Premier Li Keqiang's prepared speech to be delivered at the start of the meeting, as well as highlights from reports from the Ministry of Finance and the National Development and Reform Commission. WORK REPORT FROM PREMIER LI KEQIANG ECONOMY http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/05/us-china-parliament-idUSKBN0M1...
Shen Wei is a fine art photographer currently based in New York City. Before going to the States, he’s never even held a camera. But once he did, he never stopped. He was inspired by the medium and began exploring the power of photography. As he founded his new calling, Wei went back to China and captured moments that showed traces of the country he remembered.
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In the days after a major terror attack in Kunming, state media outlets are calling for a united front to combat terror and warning against excusing the attackers or criticizing the government’s policies on minorities.
On the evening of March 1, a group of assailants armed with large knives stormed the main train station in Kunming, the capital of the southwestern province of Yunnan, and killed twenty-nine people. Some 143 were injured.
It’s already being called “3.01,” or “three oh one,” a date that will likely burn in China’s collective memory for years to come. According to Xinhua, China’s state news agency, on the evening of March 1, around 9:00 p.m. Beijing time, ten or more uniformed assailants wielding long knives and dressed mostly in black descended upon the ticket hall at a busy train station in Kunming, the capital of southern Yunnan province.
Shen Dingli is a professor and Associate Dean at Fudan University’s Institute of International Studies. He has taught international security, China-U.S. relations, and China’s foreign policy in China, the U.S., and the Semester at Sea program. His research and publication covers such topics as China-U.S. security relations, regional security and international strategy, arms control and nonproliferation, and foreign and defense policy of China and the U.S.. He is Vice President of the Chinese Association of South Asian Studies, the Shanghai Association of International Studies, the Shanghai Association of American Studies, and the Shanghai UN Research Association. Shen received his Ph.D. in Physics from Fudan in 1989 and did his post-doc in arms control at Princeton University from 1989 to 1991. He was an Eisenhower Fellow in 1996, and in 2002 advised then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan on strategic planning of his second term. He is on the Global Council of Asia Society and was appointed by the Shanghai Municipality as Shanghai’s Conference Ambassador. He has co-edited seventeen books and published some 2000 papers and articles worldwide.
Reacting to departing U.S. Ambassador Gary Locke’s February 27 farewell news conference in Beijing, the state-run China News Service published a critique by Wang Ping that called Ambassador Locke a “banana.”
Kaiser Kuo:
Hyeon-Ju Rho is an American public interest lawyer who has advocated for the rights of vulnerable groups in the U.S. and abroad. She began her career as a trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice as part of the Attorney General’s Honors Program, and later practiced poverty law as a staff attorney at the Urban Justice Center in New York City. Hyeon-Ju has also supported social justice movements internationally, as the Country Director of the American Bar Association Rule of Law Initiative program in China. Hyeon-Ju is a graduate of Swarthmore College and New York University Law School, where she was a Root-Tilden-Kern Public Interest Scholar and co-founder of the annual Korematsu Lecture honoring Asian American contributions to the law.
Veerabhadran Ramanathan is a Distinguished Professor of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California at San Diego and UNESCO Professor of Climate and Policy at TERI University, Delhi, India.
Ramanathan discovered the greenhouse effect of halocarbons, particularly CFCs, in 1975. Along with R. Madden, in 1980 he predicted that global warming would be detected by 2000. In 1985, he led the first international NASA/WMO/UNEP assessment on the climate effects of non-CO2 greenhouse gases and concluded that they are as important as CO2 to global climate change. He was among a team of four that developed the first version of the U.S. community climate model in the 1980, and Ramanathan has done other significant work in the field of climate change.
He now leads Project Surya, which mitigates black carbon and other climate warming emissions from solid biomass cooking in South Asia and Kenya and documents their effects on public health and the environment. Teaming up with California Air Resources Board, he has initiated a World Bank sponsored project to reduce soot emissions from the transportation sector in India.
He has won numerous prestigious awards including the Tyler prize, the Volvo Prize, the Rossby Prize, and the Zayed prize. He was the 2013 Science and Innovation Laureate of the United Nations Champions of Earth. He has been elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, American Philosophical Society, the Pontifical Academy by Pope John Paul II, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He serves in Pope Francis' Council for the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
On January 3, the film critics of The New York Times published their Oscar nominations wish list. Many of their wishes came true and on Sunday night, March 2, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will broadcast its annual celebration of Hollywood and bestow golden statuettes on the handful of films its members voted the best made in 2013.
