Buying U.S. Treasury bonds is an option — but not the only option — for China, which is aware that huge debt issuance by Washington would reduce the value of China’s existing portfolio, a banking regulator said in remarks published on Friday.
Luo Ping, a director-general at the China Banking Regulatory Commission, was clarifying a Financial Times report that quoted him as saying creditor countries had no choice but to invest their surpluses in U.S. Treasuries.
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By Eric Hobsbawm

Victor Kiernan, who has died aged 95, was a man of unselfconscious charm and staggeringly wide range of learning. He was also one of the last survivors of the generation of British Marxist historians of the 1930s and 1940s. If this generation has been seen by the leading German scholar HU Wehler as the main factor behind “the global impact of English historiography since the 1960s”, it was largely due to Victor’s influence. He brought to the debates of the Communist party historians’ group between 1946 and 1956 a persistent, if always courteous, determination to think out problems of class culture and tradition for himself, whatever the orthodox position. He continued to remain loyal to the flexible, open-minded Marxism of the group to which he had contributed so much.
Most influential through his works on the imperialist era, he was also, almost certainly, the only historian who also translated 20th-century Urdu poets and wrote a book on the Latin poet Horace. The latter’s works he, like the distinguished Polish Marxist historian Witold Kula, carried with him on his travels.
Like several of his contemporaries among the Marxist historians, including Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton and Edward Thompson, he came from a nonconformist background. In his case it was a lower-middle-class, actively congregationalist family in Ashton-on-Mersey, though in his time as a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, he used his Irish name as an excuse to justify a lack of zeal for the British monarchy.
He came to Trinity College from Manchester grammar school in 1931 and remained there for the next seven years as an exceptionally brilliant undergraduate, research scholar and, from 1937, fellow. In 1934, the year of his graduation (double starred first in history), he joined the Communist party, in which he remained for the next 25 years. His first book, British Diplomacy in China 1880-1885 (1939) announced his consistent interest in the world outside Europe.
Unlike his Trinity comrade John Cornford, about whom he wrote with remarkable perception, his public profile among Cambridge Communist party members of the 1930s was low. Only those with special interests were likely to meet him, a boyish face emerging in a dressing-gown from among mountain ranges of books on the attic floor of Trinity Great Court. This was because he soon took over the officially non-existent “colonial group” from the Canadian EH Norman, later a distinguished historian of Japan, diplomat and eventual victim of the McCarthyite witch-hunt in the US, and first of a succession of communist (and later ex-communist) historians who looked after the “colonials” – overwhelmingly from south Asia – until 1939.
Marxism and the irresistible friendship of Indians moved Victor, in 1938, to use one year of his four-year Trinity fellowship to visit the subcontinent. This was nominally “to see the political scene at closer hand and with some schemes for historical study” and he also had a Comintern document for the Indian CP.
He was to stay there until 1946, mainly as a teacher at a Sikh college and, somewhat unexpectedly, at that stronghold of the raj and its rajahs, Aitchison college, both in Lahore. He returned, “reading Thucydides on the Peloponnesian war” in his cabin, with a cargo of friendships, a permanent passion for the great (and progressive) Urdu poets Iqbal and Faiz whom he translated, but with no apparent trace in his subsequent life of a short-lived marriage to Shanta Gandhi, whom he had got to know in London in 1938. Few of his British friends were even aware of it, or expected to see this quintessential bachelor don with a wife, before his fortunate second marriage in 1984 to Heather Massey.
He returned to Trinity, an unreconstructed, but always critical, communist with vast plans for a Marxist work on Shakespeare. His referee denounced his politics when he applied for posts at Oxford and Cambridge universities, but – such was Britain in 1948 – did not mind the charming subversive contaminating the history department at Edinburgh University. There he remained until retirement from a chair in 1977, to all appearances at ease with himself, though not, except for some science fiction, with the post-1945 cultural world. He returned from long bicycle rides across the Pentlands to a flat at the top of an austere staircase in the New Town, to write – not least the diary which he had kept since 1935 – and amaze students and admiring friends by his surprise that they did not know as much as he.
He settled down in the 1950s to publish on everything: from Wordsworth to Faiz, evangelicalism to mercenaries and absolute monarchy, Indo-Central Asian problems, Paraguay and the “war of the Pacific” of Chile, Peru and Bolivia, not forgetting a full-scale study of the Spanish revolution of 1854. In the 1960s he discovered his unique gift of asking historical questions, and suggesting answers, by bringing and fitting together an unparalleled range of erudition, constantly extended by one of the great readers of our time. He became the master of the perfectly chosen quotation inserted into a demure but uncompromising survey of a global scene. Nobody else could have produced the remarkable works on the era of western empires he wrote after the middle 1960s, and by which he will be chiefly remembered, notably The Lords of Human Kind: Black Man, Yellow Man and White Man in an Age of Empire (1969).
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By V. G. Kiernan

