Research Request (Reg China and Sudan)

Heard at a progressive bar in Phoenix

"China imports most of its oil from Sudan"

Totally incorrect (to be polite)

Monday, Oct. 18, 2004 By MATTHEW FORNEY

China's stepped-up oil diplomacy and its increasingly competitive stance in world oil markets are already creating friction with countries such as India, which like China has a bustling economy and a growing oil habit to satisfy. Earlier this year, ONGC Videsh, the overseas investment arm of India's largest oil-and-gas producer, was on the verge of completing a deal that would have given it an 11% stake in a proven oil field in Sudan. While the company waited for the necessary approval from India's Cabinet, CNPC swooped in with an offer that was reportedly 17% higher, and snatched the oil deal for China. "The Chinese are definitely very aggressive in the price they are willing to pay," says R.S. Butola, managing director of ONGC Videsh. Similarly, Vietnam's leaders recently complained to visiting Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao about CNOOC's intent to conduct seismic testing near the Spratly Islands in partnership with the Philippine National Oil Co. The Spratlys, a mostly uninhabited archipelago in the South China Sea, are believed to harbor commercial deposits of oil and gas, but sovereignty over the islands has long been disputed by Vietnam, China, the Philippines, Malaysia and Taiwan.

Undaunted by such diplomatic sensitivities, Beijing has demonstrated its willingness to focus first on protecting its energy interests. Last month, the United Nations discussed imposing sanctions on Sudan as a punishment for sponsoring human-rights abuses in Darfur. China has invested a reported $15 billion in Sudanese oil projects, and Sudan nowadays supplies about 7% of China's oil imports. China, which sits on the U.N. Security Council, threatened to veto the sanctions. The U.N. instead passed a watered-down measure.

(http://http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,501041025-725174,00.html)

Ghost road to boost India-China trade

Published: October 19 2007 17:37 | Last updated: October 19 2007 17:37

Overgrown and disused for much of the last 60 years, a ghost road that connects India to China via Burma will soon reappear on maps of the region.

Dismissed by Winston Churchill as a “laborious task, unlikely to be finished until the need for it has passed”, the construction of the road claimed the lives of 1,100 US servicemen and many more local labourers during the second world war.

But when a convoy led by US General Joseph W. Stilwell in February 1945 completed the journey from Indian Assam to Kunming, capital of China’s Yunnan province, it helped bust a three-year Japanese land and sea blockade of China and hastened the end of the war.

Its military purpose served, the road rapidly deteriorated, disappearing altogether in parts of Burma.

Six decades later, the road is again the scene of a race against time. As India and China vie for influence in Burma while seeking to boost their own bilateral trade, Asia’s two emerging economic giants are restoring the historic highway.

This helps to explain why India and China have been reluctant to condemn Burma’s crackdown on pro-democracy protesters, while the international community has set about trying to punish the military junta.

Although India was critical of a previous Burmese crackdown in 1988, it began to reverse policy in the early 1990s, judging that its moralising had been counter-productive and was adversely affecting national security interests by pushing the junta into China’s arms.

China has already converted its own 680km stretch into a six-lane highway and is helping to rebuild much of the road inside Burma. India is further behind, expecting to complete the transformation of a single-lane track ridden with pot-holes into a two-lane highway by March.

New Delhi, keen to connect India’s insurgency-ridden north-east with the fast-growing markets of south-west China and south-east Asia, is also expected to help build part of the 1,000km-long Burmese section.

“There is hardly any traffic on the road, but this will change,” says Ganga Sharma, a businessman who owns two small trucks and is hoping for increased cross-border trade through the nearby Pangsau Pass, now limited to fortnightly fairs.

The $30m (£14.6m, €21m) Stilwell Road project is just one of the infrastructure projects that will soon span the 1,880km Indo-Burmese border. The most important is the Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Facility, which will allow goods to be sent from India’s landlocked north-east down the Kaladan river to Burma’s Sitwe port.

BSNL and TCIL, two state-owned Indian telecoms groups, are planning fibre optic cable links connecting India’s north-eastern state of Manipur with Burma, and beyond to Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore.

Efforts are also under way to create a rail link through Burma from Jiribham in Assam to Hanoi, the Vietnamese capital. A “trilateral” highway project proposes to connect the city of Morer in Manipur to Mae Sot in Thailand – again via Burma.

“By gradually integrating this region [with south-east and east Asia] through cross-border market access, the north-eastern states can become the bridge between the Indian economy and what is beyond doubt the fastest-growing and dynamic region in the world,” Pranab Mukherjee, India’s foreign minister, told a recent seminar.

India’s efforts to develop the north-east have been spurred by China’s rapid rise and an outstanding territorial dispute over part of an area cut off from mainland India by the creation of Bangladesh in 1947.

But after a humiliating defeat to China in border conflicts in 1962, India has belatedly realised that the best way of securing the north-east is through its development.

There is much to do. Per capita incomes in India’s north-eastern states are nearly 30 per cent lower than in the rest of the country and the 12 per cent unemployment rate is nearly twice the national rate. Poverty and unemployment have also driven the spread of separatist groups in the area.

