemployment rate worsened the most dramatically over the last year. It stood at 13.8% in January, but that was a whopping 4.4-percentage-point increase from this time last year. Back in 2008 the jobless rate was at just 6.3%.
Second-worst is the Slovak Republic, where the rate of unemployment rose by 4 points to 13.7%. Spain still has the highest unemployment rate out of the advanced world - an eye-wateringly high 18.8% in January - and that's also marked a 3-point increase from January 2009.
Outside Europe
Though most of the countries in the OECD are European, the other nations in the club have fared better when it comes to keeping their jobless rates under control. America's unemployment rate is still at a relatively high 9.7%, but that was a shift up of a fair 3 percentage points from the year before. In Japan the unemployment rate has risen by just 0.7 points to 4.9%, according to OECD data.
This is just a continuation of a trend that started with the credit crisis in 2008. Between that year and 2009, the biggest jumps in unemployment by region took place in the European Union and developed economies, where the overall jobless rate increased by 2.3 percentage points, according to the International Labor Organization.
While things leveled off in America and Japan, the outlook remains grim for Europe. Economic sentiment in the region has been improving in the last 10 months, according to the European Commission, but that rebound has already lost some of its momentum. "The E.U. economy is still facing headwinds, and the outlook for the labor market remains unfavorable for 2010," the commission said in its latest monthly report on the region's employment situation.
This shouldn't be surprising considering that the American economy contracted by 2.7% in 2009, while the European Union's contracted by more than 4.1% last year, according to the International Monetary Fund. The sharpest declines took place in the emerging-market nations of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, none of which are members of the OECD.
Real Estate Bust
In developed Europe, the countries hardest hit are those that went through the boom and bust of a rapidly growing construction sector and soaring property prices. Ireland, once hailed as the Celtic Tiger, now has one of the highest unemployment rates in Europe after thousands of construction workers - many of whom were on temporary contracts - lost their jobs and struggled to find work in other sectors.
Ireland's GDP plunged by 7.5% in 2009 and is expected to fall by another 1% this year, according to the country's Investment and Development Agency. The national economy is also heavily dependent on trade - with exports representing 90% of GDP - so the slow recovery in world trade is exacerbating the country's problems.
In contrast Germany has managed to keep unemployment in check because its companies, many of them involved in engineering or high-tech manufacturing, employ highly skilled individuals who are difficult to replace. Instead of firing workers, German companies try to shorten their hours; the government has a short-term plan of subsidizing wages where hours have been reduced. Thanks to government spending, Germany has had one of the lowest increases in unemployment in the last year: Its 0.3-point increase is on par with Norway and Australia.
Denmark, Turkey, Iceland and Spain are a few other rich countries that have seen big jumps in unemployment in the last year. While Spain and Iceland have suffered from construction and financial bubbles, the labor market troubles of Denmark are curious: The Danes have a relatively low unemployment rate of 7.3% and rank enviably high in terms of their standard of living.
Yet Denmark was the first country in Europe to dip into recession, thanks to a domestic property bust. And Nevlia Konika, an economist with IHS Global Insight, points out that the Danish labor market is actually weakening as wages in the country grow, making its exports and services less competitive.
This could be a growing problem. While emerging nations like China and Brazil make a speedy recovery from their recessions and traditional powerhouses Switzerland and Japan get back on their feet, some of Europe's largest economies are struggling to get their labor markets on track.
Even Germany may see its hefty government spending result in a bigger deficit that hits the job market down the line. Economists at Deutsche Bank expect the jobless rate in Germany to rise to 9.5% in 2011.
When it comes go jobs, Europe's troubles are far from over.
Is Pope Benedict XVI a reactionary or a prophet?
Pope Benedict XVI is shy, humble, a man of temperate habits with a love of cats and classicial music. How does this square with his image as God's rottweiler? And why has he upset more people than any other pope?
Under an all-but-full moon on the opening evening of the Second Vatican Council in 1962, tens of thousands of Romans poured into St Peter's Square in a torchlight procession. Called to the window of his study by the multitude, John XXIII, the man Italians called "the good pope" (a term that speaks volumes about their view of the previous 260), delivered one of the great speeches of an eloquent decade. Its emotional high point came when he told the crowd: "Returning home, you'll find the children. Give your children a caress and say: 'This is the caress of the pope.'"
Forty-three years later, on the night Benedict XVI was elected, an SMS hurtled between cellphones as the crowds dispersed from that same square. "Returning home, you'll find the children", it read. "Give them a belt round the ear and say: 'That's a belt round the ear from the pope.'"
'Truly sorry'
In the five years since, it has become clear that the daunting reputation the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger brought into office as "God's rottweiler" was, in many respects, misleading. A man less likely to cuff a child would be hard to imagine -- although, as the latest and biggest scandal to rock his papacy has revealed, his choirmaster brother was not above cuffing choristers.
On Saturday, Benedict tried to put the lid on that scandal with a letter to the Catholics of Ireland apologising for the "sinful and criminal" abuses of children whose disclosure has rocked the Irish church to its foundations and helped bring down a Dublin government. Using language rarely heard from popes, whose utterances on some issues are held by Catholics to be infallible, he said he was "truly sorry" for what had happened over a period of decades.
But, as at other crucial junctures in his papacy, Benedict's gesture left many critics -- and admirers -- feeling that he could have achieved more by being bolder. As the scandal over clerical paedophilia spread through Europe, more than one senior Vatican official suggested it would be diplomatic for the pope to extend his letter to include countries other than Ireland.
Words such as "diplomatic" and phrases such as "media impact", though, have little relevance for Benedict. He stuck to his original plan, with the result that Catholics in The Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Italy feel he does not care about similar outrages that have come to light in their own churches. Emotions in Germany are running particularly high about the silence of the first German pope for almost 1 000 years.
Timid, stubborn
The affair highlights two characteristics of this most paradoxical of pontiffs: his timidity and his stubbornness. Benedict has a soft, plump handshake, and a tendency to cast his eyes downwards as you speak to him -- a shyness that, associates say, goes hand in hand with genuine humility. He is also a man of temperate habits; though not teetotal, his favourite drink is said to be fresh orange juice.
Other than theology and philosophy, the pope's main known enthusiasms are for classical music (he is an accomplished pianist, with a special love of Mozart and Bach) and cats -- and they also seem to have a fondness for him. Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, his secretary of state, has recounted how, when Ratzinger was a senior Vatican official, "Every time he met a cat, he would talk to it, sometimes for a long time. The cat would follow him." On one occasion, Bertone said, Ratzinger had led an entourage of "about 10" cats into the Vatican and a Swiss Guard had protested that they were "invading the Holy See".
"In private, he is more informal than you might expect," says Marcello Pera, an Italian senator who collaborated with Benedict on a book published in 2004. "He loves to talk and cast off his [official] role. If you speak to Benedict, you soon cease to remember that you're speaking to a pope."
However, a rueful subordinate describes him as "bloodless" -- and, certainly, his fame as the late John Paul II's "enforcer" was not unearned.
Holding the line
For 24 years before becoming pope, Benedict was head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), the Vatican department (once known as the Inquisition) whose main task is to maintain doctrinal orthodoxy by ensuring that theologians licensed to teach in Catholic institutions keep within bounds set in Rome. Among the most famous cases he dealt with was that of the American theologian Charles Curran, who was suspected of straying from the Vatican's line on birth control.
In his biography of Benedict, John Allen recounts a chilling episode. On 8 March 1986, Curran held a meeting with the then Joseph Ratzinger and others in the CDF's offices in Piazza del Sant'Uffizio, next to St Peter's. Curran was arguing that his approach fell within the mainstream of contemporary theological thinking when "Ratzinger asked Curran to name others who held his views. Curran did so -- pointedly, they were all German -- and Ratzinger then asked if Curran would like to accuse these thinkers, because if so, the Congregation would be happy to open an investigation."
This hardline story begins to explain the apparent contradiction of the current papacy -- that a man as mild as Benedict should have upset more people than perhaps any pope in history. His earliest and most notorious gaffe (if that is what it was) came in 2006. In a scholarly lecture at his old university at Regensburg, he quoted the words of the 14th-century Byzantine emperor Manuel II that all Muhammad had brought were "things only evil and inhuman". And that was just the start of his controversial musings.
