New Findings on Inhabitation in India

Modern Humans Lived in India Earlier Than Thought, Study Finds
By Chris Dolmetsch
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601091&sid=apBnqDezjdDE&refer=india

July 5 (Bloomberg) -- Remains of stone tools found amid ash deposits in India from a volcanic eruption 74,000 years ago show that modern humans were living there earlier than scientists had previously thought, according to a study to be published in tomorrow's edition of the journal Science.

The Youngest Toba Tuff eruption in Indonesia, the largest volcanic event of the past 2 million years, blanketed an area from the South China Sea to the Arabian Sea with ash. Scientists had theorized that the blast produced a ``volcanic winter'' that lowered global temperatures, killing plants and animals and keeping humans from leaving Africa more than 60,000 years ago.

Study author Michael Petraglia, a University of Cambridge lecturer, and colleagues found tool fragments from soil both above and below a deposit of Toba Tuff ash, showing that humans were already in India at the time and survived the blast. ``This is some of the earliest evidence for the spread of modern humans out of Africa towards Australia,'' Petraglia said in a telephone interview from New York.

Petraglia and colleagues including Ravi Korisettar of Karnatak University in Dharwad, India, found 215 artifacts under a 2.55-meter (8.4-foot) thick ash deposit near Jwalapuram, in the Jurreru River valley of southern India, and 276 more relics above the layer.

Limestone, Quartzite Fragments

The study says the relics, made of limestone, quartzite, chert and other minerals, are likely from a variety of stone tools from the Indian Middle Paleolithic era that lasted from about 150,000 to 38,000 B.C. Yet the characteristics of the artifacts are more typical of the African Middle Stone Age that ended about 40,000 years ago than they are of younger artifacts found elsewhere in Europe and Asia, the study says. That finding suggests that modern humans had migrated out of Africa and were already in southern India when the Toba Tuff eruption blanketed the region in ash. ``It will be very much debated,'' Petraglia said. ``There are people that are wedded to their theories and won't like it at all, and there are others who will welcome our study because this part of the world is very understudied.''

The research was funded by the Swindon, U.K.-based Natural Environment Research Council and its Arts and Humanities Research Council Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Dating Service, the Berkeley, California-based Leakey Foundation, the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, the Australian Research Council and Queens College in Cambridge.

Brief History of Judicial Developments in AP

Source: http://hc.ap.nic.in/aphc/history.html

The State of Andhra Pradesh was formed by the merger of the Andhra area of the Madras Presidency – Governed by the British and the Telangana area of the former Indian State of Hyderabad ruled over by the Nizam of the Hyderabad.

1. THE ANDHRA AREA:
The History of the Judiciary in Madras and Andhra commences with the setting up of the Fort St.George in Madras in 1639 by the East India Company. From 1639 to 1666, no regular court or judicial system functioned under the Company Rule. From 1666 to 1686 a regular Court consisting of the Governor and Council sat and administered Civil and Criminal Justice to all the inhabitants. Between 1686 and 1726, two regular courts functioned at Madras, a Mayor’s court made up of the Mayor (always an Englishman) and two our of twelve Aldermen constituting the Corporation of Madras and an Admirality Court mainly to determine all mercantile and maritime cases. These courts were followd by freshly constituted Mayor’s Courts established under Charters issued by the British Crown in 1726 and 1753, three Courts were set up, a Court of Requests to try cases upto 5 pagodas (Rs.15/-), a Mayor’s Court to try civil cases of value over 5 pagodas – in the case of Indians (Natives as the British used to call us) their consent to the Jurisdiction of the court was necessary – and a court of President decisions of Mayor’s Courts. Thereafter, in 1793, under an Act of Parliament a Recorders Court was set up consisting of the Mayor, three Alderman and a Recorder viz., a lawyer of not less than five years standing to supersede the courts established under the Royal Charter of 1753. This Court exercised Civil, Criminal, Ecclesiastical and Admirality jurisdiction. The Recorder’s Court was superseded by a Supreme Court established under the Letters Patent issued by George III in 1801. Thus, initially, the jurisdiction of the Mayor’s Courts and other Courts, except Court of Requests, merged into the jurisdiction of the Recorder’s Court and, thereafter, the Recorder’s Court was merged into the Supreme Court of Judicature. By 1823, Supreme Courts had been established on almost identical lines at Madras, Bombay and Calcutta. The Law administered by these Supreme Courts was the Common Law and statute law as its prevailed in England prior to 1726, the Law as obtained in Admirality and Ecclesiastical Courts in England, the Regulations made by the Governor-General-in-Council and the Hindu and Mohammedan Customary laws.

While this was the position in the Presidency town of Madras, so far as the Mofussil was concerned, before the year 1802 there were no Company Courts, Civil and Criminal justice had in many parts of the province continued much as it has been under the native rulers – there being a concentration of authority in the hands of the Collector of the District who took the place and exercised the same wide powers as the Amildar of the old regime (William Marley’s Digest quoted by Viscount Simon, Lord Chancellor in AIR 1943 Privy Council – 1164 Ryots of Garbandho v. Raja of Parlakimedi). The Adalat system, first introduced in Bengal by Lord Cornwallis, was extended to Madras under the Regulation of 1802. Under the system, Civil Justice was rendered by Zilla Courts or District Courts, Provincial Courts of Appeal to hear appeals from District Courts and the Sadar Diwani Adalat (viz., the Governor and members of the Council) to hear appeals from the Provincial Courts of Appeal. By 1843, the provincial Courts were abolished. Thereafter, in 1873, the Madras Civil Courts Act was passed providing for three categories of Judges viz., the District Munsiffs, the Sub-Judges and the District Judges – as exist now. This Act in substance continues to hold the field in the Andhra Area of the State except for some minor modifications when it wassubstitutedby the Andhra Pradesh Civil Courts Act of 1973 and this was again amended by A.P.Civil Courts Act of 2000 (Act 28/2000).

On the Criminal side also, the Bengal pattern was extended to Madras in 1802, Magistrates and Assistant Magistrates were appointed, besides four circuit courts and the Chief Criminal Courts or Fouzdari Adalat consisting of the Governor and Council. The system so established was frequently altered, amended and re-adjusted and at length over a hundred of these Regulations and Acts were codified into one Code of Criminal Procedure. The ultimate enactment is the Code of Criminal Procedure Act VIII of 1869, wherein all the earlier codes were consolidated and the various categories of criminal courts as now exist viz., the Court of Sessions Judges, Assistant Sessions Judges, and 1st, 2nd and 3rd Class Magistrates were duly established. The Code of Criminal Procedure of 1898 was revised and re-enacted in 1973 and substituted by the Code of Criminal Procedure 1973 (Act 2 of 1974).

Thus, with the introduction of the Madras Civil Courts Act and the Code of Criminal Procedure in the Moffusil area, the various Civil and Criminal Courts, as now exist came to be established. In the City of Madras, the next land mark. After the setting up of the Supreme Court in 1923 the High Courts Act of 1861 was passed, whereunder the High Court of Judicature was set up at Madras with original jurisdiction over the Presidency town of Madras and with appellate Jurisdiction over all other Courts in the Presidency. Under Section 15 of the Act, the High Court was given powers of superintendence over all courts and this power was reiterated in the Government of India Acts of 1915 and 1935 and ultimately, in the Constitution. Thus, the British had set up an integrated judicial system and organization which continues to exist without much change till today. The only draw back was the continuing of the powers of the Magistracy on the executive Revenue Officers, on the Criminal side. The British, for reasons of their own, never sought to implement the principles of their own, never sought to implement the principles of the separation of the judiciary from the Executive and it was left to the Government of Madras after the grant of Independence to make a start in this direction in 1949. The separation of Judiciary from the Executive was introduced to the whole of the Andhra area by 1958.


2. TELANGANA AREA:
The origin of the Courts in the Telangana can be traced to the Islamic System of administration of Justice introduced by the Moghuls. Khaziz disposed of Civil and Criminal cases in the districts while in Hyderabad City and Subha Headquarters a Bada Khazi disposed of cases. Petty Criminal Cases were dealt with by the Police. Important Civil and Criminal cases were heard and disposed of by the Ruler or the Naib Sultan or Subedar. After 1858, a Civil Court (Adalat Diwani) and a Criminal Court (Adalat Fouzadari) were set up in the city of Hyderabad. There were also two superior Courts viz., a King’s Court (Badashahi Adalat) to try important Criminal cases and an Appellate Court (Mohmooma Murafa). Other Courts functioning in the City were those of Naibs Sultanat, the Subedar of Hyderabad and the Commissioner of Police. In the Mofussil, the Subedars, the Collectors, the Amaldars, the I and II Talukdars and the Tahsildars were invested with Civil and Criminal powers. In about 1875, regular Civil Courts were established and the Revenue Officers were divested of Civil powers. The Scheme of separation of the Judiciary from the Executive was introduced as early as 1922 long before the scheme was ever contemplated in British India and with this scheme the Revenue Officers were deprived of their magisterial powers.

