A small Chinese carmaker with ambitious plans: WITH a model line-up that includes the Wingle, Sailor and Socool, and a corporate action plan to “attack the consciousness like a wolf while sensing danger like a rabbit”, it is easy to poke fun at Great Wall Motor, based in Hebei Province, south of Beijing. The carmaker’s output of 108,000 vehicles in 2007 is puny by global standards—about half what Toyota builds in a week. Yet there is nothing modest about Great Wall’s ambition. [Economist]

China to modernise nuclear weapons capability: One of the world’s leading arms control experts has said that the Chinese have realised that their nuclear weaponry has fallen behind those of other major powers and might not survive a first strike. [Telegraph]

India’s Bharti Airtel may buy South Africa’s MTN: According to the Financial Times, Bharti has indicated it would be willing to pay about $19 billion for 51% of the company. That would make it the heftiest overseas acquisition ever made by an Indian firm, more than Tata Steel paid for Corus, a British steelmaker, and seven times the amount India invested in the whole of Africa over the ten years to 2004. [Economist]

Tiger economies are snapping at US heels: China and India are moving toward becoming the biggest economies in the world: with 2.4bn people, or 40 per cent of the world’s population and annual GDP growth rates of between 8 per cent and 10 per cent, experts say that they could one day overtake the US. Professor Pieter Bottelier, of the Centre for Strategic International Studies, says: ‘If these two countries continue to grow at the current rate, they will overtake America, although that probably won’t happen for a number of decades.’ [Guardian]

Chinese Power Firms Eye Kangaroo Country Juice: Intensifying China’s interest in commodities and energy assets in the land Down Under, the country’s largest energy companies may, according to a report, participate in the multibillion-dollar bidding process for a clutch of public utility assets in the state of New South Wales. [Forbes]

May 9th, 2008 at 9:47 am

This article is filed under Asia Rising, Blog.

Faux feminisim: Is comtemporary art paying too much attention to work that should be ignored?: But what it demonstrates really is that the art world is in a terrific fizz about painting at the moment. It has suddenly decided that painting is not dead any more but very much alive. And like somebody startled from sleep, it can’t quite tell the difference between anything. [Independent]

Serra’s gargantuan art in Paris: France is making a fuss this week over Richard Serra, the 68-year-old American bantamweight who fashions elegant, gargantuan art out of steel. [IHT]

Power Dressing: The ideas that dominate fashion — identity, performance, gender, body shapes, sexuality, logos and the quest for state-of-the-art materials — pretty well describe the world of the superhero. These two forces are brought together in “Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy,” the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s playful look at comic book costumes and their influence on radical haute couture as well as high-tech sportswear. [NYT]

May 9th, 2008 at 9:45 am

This article is filed under Art, Blog.

Rankings Go Global: Once a purely American innovation — or problem, depending on how you look at it — lists of “best colleges” are everywhere. Even as the Times Higher is competing to establish the definitive worldwide college rankings, scores of nations from Kazakhstan to Peru are fast developing new systems to evaluate and publicly rank their institutions of higher education. College rankings have gone global. [Inside Higher Ed]

Bursting the AP bubble: The problem with the AP program is that we don’t have time to really learn U.S. history because we’re preparing for the exam. We race through the textbook, cramming in the facts, a day on the Great Awakening, a week on the Civil War and Reconstruction, a week on World War II, a week on the era from FDR to JFK, a day on the civil rights movement — with nothing on transcendentalism, or the Harlem Renaissance, or Albert Einstein. There is no time to write a paper. Bound by the exam, my history teacher wistfully says we have to be ready in early May. [LA Times]

Harlem parents are voting for charter schools with their feet: The desperation of these parents is hardly surprising. In one Harlem school district, not one public elementary school has more than 55% of its pupils reading at the level expected for their grade. And 75% of 14-year-olds are unable to read at their grade level. So Harlem parents are beginning to leave the public school system in crowds. [Economist]

May 9th, 2008 at 9:42 am

This article is filed under Education, Blog.