'I never read the critics'
He then dismayed Protestants by signing off on a document that relegated their churches to mere "ecclesial communities"; outraged indigenous representatives in Latin America by insisting that evangelisation in the New World did not represent "the imposition of a foreign culture"; and angered Jews by setting the controversial wartime pope, Pius XII, on the road to beatification. Last year, he appalled many Catholics -- and not just on the progressive wing of his church -- by agreeing to lift the excommunication of four breakaway, ultra-traditionalist bishops, one of whom turned out to be a Holocaust denier.
"I'm like the cellist Rostropovich," Benedict is said to have told a friend. "I never read the critics." Even by papal standards, his self-belief is formidable.
"He's shy -- almost timid, I would say -- but when he has to take a stand, he does it. When he thinks it's his duty, he can't be moved from saying what he feels," says Rocco Buttiglione. An Italian philosopher and politician who first met Benedict almost 40 years ago, Buttiglione knows all about the implications of voicing unpopular opinions: his own views on homosexuality cost him a place on the European Commission. And it is precisely Benedict's bluntness -- especially with regard to Islam -- that endears him to admirers such as Buttiglione. "There is so much ecumenism that is simply the exchange of meaningless words. Sooner or later we must get to grips with the real issues over Islam," he says.
'Real dialogue'
However painfully, argues Buttiglione, Benedict's Regensburg lecture helped to do just that. "It provoked a real dialogue." Several initiatives have since been launched from the Muslim side, and two years ago, representatives of 138 scholars who signed a response -- the Common Word declaration -- met the pope at the Vatican.
As the latest crisis has shown, though, Benedict's candour does not go hand-in-hand with a propensity for swift, decisive action. He might, for example, have won back a lot of ground for himself and the Vatican in Ireland by removing the Irish primate, Cardinal Sean Brady, after he admitted being involved in a shameful cover-up in the 1970s. Yet Brady remains in his job. The pope -- who is to visit Britain later this year -- may be fearless in some respects, but his personal history is one of growing fearfulness in others.
Unlikely as it may seem, Benedict was once regarded as a liberal, even a radical. As theological adviser to Cardinal Joseph Frings, the archbishop of Cologne and one of the decisive figures at the Second Vatican Council, a younger Joseph Ratzinger played a key role in awakening his church from centuries of reactionary slumber. Like many other young Catholic theologians of the time, he embraced the council's support for ecumenism, its enthusiasm for dialogue with other religions, its adoption of a liturgy in which worshippers could participate more actively, and its endorsement of greater internal democracy (in the form of increased autonomy for national Bishops' conferences). In 1966, he wrote a book that was translated into English as Theological Highlights of Vatican II.
'This is a man on fire'
"That book is absolutely brilliant," says a leading British liberal Catholic who, such is the atmosphere in today's Catholic church, asked not to be identified. "I've never seen the spirit of the council better exemplified. It's very moving. You feel that this is a man on fire." Intriguingly, Buttiglione uses precisely the same metaphor when describing his first encounter with Benedict, six years later: "He had an inner fire and great knowledge as well as a great capacity for listening."
By 1972, however, the flames kindling Ratzinger's intellect were different ones. In between, Europe had been shaken to the core by an eruption of student protest that began on the streets of Paris and raced across the continent, soon reaching the tranquil university town of Tübingen. Its revolutionary implications profoundly alarmed the then 41-year-old Ratzinger, the university's professor of dogmatic theology, and the following year he fled Tübingen for Regensburg, in his (more traditionalist) native region of Bavaria.
Buttiglione visited him there as part of a delegation from an emerging Catholic lay movement, Communion and Liberation, whose young members aimed to offer an alternative to the maverick student Marxism of the "68ers". Now, Ratzinger was one of their idols -- having embarked on a process of intellectual change that would see him question many of the most important decisions reached by the Second Vatican Council.
Ratzinger and his supporters insist he has remained theologically consistent, but the Catholic author and academic John Cornwell disagrees. "He has not been a great champion of respect for other religions. He has not been a champion of giving a greater say to bishops, and nor has he supported the liturgy of participation -- his own enthusiasm being for the Tridentine [pre-conciliar] Mass," which is normally said in Latin.
The man who once wrote so movingly about the council's embrace of the 20th century has become the pope who, as Cornwell notes, "gave a bishopric to an Austrian priest who preached that hurricane Katrina was a retribution for the sinfulness of New Orleans". But Benedict's supporters (and even some of his detractors) argue that to see him purely as a conservative is to do him an injustice.
Reactionary or a prophet?
"It would be interesting to know how he is viewed in a 100 years' time," muses a professional Vatican-watcher who also requested anonymity. "It will be either as a reactionary or a prophet. Benedict may be behind or ahead of his time, because one thing is certain – he certainly isn't of his time."
Mistrust of the zeitgeist is one of Benedict's outstanding intellectual characteristics, possibly a consequence of his having been born into a society that inflicted untold suffering on the world because it fell into unthinking conformity. Among his favourite passages from the scriptures is Romans 12:2: "Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind."
Like John Paul II, his position on several issues is more left than right. He condemned the invasion of Iraq. He deplores the death penalty as well as abortion. And the anti-free market stance of his most recent encyclical, on social and economic questions, came as an unwelcome revelation to his neocon admirers in the US. "This is not a conservative pope," insists Pera. "This is a pope who accepts the language of liberalism, in the original sense of the word, and wants to engage with all those who use that language. This is a pope who quotes Kant -- a rationalist and Protestant, one of whose books was on the Index [of works banned by the Vatican]."
Pera himself illustrates why Benedict is difficult to pigeonhole. The few cardinals who have published books with lay writers have chosen unimpeachably orthodox Catholic journalists or academics. Yet Ratzinger teamed up with a former socialist who belongs to the party of Italy's divorced and secular prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi; a man who, when asked if he is an atheist, replies, "I can't say I'm a believer."
What brought him together with the future pope was a shared belief in one of the key ideas in Benedict's intellectual make-up: that many of the most treasured (and progressive) "Western" values are inextricably bound up with Christianity and threatened by its decline. As Buttiglione puts it: "We are losing the values of the Enlightenment because we are abandoning Christianity and the idea of God." (Often the corollary of this view, which is widespread on the Italian right and centre-right, is that the biggest threat to Western ideas comes from the advance of Islam.)
The idea that today's Catholic church -- hostile to abortion and contraception, antipathetic to homosexuality and dismissive of the idea of women priests -- might be a bastion of enlightened values is one many Britons will find hard to accept. But then it is difficult to think of a society that provides Benedict with a greater challenge to his ideas than multicultural Britain, with its anti-discriminatory ethos and increasingly vociferous atheist minority. The growing popularity of writers such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and AC Grayling, who argue that religion is not just irrelevant but pernicious, is a key difference between the Britain that Benedict will find when he visits and the altogether more respectful one John Paul II experienced 28 years ago.
The chances of yet another controversy during his visit are high, not least because -- unlike his predecessor -- Benedict writes all his keynote addresses himself. "You could get another Regensburg," warned the liberal Catholic who preferred not to be identified. "It is entirely possible." - guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2010
Under an all-but-full moon on the opening evening of the Second Vatican Council in 1962, tens of thousands of Romans poured into St Peter's Square in a torchlight procession. Called to the window of his study by the multitude, John XXIII, the man Italians called "the good pope" (a term that speaks volumes about their view of the previous 260), delivered one of the great speeches of an eloquent decade. Its emotional high point came when he told the crowd: "Returning home, you'll find the children. Give your children a caress and say: 'This is the caress of the pope.'"
Forty-three years later, on the night Benedict XVI was elected, an SMS hurtled between cellphones as the crowds dispersed from that same square. "Returning home, you'll find the children", it read. "Give them a belt round the ear and say: 'That's a belt round the ear from the pope.'"
'Truly sorry'
In the five years since, it has become clear that the daunting reputation the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger brought into office as "God's rottweiler" was, in many respects, misleading. A man less likely to cuff a child would be hard to imagine -- although, as the latest and biggest scandal to rock his papacy has revealed, his choirmaster brother was not above cuffing choristers.
