Chinese officials have said that their country’s exports surged last December to edge out Germany as the world’s biggest exporter.
The official Xinhua news agency reported today that figures from the General Administration for Customs showed that exports jumped 17.7% in December from a year earlier. Over the whole of 2009 total Chinese exports reached US$1.2 trillion, above Germany’s forecast $1.17 trillion.
Huang Guohua, a statistics official with the customs administration, said the December exports rebound was an important turning point for China’s export sector. He commented that the jump was an indication that exporters have emerged from their downslide.
“We can say that China’s export enterprises have completely emerged from their all-time low in exports,” he said.
However, although China overtook Germany in exports, China’s total foreign trade — both exports and imports — fell 13.9% last year.
The riots in Greece that started on December 6 have entered their fourth night. These are the worst riots the Hellenic Republic has witnessed in decades.
A building in Athens after it was burned by rioters.Image: Georgios Pazios.
The riots were triggered when Alexandros Grigoropoulos, a 15-year-old student, was shot and killed by police. The police claim that Grigoropoulos was throwing a bomb at them when they fired.
Cities throughout Greece have been hit by the unrest, not just Athens. Hundreds of shops and businesses have been destroyed.
“No one has the right to use this tragic incident as an excuse for acts of violence,” said Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis, New Democracy party.
“The government cannot handle this crisis and has lost the trust of the Greek people,” George Papandreou of the Panhellenic Socialist Movement said. “The best thing it can do is resign and let the people find a solution … We will protect the public.”
The rioters are organizing on the campus of National Technical University of Athens (Athens Polytechnic). A constitutional clause enacted after the overthrow of the Greek military junta of 1967–1974 prevents security forces from entering the campus.
One of the banks that were set ablaze.Image: arpakola.
The Guardian is reporting that the University is being used by young men and women to stock up on firebombs and break up marble slabs to throw at police. From behind their makeshift barriers, they vowed the unrest would become “an uprising the likes of which Greece has never seen.”
“We are experiencing moments of a great social revolution,” leftist activist Panagiotis Sotiris told Reuters. Sotiris is among those occupying a university building. “The protests will last as long as necessary,” he added.
“A switch has been flicked and the pressure cooker’s boiled over,” said David Lea, an analyst at {{w|Control Risks Group|Control Risks Group]] in [[London}}, to Bloomberg News. “There are certain places where anarchists are more likely to inspire violence, and that’s Greece.”
Two police officers have been charged in the shooting death of Grigoropoulos, who was buried on Tuesday.
IIFDA mold planner is a man who encourages the development of a piece of attire or outfit from thought to origin. Originators are in charge of breaking down current patterns and choosing what is mainstream, and in addition concocting thoughts for new styles and drafting outlines for them. Fashioners can work in various diverse ventures and settings including dress makers, outline firms, or private organizations and people.
Contingent upon the mold creator’s aptitude, experience, and business, he/she may assume an alternate part in the making of another outfit. Planners who are employed by extensive outline firms are regularly in charge of drafting the plans and ignoring the creation procedure. They will pick the hues, materials, and examples for the outfit and administer tailors and sewers as they reproduce the plan. Mold creators working with littler firms will have a less administrative position. They will regularly draft their plans and make the models that they can show to customers.
At the point when individuals consider creators, they frequently think about the general population who make top of the line, “haute culture” designs. These originators frequently concentrate on creating exceptionally adapted and popular outfits for wealthier clients. These are the designs that are found in magazines, mold appears, and on big names. High-mold creators may likewise work for individual customers to make a customized troupe. Be that as it may, this is by all account not the only sort of form originator.
An originator working for a distributer or maker makes outlines for mass groups of onlookers, instead of higher-end styles. These plans must be provided food toward an extensive crowd and adjusted to fit various distinctive sizes. Contingent upon the outline, the outfits may likewise be produced in various hues too. These fashioners must concoct styles that will suit men, ladies, youngsters, and newborn children. The plans should likewise fit the financial plan and desires of the organization the creator works for.
A few people work in more particular fields. For instance, some form originators work just on wedding dresses. These architects will frequently work with people or wedding dress retailers to deliver modified dresses for their customers.
Various architects work just on ensemble plan for film and the performing expressions. In spite of the fact that this work does not really concentrate on current form slants, an ensemble creator has a considerable lot of an indistinguishable obligations from some other mold architect. Ensemble planners may need to inquire about the style of dress worn by another culture, in various day and age, or even in an anecdotal world. Ensemble originators must work intimately with chiefs so as to discover what kind of dress is called for, since executives regularly have particular thoughts regarding what their characters ought to resemble.
