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- View the Principal ads
- View the Citigroup billboards
- Previous Spot Check: Intimacy and the Internet (second entry)
From the New York Times:
SHANGHAI — Built on a swamp, Shanghai sank by roughly eight feet from 1921 to 1965, largely because of the draining of groundwater beneath the city. But officials managed to correct the problem and virtually stop the sinking—for a while. Statistics vary, but the city is again sinking, at roughly a centimeter a year. A study by a local institute said the sinking is worst in the downtown areas with the highest concentration of new buildings. … A planning bureau report says Shanghai now has at least 2,880 buildings of 18 stories or higher, an overwhelming majority of them constructed since the early 1990s. … The debate about curbing development in Shanghai comes as many economists and government officials are expressing concerns that the national real estate market could overheat and threaten China's economy. For now, though, regardless of what happens with the economy or the building law, cranes will still rise in Shanghai: officials say as many as 2,000 buildings of all sizes have been approved or are already under construction. Summary*
SINGAPORE — In the last several years, thousands of Chinese women—no one is quite sure of the precise number—have brought their children for schooling to Singapore, where the first language is English but where the population is dominated by descendants of scrappy immigrants who fled the Chinese mainland generations ago. Officially, the students and their mothers have been welcomed—the vigilant Singaporean government grants them official documents on arrival. But elsewhere, the reception has been chilly, with scarce work for the women and rude remarks about their true intentions. In many ways, the reaction to the newcomers reflects the anxieties that glittering but stagnant Singapore feels as it meets aspiring and fast-growing China. Summary*
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• Cue the flurry of articles on the legacy of Pope John Paul II. The pope's recent 25th anniversary and current frailty have journalists in a retrospective, quasi-obituary mode. The first notable piece is Jane Kramer's "Talk of the Town" in the New Yorker. Kramer calls the man born as Karol Wojtyla (and have your hyperbole sensors activated here) "the voice of the fall of Communism and much of the moral courage behind it," "road-show pontiff," "unrepentant populist," and "blindsided by his own life." Kramer suggests the faults of Pope John Paul II will be recorded as inattentiveness to social justice in Latin America, weak leadership of Catholic authorities, and shying away from hot potatoes such as birth control and the ban on female and married priests. But like an armchair quarterback, Kramer omits any suggestion of what exactly he could have done about these issues, or whether the man's global popularity and front-row seat for Communism's fall was enough to balance out the failing marks some historians will inevitably give him. Full story
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