On Saturday, Benedict tried to put the lid on that scandal with a letter to the Catholics of Ireland apologising for the "sinful and criminal" abuses of children whose disclosure has rocked the Irish church to its foundations and helped bring down a Dublin government. Using language rarely heard from popes, whose utterances on some issues are held by Catholics to be infallible, he said he was "truly sorry" for what had happened over a period of decades.
But, as at other crucial junctures in his papacy, Benedict's gesture left many critics -- and admirers -- feeling that he could have achieved more by being bolder. As the scandal over clerical paedophilia spread through Europe, more than one senior Vatican official suggested it would be diplomatic for the pope to extend his letter to include countries other than Ireland.
Words such as "diplomatic" and phrases such as "media impact", though, have little relevance for Benedict. He stuck to his original plan, with the result that Catholics in The Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Italy feel he does not care about similar outrages that have come to light in their own churches. Emotions in Germany are running particularly high about the silence of the first German pope for almost 1 000 years.
Timid, stubborn
The affair highlights two characteristics of this most paradoxical of pontiffs: his timidity and his stubbornness. Benedict has a soft, plump handshake, and a tendency to cast his eyes downwards as you speak to him -- a shyness that, associates say, goes hand in hand with genuine humility. He is also a man of temperate habits; though not teetotal, his favourite drink is said to be fresh orange juice.
Other than theology and philosophy, the pope's main known enthusiasms are for classical music (he is an accomplished pianist, with a special love of Mozart and Bach) and cats -- and they also seem to have a fondness for him. Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, his secretary of state, has recounted how, when Ratzinger was a senior Vatican official, "Every time he met a cat, he would talk to it, sometimes for a long time. The cat would follow him." On one occasion, Bertone said, Ratzinger had led an entourage of "about 10" cats into the Vatican and a Swiss Guard had protested that they were "invading the Holy See".
"In private, he is more informal than you might expect," says Marcello Pera, an Italian senator who collaborated with Benedict on a book published in 2004. "He loves to talk and cast off his [official] role. If you speak to Benedict, you soon cease to remember that you're speaking to a pope."
However, a rueful subordinate describes him as "bloodless" -- and, certainly, his fame as the late John Paul II's "enforcer" was not unearned.
Holding the line
For 24 years before becoming pope, Benedict was head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), the Vatican department (once known as the Inquisition) whose main task is to maintain doctrinal orthodoxy by ensuring that theologians licensed to teach in Catholic institutions keep within bounds set in Rome. Among the most famous cases he dealt with was that of the American theologian Charles Curran, who was suspected of straying from the Vatican's line on birth control.
In his biography of Benedict, John Allen recounts a chilling episode. On 8 March 1986, Curran held a meeting with the then Joseph Ratzinger and others in the CDF's offices in Piazza del Sant'Uffizio, next to St Peter's. Curran was arguing that his approach fell within the mainstream of contemporary theological thinking when "Ratzinger asked Curran to name others who held his views. Curran did so -- pointedly, they were all German -- and Ratzinger then asked if Curran would like to accuse these thinkers, because if so, the Congregation would be happy to open an investigation."
This hardline story begins to explain the apparent contradiction of the current papacy -- that a man as mild as Benedict should have upset more people than perhaps any pope in history. His earliest and most notorious gaffe (if that is what it was) came in 2006. In a scholarly lecture at his old university at Regensburg, he quoted the words of the 14th-century Byzantine emperor Manuel II that all Muhammad had brought were "things only evil and inhuman". And that was just the start of his controversial musings.
'I never read the critics'
He then dismayed Protestants by signing off on a document that relegated their churches to mere "ecclesial communities"; outraged indigenous representatives in Latin America by insisting that evangelisation in the New World did not represent "the imposition of a foreign culture"; and angered Jews by setting the controversial wartime pope, Pius XII, on the road to beatification. Last year, he appalled many Catholics -- and not just on the progressive wing of his church -- by agreeing to lift the excommunication of four breakaway, ultra-traditionalist bishops, one of whom turned out to be a Holocaust denier.
"I'm like the cellist Rostropovich," Benedict is said to have told a friend. "I never read the critics." Even by papal standards, his self-belief is formidable.
"He's shy -- almost timid, I would say -- but when he has to take a stand, he does it. When he thinks it's his duty, he can't be moved from saying what he feels," says Rocco Buttiglione. An Italian philosopher and politician who first met Benedict almost 40 years ago, Buttiglione knows all about the implications of voicing unpopular opinions: his own views on homosexuality cost him a place on the European Commission. And it is precisely Benedict's bluntness -- especially with regard to Islam -- that endears him to admirers such as Buttiglione. "There is so much ecumenism that is simply the exchange of meaningless words. Sooner or later we must get to grips with the real issues over Islam," he says.
'Real dialogue'
However painfully, argues Buttiglione, Benedict's Regensburg lecture helped to do just that. "It provoked a real dialogue." Several initiatives have since been launched from the Muslim side, and two years ago, representatives of 138 scholars who signed a response -- the Common Word declaration -- met the pope at the Vatican.
As the latest crisis has shown, though, Benedict's candour does not go hand-in-hand with a propensity for swift, decisive action. He might, for example, have won back a lot of ground for himself and the Vatican in Ireland by removing the Irish primate, Cardinal Sean Brady, after he admitted being involved in a shameful cover-up in the 1970s. Yet Brady remains in his job. The pope -- who is to visit Britain later this year -- may be fearless in some respects, but his personal history is one of growing fearfulness in others.
Unlikely as it may seem, Benedict was once regarded as a liberal, even a radical. As theological adviser to Cardinal Joseph Frings, the archbishop of Cologne and one of the decisive figures at the Second Vatican Council, a younger Joseph Ratzinger played a key role in awakening his church from centuries of reactionary slumber. Like many other young Catholic theologians of the time, he embraced the council's support for ecumenism, its enthusiasm for dialogue with other religions, its adoption of a liturgy in which worshippers could participate more actively, and its endorsement of greater internal democracy (in the form of increased autonomy for national Bishops' conferences). In 1966, he wrote a book that was translated into English as Theological Highlights of Vatican II.
'This is a man on fire'
"That book is absolutely brilliant," says a leading British liberal Catholic who, such is the atmosphere in today's Catholic church, asked not to be identified. "I've never seen the spirit of the council better exemplified. It's very moving. You feel that this is a man on fire." Intriguingly, Buttiglione uses precisely the same metaphor when describing his first encounter with Benedict, six years later: "He had an inner fire and great knowledge as well as a great capacity for listening."
By 1972, however, the flames kindling Ratzinger's intellect were different ones. In between, Europe had been shaken to the core by an eruption of student protest that began on the streets of Paris and raced across the continent, soon reaching the tranquil university town of Tübingen. Its revolutionary implications profoundly alarmed the then 41-year-old Ratzinger, the university's professor of dogmatic theology, and the following year he fled Tübingen for Regensburg, in his (more traditionalist) native region of Bavaria.
Buttiglione visited him there as part of a delegation from an emerging Catholic lay movement, Communion and Liberation, whose young members aimed to offer an alternative to the maverick student Marxism of the "68ers". Now, Ratzinger was one of their idols -- having embarked on a process of intellectual change that would see him question many of the most important decisions reached by the Second Vatican Council.
Ratzinger and his supporters insist he has remained theologically consistent, but the Catholic author and academic John Cornwell disagrees. "He has not been a great champion of respect for other religions. He has not been a champion of giving a greater say to bishops, and nor has he supported the liturgy of participation -- his own enthusiasm being for the Tridentine [pre-conciliar] Mass," which is normally said in Latin.
The man who once wrote so movingly about the council's embrace of the 20th century has become the pope who, as Cornwell notes, "gave a bishopric to an Austrian priest who preached that hurricane Katrina was a retribution for the sinfulness of New Orleans". But Benedict's supporters (and even some of his detractors) argue that to see him purely as a conservative is to do him an injustice.
Reactionary or a prophet?
"It would be interesting to know how he is viewed in a 100 years' time," muses a professional Vatican-watcher who also requested anonymity. "It will be either as a reactionary or a prophet. Benedict may be behind or ahead of his time, because one thing is certain – he certainly isn't of his time."