There were also separate Courts for Muslims (Darul-Quaza Court), for Hindus (Govindrao Court), for Chirstian (Adalat Beroon Bolds) and Arabs (Makums Qaza-wte-Arab). A separate Court was established in the residency in 1864 for Europeans. There were special Magistrates’ Courts for Districts dealing with thugs and dacoits. There were also Special Magistrate for Customs, Excise and Postal Cases.

The High Court of Hyderabad was established in 1872 with the Civil and Criminal Jurisdiction of the Adalat Buzrug and Padshahi Adalat Fouzdari. In 1885, a Regulation was passed to enlarge its powers. In 1336 a Royal Charter was issued and an Act was passed in 1337 F. under which, the High Court had both Judicial and Administrative powers, the former consisting in hearing Appeals, entertaining Revisions, answering References and trying cases transferred to itself, and the latter in deposing of, or expressing opinions of administrative matters concerning the Courts. Under Section 11 of the Act, the decisions of the High Court were to be final with the exception of cases in which a sentence of death or imprisonment for life were passed or in which the decision was modified or reversed by the Nizam. Originally, the Nizam was exercising his Royal Prerogative over the Full Bench decision of the High Court, but later the law minister was disposing of Appeals. In 1323 F(1914) a Judicial Committee was constituted with three or five Judges, including a Legal Advisor and atleast two Judges of the High Court who did not participate in the decision under appeal.

The Hyderabad Civil Courts Act, 1324 F.first cofified the law relating to the Subordinate Courts. Under that Act, the State was divided into 4 Subahs and a Sadar Adalat was constituted for each of them. A Nizamat-e-Adalat Diwani was cnstituted for each District and a Munsiff’s Court for one or more Taluks. Where there was no Munsiff’s Court, - Tahsildars were conferred with Civil Powers upto Rs.100/- which could be raised to Rs.300/- Provision was made for the appointment of Honorary Judicial Officers with jurisdiction upto Rs.300/-. The Nizam Darwi Quaza Court continued to exercise all the powers of a Sadar Adalat to decide cases of Mohammedans in matters like pre-emption, marriage, meher, Dower etc., Jagirdars were constituted as Courts within their Jagirs. In 1355 F. a Sadar Adalat, a District Court and a Munsiff Court were constituted for the renditioned area. The above act was repealed and re-enacted by the Hyderabad Civil Courts Act, 1954 which is still in force in Telangana area. It provided for the establishment of a District Court and Sut-Court for each District or for one or more Districts and a Court of Munsiff for each Taluk or Taluks. Appeals from the decisions of the District Judge lay to the High Court and those from the decisions of the Munsiffs lay to the District Judge. Appeals from the decision of the Sub-Judges lay to the District Judge where the value of suit did not exceed Rs.5,000/- and to the High Court in other cases.

II. THE PRESENT ORGANISATION AND FUNCTIONS OF THE JUDICIARY
The Andhra area of the composite State of Madras was carved out and constituted into the State of Andhra in 1954. Thereafter, in 1956, consequent on the passing of the State Re-organisation Act, the State of Andhra Pradesh comprising of 11 Districts of the Andhra State and the 9 District of Telangana area of the State of Hyderabad was established. Subsequently Prakasam District was formed on 2.2.1970 carved out of Kurnool, Guntur and Nellore. Vizianagaram District was formed on 1.6.1979 by taking some areas from Srikakulam and Visakhapatna. Rangareddy District was formed on 15.8.1978 by carving out some portions of Hyderabad (Urban) Taluk and the mergerj of the rural and urban areas of the remaining Taluks of Hyderabad District. The High Court of Andhra which was established in 1954 at Guntur under the Andhra State Act had all the powers hitherto being exercised by the High Court of Madras in respect of the territories included in the State of Andhra. In 1956 with the establishment of one High Court of Andhra Pradesh the jurisdiction of the High Court of Andhra was extended to the whole of the Telangana area of the erstwhile Hyderabad State and the High Court of Hyderabad was abolished. The High Court at the Apex of the Judiciary exercises superintendence and control over all the subordinate Courts functioning in the City and in Mofussil. In discussing the functions and organization of the Judiciary, it would be convenient to take up the Courts in the following order viz., the High Court, the Courts in the City (Civil and Criminal), the Civil Courts in the Districts and the Criminal Courts in the Districts.

ANDHRA HISTORY - Political Outline of Asaf Jahis

Source:http://www.aponline.gov.in/quick%20links/hist-cult/history_modern.html#Asaf

The founder of this dynasty was one Mir Kamaruddin, a noble and a courtier of the Mughal Muhammad Shah, who negotiated for a peace treaty with Nadirshah, the Iranian invader; got disgusted with the intrigues that prevailed in Delhi. He was on his way back to the Deccan, where, earlier he was a Subedar. But he had to confront Mubariz Khan, as a result of a plot by the Mughal emperor to kill the former. Mubariz Khan failed in his attempt and he was himself slain. This took place in A.D.1724, and henceforth Mir Kamaruddin, who assumed the title of Nizam-ul-Mulk, conducted himself as an independent prince. Earlier, while he was one of the Ministers of the Mughal emperor Muhammad Shah, the latter conferred on him the title of Asaf Jah. Thus begins the Asaf Jahi rule over Golconda with the capital at Aurangabad. It was only during Nizam II rule that the capital of the Deccan Subha was shifted to Hyderabad reviving its importance.

The Asafjahi Nizams are generally counted as seven, though they were ten. Nasir Jung and Muzaffar Jung, son and grandson of the Nizam I who were killed by the Kurnool and Cuddapah Nawabs and Salabatjung who also ruled for a decade, were not counted by the historians though the Mughal emperors at Delhi recognised them as Subedars of the Deccan.

The Nizams of Asafjahi dynasty who ruled the Deccan are the following:

(1) Mir Kamaruddin (Nizam-ul-Mulk - Asaf Jah I) (A.D.1724--1748), (2) Nasir Jung (A.D. 1748--1751), (3) Muzaffar Jung (A.D.1750--1751), (4) Salabat Jung (AD.1751--1761), (5) Nizam Ali Khan - Asaf Jah II (A.D.1762--1803), (6) Nizam III Sikandar Jah (A.D.1803--1829), (7) Nizam IV -- Nasir-ud-Daula (A.D.1829--1857), (8) Nizam V -- Afzal-ud-Daula (A.D.1857--1869), (9) Nizam VI -- Mir Mahaboob Ali Khan (A.D.1869--1911), and (10) Nizam VII -- Mir Osman Ali Khan (AD.1911--1948 September).

Though Hyderabad was founded in A.D.1590--91 and built by Muhammad Quli, the fifth king of the Qutbshahi dynasty, it was a princely capital under them. The pomp and peagantry of the fabulous Asafjahi Nizams gained an all-India importance as well as World wide recognition. The rule of the Nizams lasted not only for a much longer period from A.D.1724 to 1948 but also concerned a large territory with diverse language groups that came under their sway.

The authority of the founder of the State of Hyderabad, Asafjah I, extended from Narmada to Trichinapally and from Machilipatnam to Bijapur. During the period of Afzal-ud-Daula (A.D.1857--1869) it was estimated to be 95,337 sq.miles (2,46,922.83 sq.kms.), forming a lateral square of more than 450 miles (724.17 kms.) each way.

After Nizam I, Asaf Jah, died in A.D.1748, there was tussle for power among his son, Nasar Jung, and grandson Muzaffar Jung. The English supported Nasar Jung whereas Muzaffar Jung got support from the French. These two heirs were subsequently killed by Nawabs of Kurnool and Cuddapah, one after another, in A.D.1750 and AD.1751 respectively. The third son of Nizam I, Salabat Jung became the ruler as Nizam under the support of the French.

Hostilities recommenced in India between the French and the English in AD.1758 on the outbreak of Seven Years War in Europe in A.D.1756. As a result, the French lost their power in India and consequently it also lost influence at Hyderabad. In A.D.1762 Nizam Ali Khan dislodged Salabat Jung and proclaimed himself as Nizam.

Hyderabad came into focus again when Nizam Ali Khan (Nizam II) in A.D.1763 shifted the capital of the Deccan from Aurangabad to Hyderabad. Such a move helped rapid economic growth and expansion of the city, resulting in its importance and prosperity.