Countless are independently employed and work from venture to extend. They might be called to outline a scope of various outfits relying upon what the customer needs. Their employments are frequently less steady and they will by and large need to change their timetables to address the issues of every customer. Each mold planner’s employment will be diverse relying upon what kind of work they do.
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“If you get in here,” says Bill, “and say, ‘Listen. I want to suspend this girl, and I want to spank her until she’s black and blue, and I have a girl that wants to do that, I probably–when I met her and interviewed her, I probably would have told her, don’t do it. I don’t want you getting black and blue for a number of reasons. Primarily, if you get too black and blue, you’re gonna burn out. You’re not going to want to do this, and you’re not going to feel good about yourself.”Image: David Shankbone.
Torture proliferates American headlines today: whether its use is defensible in certain contexts and the morality of the practice. Wikinews reporter David Shankbone was curious about torture in American popular culture. This is the first of a two part series examining the BDSM business. This interview focuses on the owners of a dungeon, what they charge, what the clients are like and how they handle their needs.
When Shankbone rings the bell of “HC & Co.” he has no idea what to expect. A BDSM (Bondage Discipline Sadism Masochism) dungeon is a legal enterprise in New York City, and there are more than a few businesses that cater to a clientèle that wants an enema, a spanking, to be dressed like a baby or to wear women’s clothing. Shankbone went to find out what these businesses are like, who runs them, who works at them, and who frequents them. He spent three hours one night in what is considered one of the more upscale establishments in Manhattan, Rebecca’s Hidden Chamber, where according to The Village Voice, “you can take your girlfriend or wife, and have them treated with respect—unless they hope to be treated with something other than respect!”
When Shankbone arrived on the sixth floor of a midtown office building, the elevator opened up to a hallway where a smiling Rebecca greeted him. She is a beautiful forty-ish Long Island mother of three who is dressed in smart black pants and a black turtleneck that reaches up to her blond-streaked hair pulled back in a bushy ponytail. “Are you David Shankbone? We’re so excited to meet you!” she says, and leads him down the hall to a living room area with a sofa, a television playing an action-thriller, an open supply cabinet stocked with enema kits, and her husband Bill sitting at the computer trying to find where the re-release of Blade Runner is playing at the local theater. “I don’t like that movie,” says Rebecca.
Perhaps the most poignant moment came at the end of the night when Shankbone was waiting to be escorted out (to avoid running into a client). Rebecca came into the room and sat on the sofa. “You know, a lot of people out there would like to see me burn for what I do,” she says. Rebecca is a woman who has faced challenges in her life, and dealt with them the best she could given her circumstances. She sees herself as providing a service to people who have needs, no matter how debauched the outside world deems them. They sat talking mutual challenges they have faced and politics (she’s supporting Hillary); Rebecca reflected upon the irony that many of the people who supported the torture at Abu Ghraib would want her closed down. It was in this conversation that Shankbone saw that humanity can be found anywhere, including in places that appear on the surface to cater to the inhumanity some people in our society feel towards themselves, or others.
“The best way to describe it,” says Bill, “is if you had a kink, and you had a wife and you had two kids, and every time you had sex with your wife it just didn’t hit the nail on the head. What would you do about it? How would you handle it? You might go through life feeling unfulfilled. Or you might say, ‘No, my kink is I really need to dress in women’s clothing.’ We’re that outlet. We’re not the evil devil out here, plucking people off the street, keeping them chained up for days on end.”
Below is David Shankbone’s interview with Bill & Rebecca, owners of Rebecca’s Hidden Chamber, a BDSM dungeon.
Contents
1 Meet Bill & Rebecca, owners of a BDSM dungeon
1.1 Their home life
2 Operating the business
2.1 The costs
2.2 Hiring employees
2.3 The prices
3 The clients
3.1 What happens when a client walks through the door
Logarithmic graph of the Dow from January 2000 through December 2008
US stock markets dropped to twelve-year lows on Thursday, amidst falling confidence in the financial sector and worries over whether the US automobile manufacturer General Motors will be able to keep operating.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped by 4.08%, or 280.52 points, at the closing bell, reaching a level of 6595.32, a new 12-year low. The Nasdaq Composite lost 54.15 points, or 4%, to 1299.59, while the Standard & Poor’s 500 plunged by 30.27 points, or 4.25%, closing at 682.60.