Mistrust of the zeitgeist is one of Benedict's outstanding intellectual characteristics, possibly a consequence of his having been born into a society that inflicted untold suffering on the world because it fell into unthinking conformity. Among his favourite passages from the scriptures is Romans 12:2: "Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind."
Like John Paul II, his position on several issues is more left than right. He condemned the invasion of Iraq. He deplores the death penalty as well as abortion. And the anti-free market stance of his most recent encyclical, on social and economic questions, came as an unwelcome revelation to his neocon admirers in the US. "This is not a conservative pope," insists Pera. "This is a pope who accepts the language of liberalism, in the original sense of the word, and wants to engage with all those who use that language. This is a pope who quotes Kant -- a rationalist and Protestant, one of whose books was on the Index [of works banned by the Vatican]."
Pera himself illustrates why Benedict is difficult to pigeonhole. The few cardinals who have published books with lay writers have chosen unimpeachably orthodox Catholic journalists or academics. Yet Ratzinger teamed up with a former socialist who belongs to the party of Italy's divorced and secular prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi; a man who, when asked if he is an atheist, replies, "I can't say I'm a believer."
What brought him together with the future pope was a shared belief in one of the key ideas in Benedict's intellectual make-up: that many of the most treasured (and progressive) "Western" values are inextricably bound up with Christianity and threatened by its decline. As Buttiglione puts it: "We are losing the values of the Enlightenment because we are abandoning Christianity and the idea of God." (Often the corollary of this view, which is widespread on the Italian right and centre-right, is that the biggest threat to Western ideas comes from the advance of Islam.)
The idea that today's Catholic church -- hostile to abortion and contraception, antipathetic to homosexuality and dismissive of the idea of women priests -- might be a bastion of enlightened values is one many Britons will find hard to accept. But then it is difficult to think of a society that provides Benedict with a greater challenge to his ideas than multicultural Britain, with its anti-discriminatory ethos and increasingly vociferous atheist minority. The growing popularity of writers such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and AC Grayling, who argue that religion is not just irrelevant but pernicious, is a key difference between the Britain that Benedict will find when he visits and the altogether more respectful one John Paul II experienced 28 years ago.
The chances of yet another controversy during his visit are high, not least because -- unlike his predecessor -- Benedict writes all his keynote addresses himself. "You could get another Regensburg," warned the liberal Catholic who preferred not to be identified. "It is entirely possible." - guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2010
Getting rich is simpler than you think
By Harry Domash
Blend three ingredients -- a paycheck, discipline and time -- and you, too, can be a millionaire. It's not always easy, but it's simple. And you have no excuse not to do it.
Here is the single most important thing you will ever hear about investing: Getting rich is simple.
Not easy, but simple.
And here is the second most important thing you will ever hear about investing: You have no excuse not to do it.
Only three ingredients are needed: income, discipline and time. Chances are, you already have two of them, income and time. All you need to do is add the third, discipline. And armed with the following knowledge, that key third ingredient may be a lot easier to find.
Here's how it works: Say you start with nothing, invest $500 (of your income) a month (a healthy discipline), and let your money ride (over time) in diversified investments. Long term, the stock market returns at least 10% annually. Assuming a 10% return, you'd have $102,000 after 10 years, $380,000 after 20 years, and $1.1 million in 30 years.
Here's a similar scenario: If you start with a nut of $50,000 and add only $250 per month, you'd have $180,000, $516.000 and $1.4 million after 10, 20, and 30 years, respectively. All this happens through the power of regular investing and a simple-but-powerful concept called compounding.
Compounding
What is compounding?
Compounding is the reinvestment of the interest you receive from the money you set aside. For example, if you invest $1,000 and earn 10% interest on your principal at the end of each year, you'll get in $100 interest at the end of the first year. If you reinvest that interest, the second year you would start with $1,100, and thus would earn $110 interest. If you stay with it, you'd more than double your money every eight years.
"Compounding," Albert Einstein said, "is mankind's greatest invention because it allows for the reliable, systematic accumulation of wealth." Einstein was a smart man. But you hardly have to be a genius to make this concept work for you.
The real magic of investing comes when you combine the surprising power of compounding with continuous and regular investments -- in other words, discipline.
The best way to make these continuous investments happen is by setting up an account with a broker or mutual fund that automatically deducts a fixed amount from your bank account every month. "Automatic" is the operative word here. Trust me, if you don't set it up that way, it won't happen. Instead, you'll end up pouring money in when the market is soaring and skipping payments when it's heading down. Eventually you'll get discouraged and give up.
Dollar-cost averaging
The process of continuously investing a fixed dollar amount is called dollar-cost averaging -- a term that sounds much more technical than it is. Through dollar-cost averaging, you'll end up buying more shares when a stock or fund is down, and fewer when it's up. For instance, say you're investing $500 monthly in a stock trading initially at $50 per share; so the first time, you buy 10 shares. If the next month the stock moves up to $62.50 your regular purchase will net you only eight shares. However, if the stock drops to $41.67, you'll get 12 shares (not including any transaction fees).
It's easy to set up regular-investment mechanisms, thus harnessing the power of dollar-cost averaging. Mutual funds are the traditional way. But there are other outlets, as well, that allow you to apply the strategy with individual stocks or exchange-traded funds, which are baskets of stocks that identically track standard market indexes, such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average ($INDU).
Risk
Sure, investing in the stock market has risk. There's always the chance the market will go nowhere for the next 20 or 30 years and you'll end up no better than where you started. But there's risk in everything, even CDs.
With CDs, your original investment isn't in danger. Most CDs are insured, and the federal government will step in and make you whole, even if your bank goes belly up.
But a problem crops up when something more sinister surfaces: inflation. At this writing, inflation, running at around 2%, is considered relatively benign. But is it?
Let's do some math. Your real return is the interest you receive less the inflation rate. If your CD is paying 3% and the inflation rate is 2%, you're only making 1% in real terms. If inflation takes off, say to 5%, your CD will probably be paying around 4%. In inflation-adjusted terms, you've lost 1%.
But it can get worse. Inflation hit 14% in the early 1980s. In such times, CDs and similar fixed-income investments don't even come close to the inflation rate, meaning you're losing serious money, in real terms.
By contrast, assets such as real estate and stocks tend to move with prices, and, over time, the stock market has outpaced inflation. For instance, in the 20-year period ending Dec. 31, 2001, the cumulative return of the market, as measured by the S&P 500 Index ($INX), was 1,606%, compared to 88% cumulative inflation over the same period.
What's the point? Yes, there's risk in investing in the market, but the odds are that continuous, regular investing combined with the power of compounding will make you rich.
The odds
If you count yourself a member of the "I want it now" generation, the idea of waiting 20 or 30 years to get rich probably sounds like a dumb idea.
Sure, there are faster ways to get rich. You could win the lottery, or pick the next Intel (INTC, news, msgs) or Wal-Mart Stores (WMT, news, msgs). But don't quit your day job just yet. Your chances of winning big in the lottery run around 15 million to 1, at best.
Meantime, naturally, you would be sitting pretty if you had had the foresight to plunk significant cash into Intel or Wal-Mart 20 years ago. But consider this: You would have lost money if you'd picked Advanced Micro Devices (AMD, news, msgs) instead of Intel, and you'd be broke if you'd picked Kmart (SHLD, news, msgs) (which ended up merging with Sears Roebuck) instead of Wal-Mart. In both instances, your retirement plans would be history.
Here's the bottom line, like it or not: The fate of your retirement, your comfort in older age, probably lies in your commitment to the concepts laid out in the paragraphs above. For the vast majority of us, wealth creation is a slow and steady -- and powerful -- process. The tortoise almost always beats the hare.
It's not easy. But it's very, very simple.
At the time of publication, Harry Domash did not own or control shares in any of the equities mentioned in this column.
Domash publishes the Winning Investing stock and mutual fund advisory newsletter and writes the online investing column for the San Francisco Chronicle. Harry has two investing books out, the most recent being "Fire Your Stock Analyst," published by Financial Times Prentice Hall.