Between A.D.1766 and A.D.1800, Nizam's sovereignty had declined considerably and the British gained their authority over the Nizams by compelling the latter to sign six treaties.

In A.D.1766, the Nizam signed a treaty with the British, whereby in return for the Northern Circars, the British agreed to furnish Nizam Ali Khan with a subsidiary force as and when required and to pay Rs.9 lakhs per annum when the assistance of the troops was not required in lieu of Northern Circars to be ceded to them. In A.D.1768 he signed another treaty conferring the Northern Circars to the British and the payment by the British was reduced to Rs.7 lakhs. According to another treaty, he surrendered the Guntur circar in A.D.1788. In A.D.1779, the Nizam conspired with Hyder Ali of Mysore and the Peshwa of the Marathas to drive away the English. When they learnt about his designs, the English marched against the Nizam who had to sue for peace agreeing to the presence of an English Resident along with army, artillery and cavalry at Hyderabad. Through another treaty, the Nizam was compelled to disassociate himself from Hyder Ali. In A.D.1800 yet another treaty was signed by the Nizam with the British altering the earlier treaties to increase the strength of the English army in Hyderabad. In lieu of the cost of maintenance of the force, the Nizam had to cede to the company an area comprising the districts of Rayalaseema and Bellary (now in Karnataka). With this the Nizam lost not only the territory but also reputation and power.

The East India Company acquired the Nellore region comprising the present Nellore and Prakasam districts and a part of the Chittoor district from the Nawab of Arcot in A.D.1781. Together with the other parts of the territories of the Nawab, this area was merged with the then Madras Presidency of the Company in A.D.1801. Thus, by the beginning of the 19th century, the Telugu land was divided into major divisions: one that came to be popularly called Telangana under the feudal rule of the Nizam, accounting approximately one-third of the entire land and the other, broadly designated as Andhra, in British India.

It was during the period of Nizam III -- Sikandar Jah (A.D.1803--1829), that the English cantonment, raised on the other side of Hussain Sagar, was named after him as Secunderabad. This township grew rapidly as the modern town with Railway station and other commercial establishments. The notable events under the rule (A.D. 1857--1869) of Nizam V, Afzal-ud-Daula, were the construction of the Afzal Gunj Bridge or the Nayapul, over the river Musi and the establishment of a General Hospital.

The modern era of the development of the twin cities began soon after the last flood of the river Musi in A.D.1908 which had shattered the life of the people living in Hyderabad. This necessitated the planned development of the city in a phased manner. Sri M.Vishweshwarayya, the great engineer of Mysore, was specially invited for this purpose and was appointed as adviser to the Nizam's Government to suggest measures for flood control and improvement of the city. As a result of his suggestion, Osman Sagar and Himayat Sagar were constructed in A.D.1917. These two dams not only controlled the floods from river Musi, but also supplied drinking water to the city. These spots have also become recreational centres for many people in Hyderabad. Another step taken for the development of the city was the formation of the City Improvement Board in A.D.1912, which paid greater attention to the construction of roads, markets, housing sites and shopping centres in the city. Nizam VII, Osman Ali Khan, also moved to Kingkothi, the northern suburb of the city in A.D.1914, which helped in the development of its surroundings. Several public utility services were commissioned in A.D.1922. Electricity was commissioned in A.D.1923. In A.D.1928 with the establishment of rail connection to Bangalore, the city was brought on the metre-gauge map of India. By A.D.1932 bus service was started in the city and in A.D.1936 the bus routes radiated from the capital to all the district headquarters. In A.D.1935, the Madras-Karachi Air Service was linked with Hyderabad with Hakimpet as landing ground.

Many buildings of utility like Legislative Assembly, Hyderabad and Secunderabad railway stations, the High Court, City College, the Asafia Library (present State Central Library), the Unani Hospital, the Osmania University, were constructed during the reign of Nizam VII.

If Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah was the founder of Hyderabad City, Osman Ali Khan, the Nizam VII, can be called as the maker of modern Hyderabad, in a variety of ways. The buildings constructed during his reign are impressive and represent a rich variety of architecture, such as the magnificent Osmania University, synthesizing the modern, the medieval and the ancient styles of architecture. The sprawling Osmania General Hospital in the Mughal style, the lofty High Court in Indo-Saracenic style, the stately well-proportioned Legislative Assembly building in Saracenic-Rajasthani style, symbolize his desire to build modern and majestic Hyderabad. The engineers or the architects and craftsmen of the period have to be congratulated for their talent.

A fascinating pretty edifice in the centre of the city is the Andhra Pradesh Legislative Assembly building, with the lawns of the Public Gardens, to form the needed premises.

The noble buildings during the Asafjahis' period were the Chow Mahalla during Nizam V, Pancha Mahal, and the Falaknuma Palace. The Falaknuma, built by Nawab Viquar-ul-Umra, a Paigha Noble in A.D.1892 at a cost of Rs.40 lakhs, has become a land mark like Charminar.

The hereditary Diwans of the Nizams, the Salar Jungs were as colourful and dazzling as their masters. The Mir Alam Tank, the Mir Alam Mandi, the Salar Jung Museum, their Devdi, the Aliya School are inalienable parts of Hyderabad.

A Decade after 1997 South East Asian Financial Crisis

Wrong lessons from Asia’s crisis
By Chris Giles
Published: July 1 2007 18:17

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/cbb53b38-27f1-11dc-80da-000b5df10621.html

It is January 15 1998. Standing grim-faced and with arms folded, Michel Camdessus, the International Monetary Fund managing director, peers down as President Suharto of Indonesia signs his acceptance of the latest list of 50 IMF demands. Mr Suharto has no choice, even though many of the intended reforms are politically unpalatable. Such has been the outflow of money from Indonesia over the past six months that the economy would implode if a second international bail-out were refused.

This is the enduring image of the Asian financial crisis, which started 10 years ago today with the plunge of the Thai baht after currency speculators destroyed its peg to the dollar. Financial turmoil spread across east Asia, plunging economies into deep recession, bankrupting once-mighty banks and companies, forcing countries into supplication before the IMF and generating much political turmoil.

For Asia, Mr Suharto’s humiliation and subsequent downfall after more than 30 years in power symbolised the domineering attitude of the west and the late-1990s humbling of the Asian tiger economies. “Never again” was the lesson learnt by Asian politicians, whether or not they came from a crisis-hit economy.

With a decade of hindsight, it is clear that the crisis economies of a decade ago – Thailand, South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines – suffered only a “temporary setback”, according to David Burton and Alessandro Zanello, who head the IMF’s Asia and Pacific department: “Asia shines in the global economic landscape and its vitality stands out as a remarkable achievement.”

Economic growth rates are high, if not quite back at pre-crisis levels; the same sort of financial upheaval seems inconceivable today as Asian central banks are stuffed full of ready-to-use foreign exchange reserves; and debts to the IMF have been repaid early. But the effects of the crisis linger in the structure of the region’s economies, in the relevance of the IMF to emerging economies – and even in the global balance of economic activity.

The concern now is that the economies of emerging and industrial Asia, along with the US, Japan and Europe, might be vulnerable to a new financial calamity: one that stems from the unprecedented trade imbalances that exist between the US and Asia, yet has its roots directly in the Asian financial crisis of a decade ago.

Few in 1997 were surprised that Thailand’s economy was suffering. With extremely large current account deficits of around 8 per cent of gross domestic product, a vulnerability to speculative attack had been noticed by the IMF, which had recommended a more flexible exchange rate.

Thailand refused. Instead, speculators battled with the central bank through the spring of 1997 over the value of the baht. When the authorities ran out of foreign exchange reserves, they admitted defeat and allowed the currency to plunge on July 2, inflicting great pain on banks and finance companies, which had borrowed in dollars in the belief that the currency would remain pegged.

At this point the consensus view was that Thailand was a special case. But sensing blood, speculators pummelled the currencies of Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia through the summer of 1997 even though none of these countries had remotely as large a current account deficit or initial financial vulnerability as Thailand.

By October, Indonesia went to the IMF for assistance. A furious row broke out over who was to blame for the failure of the initial rescue package, which led ultimately to Mr Suharto’s humiliation in January 1998. The country was already on the road to political turmoil, devaluation and hyperinflation.

South Korea had seemed immune but it, too, fell victim to an international rush to the exit. The currency dropped like a stone in November 1997, losing almost half its pre-crisis value by December, threatening the world’s financial system. The capital outflow was stemmed only when the IMF persuaded foreign creditors to roll over loans as the year ended.

