The Lantern Festival falls on the 15th day of the 1st lunarmonth

This day's important activity is watching lanterns. Throughout the Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 220), Buddhism flourished in China. One emperor heard that Buddhist monks would watch sarira, or remains from the cremation of Buddha's body, and light lanterns to worship Buddha on the 15th day of the 1st lunar month, so he ordered to light lanterns in the imperial palace and temples to show respect to Buddha on this day. Later, the Buddhist rite developed into a grandfestival among common people and its influence expanded from the Central Plains to the whole of China.

Till today, the lantern festival is still held each year around the country. Lanterns of various shapes and sizes are hung in the streets, attracting countless visitors. Children will hold self-made or bought lanterns to stroll with on the streets, extremely excited.

"Guessing lantern riddles"is an essential part of the Festival. Lantern owners write riddleson a piece of paper and post them on the lanterns. If visitors have solutions to the riddles, they can pull the paper out and go to the lantern owners to check their answer. If they are right, they will get a little gift. The activity emerged during people's enjoyment of lanterns in the Song Dynasty (960-1279). As riddle guessing is interesting and full of wisdom, it has become popular among all social strata.

People will eat yuanxiao, or rice dumplings, on this day, so it is also called the "Yuanxiao Festival."Yuanxiao also has another name, tangyuan. It is small dumpling balls made of glutinousrice flour with rose petals, sesame, bean paste, jujube paste, walnut meat, dried fruit, sugar and edible oil as filling. Tangyuan can be boiled, fried or steamed. It tastes sweet and delicious. What's more, tangyuan in Chinese has a similar pronunciation with "tuanyuan”, meaning reunion. So people eat them to denote union, harmony and happiness for the family.

In the daytime of the Festival, performances such as a dragon lantern dance, a lion dance, a land boat dance, a yangge dance, walking on stilts and beating drums while dancing will be staged. On the night, except for magnificent lanterns, fireworks form a beautiful scene. Most families spare some fireworks from the Spring Festival and let them off in the Lantern Festival. Some local governments will even organize a fireworks party. On the night when the first full moon enters the New Year, people become really intoxicated by the imposing fireworks and bright moon in the sky.

Karzai Launches Afghan Peace Council

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has opened the inaugural session of a peace council that was organized to help reconcile with the Taliban and other militant groups.The first meeting of the 70-member council took place Thursday on the ninth anniversary of the start of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan. It includes former Taliban officials, former presidents, and civil and religious leaders.

At the session, President Karzai called on the Taliban to use the opportunity to join in bringing peace to Afghanistan. The government has urged insurgents to renounce violence and respect the constitution. But the militant group has publicly dismissed any such reconciliation until foreign forces leave the country.

U.S. President Barack Obama's administration has expressed support for the Afghan government's efforts to negotiate peace with the Taliban.

New York renamed top fashion capital but Asia sashays in

New York has reclaimed the title of the world's top fashion capital from Milan but the annual poll suggested the top five fashion cities are seeing competition from Asia and Australia.
New York had reigned as top fashion city for five years until Milan took the lead last year in the list compiled by the Global Language Monitor, a US based non-profit group that tracks the frequency of words and phrases in the media, on the Internet and throughout the blogosphere.
But with the US economy recovering, New York once again took the top spot followed by Hong Kong, London, Paris and Los Angeles.
Rounding out the top 10 were Milan, Sydney, Miami, Barcelona and Madrid.
"As the global fashion industry adjusted to the new economic reality, New York rebounded to the No. 1 spot it has now held for six of the last seven years," said Bekka Payack, the Manhattan-based fashion correspondent for the Global Language Monitor.
"This year's list of the top fashion capitals, shows the global fashion industry remaining in flux, with the relative decline of some of the previously leading players and formerly regional players emerging as significant new influences."
She said that in perhaps a harbinger of things to come, this was the first analysis where the traditional big five fashion cities -- New York, Paris, London, Milan, and Rome -- did not dominate the global fashion scene.
The biggest movers in the list were Hong Kong, Madrid and Melbourne.
The group said that the top newcomers to the expanded list included Amsterdam at number 17, Cape Town and Johannesburg at 23 and 25 respectively and Vienna at No. 27.
Following are the 10 top fashion capitals of 2010 and the change from the 2009 rankings
1. New York (up 1)
2. Hong Kong (up 5)
3. London (up 2)
4. Paris ( down 1)
5. Los Angeles (up 1)
6. Milan (down 5)
7. Sydney (up 2)
8. Miami (up 5)
9. Barcelona (up 5)
10. Madrid (up 11)

