Archive for the ‘as’ Category
BEIJING (Reuters) – Olympic host Beijing saw hazy pollution lift on Tuesday, but a damning Amnesty International report brought into sharp view tensions over China’s human rights policies ten days before the Games begin.
With the 2008 Olympic Games due to open in the shining Bird’s Nest Stadium on August 8, the human rights group on Tuesday gave a scathing assessment of China’s record, saying many of its citizens’ protections and freedoms have shrunk, not expanded, in the seven years since Beijing won the right to hold the Games.
China had not honoured vows to improve rights that officials made in lobbying for the Games, and was not living up to commitments as an Olympic host, Amnesty International stated in the report released in Hong Kong.
“There has been no progress towards fulfilling these promises, only continued deterioration,” it said in the report, titled “The Olympics countdown – broken promises”.
“The authorities have used the Olympic Games as pretext to continue, and in some respects, intensify existing policies and practices which have led to serious and widespread violations of human rights,” it said in the report released in Hong Kong.
Amnesty said Chinese authorities had targetted human rights defenders, journalists and lawyers to “silence dissent” ahead of the Games, jailing dissidents such as prominent AIDS activist Hu Jia and often intimidating their families.
A Chinese government spokesman dismissed the Amnesty report as a product of habitual bias that ignored big improvements.
“This is a statement that anyone who knows China cannot agree with,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s chief spokesman Liu Jianchao told a news conference in Beijing. “I hope Amnesty International can take off the coloured glasses it has been wearing for years and look at China fairly and objectively.” Continued…
Dave Strom of South Boston, Va., bought a Smart ForTwo Passion Coupe, which he says is getting 45 miles a gallon.
Soaring gas prices have turned the steady migration by Americans to smaller cars into a stampede.
In what industry analysts are calling a first, about one in five vehicles sold in the United States was a compact or subcompact car during April, based on monthly sales data released Thursday. Almost a decade ago, when sport utility vehicles were at their peak of popularity, only one in every eight vehicles sold was a small car.
The switch to smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles has been building in recent years, but has accelerated recently with the advent of $3.50-a-gallon gas. At the same time, sales of pickup trucks and large sport utility vehicles have dropped sharply.
In another first, fuel-sipping four-cylinder engines surpassed six-cylinder models in popularity in April.
“It’s easily the most dramatic segment shift I have witnessed in the market in my 31 years here,” said George Pipas, chief sales analyst for the Ford Motor Company.
The trend toward smaller and lighter vehicles with better mileage is a blow to Detroit automakers, which offer fewer such models than Asian carmakers like Toyota and Honda. Moreover, the decline of S.U.V.’s and pickups has curtailed the biggest source of profits for General Motors, Ford and Chrysler.
Once considered an unattractive and cheap alternative to large cars and S.U.V.’s, compacts have become the new star of the showroom at a time when overall industry sales are falling.
Sales of Toyota’s subcompact Yaris increased 46 percent, and Honda’s tiny Fit had a record month. Ford’s compact Focus model jumped 32 percent in April from a year earlier. All those models are rated at more than 30 miles per gallon for highway driving.
Dave Strom of South Boston, Va., recently bought a tiny Smart ForTwo Passion Coupe, made by Daimler, the German automaker.
Mr. Strom also owns a pickup truck, which he uses mainly to haul his boat. When he runs errands, he drives his Smart, which he says is getting 45 miles a gallon.
“I had to smile the other day when I filled my tank for $18 and the guy next to me had a Ford Explorer and the pump was clicking past $80,” said Mr. Strom, a 66-year-old retired manager of a Chevrolet dealership.
Previous spikes in sales of smaller cars were often a result of consumers trading down during tough economic conditions or gas-price increases. When the economy improved or fuel prices dropped again — as they did after the oil-price shocks in the 1970s eased — buyers invariably went back to bigger vehicles.
But with oil prices expected to remain high for years, auto industry executives are seeing a turning point.
The American economy lost 20,000 jobs in April, the fourth consecutive month of decline, in what many economists took as powerful evidence that the United States is almost certainly now ensnared in a recession.
But the number of jobs reported lost by the Labor Department on Friday was significantly smaller than most analysts had predicted, and the unemployment rate nudged down to 5 percent, raising hopes that the economy may not suffer as severely as once feared.
“It strongly argues that this downturn will be mild and short- lived,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com. “As long as businesses hold the line on their layoffs, the economy will weaken, but it won’t unravel.”
On Wall Street, investors bought into that thinking, bidding stocks up sharply in morning trading before pulling back in the afternoon, pushing the Dow Jones industrial average up 0.4 percent for the day, to close at 13,058.40, a new high for 2008.
But economists emphasized that a substantial pullback in consumer spending could yet force American companies to lay off hundreds of thousands of workers in coming months if business prospects do not improve swiftly.
The Federal Reserve increased its direct lending to financial institutions on Friday, in an effort to overcome the banks’ reluctance to lend money.
Despite the comparatively modest number of jobs lost last month, economists found clear signs of widening distress for millions of American workers.
Companies are cutting working hours, even as many avoid layoffs. The number of people working part time because of slack business or because they could not find full-time work swelled to 5.2 million in April from 4.9 million in March. In percentage terms, employees working part time involuntarily were the most since 1995.
The average weekly pay for rank-and-file workers — about 80 percent of the American work force — has risen by a mere 3 percent over the last year, to $602.56. But that increase has failed to keep pace with the rise in the cost of living, driven primarily by the soaring costs of food and energy. In inflation-adjusted terms, these weekly wages have slipped by 1.3 percent since late 2006.
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