Mani Shankar Aiyar, India’s minister for the north-east region, sees Beijing’s concerted development of its south-west, once the poorest region in China, and the history of the Stilwell road as an inspiration: “If the Japanese could be defeated because you are able to link Assam with south-west China, can’t we defeat the Japanese once again in the economic race by linking the north-east region with south-west China?”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

(http://www.ft.com)

Poll: Americans want fewer illegal immigrants in U.S., but only three in 10 say all of them should be deported

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Most Americans would like there to be fewer illegal immigrants in the country, but only three in 10 say all of them should be deported, a CNN Opinion Research poll said Wednesday.

A crowd in Manassas, Virginia, where officials are weighing a controversial immigration measure.

Seven percent of those polled said they would like to see the number of illegal immigrants increase, 22 percent said they would like the number to remain the same, 16 percent want it decreased "a little" and 22 percent want it decreased "a lot," according to the poll of 1,212 adult Americans.

Blacks and whites differed over whether the number of illegal immigrants should be increased, with 14 percent of African-Americans saying it should, versus 3 percent of whites.

Nineteen percent of blacks said they thought all illegal immigrants should be removed from the country; 35 percent of whites said that.

Blacks and whites overwhelmingly oppose state governments issuing driver's licenses to illegal immigrants, with 76 percent of blacks and 83 percent of whites taking that stance, the poll said.

The races differed more on whether state and local police should turn over illegal immigrants

they encounter, even if the immigrants have broken no state or local laws. In such cases, 45 percent of blacks and 61 percent of whites said they believe police should turn over illegal immigrants.

Asked whether people who cannot read or write English should be allowed to vote, 54 percent of blacks said they should, versus 43 percent of whites.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 eliminated voting barriers such as a literacy test.

On a related topic, the public appeared split on foreign trade -- 46 percent said they see trade more as an opportunity for economic growth, whereas 45 percent said they see it as a threat to the U.S. economy. Five percent said they see it as both an opportunity and a threat.

The telephone poll was carried out Friday through Sunday and had a sampling error of plus-or-minus 3.5 percentage points.

(http://www.cnn.com)

Research Request (Australian aborigines)

Australian aborigines, native people of Australia who probably came from somewhere in Asia more than 40,000 years ago. In 2001 the population of aborigines and Torres Straits Islanders was 366,429, 1.9% of the Australian population as a whole and slightly more than the estimated aboriginal population of 350,000 at the time of European colonization in the late 18th cent. At that time, there were 500–600 distinct groups of aborigines speaking about 200 different languages or dialects (at least 50 of which are now extinct). Although culturally diverse, these groups were not political and economic entities and lacked class hierarchies and chiefs. They lived by hunting and gathering, and there was extensive intergroup trade throughout the continent.

The aborigines have an intricate classification system that defines kinship relations and regulates marriages. The Kariera, for example, are divided into hordes, or local groups of about 30 people, which are divided into four classes, or sections. Membership in a section determines ritual and territorial claims. In half of the hordes the men are divided among the Karimera and Burung sections; in the other half they are divided among the Palyeri and Banaka sections. These sections are exogamous, and rules of marriage, descent, and residence determine how these sections interact: Karimera men must marry Palyeri women, and their children are Burung, and so on. Sons live in the same hordes as their fathers, so the composition of hordes alternates every generation. The complex system, by requiring each man to marry a woman from only one of the three possible sections, fosters a broad network of social relations and creates familial solidarity within the horde as a whole. Aborigines maintain elaborate systems of totemism (the belief that there is a genealogical relationship between people and species of plants or animals). They see the relationship between totemic plants and animals as a symbolic map of the relations between different people.

Contact with British settlers, beginning in 1788, initially led to economic marginalization, a loss of political autonomy, and death by disease. So-called pacification by force culminated in the late 1880s, leading to a massive depopulation and extinction for some groups. By the 1940s almost all aborigines were missionized and assimilated into rural and urban Australian society as low-paid laborers with limited rights; many aborigine children were taken from their natural parents and given to foster parents to promote assimilation.

In 1976 and 1993 the Australian government enacted land-rights legislation that has returned to the aborigines a degree of autonomy, and court decisions in 1992, 1996, and 2006 have recognized aboriginal property and native title rights. The recent increase in aboriginal population reflects improved living conditions and a broad and inclusive definition of aboriginal identity on the part of the government. Their average standard of living and life expectancy, however, are not comparable with that of most Australians.

In 1999 the Australian government issued an official expression of regret for past mistreatment of aborigines, but has opposed issuing the formal national apology sought by aborigine leaders, fearing that would encourage claims for compensation.

See P. S. Bellwood, Man's Conquest of the Pacific (1978); W. Shapiro, Social Organization in Aboriginal Australia (1979); G. Blainey, Triumph of the Nomads: A History of Aboriginal Australia (1982); S. Bennett, Aborigines and Political Power (1989).

