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http://www.eiu.com/Handlers/WhitepaperHandler.ashx?fi=NEW_August_liveability_PDF.pdf&mode=wp

We still rank higher than Singapore, Seoul and New York

By Tiffany Lam 31 August, 2011

Despite soaring property prices, Hong Kong is still a great place to live in.

Hong Kong came 31st on a list of the world’s best city’s to live in.

Melbourne is now the world’s most liveable city, ending Vancouver’s nine-year reign on the Economist Intelligence Unit’s (EIU) bi-annual Global Liveability Survey.

Vienna was rated the second best place to live, and Vancouver the third. Toronto and Calgary rounded out the top five. In another coup for Australia, Sydney jumped ahead of Helsinki to sixth spot.

Longtime runner-up Melbourne — Sydney’s arch rival, and some would say attention-seeking little sister — edged in front for its low crime rates, political stability, and comprehensive health care and infrastructure.

Melbourne’s vibrant restaurant scene and European-style café culture didn’t hurt its ratings, either.

Vancouver fell from grace because of the recent intermittent closure of the key Malahat Highway, causing the city to lose points for infrastructure, said the EIU.

Japan tops Asian entries

Osaka and Tokyo were Asia’s top ranking cities in 12th and 18th place respectively. Hong Kong came in 31st, Singapore 51st, Seoul 58th, and Shanghai 79th. Mumbai moved up one place from last year at 116th.

Honolulu was placed highest in the United States at 26th, followed by Pittsburgh at 30th. New York came 56th.

“Those that score best tend to be mid-sized cities in wealthier countries with a relatively low population density,” the EIU report pointed out. “This can foster a range of recreational activities without leading to high crime levels or overburdened infrastructure.”

Cities are rated out of 100 points. Stability, health care, education, infrastructure, culture andenvironment are factors that the survey takes into consideration.

Aussies and Canucks rule

As in previous years, Australian and Canadian cities dominated the rest of the top 10, while New Zealand’s Auckland, ranked tenth.

Cities in Africa and the Middle East languished at the bottom of the 140 cities in the survey, with Zimbabwe’s Harare once again trailing in last place due to flagging scores in stability, health care and infrastructure.

The “Arab Spring” saw a fall in regional stability, with war-torn Tripoli in Libya sliding into the bottom 10 from its previous placement at 107.

The ongoing eurozone crisis also made European cities less liveable generally, the report said.

The world’s top liveable cities:

1. Melbourne, Australia

2. Vienna, Austria

3. Vancouver, Canada

4. Toronto, Canada

5. Calgary, Canada

6. Sydney, Australia

7. Helsinki, Finland

8. Perth, Australia

9. Adelaide, Australia

10. Auckland, New Zealand

And the worst cities on the planet:

131: Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire

132: Tehran, Iran

133: Douala, Cameroon

134: Karachi, Pakistan

135: Tripoli, Libya

136: Algiers, Algeria

137: Lagos, Nigeria

138: Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea

139: Dhaka, Bangladesh

140: Harare, Zimbabwe
http://www.cnngo.com/hong-kong/life/hong-kong-31st-worlds-most-livaeble-cities-list-197932
Read more: Hong Kong 31st on world’s most liveable cities list | CNNGo.com http://www.cnngo.com/hong-kong/life/hong-kong-31st-worlds-most-livaeble-cities-list-197932#ixzz1WgLqbGNc

The liveability report surveys 140 locations around the world to assess the best or the worst living conditions. It originated as a means of testing whether HR departments needed to assign a hardship allowance as part of expatriate relocation packages. It has since evolved as a broad benchmarking tool used by city councils, organisations or corporate entities looking to test locations against one another.

Cities are scored on political and social stability, crime rates and access to quality health care. It also measures the diversity and standard of cultural events and the natural environment; education (school and university); and the standard of infrastructure, including public transport.

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South China Morning Post – 16 August 2010

As the Legislative Council heads into its last session before elections in September next year, its least active lawmakers have failed to show any sign of revival from their torpor.

Timothy Fok Tsun-ting remained the most reluctant lawmaker in the legislative year just ended. Fok, who has represented the sports, performing arts, culture and publications functional constituency since 1998, had the worst attendance and one of the worst voting records of the 60 lawmakers. While that echoes his previous record in analyses conducted by the South China Morning Post (SEHK: 0583, announcements, news) , his participation on some panels has shown further deterioration.

