travel insurance policy - incoming visitors to borneo

Ken Novak: Current events
Post-9-11 events and analyses

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  Reverse Foreign Aid:  Important issues with incomplete explanation.  "According to the United Nations, in 2006 the net transfer of capital from poorer countries to rich ones was $784 billion, up from $229 billion in 2002. (In 1997, the balance was even.)"  Reasons:
  
• Since 1990, the world’s nonrich nations have increased their reserves, on average, from around three months’ worth of imports to more than eight months’ worth — or the equivalent of about 30 percent of their G.D.P. China and other countries maintain those reserves mainly in the form of supersecure U.S. Treasury bills.. But the problem is that T-bills earn low returns. All the money spent on T-bills — a very substantial sum — could be earning far better returns invested elsewhere, or could be used to pay teachers and build highways at home, activities that bring returns of a different type. Dani Rodrik, an economist at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, estimates conservatively that maintaining reserves in excess of the three-month standard costs poor countries 1 percent of their economies annually — some $110 billion every year. Joseph Stiglitz, the Columbia University economist, says he thinks the real cost could be double that.
• As poorer countries enter the W.T.O., they must agree to pay royalties on [intellectual property] — and a result is a net obligation of more than $40 billion annually that poorer countries owe to American and European corporations.
• The hypercompetition for global investment has produced another important reverse subsidy: the tax holidays poor countries offer foreign investors... Since deals between corporations and governments are usually secret, it is hard to know how much investment incentives cost poorer countries — certainly tens of billions of dollars. Whatever the cost, it is growing, as country after country has passed laws enabling the offer of such incentives.
• The migration of highly educated people from poor nations is increasing. A small brain drain can benefit the South, as emigrants send money home and may return with new skills and capital. But in places where educated people are few and emigrants don’t go home again, the brain drain devastates. .. The financial consequences for the poorer nations can be severe. A doctor who moves from Johannesburg to North Dakota costs the South African government as much as $100,000, the price of training him there. ..
• Most costly to poor countries, they have been drafted into paying for rich nations’ energy use. On a per capita basis, Americans .. create more global warming — than anyone else. .. American energy use is being subsidized by tropical coastal nations, who appear to be global warming’s first victims."
Reasons 1-3 add up to less than $300B of today's $784B.  Reason 4 has been happening ever since decolonization, and is substantially offset by remittances from the migrant home.  Reason 5 is not monetized today.  So the substantial majority of the amount is unexplained -- esp by comparison to 2002, when it was one third the size.  What changed so drastically?  Does this figure include China's net exports, and their policy of incredibly high foreign exchange holdings, inflating the entire issue?

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  A World Free of Nuclear Weapons:  Long op-ed by George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn on both urgent and long-term measures to cut the nuclear threat.  Meanwhile, US policy is going the other way: see U.S. Selecting Hybrid Design For Warheads and Complex 2030: DOE's Misguided Plan to Rebuild the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Complex.
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  Dollar going down:  Mini-fact: Dollar down by 30% in last 5 years.  "The United States dollar index, a measure of the dollar’s strength against a basket of currencies, fell to 83.23 from 83.65 on Friday. In February 2002, the index was at 120."
  
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  FT.com - Richest 2% hold half the world's assets:  "Personal wealth is distributed so unevenly across the world that the richest two per cent of adults own more than 50 per cent of the world’s assets while the poorest half hold only 1 per cent of wealth .. according to the data from the World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University (UNU-Wider). ..
  
  Adults with more than $2,200 of assets were in the top half of the global wealth league table, while those with more than $61,000 were in the top 10 per cent, [and] to belong to the top 1 per cent of the world’s wealthiest adults you would need more than $500,000, something that 37m adults have achieved.  So much of the world’s wealth is concentrated in few hands that if all the world’s wealth was distributed evenly, each person would have $20,500 of assets to use.
  
  Almost 90 per cent of the world’s wealth is held in North America, Europe and high-income Asian and Pacific countries, such as Japan and Australia.  While North America has 6 per cent of the world’s adult population, it accounts for 34 per cent of household wealth.  The concentration of wealth in different countries varies considerably, with the top 10 per cent in the US holding 70 per cent of the country’s wealth, compared with 61 per cent in France, 56 per cent in the UK, 44 per cent in Germany and 39 per cent in Japan."
  
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  Global Voices Online:  Interesting compilation of current blog material from citizens of many counties, including Lebanon, Libya, China, Iran, with coverage of local news.  Would provide interesting inputs to the "open source intelligence" movement.
  
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  Dealing with Tehran:  Assessing U.S. Diplomatic Options Toward Iran by former CIA official Flynt L. Leverett, The Century Foundation, 12/4/2006.  An op-ed version of this was blocked from publication by the CIA. It "lays out the essential features of a U.S.-Iranian grand bargain. If Washington does not begin to pursue such an arrangement vigorously and soon, the window for this kind of strategic understanding between the United States and the Islamic Republic is likely to close. Under these circumstances, Iran’s development of at least a nuclear weapons option in the next few years is highly likely.
  
  Thus, if it does not pursue a grand bargain with Tehran, the United States almost certainly will have to take up the more daunting and less potentially satisfying challenges of coping with a nuclear-capable Iran. And the standing of the United States in the world’s most strategically critical region will continue its already disturbing decline."  See also commentary from Newsweek's James Dickey.
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  Anbar Picture Grows Clearer, and Bleaker:  "The U.S. military is no longer able to defeat a bloody insurgency in western Iraq or counter al-Qaeda's rising popularity there, according to newly disclosed details from a classified Marine Corps intelligence report that set off debate in recent months about the military's mission in Anbar province.  .. The Marines recently filed an updated version of [the August] assessment that stood by its conclusions ..
  
  The report describes Iraq's Sunni minority as "embroiled in a daily fight for survival," fearful of "pogroms" by the Shiite majority and increasingly dependent on al-Qaeda in Iraq as its only hope against growing Iranian dominance across the capital. .. True or not, the memo says, "from the Sunni perspective, their greatest fears have been realized: Iran controls Baghdad and Anbaris have been marginalized." Moreover, most Sunnis now believe it would be unwise to count on or help U.S. forces because they are seen as likely to leave the country before imposing stability.
  
  Between al-Qaeda's violence, Iran's influence and an expected U.S. drawdown, "the social and political situation has deteriorated to a point" that U.S. and Iraqi troops "are no longer capable of militarily defeating the insurgency in al-Anbar," the assessment found. ..  "Despite the success of the December elections, nearly all government institutions from the village to provincial levels have disintegrated or have been thoroughly corrupted and infiltrated by Al Qaeda in Iraq," or a smattering of other insurgent groups, the report says"
  
  From the story on the August report:  "One Army officer summarized it as arguing that in Anbar provinc