When Marx died in 1883 and Engels, less than twenty years before the Great War, in 1895, they left the outlines of a “Marxist” philosophy to be carried forward by disciples of their own like Kautsky, and by new men in new lands like Plekhanov and then Lenin in Russia, or Labriola in Italy. The Marxism held its ground against “revisionist” criticism in the international socialist movement before 1914, but more securely in appearance than in reality because most of its upholders were too much concerned to defend it as an established creed, too little to develop it and keep abreast of changing times.
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By Arzu Celalifer Ekinci

Recent Israeli attacks on Gaza caused more than a thousand civilian casualties. At least 1,300 Palestinians have been killed and 5000 injured since the beginning of the attacks. Israel’s disproportionate use of force and its attacks on civilians had been condemned and led to many protests all around the world. It was probably the first time that the world public opinion reacted in such a large scale at the same time.
There are various opinions about why Israel chose such a roadmap. While a noteworthy majority explains this by the oncoming elections in Israel, others claim that the main reason behind those attacks was inciting Iran and endangering the possible dialogue process between the U.S and Iran by drawing Iran in that conflict. Another group defends the idea that the key player behind this conflict was Iran and Iran would be the only beneficiary of that conflict in any case. Thus the Iranian stance toward the conflict has become important.

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By Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Dec 9 (IPS) – In a ritual that includes sacrificing goats or fowl, a “babalawo” priest of the Yoruba religion in Venezuela can “mount a saint” (attract blessings from forces of nature) on an initiate willing to pay up to 10,000 dollars, and sometimes even more.

The ancestral faith of the West African Yoruba people – who inhabit present-day Nigeria, Benin, Ghana and Togo – “has been distorted, turned into a religion used to make a profit through scams,” Pablo Acosta, president of Venezuela’s Ile-Ife Foundation, told IPS.

Ile-Ife is the mythical original city of the Yoruba, who were brought to the Americas in great numbers during the slave trade. The slaves managed to keep their religious traditions alive, practicing their beliefs through secretly celebrated rituals and a form of religious syncretism that especially took root in Brazil and in Cuba and other Caribbean countries, forming faiths alternative to the dominant Catholic religion.

In Venezuela, a set of beliefs in the powers of the saints and their priests known as “Santería” developed from Yoruba rituals, and today it is experiencing a boom that has not been quantified but which is visible everywhere. Boxes with dead, sacrificed animals can be seen strewn on beaches, along the side of roads, or on river banks.

Santería followers are easily identified through the typical ribbons, bracelets, necklaces and white clothing they wear. According to the Catholic priest Otty Aristizábal, Venezuela currently has thousands of babalaos or babalawos, a Yoruba term that literally means ‘father or master of the mysteries’ and is the title that denotes a priest of Ifa, or system of divination. Apprentices are recruited among high school students.

The Santería faith has reached such a level of sophistication that babalawos are being brought over from Cuba, and even Nigeria, to “mount saints” for believers among the wealthier population, and important figures in Venezuela’s political circles have been swept away by this “new wave.”

It has also opened the door to “palería” rituals – known in Cuba as Palo Monte or Palo Mayombe -, which are considered to be black magic or witchery practices and use human bones stolen from desecrated graves.

“Practices that combine ancestral African beliefs with Venezuela’s dominant religion have spread widely, drawing large numbers of believers. Although there are no reliable studies or statistics available, perhaps up to 30 percent of the population has turned to these faiths,” Vice President of the Ile-Ife Foundation Marjorie Montiel told IPS.

The Archbishop of Caracas Jorge Urosa told IPS that “the Catholic Church is naturally concerned by such a surge in followers of these practices, which we reject because they deviate from our creed and our guiding principles.”

“But they also deviate from the traditional values that Venezuelan society has been built on, and they’re often used as a means to swindle people, obtaining favours and benefits for individuals who are nothing but con artists,” Urosa said.

Shops that sell herbs, icons and articles used in the celebration of Santería and similar rituals are mushrooming throughout Caracas and other cities of Venezuela. The local newspaper El Universal reports that there are 150 of these stores in the capital alone.

Aura Meza, the manager at one of these shops in the downtown district of Quinta Crespo, told IPS that they haven’t seen changes in what people are buying, as “they’re still taking the same herbs and products to use in their baths and mix with their rubbish, following recipes to bring health, love or fortune, or for initiation with babalawos; but we have seen a growth in sales.”

For her part, Montiel said that “if people feel the need to resort to these African-based beliefs, they have the right to do it.” She added that there “must be a reason why they don’t find what they need in faiths such as that of the Catholic Church.”

Superstitions are very much present in cultures across Latin America, and they have always made it into the high circles of social and political power. The late Luis Herrera Campins, who governed Venezuela from 1979 through 1984, was a devout Catholic but always carried with him a “zamuro pip” – the polished seed of a local tree – as a good luck charm.

Today, President Hugo Chávez wears a scapular that belonged to his great-grandfather Pedro Pérez, nicknamed “Maisanta,” who fought in the wars between conservatives and liberals in the early 20th century. Chávez’s critics have spread alleged reports and testimonies depicting the leader as a Santería follower.

“We have reports of people very high up in Venezuelan political, and also economic, circles, who have gone to babalawos and paid important sums to obtain the so-called protection of Ifá,” Acosta said.