In a few short months, a contagious financial crisis had spread through the region. Although not much recognised at the time, the common features were that each crisis economy had enjoyed a period of high foreign capital inflows in short-term assets before the crisis hit, they each had current account deficits, fixed exchange rates to the dollar, poor regulation of their banking and financial sectors and they each had massive borrowing in foreign currency. The first three features ensured vulnerability to a crisis while the final two guaranteed that the crisis would be painful.

As Anne Kruger, IMF deputy managing director in 2001-06, has said: “Devaluation then left financial institutions facing massive losses, or insolvency ... The contraction in GDP that most crisis countries experienced made things even worse, of course, because the number, and size, of non-performing loans grew rapidly. The further weakening of the financial sector inevitably had adverse consequences for the economy as a whole. In short, the crisis economies found themselves in a vicious downward spiral.”

For the IMF itself, the upshot was that it lost the confidence of the most rapidly expanding region in the world. Asian academics such as Takatoshi Ito, a professor at Tokyo University, argue that it provided too little money with too many conditions: “The IMF lost credibility as an institution that could give a seal-of-approval effect to financial markets to stop capital outflows.” He contrasts its actions with subsequent crises in Latin America, particularly in Argentina, where it provided too much money with too few conditions.

The fund concedes that some of its fiscal advice was too harsh, that it took time to get the conditions of its loans right and that it is still struggling to regain credibility and legitimacy in Asia.

The consequence for Asian economies was initially bleak. In 1998, Indonesia, Thailand, South Korea, Malaysia and the Philippines each saw economic activity fall by between 8 per cent and 13 per cent, creating deep social problems. But growth returned quickly in what became known as the “V-shaped recovery”.

The lost output of 1998 was never recovered and the Asian Development Bank calculates that the post-crisis average growth rates “have slipped by an average 2.5 [percentage points] in the five countries that were most directly affected”. The main reason for slower growth has been a sharp decline in the rate of investment as a share of GDP in each of the economies, which al­lowed the countries to move from having persistent trade deficits to surpluses but also slowed both actual and potential rates of economic expansion.

In a recent study* the Asian Development Bank says it is difficult to see why investment rates have fallen so far in the crisis countries, except for South Korea where its prosperity would naturally suggest lower investment. It suggests that “firms and investors may now be more circumspect than a decade ago” and recommends more effective regulation, better governance, greater competition and improved financial systems as the route back to the pre-crisis growth rates.

What people in Asia are reluctant to concede, but US academics such as Nouriel Roubini of New York University claim, is that the lesson learnt by Asia was the wrong one.

Asia learnt that it must never again allow itself to be vulnerable to capital outflows. Governments have managed their currencies this decade to ensure they have low exchange rates and trade surpluses. The biggest emerging Asian economy, that of China, studied the lesson particularly closely, even though capital controls had limited hot money flows in the 1990s.

It has since accumulated foreign exchange reserves of more than $1,200bn (£600bn, €892bn) at a rate that is now approaching $40bn a month. According to Prof Roubini, Asian countries led by China have in effect returned “to fixed exchange rates in spite of the rhetoric of a move to floating rates”.

Initially, this policy of buying dollars to hold currencies down was benign, because the crisis economies needed to rebuild their foreign exchange war chests to prevent a repeat of the crisis and China was still relatively insignificant in the global economy. But all Asian countries now have vastly more reserves than are needed to cover their public and private sector short-term debts.

The Bank for International Settlements, the central bankers’ bank, concluded in typically understated language last week that “the stock of reserves does appear to be well above standard measures of adequacy based on liquidity considerations alone”. China is now the world’s fourth largest economy, with a rapidly rising share of global exports.

Asian growth

Alone, the post-crisis actions by Asian countries would not have created the vast trade imbalances of this century. To be stable, those also required the US to become the consumer of last resort. The Federal Reserve slashed interest rates in 2001 and the government cut taxes in response to the recession of the beginning of the decade, encouraging Americans to spend their way back to prosperity.

These actions ensured that US and Asian policies were in alignment, with unconstrained spending and trade deficits in the former balanced by mercantilism and trade surpluses in Asia.

The result has been an unbalanced global economy, with Asian countries arguably too dependent on exports to the US and building up unnecessary foreign currency reserves, while the US economy can be seen as distorted towards non-tradable services such as real estate.

This potentially fragile state of the world’s economy has continued for much longer than many thought possible, even with periodic fretting at the IMF and elsewhere. The unanswerable question is how long such imbalances can continue.

The IMF is concerned that a hard landing in the US could lead to a painful slowdown in Asia, undermine the fragile balance in world currency and financial markets and raise the threat of protectionism. With Asian countries’ financial systems still weak, particularly in China, the wider Asian economy is vulnerable to a sudden change of view about its prospects.

In the current fragile global equilibrium, all countries like to present themselves as the helpless victims of other countries’ economic choices and so not to blame. That makes them reluctant to take the hard medicine needed to move to a more sustainable world economy. Achieving a co-ordinated response – greater consumption and investment in Asia alongside greater savings and the production of tradable goods in the US – has proved notoriously difficult.

No one knows whether Asian governments would learn to spend heavily if demand from elsewhere diminished. Optimists believe they would; pessimists suggest that it is already in China’s self-interest to allow its citizens to consume more, yet it does not pursue policies that encourage spending. There is also little sign of US consumers rediscovering the habit of saving.

So while the impact of the crisis a decade ago seems long gone, its lasting legacy has a profound effect on the development of the global economy. It is a bequest that, while temporary, looks ever more intractable.

*Ten Years after the Crisis: The Facts about Investment and Growth, Asian Development Bank

Corporate groups are pressed to reduce their opacity

Before the Asian crisis erupted in July 1997, corporate governance in emerging markets received minimal attention. After the dramatic outflow of funds from Thailand, South Korea, Indonesia and other countries in the region, the subject was transformed into a political hot topic, writes John Plender.

International policymakers concluded that improved corporate governance was part of the key to promoting more stable capital flows to developing countries to lessen their vulnerability to the vagaries of hot money. For the Group of Seven leading industrial nations, along with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, it became a priority in responding to the crisis.

Whether better corporate governance could have helped prevent a debacle whose origins were primarily financial seems implausible. Efforts to improve governance have also proved irrelevant in terms of reducing financial vulnerability in the region. The commitment of Asian countries to preventing a repetition of this economic catastrophe has led to an accumulation of official reserves on a scale that far exceeds what is needed to prevent speculative runs on their currencies.

That said, the impetus for corporate governance reform in the region has not gone away. Initiatives such as the Asian Roundtable on Corporate Governance, organised by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, foster efforts to address shortcomings, as in a meeting in Singapore last month where delegates pledged themselves to further reforms.

A recognition is growing, too, of the role corporate governance plays in enhancing corporate performance, reducing the cost of capital and promoting capital market efficiency. Above all it has been the spur to reform arising from corporate scandals. Foremost among those have been a fraud at Procomp, the Taiwanese Enron, and criminal mis-statements in relation to derivative losses at China Aviation Oil in Singapore. A host of other cases across the region have involved the exploitation of minority shareholders by controlling families or government shareholders. But after a decade of reforms, Asia’s company law frameworks and corporate governance codes are close to global best practice. The flaws are largely in implementation and enforcement.

The biggest challenge stems from the structure of Asia’s corporate sector. Roughly two-thirds of listed companies and nearly all private companies are family-run. Asian families tend to run large interlocking networks of subsidiaries and sister companies that include partly-owned quoted companies. This gives them a degree of control over operations and cash flow that is disproportionate to their equity stake.

The extent of their ownership is often opaque. Concentrated and convoluted structures lend themselves to related-party transactions whereby family shareholders can exploit outside investors.

In China the controlling shareholder is often the state. Chinese provincial governments have been particularly adept at expropriating minority investors.

There was general agreement at the roundtable that disclosure requirements on related-party transactions should be strengthened and that regulators needed a greater capacity to monitor dealings and impose sanctions. On the wider governance agenda, obvious priorities include clarifying and strengthening directors’ duty to act in the interests of the company and all its shareholders, prohibiting the indemnification of directors for breaches of that fiduciary duty and entitling investors to pursue class actions.

This is easier said than done. The judicial infrastructure in Asia is often underfunded and beholden to powerful interests. The political will to reform is frequently absent: corporate governance is not politically sexy without the spur of corporate scandal. Stock exchange authorities are subject to conflicts of interest since their desire for a high volume of initial public offerings and share dealings can militate against regulation and supervision.

Accountancy and audit quality remains patchy. Accountancy firms have difficulty maintaining uniform audit standards across the region.