Every stock in the Dow Jones, other than Wal-Mart, either lost ground or remained even, and all stocks in the S&P 500 index lost ground.
General Motors’ shares lost 15.5% after the auto firm announced that its auditors had “substantial doubt” over whether it would be able to keep operating.
Shares of financial companies were lower by nine percent, with Bank of America losing 11.7% and Citigroup falling by 9.7%.
“What’s most worrisome is that we haven’t hit the crescendo yet,” said Bill Groeneveld, the head trader for vFinance Investments. “Asset-management divisions are getting calls to just liquidate everything, and we haven’t seen the big players come back in at all.”
“This is one of the worst bear markets in the last 100 years; it started out with the credit crisis and the subprime [loans], but it is like a forest fire that has raced across the clearing and ignited other parts: Autos, auto parts, the insurance companies have been hit very hard. The credit crisis is causing an unraveling of industry after industry because the banks don’t lend,” said David Dreman, the chief investment officer of Dreman Value Management.
European markets were also lower today, with the London’s FTSE index losing 3.2% and the DAX index of Germany falling by five percent.
In a videotape recorded prior to his murder on Sunday, Guatemalan lawyer Rodrigo Rosenberg accused President of Guatemala Álvaro Colom and his wife Sandra Torres of complicity in his violent death.
“If you are watching this message,” Rosenberg told the camera, “it is because I was assassinated by President Álvaro Colom with help from [private secretary to the president] Gustavo Alejos.”
In the video, distributed at his funeral, Rosenberg attributed the motive of the incipient murder to his representation of businessman Khalil Musa. Musa and his daughter Marjorie were murdered in April. Rosenberg alleged that Musa was killed because he was unwilling to enter into corrupt dealings at the behest of president Colom.
Presidential spokesperson Fernando Barrillas categorically rejected the accusations. “This reveals the intention of creating a political crisis around a case that should be investigated and processed by the courts,” he said in a statement posted on the official web site of the Guatemalan government. Barrillas also announced the intention to seek international help in the investigation of Rosenberg’s murder.
Rosenberg was shot on Sunday while riding his bicycle in Zone 14 of Guatemala City. His video statement has been posted to the YouTube web site.
Helen Mack of the Myrna Mack Foundation, a Guatemalan Human Rights organization, called for the video to be authenticated by experts, describing the investigation of the accusations as “rather difficult at a political level.” ((Translated from Spanish))Spanish: ?bastante difícil a nivel político.
Wikinews correspondent J.J. Liu spoke with Technological University Dublin (TUD) senior lecturer at the School of Surveying & Construction Management, Dr Lorcan Sirr on Friday regarding the supply of housing in the Republic of Ireland and relevant parallels across the rest of Europe, as well as recent developments by the government and private sector that are causing a rise in rents and home prices in the Irish real estate market.
Dr Sirr is a regular contributor to The Irish Times and has provided commentary to Irish radio station Newstalk, national broadcaster Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ) and various other publications. In addition to being a chartered planning and development surveyor and assessor to the Society of Chartered Surveyors, Dr Sirr is a Peace Commissioner and former external examiner for the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology, according to his profile on Worky.
Dr Sirr was a lecturer and former head of research for the Faculty of the Built Environment at the Dublin Institute of Technology, which entered a merger with two partner institutes to become TUD January 1, 2019. He received his bachelor’s degree in estate management at the University of Greenwich, United Kingdom, and master’s degree in urban design and PhD in town planning at the University of Manchester. He has a second master’s in literature from KU Leuven, Belgium, and speaks French.
Downtown Singapore blanketed by smoke from Indonesian forest fires in September 2006. Image: Sengkang.
Seeking to stave off the forest fires that have blanketed five Southeast Asian countries with choking haze for the past two years, Indonesian environmental and forestry officials said yesterday they would be able to reduce the number of hot spots this year by more than half.
Meeting in Jambi, Sumatra, cabinet ministers from Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand heard what Indonesia plans to do this year to combat the illegal forest fires, which start each year during the August-November dry season.
“We are targeting a drop of about 50 percent in forest fires but we are entering the dry season between July and August so we have to increase our alertness,” Indonesian deputy environment minister Masnellyarti Hilman was quoted as saying by Agence France-Presse. “We explained the efforts that we’ve taken to prevent a repeat of the choking haze…and they praised our efforts,” he said.