Ifá is the orisa, or deity, of wisdom and knowledge, and it also refers to the system of geomantic divination of the Yoruba culture, which uses numbers and verses and is basically a corpus of values and instruments that relate human beings with elements of nature such as the sun, the moon, winds, tides or mountains, he explained.

The Ifa Divination system was added in 2005 by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) to its list of “Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity”.

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Social isolation affects how people behave as well as how their brains operate, a study at the University of Chicago shows.

The research, presented Sunday at a briefing, “Social Emotion and the Brain,” at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, is the first to use fMRI scans to study the connections between perceived social isolation (or loneliness) and activity in the brain. Combining fMRI scans with data relevant to social behavior is part of an emerging field examining brain mechanisms—an approach to psychology being pioneered at the University of Chicago.

Researchers found that the ventral striatum—a region of the brain associated with rewards—is much more activated in non-lonely people than in the lonely when they view pictures of people in pleasant settings. In contrast, the temporoparietal junction—a region associated with taking the perspective of another person—is much less activated among lonely than in the non-lonely when viewing pictures of people in unpleasant settings.

“Given their feelings of social isolation, lonely individuals may be left to find relative comfort in nonsocial rewards,” said John Cacioppo, the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Professor in Psychology at the University. He spoke at the briefing along with Jean Decety, the Irwin B. Harris Professor in Psychology and Psychiatry at the University.

The ventral striatum, which is critical to learning, is a key portion of the brain and is activated through primary rewards such as food and secondary rewards such as money. Social rewards and feelings of love also may activate the region.

Cacioppo, one of the nation’s leading scholars on loneliness, has shown that loneliness undermines health and can be as detrimental as smoking. About one in five Americans experience loneliness, he said. Decety is one of the nation’s leading researchers to use fMRI scans to explore empathy.

They were among five co-authors of a paper, “In the Eye of the Beholder: Individual Differences in Perceived Social Isolation Predict Regional Brain Activation to Social Stimuli,” published in the current issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.
In the study, 23 female undergraduates were tested to determine their level of loneliness. While in an fMRI scanner, the subjects were shown unpleasant pictures and human conflict as well as pleasant things such as money and happy people.

The subjects who rated as lonely were least likely to have strong activity in their ventral striata when shown pictures of people enjoying themselves.

Although loneliness may be influence brain activity, the research also suggests that activity in the ventral striatum may prompt feelings of loneliness, Decety said. “The study raises the intriguing possibility that loneliness may result from reduced reward-related activity in the ventral striatum in response to social rewards.”

In addition to differing responses in the ventral striatum, the subjects also recorded differing responses in parts of the brain that indicated loneliness played a role in how their brain operates.

Joining Decety and Cacioppo in writing the Journal of Cognitive Science paper were Catherine Norris, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Dartmouth College; George Monteleone, a graduate student at the University of Chicago; and Howard Nusbaum, Chair of Psychology at the University of Chicago.

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By Bob Weber

An academic maverick is challenging conventional wisdom on Canada’s prehistory by claiming an archeological site in southern Alberta is really a vast, open-air sun temple with a precise 5,000-year-old calendar predating England’s Stonehenge and Egypt’s pyramids.
Mainstream archeologists consider the rock-encircled cairn to be just another medicine wheel left behind by early aboriginals. But a new book by retired University of Alberta professor Gordon Freeman says it is in fact the centre of a 26-square-kilometre stone “lacework” that marks the changing seasons and the phases of the moon with greater accuracy than our current calendar.
“Genius existed on the prairies 5,000 years ago,” says Mr. Freeman, the widely published former head of the university’s physical and theoretical chemistry department.
Mr. Freeman’s fascination with prairie prehistory dates back to his Saskatchewan boyhood. He and his father would comb the short grasses of the plains in search of artifacts exposed by the scouring wind. That curiosity never left him and he returned to it as he prepared to retire from active teaching.
Looking for a hobby, he asked a friend with an interest in history to suggest a few intriguing sites to visit. On a warm late-August day in 1980, that list drew him to what he has come to call Canada’s Stonehenge, which is also the title of his book.
A central cairn atop one of a series of low hills overlooking the Bow River, about 70 kilometres east of Calgary, had been partially excavated in 1971 and dated at about 5,000 years old. But as he approached it, Freeman strongly felt there was much more there than previously thought.
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(Submitted by a reader)

The caning of 16 primary school teachers by the police officers has sparked outrage in the education sector, with the teachers’ union threatening to take legal action against the ministry.

The teachers were reported to have been caned by the police after an inquiry into poor exam results at three schools, which the officials claimed teachers were not teaching the official syllabus and were failing to show up at work.

The Bukoba District Commissioner Albert Mnali allegedly ordered a police officer who was accompanying him during his official tour in the District last Wednesday to dispense four strokes of the cane each to 16 teachers for failure to execute their duties.

But Deputy Education Minister Mwantumu Mahiza termed the incident as “unfortunate and utterly absurd,” suggesting that Mr Mnali needed to be psychologically assessed for his unusual behavior.

“I really can’t believe that a sane senior government official can order the police to cane civil servants. There are procedures to be followed before a civil servant is punished,” Ms Mahiza said.
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