A striking governance lacuna concerns the role of institutional investors. Asian institutions have been very passive. Jamie Allen, secretary general of the Asian Corporate Governance Association, points out that a growing number of foreign investors – such as Calpers, TIAA-Cref, Hermes, F&C and British Columbia Investment Management, together with advisers such as Governance For Owners – are engaging with company managements behind the scenes. But it is, he adds, a relatively small group. The same is true of those engaged in more high-profile activism.

The reality is that the vast majority of institutional investors in Asia do not even vote their shareholdings. Conflicts of interest are largely to blame. Few want to alienate corporate managers from whom they hope to win fund management business. Nor do they want to jeopardise their own access to management.

When economies are buoyant and markets are high, bad governance is too readily overlooked. But in financial markets, history has a nasty way of repeating itself, if never in quite the same way. The current state of most Asian economies’ balance sheets makes a repeat of the 1997-98 outflows inconceivable. But that does not mean stock markets are immune from a dramatic plunge, followed by a renewed cycle of scandal-induced corporate governance reform.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

Internet World - Condemned to Google Hell

Internet
Condemned To Google Hell
Andy Greenberg 04.30.07, 6:00 AM ET

http://www.forbes.com/technology/2007/04/29/sanar-google-skyfacet-tech-cx_ag_0430googhell.html

Don't anger the Google gods.

That's the lesson Paul Sanar learned--too late--last year. Up until last fall, the 21-year-old New Yorker depended solely on the search engine to keep traffic flowing to Skyfacet.com, his online diamond business; Sanar says he sold $3 million dollars worth of jewelry a year. Then, he says, Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) turned its back on Skyfacet.com, condemning the site to Internet obscurity.
Slide show: Grading Google

Beginning in September 2006, Skyfacet no longer showed up on the first few pages of Google's results when users typed in search terms like "diamonds" and "engagement ring." The site's traffic vanished, and Sanar says his sales dropped $500,000 in three months.

What happened? Sanar isn't completely sure. But he does know that his site has been condemned to the supplemental index, a dreaded backwater region of Google search results that goes by another name in online marketing circles: Google Hell.

Google Hell is the worst fear of the untold numbers of companies that depend on search results to keep their business visible online. Getting stuck there means most users will never see the site, or at least many of the site's pages, when they enter certain keywords. And getting out can be next to impossible--because site operators often don't know what they did to get placed there.

Google's programmers appear to have created the supplemental index with the best intentions. It's designed to lighten the workload of Google's "spider," the algorithm that constantly combs and categorizes the Web's pages. Google uses the index as a holding pen for pages it deems to be of low quality or designed to appear artificially high in search results.

Those pages are scanned far less frequently than those in the main index, meaning that once a page is marked for Google Hell, it can languish there for as long as a year before Google even deigns it worthy of a reappraisal. And as Google tries to manage an explosively growing Web, more and more sites are finding themselves thrown into the search engine's digital dungeon.

If that makes the world's leading Web-crawler sound judgmental, consider Google's difficult position. The search juggernaut is faced with the endless task of reading and ranking the ever-expanding Web's billions of pages, the equivalent of putting the Earth's population in order from tallest to shortest every few minutes. Meanwhile there are growing numbers of pages filled only with junk text and advertising, designed solely to fool the engine. It's Google's task to sort out the trash from the worthwhile, and to do it better and faster than competitors like Yahoo! (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people ), Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ), or InterActiveCorp's (nasdaq: IACI - news - people ) Ask.com.

So how does Google decide what kind of pages get punished? That's where things get tricky. Google keeps the details of its decision-making a secret, since the company is trying to prevent sites from gaming the search engine. But it also means that site operators like Paul Sanar can offend Google and not know what they've done until its too late.

In retrospect, Sanar thinks he can trace his problem to a search marketing consultant he had paid $35,000 to improve Skyfacet's Google rankings. He now believes the consultant mistakenly replicated content on many of the site's pages, making them look like duplicate--that is, spam--content. But even after he reversed the consultant's changes, he couldn't get Skyfacet's pages out of Google Hell, where they remain today.

Other online businesses have similar stories. MySolitaire.com, another online diamond business, spent January to June of 2006 in the supplemental index. Amit Jhalani, the site's vice president of search marketing, says he figures that cost his business $250,000 in sales, and he says he still doesn't know why the site's pages got Google's thumbs-down.

"So many of the rules are vague," Jhalani says. But he admits that he tried gray-area tactics like buying links from more established sites to juice his traffic. "For a small site like ours, you have to stay right on the edge to compete with sites with bigger budgets," he confesses.

Jhalani says he removed the links that may have offended Google, but the site remained in Google's gulag. Jhalani wrote Google asking the search engine to reappraise MySolitaire; nothing happened. Since Google ranks sites partially by the quality of sites that link to them, he painstakingly contacted every site that seemed to be of low quality and linked to MySolitaire, asking them to remove their links, sometimes even sending cease-and-desist letters. Finally the site returned to Google's main index last June, though Jhalani has no way of knowing just what finally caused Google's algorithm to forgive him.

Chris Bartow is a search marketing consultant for Revenco.com, a real estate site that also saw the majority of its pages sent to Google Hell for six months of 2006. Bartow believes that some identical content on 90 of his site's property listing pages caused Google to mistake them for plagiarized spam sites. "I know they're trying to get rid of sites with no practical purpose," he says. " But when your pages get dumped, you lose half your traffic and a lot of money."

Bartow thinks his misfortune stemmed from a temporary glitch in Google's algorithm. But other search engine marketers say that Google Hell is only increasing in size and severity. "The supplemental index has been on the upswing for quite a while," says Aaron Wall, a search engine consultant and Google-watcher. "They've gotten much more aggressive about throwing pages in there."

Search marketer Michael Gray says he's seen the standards "tighten and loosen and tighten and loosen," but the last six months have been particularly brutal. "There has been a lot of collateral damage with some of these decisions," Gray says. He cites the growing sophistication of spam pages as one source of trouble. "Google's trying not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but it's kind of impossible. A spammer can very easily create something that resembles a legitimate site if he knows the right tricks," he says.

The criteria for which pages are targeted for the supplemental index remains a subject of guesswork. But Web designers have found that pages with duplicate content, few words or pictures, and a lack of links to other quality sites are the most likely to be pulled in. Most agree that newly created sites are especially vulnerable.

As for Google's own take on its supplemental index, the company is typically tight-lipped. Google's official page for Webmasters cryptically notes that Google is "able to place fewer restraints on sites that we crawl for this supplemental index than we do on sites that are crawled for our main index," a phrase that puzzles most search marketers.

In an e-mail, Google product manager Prashanth Koppula offers little more in the way of an explanation. Asked if the supplemental index is getting bigger, he responds that "new pages are constantly being added," but that the "algorithmic nature" of Google's spider makes it hard to measure the index's size or how fast it's growing. That's not a problem, Koppula says, because supplemental results are no less legitimate than normal results, and pages in the supplemental index aren't checked any less frequently by Google's spider.

But Jim Boykin, another search marketing consultant and blogger, doesn't buy it. "If your page is in the supplementals, it won't rank for any competitive search, and it can be really hard to get it out," he says. "That's why we call it Google Hell."

New World of Corporate Philanthropy

Rockefeller Firm Tells Would-Be Buffetts How to Give Money Away By Lisa Kassenaar