Ancient Seaweed Tells of Earliest Americans: Remains of meals that included seaweed are helping confirm the date of a settlement in southern Chile that may offer the earliest evidence of humans in the Americas. [Discovery]

Past masters: Cro-Magnon people are sometimes depicted as crude, mammoth-hunting cavemen who were little better than grunting savages. The idea is a gross distortion of the truth, of course, as is quickly revealed with visits to the caverns in France and Spain where walls are adorned with their 20,000- to 30,000-year-old art. [Guardian]

85,000-year-old finery recovered in Moroccan cave: Archaeologists have uncovered shells used for finery by prehistoric communities 85,000 years ago in a cave in eastern Morocco, the country’s heritage institute said Tuesday. [Daily Star]

May 9th, 2008 at 9:41 am

This article is filed under Prehistory, Blog.

Want to Help the Environment? Eat Insects: “Americans have no idea how wasteful these large mammals are,” Gracer says. “If you want to feed a lot of people, insects are the best choice in terms of getting the biggest bang for your buck.” Insects, he claims, are nutritious. [Discover]

Is Cheap Meat Bigger Threat to Amazon than Biofuels?: Brazil plans to massively expand the production of biofuels but environmental campaigners worry about the effect this will have on the rainforest. Germany’s environment minister, who recently visited the country, thinks demand for cheap meat presents an even great danger. [Spiegel]

Pollution in paradise: Flamingos vs the factory: It is one of the world’s greatest natural spectacles. More than 500,000 flamingos congregate on the salty shores of Lake Natron in the north of Tanzania every year to breed. And it could be about to end. [Independent]

May 8th, 2008 at 9:06 am

This article is filed under Environment, Blog.

Coming soon: The post-female American cinema: Nowhere is our irrelevance more starkly apparent than during the summer, the ultimate boys’ club. Over the next few months, U.S. cinemas - and many worldwide - will reverberate with the romping-stomping of comic book titans like Iron Man and the Hulk. The sexagenarian Harrison Ford will be cracking his Indy whip (some old men get a pass, after all, especially when Steven Spielberg is on board) alongside the fast-talking sprout from “Transformers.” Hellboy will relock and load, tongue and cigar planted in cheek. The girls of summer are few in number, and real women are close to extinct. [IHT]

Kazakhstan seeks identity on the big screen: If the satirical movie “Borat” spoofed an entire nation, then “Mongol” was a decent counterpunch, casting back 800 years to the glory of a world conqueror, and earning Kazakhstan its first nomination for a foreign-language Academy Award earlier this year. But “Mongol” was more than a big-budget Genghis Khan biopic, says Gulnara Sarsenova, the perfume and cosmetics magnate who helped bankroll the $23 million production. It also aimed to bolster the self-respect of a traditionally nomadic people aggressively Russified during 70 years of Soviet domination. [CSM]

Jewish culture, and anti-Semitism, on the rise in Hungary: It’s hard to know whether to feel disheartened by the large showing of neo-Nazis or encouraged by the larger opposition to it. It turns out that aside from the well-documented rise of the far right, Jewish culture has also been conspicuously on the rise here. [IHT]

Sex? Yawn. Politics? That’s Hot!: A FORMER editor of People magazine had some hard-and-fast rules: young is better than old, pretty is better than ugly, television is better than music, music is better than movies, movies are better than sports. And anything is better than politics. Apparently that rule does not apply to the high-drama presidential campaign of 2008. [NYT]

May 8th, 2008 at 9:03 am

This article is filed under Society, Blog.