Fok topped the absentee list for full council meetings for the sixth consecutive year: he attended 22 of its 35 meetings, or 64 per cent, compared to the 96 per cent attendance average of Legco members.

The Legco session that ended on July 13 also marked the ninth year of his 13 as a lawmaker in which Fok had the worst attendance. He also missed or failed to vote in 122, or 65 per cent, of the 187 votes cast in full council meetings in the past year, compared with the average of 25.4 per cent.

The member who lodged the fewest votes was finance sector lawmaker David Li Kwok-po, who missed 90.3 per cent of votes.Medical sector representative Dr Leung Ka-lau was next, at 66.3 per cent.

Fok’s poor performance was consistent across chamber business. He had the lowest attendance on five of the nine major panels and committees he joined. He attended fewer than a third of the 32 meetings of the House Committee, on which all lawmakers except the Legco president sit – a slight deterioration on his performance the previous year.

Repeated attempts by the Post to contact Fok for comment failed. In response to the Post’s analysis of attendances in 2009 – when he was also bottom – he said attendance records were “too simple a tool to judge a lawmaker’s performance”.

While Fok’s average participation at meetings of the seven panels to which he belonged was 39 per cent – up from 33 per cent the previous year – he was among the worst three lawmakers in terms of attendance on all seven panels.

His average was improved slightly by better performance in attending meetings of the home affairs panel, the business of which corresponds most closely with that of his functional constituency. While last year the Post reported that Fok did not show up at a single meeting of the panel, this year he attended eight of its 15 meetings, or 53 per cent, bettering two lawmakers, People Power’s Wong Yuk-man (27 per cent) and pro-government lawmaker Philip Wong Yu-hong (40 per cent).

While it is unsurprising that lawmakers from functional constituencies tend to be less keen to attend meetings and vote on motions or bills than those from geographical constituencies, some directly elected lawmakers also have poor records.

Independent pan-democrat Leung Yiu-chung was either absent or did not press the voting button for 104 of the 197 votes, or 56 per cent – more than doubling the 25 per cent of votes he missed in the previous year.

Independent pan-democrat Andrew Cheng Kar-foo attended just 13 (or 36 per cent) of the 36 meetings of the Public Accounts Committee, the group that stirred heated debate by criticising government figures over 2009’s East Asian Games and directly subsidised schools. Cheng, a solicitor, said being a lawmaker was not his only job. “The [Public Accounts Committee] clashed with many of my other meetings.

“I will withdraw from it in the coming session,” he said. “And I do not only work for one job only… I may not seek re-election next year.”

The Civic Party’s Ronny Tong Ka-wah had the poorest record of attending meetings on Lehman Brothers minibonds issues. He turned up at just four of the 51 hearings of the Lehman Brothers minibond subcommittee, only surpassing in attendance the no-show of the medical sector’s Leung, who quit after four meetings.

Tong said he deliberately skipped the meetings because he thought the purpose of the hearings was to study the structure of the minibonds, not to hear complaints from the victims.

Leung was not available for comment.

Chinese University political scientist Ivan Choy Chi-keung said that while different lawmakers may have their reasons to skip Legco, “both functional and geographical lawmakers should work equally hard”.

tanna.chong@scmp.com

South China Morning Post — 16 August 2011

Only 8pc of businesses polled say the minimum wage has raised operating costs

High rents rather than the minimum wage represent the biggest threat to small and medium-sized businesses, a study shows.

Just 8 per cent of the businesses polled said the minimum wage had increased their operating costs, while more than 90 per cent said ever-rising rents hurt them more.

The survey casts doubt on claims by some businesses that the HK$28 per hour minimum wage, which came into force in May, had increased their operating costs.

The Catholic Commission for Labour Affairs polled the bosses of 100 stores employing fewer than 50 people in shopping malls owned by The Link, which owns 180 properties on public housing estates, and developers Cheung Kong (Holdings) (SEHK: 0001), Sun Kung Kai Properties and Henderson Land Development (SEHK: 0012). It interviewed in more depth about a dozen businesses to gather their views on the minimum wage.

More than 70 per cent of respondents said the wage law had not put them under greater economic pressure. Some 80 per cent said rent was their largest single expense, with 65 per cent saying it accounted for more than 40 per cent of revenue.

More than 90 per cent said staying in business was tough, and most of them attributed their problems to rent.

Law Pui-shan, the commission’s policy research officer, said the findings proved that most small and medium-sized enterprises had not suffered as a result of the law. “Since many such businesses see high rent as unavoidable, they shift their attention to their workers’ wages, sometimes without justification,” she said.