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=ampzu4gp5vpw&refer=home

Jan. 11 (Bloomberg) -- Melissa Berman bears the burdens of the whole world. Right now, she's figuring out how to prevent children from becoming soldiers in Darfur. She's working to bring sustainable power to Sri Lankan villagers. She's trying to cut environmental health risks in post-Katrina New Orleans and stem a loss of nurses that will leave U.S. hospitals in crisis by 2020.
Berman, 51, who leads Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors in New York, is working for millionaires who've done well -- and are eager to do good. And with philanthropy in vogue, her phone keeps ringing with more calls from hedge fund managers, real estate moguls and technology entrepreneurs.
``It's getting intense,'' says Berman, who holds a Ph.D. in English literature and once lived in Sweden deciphering Old Norse. Her 36th-floor corner office on Madison Avenue is piled so high with files and books that she can barely take in a view that includes a sliver of the East River. ``There's a lot of new wealth, and people are very focused on doing something with it while they are alive,'' she says.
Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, a nonprofit charity that was split off from the wealth management office of Rockefeller Financial Services five years ago, helped steer about $150 million to U.S. and international charities in 2006, twice the amount of 2002, Chief Executive Officer Berman says. In 2007, Wall Street bankers and traders sharing more than $36 billion in bonuses may help drive the donations Berman's group advises on to $170 million or more, she says.
Since June, when Warren Buffett said he'd hand most of his $40 billion fortune to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Berman's client list has jumped to about 135 from 120. Another 45 potential donors are in the wings. She's doubled her staff, to 32, in three years.
Ambitious Donors
Berman belongs to a growing class of charity advisers catering to the new rich, a group that's proving as ambitious about parting with their money as they were about earning it.
``The model in the past was that you made some money and kept a low profile, and when you died, you hoped it all turned out well,'' says Peter Frumkin, director of the RGK Center for Philanthropy and Community Service at the University of Texas at Austin and author of ``Strategic Giving: The Art and Science of Philanthropy'' (University of Chicago Press, 448 pages, $39).
``The new model is to take a more high-engagement philanthropy approach,'' he says. ``For every dollar invested, they want two or three dollars of impact.''
Citi, Harvard
The biggest financial firms, including Citigroup Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co., are adding philanthropy consultants. The services are becoming necessary to hold on to rich clients, who increasingly see charity as an integral part of managing family wealth, says David Ratcliffe, director of Merrill Lynch & Co.'s Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Management.
At Harvard University, Charles W. Collier, a senior philanthropic adviser, has started helping wealthy alumni fund more than just the school. Nonprofit consulting firms, including the 17-year-old Philanthropic Initiative in Boston and the 30-year-old Tides Foundation in San Francisco, are also helping hand out more grants than ever. New York University has even begun offering a graduate degree in philanthropy.
``This is a cottage industry that's about to become a lot more than that,'' says Tom Reis, a program director at the 76-year- old W.K. Kellogg Foundation in Battle Creek, Michigan. Kellogg, founded by the breakfast-cereal family, is the seventh-biggest U.S. philanthropy, with $7.8 billion in assets. ``It's like everything in philanthropy,'' Reis says. ``It's exploding.''
`Almost a Fad'
Enriched by rising financial markets and moved by images of natural disasters from the U.S. Gulf Coast to Thailand and Pakistan, Americans are giving to charity like never before.
Donations rose 6.1 percent to $260.3 billion in 2005 from a year earlier, including $7.4 billion for disaster relief, according to the Glenview, Illinois-based Giving USA Foundation. About 36 percent went to religious groups; 18.4 percent to health and human services organizations and 14.8 percent to education. Individuals made $199 billion of the donations, or 76.5 percent of the total.
Philanthropy is also fashionable because of the examples of public spirit set by Buffett and Gates, the world's two richest people, says Steve Gunderson, president of the Washington-based Council on Foundations, a network with 2,000 members.
``Their personal commitments to give up their resources sent a signal to the rest of society that this was the appropriate thing to do,'' Gunderson says. ``It almost makes it a fad.''
Lance, Angelina
Other celebrities are adding juice, including Lance Armstrong, the seven-time Tour de France winner and cancer survivor who now spends his time raising money to combat the disease. In November, the cyclist ran the New York City Marathon to promote his cause, garnering as much TV coverage as the Brazilian winner, Marilson Gomes dos Santos.
Rock star Bono, actress Angelina Jolie and talk-show host Oprah Winfrey are using their star power to draw attention to causes in Africa, from debt relief to AIDS orphans.
With all of that money out there and more consultants hanging out their shingles, donors need to be skeptical about where they find counsel, Reis says. ``As advice blossoms -- and it will -- the challenge will be good advice,'' he says. ``You can't underestimate how hard it is to give away money well.''
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. isn't even trying to give its clients philanthropy advice. The investment bank, which set aside $16.5 billion to pay its staff for the year ended in November, sends employees and customers, who typically have $10 million or more, to outside philanthropy advisers, says Karey Dye, a vice president in private wealth management who meets with the charity-minded.
``They are the experts on this stuff,'' Dye, 46, says. ``The best thing we can do for our clients is put them together.''
Robin Hood
Many people who've gotten rich in financial services are wary of nonprofit groups, fearing they might squander funds, says Nigel Morris, co-founder of Capital One Financial Corp., the biggest U.S. independent issuer of credit cards.
``These people believe in cause and effect,'' Morris says. ``Money should go to the charities that are better performers and have the best business models.''
Morris, 48, a Briton who lives in the U.S., is now a trustee of London-based New Philanthropy Capital, which does financial analysis of charities and advises individuals on philanthropy. The group is looking at bringing its services to the U.S., he says.
Some donor groups, such as New York's Robin Hood Foundation, withdraw their support from charities that don't perform. Robin Hood, started by hedge fund guru Paul Tudor Jones in 1987, collects annual data from groups it contributes to and compares relative returns. In the past three years, Robin Hood has canceled funding for 24 organizations, spokeswoman Ruth Gallogly says. Robin Hood gave money to 244 groups in 2006.
Hedge Fund Donors
``There's an intense focus on what it means to be an effective philanthropist,'' says Berman of Rockefeller, which charges clients based on the amount of time spent on a project or as a percentage of the donation handed out.
Her organization was created in 2001 when descendents of John D. Rockefeller Sr., the founder of Standard Oil Co., decided to make their private advisers available to other philanthropists. The aim is to help expand the circle of donors to niche causes all over the world, Berman says.
One California couple who made their money in hedge funds hired Berman to advise them on supporting education, which they felt had been important to their own success. Rockefeller staff spent two years discussing dozens of possible education issues with the pair, Berman says. Eventually, the couple decided to support programs to train school principals and teachers in some of the communities where they have roots.
Family Values
``You start with a very broad topic and end up with something actionable,'' says Berman, who formerly spent 15 years leading research on the role of business in society at the New York-based Conference Board. Berman, who grew up in Miami, earned her doctorate at Stanford University.
Philanthropy advisers typically delve into a family's values and past before advising them on how to give, says Lisa Philp, head of philanthropic services at JPMorgan Private Bank. Housed in a Park Avenue tower looking over St. Bartholomew's domed church, the bank now has six senior philanthropy consultants researching charities for clients with a minimum net worth of $25 million. Five years ago, one person handled the job.
Philp, 40, says she goes to about 10 meetings a week with clients, including a growing number of people under age 50 who are still working. ``Families are asking, `What's our legacy?''' she says. ``They're starting to see philanthropy as an expected part of their lives.''
Animals, Environment
Philp has a degree in Asian studies and economics from the University of Michigan and an MBA from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. She joined the bank in 1998 after a year at Robin Hood and eight years at the New York Regional Association of Grantmakers.
Her staff may begin with a discussion about a client's general interests and then try to narrow it down, Philp says. Separate meetings often occur with children and grandchildren.
One JPMorgan client interested in animals decided she wanted to reduce the number of dogs and cats being euthanized. With the bank's help, she's now aiming to build up programs to spay and neuter pets and increase pet adoption rates. Philp is sending her employees to visit New York animal shelters and interview potential grant recipients.
Another client supports a U.K.-based environmental group and needed help setting up a chapter in the U.S. to attract financial donations and carbon offsets, which help reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the air. Carbon dioxide is the main pollutant responsible for global warming.
Jacqueline Elias, 38, who has a master's degree in urban and environmental policy from Tufts University and is JPMorgan's expert on environmental issues, advised against setting up a new nonprofit and recommended making an alliance with an existing U.S. group instead.
Matchmaker
At Citigroup, Charles ``Chip'' Raymond works closely with about 25 clients worth at least $50 million each. Raymond, 64, is the former leader of the bank's own foundation. He also worked for four New York mayors, including David Dinkins, for whom he led the city's Department of Homeless Services, and headed the New York City Ballet.
Last summer, three clients asked Raymond to connect them with the Clinton Global Initiative, he says. Former President Bill Clinton's philanthropic foundation holds an annual meeting in September in New York that's attended by heads of state, chief executives, religious leaders and some of the world's most generous donors.
Raymond says he's working on plans to introduce clients with $100 million or more who have similar philanthropic interests. Those may include a regular newsletter and lunches or lectures on specific topics attended by clients from all over the world. ``I'm a matchmaker,'' he says.
Personal Agenda
Raymond's colleague Melanie Schnoll-Begun, a Citigroup managing director in charge of philanthropic services, says some clients aren't sure of their interests when they come to the bank.
In July, she met over lunch with a couple and their two children who'd recently inherited millions of dollars from a relative.
As they ordered their food, Schnoll-Begun, who's diabetic, took out an electronic device to test her blood sugar, as she does several times a day. It turned out that the woman was also diabetic, and they began to chat about the disease.
Citigroup ended up connecting the family with a group of medical researchers conducting clinical trials related to reinvigorating the pancreas in patients with diabetes.
``The family has become critically interested in studying obesity in youth and linking it with diabetes,'' Schnoll-Begun, 37, says. ``People realize they can push their own personal agenda through philanthropy.''
Fidelity
Those without million-dollar fortunes still have options for philanthropy. With as little as $5,000, they can open an account with a so-called donor-advised fund. The accounts offer an immediate tax break, while the investor can disburse the money to charity whenever he or she chooses.
The biggest fund is Fidelity Investment's 15-year-old Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund, which has $3.75 billion in assets. Fidelity, the world's largest mutual fund company, helps customers determine whether it would make sense to contribute cash or appreciated stock to the funds but won't help them select charities, says David Giunta, 41, the fund's president.
Clients can do their own research with the help of GuideStar.org, a 12-year-old organization that now offers data on more than 1.5 million charities online, he says.
High Stakes
Going it alone wasn't for Donald Jonas, 77, after he sold part of his abstract expressionist art collection with a plan to donate the money to charity.
``I needed someone to be there for me to hold my hand,'' says Jonas, who co-founded Harrison, New Jersey-based housewares retail chain Lechter's Inc. He ended up hiring Rockefeller's Berman, who helped him choose to support nurses. ``We didn't want to make a mistake.''
Jonas and his wife, Barbara, were married in 1953 and have two children. They collected art for 30 years and, in May 2005, raised $44.3 million by selling works including paintings by Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, two wooden boxes by Joseph Cornell and ``Sailcloth,'' a 1949 Willem de Kooning oil that once hung in their Fifth Avenue apartment's library.
Jonas says he picked nursing as his beneficiary because he wanted a cause that had been overlooked by others. Rockefeller helped examine how nursing in the U.S. is losing status as hospital practices change, discouraging people from entering the field.
That portends a loss of more than a million nurses in the U.S. by 2020. Jonas says he knew it was the right subject for him when he realized that no one was funding programs to address the root causes of the shortage.
Annual Grants
The Jonas Center for Nursing Excellence opened in the offices of the Visiting Nurse Service of New York on Manhattan's Upper East Side this past May. The organization's partners include the nursing departments at Columbia and New York universities and three other area schools.
The Jonases made 11 research grants this year ranging from $150,000 to $400,000 for programs to improve retention of nurses, build racial and ethnic understanding in the nursing workplace and develop clear paths for career advancement.
Barbara Jonas, 72, whose Manhattan duplex is still filled with art, including a Jackson Pollock watercolor over the mantle, says she misses living with the works she and her husband sold at auction. Yet when 400 people showed up at a Jonas Center symposium on nursing at the New York Academy of Medicine in November, the excitement for what's happening with the money was palpable, she says. Some people were crying.
``This is a new part of our life,'' Barbara says. ``We wanted to be as thorough about this as we were about collecting art -- that's how we got the masterpieces.''
The Jonases are planning more philanthropic programs with Rockefeller, including one for disadvantaged children and one for mental health. Soon, Donald Jonas may be able to give advice to others; this fall, he took a course in philanthropy at New York University.