Blend three ingredients -- a paycheck, discipline and time -- and you, too, can be a millionaire. It's not always easy, but it's simple. And you have no excuse not to do it.
Here is the single most important thing you will ever hear about investing: Getting rich is simple.
Not easy, but simple.
And here is the second most important thing you will ever hear about investing: You have no excuse not to do it.
Only three ingredients are needed: income, discipline and time. Chances are, you already have two of them, income and time. All you need to do is add the third, discipline. And armed with the following knowledge, that key third ingredient may be a lot easier to find.
Here's how it works: Say you start with nothing, invest $500 (of your income) a month (a healthy discipline), and let your money ride (over time) in diversified investments. Long term, the stock market returns at least 10% annually. Assuming a 10% return, you'd have $102,000 after 10 years, $380,000 after 20 years, and $1.1 million in 30 years.
Here's a similar scenario: If you start with a nut of $50,000 and add only $250 per month, you'd have $180,000, $516.000 and $1.4 million after 10, 20, and 30 years, respectively. All this happens through the power of regular investing and a simple-but-powerful concept called compounding.
Compounding
What is compounding?
Compounding is the reinvestment of the interest you receive from the money you set aside. For example, if you invest $1,000 and earn 10% interest on your principal at the end of each year, you'll get in $100 interest at the end of the first year. If you reinvest that interest, the second year you would start with $1,100, and thus would earn $110 interest. If you stay with it, you'd more than double your money every eight years.
"Compounding," Albert Einstein said, "is mankind's greatest invention because it allows for the reliable, systematic accumulation of wealth." Einstein was a smart man. But you hardly have to be a genius to make this concept work for you.
The real magic of investing comes when you combine the surprising power of compounding with continuous and regular investments -- in other words, discipline.
The best way to make these continuous investments happen is by setting up an account with a broker or mutual fund that automatically deducts a fixed amount from your bank account every month. "Automatic" is the operative word here. Trust me, if you don't set it up that way, it won't happen. Instead, you'll end up pouring money in when the market is soaring and skipping payments when it's heading down. Eventually you'll get discouraged and give up.
Dollar-cost averaging
The process of continuously investing a fixed dollar amount is called dollar-cost averaging -- a term that sounds much more technical than it is. Through dollar-cost averaging, you'll end up buying more shares when a stock or fund is down, and fewer when it's up. For instance, say you're investing $500 monthly in a stock trading initially at $50 per share; so the first time, you buy 10 shares. If the next month the stock moves up to $62.50 your regular purchase will net you only eight shares. However, if the stock drops to $41.67, you'll get 12 shares (not including any transaction fees).
It's easy to set up regular-investment mechanisms, thus harnessing the power of dollar-cost averaging. Mutual funds are the traditional way. But there are other outlets, as well, that allow you to apply the strategy with individual stocks or exchange-traded funds, which are baskets of stocks that identically track standard market indexes, such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average ($INDU).
Risk
Sure, investing in the stock market has risk. There's always the chance the market will go nowhere for the next 20 or 30 years and you'll end up no better than where you started. But there's risk in everything, even CDs.
With CDs, your original investment isn't in danger. Most CDs are insured, and the federal government will step in and make you whole, even if your bank goes belly up.
But a problem crops up when something more sinister surfaces: inflation. At this writing, inflation, running at around 2%, is considered relatively benign. But is it?
Let's do some math. Your real return is the interest you receive less the inflation rate. If your CD is paying 3% and the inflation rate is 2%, you're only making 1% in real terms. If inflation takes off, say to 5%, your CD will probably be paying around 4%. In inflation-adjusted terms, you've lost 1%.
But it can get worse. Inflation hit 14% in the early 1980s. In such times, CDs and similar fixed-income investments don't even come close to the inflation rate, meaning you're losing serious money, in real terms.
By contrast, assets such as real estate and stocks tend to move with prices, and, over time, the stock market has outpaced inflation. For instance, in the 20-year period ending Dec. 31, 2001, the cumulative return of the market, as measured by the S&P 500 Index ($INX), was 1,606%, compared to 88% cumulative inflation over the same period.
What's the point? Yes, there's risk in investing in the market, but the odds are that continuous, regular investing combined with the power of compounding will make you rich.
The odds
If you count yourself a member of the "I want it now" generation, the idea of waiting 20 or 30 years to get rich probably sounds like a dumb idea.
Sure, there are faster ways to get rich. You could win the lottery, or pick the next Intel (INTC, news, msgs) or Wal-Mart Stores (WMT, news, msgs). But don't quit your day job just yet. Your chances of winning big in the lottery run around 15 million to 1, at best.
Meantime, naturally, you would be sitting pretty if you had had the foresight to plunk significant cash into Intel or Wal-Mart 20 years ago. But consider this: You would have lost money if you'd picked Advanced Micro Devices (AMD, news, msgs) instead of Intel, and you'd be broke if you'd picked Kmart (SHLD, news, msgs) (which ended up merging with Sears Roebuck) instead of Wal-Mart. In both instances, your retirement plans would be history.
Here's the bottom line, like it or not: The fate of your retirement, your comfort in older age, probably lies in your commitment to the concepts laid out in the paragraphs above. For the vast majority of us, wealth creation is a slow and steady -- and powerful -- process. The tortoise almost always beats the hare.
It's not easy. But it's very, very simple.
At the time of publication, Harry Domash did not own or control shares in any of the equities mentioned in this column.
Domash publishes the Winning Investing stock and mutual fund advisory newsletter and writes the online investing column for the San Francisco Chronicle. Harry has two investing books out, the most recent being "Fire Your Stock Analyst," published by Financial Times Prentice Hall.
Job Market Stabilizes for Business Students
By ROBBIE BROWN
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — For two years in a row, Kwame Yankson, a business school student at the University of Virginia, has sent a flurry of résumés to investment banks. He has cold-called Wall Street recruiters. And he has landed coveted interview slots.
But the difference in the outcome each year was stark. Last year, Mr. Yankson was turned down for summer internships by about 15 recession-plagued banks and ended up working for an education nonprofit organization. This year, as he sought a full-time job, Wells Fargo quickly gave him the response he wanted: When can you start?
“The banks this year kept saying, ‘It’s a good year,’ ‘We just approved a lot of hiring,’ ‘The market is clearing up,’ ” Mr. Yankson said. “It was a completely different experience.”
With banks climbing out of the recession, more business students across the country are finding banking jobs and internships, enrolling in finance clubs and going on class trips to Wall Street, universities say.
Unemployment is plaguing millions of families, and the public may still be seething about bank bailouts and eight-figure bonuses. But business students and career advisers see a job market that is quickly stabilizing.
Aspiring bankers know their career choice comes at an awkward time. Ben Phelps, an M.B.A. student at Duke who is going to work for Bank of America Merrill Lynch after graduation, was shouted at by a stranger on Wall Street during a summer internship. He and his classmates joke that they would sooner describe themselves as “bank tellers” than “investment bankers.”
“A lot of people lost their savings, and I can understand those people being angry,” Mr. Phelps said. “But I wish sometimes that their anger wasn’t directed just at bankers.”
Still, he said, the public perception of banking was not a factor when he accepted the job that he calls “the reason I came to business school,” in the bank’s mergers and acquisitions division. He expects the work to be fast-paced, intellectually challenging, financially rewarding and helpful in building a career — the same reasons given by many aspiring bankers.
On a recent interview day at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, students in pinstriped suits and polished shoes waited anxiously for meetings with representatives from J. P. Morgan and BB&T Capital Markets.
The competition would be steep — with dozens of students applying for each internship — but less selective than in 2009. The number of banks interviewing at Darden this year increased 20 percent, and the number of job offers so far has risen 33 percent, the school said.
“There’s reason for students to be optimistic,” said Tracy Handler, a spokeswoman for the M.B.A. Career Services Council, an association of business school career advisers. “Any signs of recovery are modest. But business schools are looking ahead and seeing a light at the end of what is now a pretty short tunnel.”
A survey by the career council in December found that 39 percent of business schools expected internship opportunities to increase this summer, while 26 percent expected them to decrease.