She urged the government to release an assessment of how the minimum wage had affected businesses. She also called on it to find ways to tackle the growing power of property developers. “If not, we don’t see how rents can go down.”

Property developers have been the target of protests in recent months. Organisers of the annual July 1 march made “toppling property hegemony” – the dominance of property developers over the economy and politics – one of its key themes, while activists brought a ParknShop to a standstill in March in a protest against the chain’s owner, tycoon Li Ka-shing.

adrian.wan@scmp.com

South China Morning Post – 28 July 2011

Yesterday InvestHK conducted its annual farce at the announcement of foreign direct investment figures produced by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.

Simon Galpin, director general of InvestHK, sat on the podium looking like the cat that had got the cream when he announced with evident pleasure that Hong Kong had moved into third place behind the United States and China and had apparently received an astonishing US$68.9 billion in FDI last year.

“This is very significant for an economy of only seven million people,” gushed Galpin.

Indeed it is – and you would have thought he might have been a tiny bit sceptical.

However, on he went to explain how Hong Kong’s wonderful business environment had been able to attract more investment than most of the rest of Asia put together.

According to Professor Wong Tak-Jun, the dean of the Faculty of Business Administration at the Chinese University of Hong Kong – who shared the podium with Galpin – this is not hot money or portfolio investment in the stock market, this is money that is invested in Hong Kong and stays here.

Asked where and in what the money was invested in, he responded: “I am sorry. We don’t have these figures.”

Let’s put this in perspective. The Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau bridge is estimated to cost US$10.7 billion so we have the equivalent of at least six of those.

We could also afford at least eight high-speed railways of the kind between Hong Kong to Guangzhou.

The combined IFC1 and IFC2 complex cost HK$20 billion, so according to InvestHK foreign investors put in enough funds last year to build 26 of these vast complexes. Yet they don’t know where the investment went.

If somebody stumbles across a hitherto undisclosed US$68.9 billion of infrastructure could they let InvestHK know?

Of course, these funds are not being invested here. About 10 years ago, Raymond Baker, from Washington’s Centre for International Policy told the Far Eastern Economic Review: “I would speculate, without being certain, that most of what is coming into Hong Kong represents Chinese illegal flight capital that has gone abroad and reestablished itself as a foreign entity. A big proportion then goes back to China.”

According to the International Monetary Fund, FDI is defined as when an investor based overseas acquires an asset in one country with intent to manage that asset.

Another statistic Galpin downplayed was that Hong Kong was ranked fourth for outward FDI, which interestingly came to US$76 billion and was rather more than flowed in. This might explain why we haven’t seen 20 IFCs sprouting up in Hong Kong. So come off it, InvestHK. Stop this nonsense. We are supposed to be Asia’s world city where we do things properly and not play these silly games.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/jul/27/higher-latitudes-bigger-eyes-brains

On average, the eyeballs of people whose ancestors lived within the Arctic circle are 20% bigger than those whose ancestors lived near the equator. Photograph: Alamy

People who live at higher latitudes have larger eyes and more processing power in their brains to deal with visual information compared with those living nearer the equator, a study suggests.

“As you move away from the equator, there’s less and less light available, so humans have had to evolve bigger and bigger eyes,” said Eiluned Pearce from the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University, a lead author on the study.

“Their brains also need to be bigger to deal with the extra visual input. Having bigger brains doesn’t mean that higher-latitude humans are smarter, it just means they need bigger brains to be able to see well where they live.”

This suggests that someone from Greenland and someone from Kenya will have the same ability to discern detail, but the person from the higher latitude needs more brainpower and bigger eyes to deal with the lower light levels.

Professor Robin Dunbar, director of the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University and a co-author of the study, said that people whose ancestors have lived within the Arctic circle, have eyeballs 20% bigger than people whose ancestors lived near the equator. They have an associated increase in the size of the brain’s visual cortex, which previous studies have shown correlates with the size of the eyeball.

Brain volume is known to increase with latitude: people living at high latitudes north and south of the equator have bigger brains than people living near the equator and . Dunbar said that scientists have wondered whether these inherited differences in total brain volume were driven by the pressure to adapt to low light levels at high latitudes.

The researchers measured the brain volumes and eye sockets of 55 skulls kept at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History dating from the 19th century. The skulls represented 12 different populations from around the world, including indigenous people from England, Australia, China, Kenya, Micronesia and Scandinavia.