China's 1,600-Year-Old Dunhuang Frescoes Enter the Digital Age

By: Eugene Tang

SOURCE: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601089&sid=aBE77LLrf8M8&refer=china

May 30 (Bloomberg) -- The frescoes of China's Dunhuang caves on the ancient Silk Road have survived 1,600 years of sandstorms, wars and Mao Zedong's red guards. Now, caretakers are turning to computers to save them from half a million tourists a year.

Officials will scan 45,000 square meters (54,000 square yards) of frescoes, or about the area of 10 football fields, and 3,390 Buddhist statues. The images will form a virtual-reality tour for visitors to see before they enter the grottoes. The project, a collaboration with the Mellon Institute in Pittsburgh, may take five years to record the first 20 of 492 caves, said Fan Jinshi, director of the Dunhuang Research Institute.

``Because tourists must use flashlights when they enter the grottoes, they get vague impressions of what they see,'' Fan said. ``The digital displays give them a better-informed tour and save them the trek to caves they're not interested in.''

Reducing the time visitors spend inside the caves helps cut the levels of carbon dioxide and moisture, emissions that break down the delicate dye-on-plaster of the murals and statues.

Dunhuang was a trade hub on the Silk Road during the Sui Dynasty (581-618) and Tang Dynasty (618-907), when caravans bearing Chinese tea and silk for Persia and Europe stopped at its oases. The area was also a religious center, where the aesthetics of Buddhism, Islam, Tibetan sects, Sogdian and Tangut cultures were displayed in clay sculptures and cave murals.

Construction of the caves began in the fourth century by a monk called Yuezun and continued until the 14th century. The earliest of Dunhuang's grottoes at Mogao date to the Northern Liang period (366-439). One of the largest caves features a 26- meter (85-feet) sitting Buddha made during the Tang Dynasty.

Cultural Revolution
``I've been pushing for this for the past four years to divert the flow of visitors to reduce pressure on the precious relics and frescoes,'' said Fan said in an interview at Mogao, 25 kilometers from Dunhuang city in western China's Gansu province.

The grottoes have survived 16 centuries of desert sandstorms in one of China's most arid regions and the Cultural Revolution, which, from 1966 to 1976, destroyed hundreds of thousands of the country's relics.

During China's Cultural Revolution, Fan and her researchers turned to farming to stay on the land and protect Mogao from the red guards who were destroying artifacts throughout the country. They boarded up the caves and handed out pamphlets with an edict by then Premier Zhou Enlai designating Mogao as a national heritage site, said Fan, who'd been working in Mogao since 1963.

Seeping Rain
Tourists are not the only threat to the relics. Caretakers have been working since 1989 with Los Angeles-based Getty Research Institute to preserve 16 large sutras in cave 85, a chamber commissioned in 867 depicting the life stories of King Divi before he reached enlightenment to become the Buddha.

The murals, painted in mineral and plant dye over plaster, have been peeling away from their bedrock because of increasing moisture and mineral salts that crystallize from seeping rain water, Fan said in the April 30 interview.

There are a total of 812 caves along a 1.7 kilometer (1 mile) of cliff face, hewn into the sandstone of the Mingsha Mountains in the Gobi desert. The Mogao caves were designated in 1991 as a World Cultural Heritage Site by the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Tourists to Mogao reached 550,000 last year, from about 200,000 in 1998.

``I'm sure we'll easily top the 2006 numbers this year,'' said Fan, 68. ``The number of visitors jumped especially after 1998, with improved highways, faster trains and a larger airport in Dunhuang.''

Relic Hunter
Some efforts already are under way to regulate visitor numbers to Dunhuang. Caretakers open as many as 80 caves to tourists during the peak season from July to September, leaving 30 caves opened during the rest of the year. Tour operators must reserve in advance and follow designated routes, she said.

The Dunhuang digital archive will include images from the caves as well as frescoes and scriptures from the area that now reside in the world's museums, including the British Library.

The new technology ``will allow a clearer view of every detail of the frescoes before you pick your route through the grottoes,'' Fan said. ``It lets us preserve while allowing access.''

Digitizing American history

By: Jon Brodkin

SOURCE: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=
viewArticleBasic&taxonomyId=9&articleId=9009981&intsrc=hm_topic

February 01, 2007 (Network World) The Library of Congress has been awarded a $2 million grant to digitize thousands of works in the public domain, in a project focusing on at-risk "brittle books" and U.S. history volumes, the library announced Wednesday.
Awarded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the grant will enable the world's largest library to scan and display volumes, including foldouts; develop a page-turner display technology; and begin a pilot program to record metadata such as tables of contents, chapters, sections and indexes.
The project, titled "Digitizing American Imprints at the Library of Congress," will begin scanning books within a few months. "Past digitization projects have shied away from brittle books because of the condition of the materials, but Digitizing American Imprints intends to serve as a demonstration project of best practices for the handling and scanning of such vulnerable works," the Library of Congress stated in a press release.
The Library of Congress has more than 134 million items in various languages, including books, photographs, prints, drawings, manuscripts, maps, sound recordings and motion pictures. More than 7.5 million of these items have been converted into digital form.
The digitization program will include American history volumes, including county, state and regional histories. It will also include U.S. genealogy and regimental histories, including memoirs, diaries and other collections from the Civil War.
The project will include the Benjamin Franklin Collection, selections from the Confederate States of America Collection and first editions from the Library's Rare Book and Special Collections Division. Photography works also will be scanned.
The project will take advantage of Scribe scanning technology from the Open Content Alliance.
"It is inspiring to think that one of these books, many of which are in physical jeopardy, might spark the creativity of a future scholar or ordinary citizen who otherwise might not have had access to this wealth of human understanding," said James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress, in a statement.