At Duke University, for instance, the business school career office reported last month that the number of students with investment banking internships had doubled compared with last year. Four new banks went to Duke this year to interview, and the number of Duke students submitting résumés to banks increased 37 percent. The number of students participating in the school’s Week on Wall Street trip also rose, to 90 from 60 last year.
“Ironically, this can be a superb time to enter banking,” said Jeff Fischer, the director of career management at the business school at the University of North Carolina, where the number of investment bankers visiting campus has risen 67 percent since last year. “The M.B.A. population is like the end of a whip. When cycles swing up and down, students are the ones who swing up and down the most in terms of employment.”
Though some banks are still cautious, business school counselors are telling students to be persistent. Banks under-hired during the market collapse, the counselors say, and will soon be creating more full-time positions than former interns can fill.
Top banks declined to release hiring statistics for this article, and many business schools said it was too early to predict hiring results because job offers can continue through the spring. But in interviews with two dozen students and administrators at several business schools across the country, there was growing optimism about banking jobs. Many students said Wall Street remained a dream destination, even if they occasionally had to explain their dream to friends.
“The answer is the level of knowledge that can be gained at such a young age,” said P. J. Martin, a first-year M.B.A. student at the University of North Carolina who is interning at Barclays Capital next summer, explaining his interest in investment banking. “You have access to top-level management, to the top minds in the finance field.”
But many students admitted a twinge of guilt about landing jobs and internships while so many classmates — and much of the country — remain unemployed.
“I feel lucky,” said Mr. Phelps, from Duke. “My timing ended up being perfect, and it could easily have not been. Lots of friends are struggling and not finding jobs.”
The speed of the turnaround in banking has not surprised Ben Bloomfield, a first-year M.B.A. student at Darden. Business students, he said, expect cyclical markets, but know that banking will remain prestigious.
“I don’t think any business school student was disillusioned enough to think, ‘Oh, Goldman Sachs on my résumé is not going to be valuable,’ ” Mr. Bloomfield said. “It was more, ‘Goldman Sachs is going to come to campus, and I’m not even sure they’re going to hire anybody.’ ”
That patience seems to have been rewarded. After a tough round of interviews, Mr. Bloomfield just received an internship at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — For two years in a row, Kwame Yankson, a business school student at the University of Virginia, has sent a flurry of résumés to investment banks. He has cold-called Wall Street recruiters. And he has landed coveted interview slots.
But the difference in the outcome each year was stark. Last year, Mr. Yankson was turned down for summer internships by about 15 recession-plagued banks and ended up working for an education nonprofit organization. This year, as he sought a full-time job, Wells Fargo quickly gave him the response he wanted: When can you start?
“The banks this year kept saying, ‘It’s a good year,’ ‘We just approved a lot of hiring,’ ‘The market is clearing up,’ ” Mr. Yankson said. “It was a completely different experience.”
With banks climbing out of the recession, more business students across the country are finding banking jobs and internships, enrolling in finance clubs and going on class trips to Wall Street, universities say.
Unemployment is plaguing millions of families, and the public may still be seething about bank bailouts and eight-figure bonuses. But business students and career advisers see a job market that is quickly stabilizing.
Aspiring bankers know their career choice comes at an awkward time. Ben Phelps, an M.B.A. student at Duke who is going to work for Bank of America Merrill Lynch after graduation, was shouted at by a stranger on Wall Street during a summer internship. He and his classmates joke that they would sooner describe themselves as “bank tellers” than “investment bankers.”
“A lot of people lost their savings, and I can understand those people being angry,” Mr. Phelps said. “But I wish sometimes that their anger wasn’t directed just at bankers.”
Still, he said, the public perception of banking was not a factor when he accepted the job that he calls “the reason I came to business school,” in the bank’s mergers and acquisitions division. He expects the work to be fast-paced, intellectually challenging, financially rewarding and helpful in building a career — the same reasons given by many aspiring bankers.
On a recent interview day at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, students in pinstriped suits and polished shoes waited anxiously for meetings with representatives from J. P. Morgan and BB&T Capital Markets.
The competition would be steep — with dozens of students applying for each internship — but less selective than in 2009. The number of banks interviewing at Darden this year increased 20 percent, and the number of job offers so far has risen 33 percent, the school said.
“There’s reason for students to be optimistic,” said Tracy Handler, a spokeswoman for the M.B.A. Career Services Council, an association of business school career advisers. “Any signs of recovery are modest. But business schools are looking ahead and seeing a light at the end of what is now a pretty short tunnel.”
A survey by the career council in December found that 39 percent of business schools expected internship opportunities to increase this summer, while 26 percent expected them to decrease.
At Duke University, for instance, the business school career office reported last month that the number of students with investment banking internships had doubled compared with last year. Four new banks went to Duke this year to interview, and the number of Duke students submitting résumés to banks increased 37 percent. The number of students participating in the school’s Week on Wall Street trip also rose, to 90 from 60 last year.
“Ironically, this can be a superb time to enter banking,” said Jeff Fischer, the director of career management at the business school at the University of North Carolina, where the number of investment bankers visiting campus has risen 67 percent since last year. “The M.B.A. population is like the end of a whip. When cycles swing up and down, students are the ones who swing up and down the most in terms of employment.”
Though some banks are still cautious, business school counselors are telling students to be persistent. Banks under-hired during the market collapse, the counselors say, and will soon be creating more full-time positions than former interns can fill.
Top banks declined to release hiring statistics for this article, and many business schools said it was too early to predict hiring results because job offers can continue through the spring. But in interviews with two dozen students and administrators at several business schools across the country, there was growing optimism about banking jobs. Many students said Wall Street remained a dream destination, even if they occasionally had to explain their dream to friends.
“The answer is the level of knowledge that can be gained at such a young age,” said P. J. Martin, a first-year M.B.A. student at the University of North Carolina who is interning at Barclays Capital next summer, explaining his interest in investment banking. “You have access to top-level management, to the top minds in the finance field.”
But many students admitted a twinge of guilt about landing jobs and internships while so many classmates — and much of the country — remain unemployed.
“I feel lucky,” said Mr. Phelps, from Duke. “My timing ended up being perfect, and it could easily have not been. Lots of friends are struggling and not finding jobs.”
The speed of the turnaround in banking has not surprised Ben Bloomfield, a first-year M.B.A. student at Darden. Business students, he said, expect cyclical markets, but know that banking will remain prestigious.
“I don’t think any business school student was disillusioned enough to think, ‘Oh, Goldman Sachs on my résumé is not going to be valuable,’ ” Mr. Bloomfield said. “It was more, ‘Goldman Sachs is going to come to campus, and I’m not even sure they’re going to hire anybody.’ ”
That patience seems to have been rewarded. After a tough round of interviews, Mr. Bloomfield just received an internship at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
Singapore 10-year old boy is a tech prodigy
Singapore tech prodigy rides mobile apps boom
SINGAPORE (AFP) - As 10-year-old Lim Ding Wei blasts alien space ships on a computer screen in his living room, his father Lim Thye Chean looks over his shoulder proudly.
"This is way beyond me already, because I do not know how to do 3D programming. I can't teach him any more," he said proudly as his son zips around in outer space fully rendered in 3D.
From being the teacher, Thye Chean, 40, a chief technology officer at a local firm, has now become the student of his son, whom local media reports fete as Singapore's youngest programmer of mobile applications.
The game is the latest in Ding Wei's repertoire of mobile applications, which include the hit Invader Wars 1 as well as art scrawler Doodle Kids that has registered more than half a million downloads since it was posted on the iPhone App Store last year.
Fifth-grader Ding Wei is just one of a growing number of local programme developers jumping on the bandwagon as analysts predict a boom in global mobile applications, or 'mobile apps', industry this year.
"I plan to be a software programmer," said the boy, whose favourite subject in school is mathematics.
Mobile applications come with mobile phones and other hand-held devices, allowing users to access a wide array of Internet services while on the go, including finding one's way in a shopping mall or playing games online.
Information technology research firm Gartner forecasts that revenue from mobile phone applications worldwide will hit 6.8 billion US dollars in 2010, up 60 percent over last year.
Downloads from the massively-popular Apple App Store also accounted for at least 99.4 percent of the 2.516 billion downloads of the mini-programs last year, Gartner said.
