Six In The Morning

Heed rights protests, senior Communist party secretary tells Chinese officials

Zhu Mingguo condemns local party officials as 'red apples, rotten inside' in wake of Wukan protests over confiscated farmland

• Reuters
• guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 27 December 2011 0

The senior Chinese official who helped defuse a standoff with protesting villagers has told officials to get used to citizens who are increasingly assertive about their rights and likened erring local governments to red apples with rotten cores.

Zhu Mingguo, a deputy Communist party secretary of southern Guangdong province, last week helped broker a compromise between the government and residents of Wukan village. Ten days of protests over confiscated farmland and the death of a protest organiser drew widespread attention as a rebuff to the government

Secret paper reveals EU broadside over plight of Israel's Arabs

Memo seen by The Independent highlights tensions between Jerusalem and Europe

A growing gulf between Israel's Jewish and Arab communities is highlighted in a critical EU paper which breaks new ground by suggesting that the international community has a role in ensuring "genuinely equal treatment" for the country's Arab minority.

The confidential 27-page draft prepared by European diplomats and seen by The Independent charts a wide range of indicators showing that Israeli Arabs suffer "economic disparities ... unequal access to land and housing ... discriminatory draft legislation and a political climate in which discriminatory rhetoric and practice go unsanctioned."

Arab peace observers begin Syrian evaluation

ERIKA SOLOMON BEIRUS, SYRIA - Dec 27 2011 09:42

At least 31 people were killed in the city on Monday as tanks fired into districts where opposition has been strongest against Assad's rule, activists said.

Assad's opponents fear that the monitors -- who arrived in the country on Monday after weeks of negotiations with Arab states -- will be used as a cloak of respectability for a government that will hide the extent of violence.

Assad, heir to a 41-year-old dynasty, says he is facing an attack by Islamist terrorists directed from abroad.

Eastern Libya poll indicates political Islam will closely follow democracy

If Libya manages to forge a political system where majority views are taken into account it's clear that political Islam is set to play a major political role.

By Dan Murphy, Staff writer 

A new poll of eastern Libyan public opinion released last week indicates that political Islam is set to play a major role in the country's future if institutions emerge that take into accout the will of the general public.

The poll sponsored by the International Republican Institute (a US-government funded non-profit) found a high degree of optimism about the future, concerns about the security situation in the country, and conservative (and somewhat contradictory) attitudes when it comes to faith and politics.

In Eastern Libya, 83 percent said freedom of the press was "important," and 71 percent said it was important to have laws giving equal rights to "religious and tribal groups," which would seem to indicate concern for protecting minority rights.

Growing wealth widens distance between lawmakers and constituents

By Peter Whoriskey, Tuesday, December 27, 4:54 AM

BUTLER, Pa. — One day after his shift at the steel mill, Gary Myers drove home in his 10-year-old Pontiac and told his wife he was going to run for Congress.

The odds were long. At 34, ­Myers was the shift foreman at the “hot mill” of the Armco plant here. He had no political experience and little or no money, and he was a Republican in a district that tilted Democratic.

But standing in the dining room, still in his work clothes, he said he felt voters deserved a better choice.

Three years later, he won.

The world's 7 fastest rail trips

By Sascha Segan, Frommers.com

Sick of flying? It's well known in transportation circles that for distances of around 250 miles -- that's the distance from Dallas to Houston, or New York to Boston -- high-speed trains are the best option. From city center to city center, they're faster, more reliable and more environmentally friendly than either flying or driving. That's why European and Asian countries are frantically laying high-speed tracks to connect their population centers.

Slideshow: See the world's fastest rail pairs

We'll probably never see those kinds of trains in the United States. Although there are plenty of routes that have been identified as viable for high-speed rail such as Washington-New York-Boston, San Diego-Los Angeles-San Francisco, Dallas-Houston-Austin and Detroit-Chicago-St. Louis, short-term thinking and incompetence seem to rule the day here in the U.S.