Medical tourism’s popularity on the rise

(NOTE: This article is useful for Travel & Tourism General Elective Students)

By Chris Taylor
Published: June 22 2007 16:50
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/98f03b1c-203f-11dc-9eb1-000b5df10621,dwp_uuid=d8e9ac2a-30dc-11da-ac1b-00000e2511c8.html

When David Woodman announced he was going to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, for major dental work, his son Josef thought his dad had lost his mind. He had visions of untrained dentists burrowing into his father’s mouth, clutching fistfuls of rusty needles.
So the younger Woodman tagged along, to make sure his father would not fall victim to foreign quackery. “Instead of what I feared, he got a board-trained dentist in a great clinic, with state-of-the-art instruments and panoramic X-rays,” says Woodman, who was so impressed he ended up researching and writing the new book Patients Beyond Borders on the phenomenon of medical tourism. “And he saved $11,000 on a mouthful of teeth. I came away with a different perspective.”
Woodman’s father is not alone in looking abroad for a medical overhaul. After all, if the American healthcare system is not completely broken, it is certainly dysfunctional: 47m people have no health coverage, and 130m have no dental insurance. As baby boomers age into more medical problems with spotty coverage, and would prefer not to deplete their retirement savings, they are looking at all available options.
Enter countries such as India, Thailand, Mexico, Costa Rica, Malaysia and Singapore that cater to the maladies of well-heeled foreigners. In fact about 150,000 Americans a year leave the US to have medical work done and the industry is growing by about 15-20 per cent annually. The quality of care in top hospitals is said to beat most American hospitals, while providing savings of 30-80 per cent. In fact, in 10-15 years, “the best offshore hospitals will routinely be included in networks offered to insured Americans”, predicts Arnold Milstein, chief physician for the consulting firm Mercer Health & Benefits.
Not that medical tourism is a worry-free venture. From the training of foreign doctors and the conditions of far-flung facilities, to the legal limbo should something go awry, to the wisdom of getting on long-haul flights after major surgery, there are troubling questions to consider. But when patients are facing a major operation – a hip replacement, say, that could cost anywhere from $55,000-$85,000 stateside – it seems that more Americans are proving able to get beyond their doubts.
“Many people just can’t afford the procedures here in the US and the value overseas is so much greater,” says Patrick Marsek, managing director of Chicago-based group MedRetreat, which is facilitating 650 overseas surgeries for clients this year. While historically most Americans have gone abroad for dental or cosmetic work, he says, it is now extending to other areas – hip and knee replacements, heart surgery and hysterectomies.
Indeed, there is now a cottage industry growing up around medical tourism, led by companies such as MedRetreat and Planet Hospital. Not just in the US, but in countries with creaky national health systems such as the UK, where lengthy waiting lists for non-emergency surgery have spurred many to look abroad. “Now you can buy a travel package where they’ll literally handle everything for you,” says David Hancock, author of the newly published guide The Complete Medical Tourist. “They pick you up at your front door, take you to the airport, fly you in and accompany you to all clinical visits and operations. Then you’re off to a five-star hotel to recuperate for two weeks, before flying you back and getting a private car back home. And it all comes in at half of what it would be at a private hospital in the UK.”
As Josef Woodman discovered, the steep discounts are not because of ramshackle venues and dodgy doctors. Bumrungrad Hospital in Bangkok, for instance – which caters to an estimated 400,000 foreigners a year – is known for its marble floors and luxury amenities that make it look more like a resort hotel than a healthcare facility. “When I returned from my tour of 20 hospitals overseas, I showed my son the slides, and he kept asking if they were photos of my hotel,” Woodman says. “In fact they were all pictures of the wards. Often they’re not just as nice as American hospitals – they’re three times as nice.”
So why isn’t everyone jetting off for a few dental crowns or a tummy tuck? For one, heading abroad will put you in a hazy legal zone should anything go wrong. Where a botched surgery might lead to a multi-million-dollar settlement in the US, malpractice awards abroad tend to be capped at a much smaller amount – never mind the potential nightmare of navigating through a foreign legal system.
To avoid ham-handed foreign surgeons, remember that all venues are not created equal. If a hospital has only done 50 relevant surgeries and cannot produce success rates or dossiers on their top surgeons – who have ideally been board-certified in the US or Europe, before returning to their home countries – steer clear.
To do medical tourism right, there are a few key steps to take. Whether you are on your own or working with a healthcare planner such as MedRetreat, look for hospitals accredited by the nonprofit Joint Commission International, and those affiliated with top American institutions.
As your search narrows, do your due diligence and find out how many surgeries your target hospital has performed, and what the documented success rates are. To wit: Wockhardt Hospital in India, which caters to foreigners, has a success rate of 98.4 per cent after 15,000 cardiovascular surgeries, which compares favourably with any US hospital and means “you won’t be coming back with a scalpel in your belly”, Woodman says.
While India and Thailand tend to get the lion’s share of attention for medical tourism, Woodman suggests Singapore could actually be your best value. It is ranked sixth in the world for healthcare by the World Health Organisation, has 11 JCI-accredited hospitals, and houses a facility allied with the legendary American institution Johns Hopkins. Singapore might cost you about 20 per cent more than what you would find in India or Thailand, but it is still roughly half the cost of procedures in the US.
For Don Williams, a Denver technician for Apple Computer, Malaysia seemed a savvy bet. Hampered for years by an old knee injury that was only getting worse, Williams, 61, started looking abroad for solutions after being prodded by his wife Joy.
With the help of MedRetreat, they settled on treatment earlier this year at Adventist Hospital, a church-affiliated institution on the island of Penang.
Williams had health coverage, but his deductible was so high that for the same price that he would pay for a knee replacement in the US, he could have the same work done – and enjoy a month-long vacation with his wife at a five-star Malaysian resort, the Eastern and Oriental.
“It was a very luxurious place to recuperate,” says Williams, who recently was able to go on his first walk in a long time, and looks forward to biking and hiking again. “We loved it.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

Conference on Socio-economic History and Transformation of Andhra

Our Department will be hosting a conference titled “Socio-economic History & Transformation of Andhra". We believe this conference is rather unique as we hope to bring together serious academicians, minus those who thrive by plagiarisng others works, to discuss various important issues of historical as well as contemporary relevance. The aim of the conference is to engage serious researchers on issues such as socio-economic history, economic sociology and cultural studies. We think such an intellectual engagement is the first of its kind in the City of Vijayawada.

Grounding the Conference
A cursory glance at the history of the Madras Presidency would suggest that the construction of the anicuts over the rivers Godavari and Krishna transformed this drought prone part of Andhra region of the Madras Presidency into a prosperous and fertile area. This economic transformation and its attendant social impact on the region deserves far greater attention than have been given in economic and social history. The consequences changed the social, economic and political foundations of the Colonial and postcolonial life. This conference attempts to grapple with the factors that caused this transformation and the social forces that this economic change unleashed need to be analysed in great depth. It has led to the rise of the region comprising the modern day districts of Krishna, Guntur, East and West Godavari into the nerve centre of economic, political and social movements. Certain aspects of the economic and social developments seem to have had not merely regional but national importance.

Main Objectives of the Conference
The conference will be divided into four major sessions. They are (1) Historiography (2) Economic Transformation (3) Socio-cultural Transformation and (4) Trade, Commerce and Urbanisation.

The main objectives of the Conference may include:
1. To critically re-apprise the historiography of the region;
2. To understand the socio-economic changes in the region between 1850 – 1947 in a historical perspective;
3. To critically understand the nature and dynamics of the major economic change in the aftermath of the construction of the Anicuts by the British
4. To contextualise the rise of trade & commerce in the region during the period 1850 – 1947 ;
5. To outline the major social and cultural consequences of the economic transformation of the region;
6. To understand the economic sociology of the region since 1947.

This conference is part funded by ICHR and is tentatively scheduled to be held in the last week of August 2007. Papers will be presented by only a select group of serious researchers or students of ALC History Department. However, we welcome participation by the general populace. Interested participants may contact us for further information.

Why This Blog

This blog hopes to provide a valuable additional platform for all our students (past and present) to interact with us and provide inputs transcending geographical limitations. Through these interactions, we hope to improve our knowledge as well as provide qualitatively better services to our students. We at the department, hope to develop this blog an additional forum to express ourselves freely and outside the claustrophobic disciplinarian boundaries. We hope this will serve as a place where participants can frankly exchanges, views and ideas in a environment free from the constraints of classroom teaching and learning.

An attempt will be made on our part to post some interesting stories, news or simply information about forthcoming events. We encourage participants to post any information what they find interesting. We would welcome feedback on any aspect (curriculum, teaching methods, or any other item). We believe it is best to avoid posting class notes.

We will do our best to live up to our aim, namely, "Creating students who will build a name for themselves, and go beyond becoming a mere statistic or number in the world".