Inhaling Tuberculosis Drugs Could Be More Effective

A new way of taking tuberculosis drugs shows promise in laboratory tests. Instead of taking a pill or getting a shot, patients would inhale their medicine to get the drug deep into the lungs.

Tuberculosis is one of the world's most serious health challenges. The World Health Organization says one-third of the world's population is infected - that's two billion people. The vast majority of them never get sick, but last year alone more than nine million did, and an estimated 1.7 million died from TB.

Treating tuberculosis has never been easy. Drugs must be taken for months, and too often patients stop taking the pills, which opens the way for resistant forms of the disease to develop. So the search is on for better ways to treat TB.

A PhD student at the University of Colorado has been exploring using existing drugs in a new form - a very fine powder that is inhaled, instead of a pill. J'aime Manion says most tuberculosis bacteria cluster in the lungs, so delivering drugs directly to the lungs can be more effective, faster, and require lower doses.

"Over and over again we see that when you treat with inhalation, you see a faster clearance of the bacteria," she said. "And this is so important because the treatment times for tuberculosis are from three to six months, with tons of antibiotics, with terrible side effects."

Manion has been working with inhalable particles that are about three microns in diameter - three one-thousandths of a millimeter across.

Mellon equity fund begins operations

BNY Mellon Western Fund Management Co, an equity fund venture jointly set up by the world's largest custody lender - Bank of New York Mellon Corp (BNY Mellon) and China's Western Securities, officially began operations on Monday, and plans to launch its first fund product as early as the end of this year.
"Our team has fully prepared and we hope to issue our first fund product by (the end of ) this year but the final decision is subject to regulatory approval," An Baohe, chairman of the newly established fund house, said in Shanghai , where the new firm will be based.
The fund, with registered capital of 200 million yuan ($30 million), was granted a business license in July by the China Securities Regulatory Commission, making it the first such enterprise in the country to receive the license in two years. Western Securities holds a 51 percent stake in the joint venture, while the remainder is owned by BNY Mellon, the world's 11th-largest fund manager, managing assets worth $1.14 trillion.
The fund management joint venture initially aims to manage Chinese securities in a range of local retail fund products and focus on leveraging distribution within the banking and securities sectors.
China's A shares are traded at a P/E (price-earnings) ratio of approximately 16 times, which is quite reasonable, said Hu Bin, chief executive officer of the fund management house.
The Shanghai Composite Index, the larger of the mainland's two gauges, was among the world's best performers in 2009 with 80 percent growth. But amid the government's tightening policies to curb "hot money" inflows and asset bubbles, the gauge has cumulatively declined more than 8 percent so far this year.
"The government's recent curbs on liquidity are a relative adjustment of monetary policy made earlier There will be reasonable investment opportunities in China's stock market in the future if the nation's economy continues to expand by 8 to 10 percent ahead, which indicates even higher corporate earnings," Hu said.
Liu Jianwu, chairman of Western Securities based in Xi'an, said that the venture's funds are seeking to achieve long-term growth, and, as a shareholder, the company will not be disappointed if the fund house does not break even within two to three years. "If required, we can inject additional capital to the new company at anytime," Liu said.
BNY Mellon, which has been in the Chinese market for more than 15 years, has bet on the world's second-largest economy for higher investment returns while the US recovery is on shaky ground.
BNY Mellon expects that more than 50 percent of its business will come from outside the US market, which currently accounts for one-third of the lender's total, according to Robert Kelly, the company's chairman.