The recently-released iPad tablet computer, which has already stoked interest among tech aficionados, can also run iPhone applications from the App Store, Apple chief executive Steve Jobs has said.
In addition to the upbeat figures, local developers have been heartened by local telecom firms Starhub and Mobile One breaking incumbent Singtel's stranglehold on iPhone sales.
"With the other two telcos coming in, there is definitely a boom in the number of (iPhone) handsets going out," said Sunny Koh, president of local game developer Personae Studios.
There is "huge potential" for the mobile application market to grow this year, he added.
"Singapore's market is growing and it is a good time for us to emerge as a publisher," Koh said.
Aside from games and quirky localised programmes like cash machine locators and mall directories, developers are also creating applications for schools to aid students in subjects like creative writing and chemistry.
Education application developer Elchemi Education said demand was growing as more students and teachers got hold of the latest smartphone and gained access to mobile application platforms.
"A lot of teachers are exploring mobile devices and a lot of students have iPods and iPhones... so with the kids having these existing devices, the school would also want to tap on using them," said director Joanne Chia.
The developer has rolled out applications in collaboration with schools and students.
One programme called S!Plot consists of virtual wheels which can be spun to generate random scenarios for students to practise their creative writing skills.
"A lot of kids like the graphic interface, so we use the iPhone or iPod Touch to wow them," Chia said.
In addition, the company has set up a club in conjunction with five secondary schools specialising in creating iPhone applications for their primary-level counterparts.
"The students can take their creativity and skills, like photo-editing, creating websites and all. Now they use those skills in iPhone (applications) development," said Chia.
But 10-year-old Ding Wei is looking at home, rather than school, for his next project: an open-ended simulation game centred around the management of a condominium, and modelled after his favourite game series, The Sims.
"I want to create a 'MyCondo' game," he says.
Haiti quake more destructive than 2004 tsunami: study
PORT-AU-PRINCE (AFP) – The scale of devastation in Haiti is far worse than in Asia after the 2004 tsunami, a study has said, estimating the cost of last month's earthquake at up to 14 billion dollars.
The report released Tuesday from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) raised the possibility that the quake could be the most destructive disaster in modern history.
Its stark assessment comes with Port-au-Prince still lying in ruins more than one month on, while the bodies of more than 200,000 dead pile up in mass graves outside the capital.
The study's release coincided with what would normally be Haiti's annual carnival, an explosion of pulsing music and colorful parades. But this year, the events have been cancelled as no one is in the mood to party.
The preliminary IDB report estimated the damage at between eight and 14 billion dollars in what was already the poorest country in the Americas before the catastrophe.
Factoring in Haiti's population and economic output, the upper estimate would make it the most destructive natural disaster in modern history, the bank said. Related article: Haiti gang turf wars
"Indeed, in this respect the Haiti earthquake was vastly more destructive than the Indonesian tsunami of 2004 and the cyclone that hit Myanmar in 2008," an IDB statement said.
"It caused five times more deaths per million inhabitants than the second-ranking natural killer, the 1972 earthquake in Nicaragua."
Haiti officials say more than 217,000 people were killed in the quake, or about 2.4 percent of the country's population of nine million.
The 14-billion-dollar figure is the Washington-based bank's upper estimate for the cost of reconstructing homes, schools, streets and other infrastructure in Haiti following the January 12 quake.
The IDB said a more detailed accounting of the situation would come in the following months but that its preliminary study showed that the reconstruction cost was likely to be far higher than anticipated.
Meanwhile, Haiti's carnival celebrations, usually the culmination of weeks of parties, were replaced by mourning.
"Everybody's sad," said Nanotte Verly, a 48-year-old mother of nine who lost her home in the quake and sells jewelry and wooden plaques praising Jesus on a roadside. "All the buildings are still collapsed on the ground."
More than a million Haitians are still homeless following the earthquake, living in squalid camps in and around the capital.
Related article: Haiti's raucous carnival replaced by mourning
The traditional center of carnival celebrations, the Champ de Mars park across from the collapsed National Palace, is now a sprawling homeless camp housing some 16,000 people in a maze of tents made of scrap wood and sheets.
Lemaire Sicard, 37, lives at the site and spoke of how the Champ de Mars would be filled with revelers and partying in years past.
"But now there's nothing," he said. "It's not possible. There are people from this area who were hurt -- deaths also."
While aid workers rush to distribute tarpaulins before the rainy season starts, the United Nations says only about 272,000 people have been provided with shelter materials so far.
On his second day in Haiti to give a boost to the relief effort, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper visited Canadian troops in Leogane, a town largely wiped out by the quake where the soldiers are helping set up a hospital.
Harper had earlier said Canada would set up a semi-permanent, 11-million-dollar headquarters for the Haitian government, which currently operates out of a police building because the palace and many government ministries were destroyed in the quake.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy was due to arrive here on Wednesday.
In a positive sign for the quake-torn country, American Airlines said it would resume the first commercial flights to Haiti on Friday.
The report released Tuesday from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) raised the possibility that the quake could be the most destructive disaster in modern history.
Its stark assessment comes with Port-au-Prince still lying in ruins more than one month on, while the bodies of more than 200,000 dead pile up in mass graves outside the capital.
The study's release coincided with what would normally be Haiti's annual carnival, an explosion of pulsing music and colorful parades. But this year, the events have been cancelled as no one is in the mood to party.
The preliminary IDB report estimated the damage at between eight and 14 billion dollars in what was already the poorest country in the Americas before the catastrophe.
Factoring in Haiti's population and economic output, the upper estimate would make it the most destructive natural disaster in modern history, the bank said. Related article: Haiti gang turf wars
"Indeed, in this respect the Haiti earthquake was vastly more destructive than the Indonesian tsunami of 2004 and the cyclone that hit Myanmar in 2008," an IDB statement said.
"It caused five times more deaths per million inhabitants than the second-ranking natural killer, the 1972 earthquake in Nicaragua."
Haiti officials say more than 217,000 people were killed in the quake, or about 2.4 percent of the country's population of nine million.
The 14-billion-dollar figure is the Washington-based bank's upper estimate for the cost of reconstructing homes, schools, streets and other infrastructure in Haiti following the January 12 quake.
The IDB said a more detailed accounting of the situation would come in the following months but that its preliminary study showed that the reconstruction cost was likely to be far higher than anticipated.
Meanwhile, Haiti's carnival celebrations, usually the culmination of weeks of parties, were replaced by mourning.
"Everybody's sad," said Nanotte Verly, a 48-year-old mother of nine who lost her home in the quake and sells jewelry and wooden plaques praising Jesus on a roadside. "All the buildings are still collapsed on the ground."
More than a million Haitians are still homeless following the earthquake, living in squalid camps in and around the capital.
Related article: Haiti's raucous carnival replaced by mourning
The traditional center of carnival celebrations, the Champ de Mars park across from the collapsed National Palace, is now a sprawling homeless camp housing some 16,000 people in a maze of tents made of scrap wood and sheets.
Lemaire Sicard, 37, lives at the site and spoke of how the Champ de Mars would be filled with revelers and partying in years past.
"But now there's nothing," he said. "It's not possible. There are people from this area who were hurt -- deaths also."
While aid workers rush to distribute tarpaulins before the rainy season starts, the United Nations says only about 272,000 people have been provided with shelter materials so far.
On his second day in Haiti to give a boost to the relief effort, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper visited Canadian troops in Leogane, a town largely wiped out by the quake where the soldiers are helping set up a hospital.
Harper had earlier said Canada would set up a semi-permanent, 11-million-dollar headquarters for the Haitian government, which currently operates out of a police building because the palace and many government ministries were destroyed in the quake.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy was due to arrive here on Wednesday.
In a positive sign for the quake-torn country, American Airlines said it would resume the first commercial flights to Haiti on Friday.
Haitian judge poised to release US missionaries
By FRANK BAJAK, Associated Press Writer Frank Bajak, Associated Press Writer
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – The 10 U.S. missionaries facing trial for trying to take a busload of children out of Haiti should be released from jail while an investigation continues, a Haitian judge said Thursday, giving the Americans their best news since their arrests nearly two weeks ago.