A statement issued by the ministers after the meeting said Indonesia’s efforts would reduce the number of hot spots by 58 percent from the previous year.
Caused by slash-and-burn cultivation on palm oil and timber plantations on Borneo and Sumatra, the haze has covered parts of the affected countries for the past two years. It was first problematic in 1997, due to the El Niño weather pattern.
a DHC-6 Twin Otter, similar to the one that crashed. Image: Leonard G..
A passenger plane carrying tourists, has crash-landed at an airport near Mount Everest killing 18 of the 19 people on board. Of those killed were 12 German, two Australian and two Nepalese tourists. The remaining three were the plane’s crew who were of Nepalese decent. The only survivor was the pilot-in-command.
The twin engine DeHavilland DHC-6 Twin Otter plane, operated by Yeti Airlines, was flying in Nepal from the nation’s capital of Kathmandu to Lukla. It was landing at the Lukla Airport when its wheels got caught on a fence at the end of the runway, causing it to hit the runway and burst into flames. Firefighters fought for nearly two hours before bringing the fire under control.
Officials blame the crash on heavy fog and bad weather. Reports state that visibility was only 1,310 feet (400 meters), which was considered to be just enough for the plane to land.
“According to initial reports we have it crashed before it was to land and caught fire. The accident was probably caused by a last minute change in the weather,” said Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal chief, Yagya Prasad Gautam.
There was at least one accident at the airport in 2005 when nine people survived a crash, only suffering minor injures. That plane was operated by Gorkha Airlines.
A top US commander said yesterday that the United States is not planning a preemptive attack on Iran despite increasing rhetoric from Washington, D.C. The United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice also denied that an attack was imminent, stating that there is no Congressional authorization for military action against Iran.
The denials came as The Observer ran a report saying that US personnel involved in interrogating insurgents in Iraq are under “huge” pressure to find evidence against Iran. It quoted Micah Brose, a privately contracted interrogator working for the US military there, as saying that information on Iran is “gold”.
“They push a lot for us to establish a link with Iran”, Brose claimed in the interview, adding that “it feels a lot like, if you get something and Iran’s not involved, it’s a let down.” He further claimed that people have said to him that “they’re really pushing the Iran thing.” Brose denied being asked to manufacture evidence, but stated that “if a detainee wants to tell me what I want to hear so he can get out of jail … you know what I’m saying.”
The US has in the past been accused of using exaggerated and fabricated evidence to build its case against Iraq prior to the war.
The article by the British based newspaper said most military intelligence officers refused to comment but that one said “The message is, ‘Got to find a link with Iran, got to find a link with Iran.’ It’s sickening.”
A strike is “not in the offing” – William J. Fallon
“None of this is helped by the continuing stories that just keep going around and around and around that any day now there will be another war which is just not where we want to go,” Fallon continued. “Getting Iranian behavior to change and finding ways to get them to come to their senses and do that is the real objective. Attacking them as a means to get to that spot strikes me as being not the first choice in my book.” Despite saying this, he refused to rule out a strike against Iran in the future.
“The question is, why will Tehran not talk to us?” – Condoleezza Rice
Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was on ABC‘s This Week on Sunday, saying that a Senate resolution designating Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization does not authorize military action.
“There is nothing in this particular resolution that would suggest that from our point of view. And, clearly, the president has also made very clear that he’s on a diplomatic path where Iran comes into focus,” Rice said.
“This resolution is saying that there needs to be strong measures taken against Iran, which we have definitely done,” Rice continued. “And if the Iranians suspend their enrichment and reprocessing, I’m prepared to meet my counterpart anyplace, anytime, anywhere. So the question isn’t why will we not talk to Tehran. The question is, why will Tehran not talk to us?”
“No congressional authority exists for unilateral military action against Iran” – Hillary Clinton
Senator Hillary Clinton, who is running for President, voted for the resolution. She has said that the resolution could not be used to justify war, but rather it seeks to escalate diplomatic efforts. “We wish to emphasize that no congressional authority exists for unilateral military action against Iran,” she said in an open letter on November 1, 2007.
Attack on Iran would be a “nightmare” – Joschka Fischer
Last week, former Foreign Minister of Germany, Joschka Fischer said that he was worried that the upcoming US Presidential election could heighten tensions between the US and Iran. He found particularly worrisome a statement by Presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani in October that “If I am President of the United States, I guarantee you, we will never find out what they will do if they get nuclear weapons, because they are not going to get a nuclear weapon … the military option is not off the table.”