The U.N. Children's Fund says the lives of a growing number of children in the Horn of Africa are threatened by chronic food insecurity, conflict and political instability

The U.N. Children's Fund says an all too familiar tragedy is unfolding in the Horn of Africa. It warns an already bad situation for children will only get worse unless the world acts with much greater urgency to provide food and other assistance.

　

It says countries in the region are reeling from a combination of erratic weather patterns, the global economic crisis and intensifying conflict and insecurity. It says piracy and the hijacking of ships off the Somali coast also is adding to the emergency.

UNICEF spokeswoman, Miranda Eeles, says 19.8-million people, including four-million children under the age of five, are in need of emergency relief assistance.

　
"This is a substantial increase over the September 2008 figure of 14 million people requiring assistance," said Eeles. "Over the last few months, there has been a steady increase in the numbers of children suffering from acute malnutrition. Data collected from nutrition surveillance and feeding centers indicate growing numbers of children are suffering from acute malnutrition, a condition which if not treated quickly can lead to death."

To illustrate the gravity of the situation, UNICEF notes the rates of acute malnutrition in two provinces in Eritrea were above the World Health Organization emergency threshold of 15 percent.

　
In Ethiopia, it says poor food security and nutrition conditions in some parts of the country may get worse because of the late start of the rains and the approaching hunger gap.

In Eastern Kenya, it says a major cholera outbreak caused by poor water and sanitation also is contributing to acute malnutrition and mortality. It says acute rates of malnutrition in both Somalia and Djibouti are beyond the emergency threshold.

It says lack of safe water and sanitation is putting millions of people at risk from waterborne disease. And, cholera and diarrheal disease outbreaks have been reported throughout the Horn of Africa.

UNICEF says aid agencies urgently need funds from International donors to carry out their aid programs. The children's agency says it has received less than 10 percent of the $178 million emergency appeal it launched earlier this year.

　
It warns it will be unable to carry out its humanitarian operations for millions of vulnerable children and women this year if it does not receive this money.

China Is US's 'Central Challenge'

The U.S. relationship with China will be the 'central American challenge going forward,' as the U.S. works to redevelop its economy, White House National Economic Council Director Larry Summers said on Monday.

'A reading of the long sweep of history suggests that rapidly transforming economies in a rapidly transforming global system produce histories that are not always happy ones,' Mr. Summers said at The Wall Street Journal CEO Council. 'Our wisdom, their wisdom, the way in which we interact is going to be of the utmost importance.'

Mr. Summers, who will leave the White House at the end of the year, said China's rising economic and political might presents the central challenge facing the world.

The history of the early 21st century 'will be about how the world adjusted to the movement of the theater of history toward China,' Mr. Summers said.

Underscoring the tension between the countries, Min Zhu, special advisor for the International Monetary Fund in Washington and former deputy governor of the People's Bank of China, told the same forum that the weight of global GDP is shifting toward China and other fast-growing emerging economies while richer nations still face high debt and weak growth.

Given current trends, emerging markets and developing countries will account for 60% of global gross domestic product in six years, he said. 'It is a different world,' Mr. Zhu said.

Robert Diamond, head of Barclays PLC, said U.S. businesses could pick up the mantle but lack the confidence to start hiring because of concerns the country isn't on the right path with spending, deficits and taxes.

Meanwhile, China is moving up the value chain into high-tech capital goods and is poised to account for about a third of global manufacturing of advanced machinery and equipment within a decade, from about 8% today, Mr. Zhu said. 'China will probably lead a global manufacturing restructuring. That will be a big impact for advanced economies, particularly for economies that want to export tech goods.'

Mr. Summers, facing a group of American executives, many of whom are looking to capitalize on overseas growth, ended his remarks with an appeal to think about their role as 'citizens.'

The last election was partly a reaction against President Barack Obama's policies, Mr. Summers said, but it was also a 'an important rejection of elites . . . that were seen as more citizens of Davos than of their countries.'