Judge Bernard Saint-Vil has the final word on whether to free the missionaries, though he gave the prosecutor-general the opportunity to raise objections. He said he was accepting defense attorneys' request to provisionally free the Americans while an investigation of the case continues.
It is unclear when the missionaries, most from an Idaho Baptist church group, might be released, and Saint-Vil said it was too early to say whether they would be able to leave this earthquake-crippled Caribbean nation if granted provisional freedom. It is also unclear what bearing releasing the missionaries might have on whether they go to trial.
Saint-Vil on Thursday privately questioned the last of a group of parents who said they willingly gave their children to the Baptist missionaries, believing the Americans would educate and care for them.
"After listening to the families, I see the possibility that they can all be released," Saint-Vil told The Associated Press. "I am recommending that all 10 Americans be released."
It wasn't known late Thursday whether the prosecutor had received Saint-Vil's formal recommendation. The prosecutor couldn't be reached for comment.
The Americans were charged last week with child kidnapping and criminal association after being arrested Jan. 29 while trying to take 33 children, ages 2 to 12, across the border to an orphanage they were trying to set up in the Dominican Republic.
The following day, group leader Laura Silsby of Meridian, Idaho, told the AP the children were obtained either from orphanages or from distant relatives. She said only children who were found not to have living parents or relatives who could care for them might be put up for adoption.
However, at least 20 of the children are from a single village and have living parents. Some of the parents told the AP they willingly turned over their children to the missionaries because they could no longer feed or otherwise care for them — the children's school and many of their homes collapsed in the quake.
State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said Thursday that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had not personally intervened in the case, as the U.S.-based legal team for one of the missionaries, Jim Allen of Amarillo, Texas, requested in a Tuesday letter.
"We have been very careful not to intervene specifically in this case," Crowley said. "This is a matter for Haitian authorities to resolve."
Crowley added that Washington was "satisfied with the overall conduct of this case."
Drew Ham, assistant pastor at Central Valley Baptist Church in Meridian, on Thursday called the judge's pending recommendation encouraging but said it's too soon to celebrate.
"It's a good sign," Ham told the AP. "But we still don't have confirmation of their release."
On Wednesday, from behind cell bars in the stuffy, grimy jail where they have been held, the missionaries refused to be interviewed.
"We've said all we're going to say for now. We don't want to talk now," Silsby said. The women were held separately from the men, who shared their cell with nine Haitian men, some of whom played checkers on the cell floor.
"We will not talk unless our lawyer is present," said Paul Thompson, pastor of the Eastside Baptist Church in Twin Falls, Idaho.
Silsby decided last summer to create an orphanage in the Dominican Republic and in November registered the nonprofit New Life Children's Refuge Inc. in Idaho.
After Haiti's catastrophic Jan. 12 earthquake, she accelerated the plan and recruited her fellow missionaries. Silsby told the AP she was interested only in saving suffering children.
However, she did not have the Haitian papers required to take the children out of the country, and a Dominican diplomat told the AP he warned her the day the missionaries were arrested that without those papers she could be arrested.
Haitian government officials view the case both as a distraction to the greater issues of earthquake relief and as a matter of national sovereignty. The prospect of child trafficking is taken seriously here, and the Americans' case has provided a government widely criticized at home for its response to the quake an opportunity to show it is functioning.
The case has tapped into fears in Haiti that traffickers would take advantage of the chaos immediately after the quake to abduct children. It also has irritated Haitian government officials conducting business out of the same police station used to jail the Americans. Nearly every government building was destroyed in the quake.
Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive has lamented the fact that journalists are paying more attention to 10 Americans than the 3 million Haitians in need of help.
Before the quake, prospective parents crowded every day outside the U.S. Embassy, waiting to apply for visas for the children they wanted to adopt. About 1,000 children were legally adopted by foreigners in 2008 — by French parents in nearly half the cases.
Thousands more Haitian children, orphaned and not, leave the country illicitly each year, according to the U.N. Children's Fund. They are forced into domestic or agricultural labor, used as sex slaves or sold on the clandestine market for adoption.
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – The 10 U.S. missionaries facing trial for trying to take a busload of children out of Haiti should be released from jail while an investigation continues, a Haitian judge said Thursday, giving the Americans their best news since their arrests nearly two weeks ago.
Judge Bernard Saint-Vil has the final word on whether to free the missionaries, though he gave the prosecutor-general the opportunity to raise objections. He said he was accepting defense attorneys' request to provisionally free the Americans while an investigation of the case continues.
It is unclear when the missionaries, most from an Idaho Baptist church group, might be released, and Saint-Vil said it was too early to say whether they would be able to leave this earthquake-crippled Caribbean nation if granted provisional freedom. It is also unclear what bearing releasing the missionaries might have on whether they go to trial.
Saint-Vil on Thursday privately questioned the last of a group of parents who said they willingly gave their children to the Baptist missionaries, believing the Americans would educate and care for them.
"After listening to the families, I see the possibility that they can all be released," Saint-Vil told The Associated Press. "I am recommending that all 10 Americans be released."
It wasn't known late Thursday whether the prosecutor had received Saint-Vil's formal recommendation. The prosecutor couldn't be reached for comment.
The Americans were charged last week with child kidnapping and criminal association after being arrested Jan. 29 while trying to take 33 children, ages 2 to 12, across the border to an orphanage they were trying to set up in the Dominican Republic.
The following day, group leader Laura Silsby of Meridian, Idaho, told the AP the children were obtained either from orphanages or from distant relatives. She said only children who were found not to have living parents or relatives who could care for them might be put up for adoption.
However, at least 20 of the children are from a single village and have living parents. Some of the parents told the AP they willingly turned over their children to the missionaries because they could no longer feed or otherwise care for them — the children's school and many of their homes collapsed in the quake.
State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said Thursday that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had not personally intervened in the case, as the U.S.-based legal team for one of the missionaries, Jim Allen of Amarillo, Texas, requested in a Tuesday letter.
"We have been very careful not to intervene specifically in this case," Crowley said. "This is a matter for Haitian authorities to resolve."
Crowley added that Washington was "satisfied with the overall conduct of this case."
Drew Ham, assistant pastor at Central Valley Baptist Church in Meridian, on Thursday called the judge's pending recommendation encouraging but said it's too soon to celebrate.
"It's a good sign," Ham told the AP. "But we still don't have confirmation of their release."
On Wednesday, from behind cell bars in the stuffy, grimy jail where they have been held, the missionaries refused to be interviewed.
"We've said all we're going to say for now. We don't want to talk now," Silsby said. The women were held separately from the men, who shared their cell with nine Haitian men, some of whom played checkers on the cell floor.
"We will not talk unless our lawyer is present," said Paul Thompson, pastor of the Eastside Baptist Church in Twin Falls, Idaho.
Silsby decided last summer to create an orphanage in the Dominican Republic and in November registered the nonprofit New Life Children's Refuge Inc. in Idaho.
After Haiti's catastrophic Jan. 12 earthquake, she accelerated the plan and recruited her fellow missionaries. Silsby told the AP she was interested only in saving suffering children.
However, she did not have the Haitian papers required to take the children out of the country, and a Dominican diplomat told the AP he warned her the day the missionaries were arrested that without those papers she could be arrested.
Haitian government officials view the case both as a distraction to the greater issues of earthquake relief and as a matter of national sovereignty. The prospect of child trafficking is taken seriously here, and the Americans' case has provided a government widely criticized at home for its response to the quake an opportunity to show it is functioning.
The case has tapped into fears in Haiti that traffickers would take advantage of the chaos immediately after the quake to abduct children. It also has irritated Haitian government officials conducting business out of the same police station used to jail the Americans. Nearly every government building was destroyed in the quake.
Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive has lamented the fact that journalists are paying more attention to 10 Americans than the 3 million Haitians in need of help.
Before the quake, prospective parents crowded every day outside the U.S. Embassy, waiting to apply for visas for the children they wanted to adopt. About 1,000 children were legally adopted by foreigners in 2008 — by French parents in nearly half the cases.
Thousands more Haitian children, orphaned and not, leave the country illicitly each year, according to the U.N. Children's Fund. They are forced into domestic or agricultural labor, used as sex slaves or sold on the clandestine market for adoption.
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