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2007, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

TCS takes outsourcing centres to US

By Joe Leahy in Mumbai

Published: October 16 2007 17:04 | Last updated: October 16 2007 17:04

Tata Consultancy Services plans to open two computer services centres in the US in one of the biggest expansions by an Indian information technology outsourcing company in a developed market.

India’s largest computer services company, part of Tata Industries, said the first centre of 500-1000 people would open in Cincinnati, Ohio, by the end of this year or early next year, with the second to follow in late 2008 or early 2009 at an undisclosed location.

S. Ramadorai, TCS chief executive, said the centres would help the company to recruit from US universities and to qualify for IT outsourcing work that can only be done onshore, such as government contracts.

It could also help to reduce criticism of the Indian outsourcing industry from politicians in Washington keen to turn perceived job losses to India into an election issue ahead of US presidential polls.

Mr Ramadorai said one of the aims of setting up overseas centres “is to create employment generation in those countries”.

“It shows we belong to that community,” he told the Financial Times. India’s fast-growing IT outsourcing industry faces one of its biggest challenges since it first began to seize market share from developed world rivals a decade ago.

The country’s currency, the rupee, is trading at nine-year highs against the dollar, strengthening more than 10 per cent in the first six months of this year.

Together with wage inflation of 10-15 per cent, this is threatening Indian companies’ operating margins, which are among the highest in the industry at 20-30 per cent.

Indian outsourcers earn most of their revenues in dollars or other foreign currencies, but pay most of their costs in rupees.

To maintain their margins, such companies are seeking to improve productivity by offering more sophisticated services and undertaking more research and development.

However, a shortage in Indian universities of postgraduate students in fields such as computer science is threatening to hold back this evolution.

Mr Ramadorai said TCS aimed to double its research and development budget from 2-2.5 per cent of sales to 5 per cent in the next two years.

The US centres, as well as a third unit in Peterborough in the UK, would play a role in this.

“The value-add will be attracting some of the PhDs and people who are at US universities,” Mr Ramadorai said. “That will feed back into India or to other parts of the world which have lower cost locations.”

He said the company was also considering the introduction of contracts that would enable profit-sharing with clients as another way of improving margins.

Aside from TCS, Infosys Technologies and Wipro, India’s number two and three computer services companies, have also been boosting their operations in the US.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

(http://www.ft.com)

Foreign investors flee US securities

By Michael Mackenzie in New York

Published: October 16 2007 17:07 | Last updated: October 16 2007 21:16

Foreign investors slashed their holdings of US securities by a record amount as the credit squeeze intensified, according to the latest Treasury figures.

The Treasury International Capital report – known as the Tic – for August will be closely watched because it appears amid growing concerns about the weakness of the US dollar, which hit a record low recently against a basket of major currencies.

“The bad news is that [the data] plainly show how vulnerable the dollar is to a continuation of the credit crunch-risk averse environment,” said Alan Ruskin, chief international strategist at RBS Greenwich Capital. “There is no way to get away from the lack of corporate bond inflows, the foreign selling of US equities and the countervailing strong US purchases of foreign equities and bonds.”

The Treasury said net sales of US market assets – including bonds, notes and equities – were $69.3bn in August after a revised inflow of $19.5bn during July. The August outflow exceeded the previous record decline of $21.2bn in March 1990.

Until now, US policymakers have appeared relatively relaxed about the dollar’s decline, since there has been little sign to date that this has been been triggered by a broader global aversion to US assets. However, that attitude could change if signs emerge in the coming months that non-US investors are becoming more nervous about holding dollar assets, as a result of the recent credit squeeze.

Some analysts said on Tuesday that the August data might turn out to be an aberration, since it occurred during the most intense period of this summer’s credit squeeze – when investors were arguably most uneasy about the market outlook. Consequently, some said they hoped that the outflows will have been reversed in September.

“There was clear panic-selling of equities in August, but given the market’s subsequent rebound, those flows should have reversed,” said Dominic Konstam, head of interest rate strategy at Credit Suisse. “If foreign investors return to buying equities, it is not obvious that there will be a capital flight from the US that will lead to a dollar crisis.”

However, others suggested that the scale of swing in August indicated that more fundamental pressures were now bubbling – not least because the dollar continued to decline in September.

The dollar was generally firmer on Tuesday after traders digested the Treasury data. The dollar index was 0.2 per cent higher at 78.25, but that is only 0.8 per cent above its record low set late last month. The dollar was up 0.3 per cent against the euro, but was 0.6 per cent lower against the yen.

Since August 1998, Tic flows have been positive and the last period of pronounced outflows was in the early 1990s when the current account deficit was briefly eliminated.

A breakdown of the data showed that one key reason for the outflows was that there were net foreign sales of US equities of $40.6bn in August, more than reversing the purchase of $21.2bn in July. Reflecting the pressure on US markets and the dollar, US residents purchased a net $34.5bn of long-term foreign securities.

In the debt world, there were net sales by foreign investors of US corporate bonds – but overall holdings of US government debt remained relatively balanced.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

(http://www.ft.com)