Designer Genes: When Drew Endy envisions the future, he sees giant gourds engineered to grow into four-bedroom, two-bathroom houses. He sees people alerted to nascent tumors in their bodies by internal biological sensors, and cars fueled by bacteria-produced gasoline. Endy, 37, is a pioneer in synthetic biology, a field that combines biology, chemistry, and engineering to remake biological systems to act according to human design. [Good]

Platypus proves even odder than scientists thought: At first dismissed as a prank, and later cited as proof that God has a sense of humour, the duck-billed platypus has finally given up its evolutionary secrets. The creature, considered one of the strangest mammals in the world, has become the latest to have its genetic code sequenced, revealing it to be a bizarre mix of mammal, bird and reptile, with very complex sexuality. [Guardian]

Why beauty is an advert for good genes: The findings back the claim that the masculinity/femininity of faces is linked with symmetry and hence advertise quality, that is good genes. [Telegraph]

May 8th, 2008 at 9:01 am

This article is filed under Biology, Blog.

Arizona’s solar aspirations in peril: The sun shines 325 days a year in Arizona, on average, and some here see that as the state’s biggest energy asset. But fledgling efforts to turn Arizona into the solar capital of the world depend on making the initial investment in new energy plants affordable – something that could become much more difficult, perhaps even impossible, if a federal tax credit for solar projects expires at the end of the year as scheduled. [CSM]

“Green” Banana Farming Gains Industry Appeal: Today EARTH’s 600-acre (243-hectare) farm is the oldest working banana plantation in Costa Rica, selling its wares exclusively to the eco-friendly Whole Foods Market chain, which has more than 270 stores in the U.S. and the U.K. [National Geographic]

Just how ‘green’ is that shirt?: But judging competing social and environmental claims isn’t so easy, and the task is getting more complex now that companies like Britain’s Marks & Spencer are taking on climate change directly with a “carbon free” lingerie factory in Sri Lanka promising a garment produced entirely with renewable energy. [CSM]

A City Committed to Recycling Is Ready for More: So Mr. Newsom will soon be sending the city’s Board of Supervisors a proposal that would make the recycling of cans, bottles, paper, yard waste and food scraps mandatory instead of voluntary, on the pain of having garbage pickups suspended. [NYT]

May 7th, 2008 at 9:34 am

This article is filed under Environment, Blog.

I’m Not Lying, I’m Telling a Future Truth. Really.: Touching up scenes or past performances induces none of the anxiety that lying or keeping secrets does, these studies find; and embroiderers often work to live up to the enhanced self-images they project. The findings imply that some kinds of deception are aimed more at the deceiver than at the audience, and they may help in distinguishing braggarts and posers from those who are expressing personal aspirations, however clumsily. [NYT]

Abuse as a child ‘makes adults more likely to commit sucide’: Survivors of child abuse may be more likely to kill themselves as adults because their early experiences change the way a critical gene works in the brain, according to new research that could shed light on the biology of suicide. [Times]

Can You Become a Creature of New Habits?: So it seems antithetical to talk about habits in the same context as creativity and innovation. But brain researchers have discovered that when we consciously develop new habits, we create parallel synaptic paths, and even entirely new brain cells, that can jump our trains of thought onto new, innovative tracks. [NYT]

May 7th, 2008 at 9:31 am

This article is filed under Psychology, Blog.

No Way to Treat a Lady: “D.C. Madam” Deborah Jeane Palfrey played a risky game in catering to Washington’s power brokers with her upscale escort service. Her suicide, this month, marked a tragic—and not unexpected—end for a complicated woman who believed she was unfairly victimized. Having talked to Palfrey for months and spoken with her mother after her death, the author tells the whole story. [Vanity Fair]

Luis Posada Carriles, a terror suspect abroad, enjoys a ‘coming-out’ in Miami: A dinner with 500 fellow Cuban exiles honors the militant and former CIA operative, now 80 and still wanted in Venezuela on terrorism charges. [LA Times]

Oil in the Family: In 1935 oil tycoon H. L. Hunt, known as the richest man in America, created what would become a multi-billion-dollar trust for his descendants. Three generations later, a lawsuit by his free-spending great-grandson is shaking the foundations of that mighty family fortune. [Vanity Fair]

May 7th, 2008 at 9:30 am

This article is filed under People, Blog.