The results, published on Wednesday in the journal Biology Letters, showed that the biggest brains, averaging 1,484 millilitres, were from Scandinavia, while the smallest brains, around 1,200 millilitres, came from Micronesia. Average eye socket size was 27 millilitres in Scandinavia and 22 millilitres in Micronesia.

Dunbar said the increase in brain volume must have evolved relatively recently in human history. “It’s only within the last 10,000 years or so that modern humans have occupied all latitudes right up to the Arctic circle. This is, I guess, an adaptation that’s happened within the last 10,000 years.”

The researchers controlled for possible confounding variables influencing their data, such as the fact that people who live at higher latitudes are physically bigger and the possibility that the size of a person’s eye socket in colder climates might be bigger to allow for a thicker layer of insulating fat.

The results for human eyes mirror those found in birds and non-human primates. Bird species that sing earlier in the dawn chorus at high latitudes have bigger eyes than those that sing later, and nocturnal primates have bigger eyeballs than species that are awake during the day.

South China Morning Post – 22 July 2011

Striking a balance between the needs for development and environmental protection is not easy. In a city where development is synonymous with progress, conservation has always been a difficult course to champion, until a law was put in place to mandate all projects to undergo green impact studies 13 years ago. Over the years, the mechanism is thought to have been working well, until recently when there have been growing signs that a fundamental review is necessary.

Green activists often joked that the environmental impact assessment reports are “invincible” in that they are compiled, tabled, discussed but never rejected. If there is any truth in it, it is hardly a joke. A news report in this paper has rung the alarm bell that the director of environmental protection has only rejected seven – or less than 4 per cent – of the 196 cases handled since 1998. Critics may find this hardly surprising, as the majority of them are government projects which appear to be just rubber stamped as a matter of formality.

The head of the Advisory Council on the Environment, which helps scrutinise the assessment reports, argues that most studies have been endorsed because the concerns raised during the process had been addressed in the final report. It will be less worrying if this is the case. But the expert also agrees to the need for more international experts to help, saying fellow members find it difficult to comment on technical issues. The suggestion, coming from someone with first-hand experience, is worth considering further.

The activists have also rightly challenged if the director has the professional knowledge in approving the studies. Unlike the previous one who was an environmental scientist, a top bureaucrat also acts as the director, raising doubts if she has the expertise in discharging the power under the law.

Concerns over the independence and professionalism of the consultants commissioned by the developers should also be taken seriously. More than one-third of the 196 studies were done by one of the three key consultancy groups in the market. While there is no evidence to suggest they are paid to distort the studies to suit their clients’ need, the lack of an independent panel to monitor their qualifications would inevitably undermine confidence in their work.

Sadly, officials are still dodging a review pending a court appeal over the bridge project across the Pearl River Delta. The judge has ruled that the director of environmental protection had no power to approve the impact assessment reports in the absence of separate analysis of likely environmental conditions if the projects were not built. While the appeal is now a matter for the court to decide, there is no reason why the public should stop debating other perceived inadequacies in the mechanism.

http://www.europolitics.info/institutions/new-anti-fraud-strategy-aims-to-name-and-shame-art307999-36.html

EUROPOLITICS / European Commission

Commission

New anti-fraud strategy aims to name and shame

By Gaspard Sebag | Friday 24 June 2011

The European Commission adopted, on 24 June, a new anti-fraud strategy that will enable the naming and shaming of fraudsters of EU funds. The overall aim is to facilitate prevention and detection and to improve the conditions for investigations of fraud and also achieve adequate reparation and deterrence with proportionate and dissuasive sanctions. The measures proposed – updating the 2000 strategy, which has been rendered somewhat obsolete due to the enlargement, amongst other factors – are expected to enter into force between now and the end of 2014.

New IT tools, such as a technical platform for secure exchange of data between customs and other relevant national authorities (the Mutual Assistance Broker), will be put to use to improve in a systematic way the Commission’s audit and control capacities. The EU executive also commits to intensify communication over penalties sanctioning fraudsters or beneficiaries of misused EU funds, ie naming and shaming that has been requested by Parliament.

The role of the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) will be reinforced by enhancing the expertise, assistance and guidance it already provides to Commission services. Specific sectoral strategies will be set up, covering expenditure, such as Structural Funds or the European Fisheries Fund.

On the same day, the Commission unveiled a regional action plan to fight against smuggling of cigarettes and alcohol – the cause of a €10 billion shortfall in customs and tax revenues for the EU and member states – along the Eastern borders. It proposes targeted actions ranging from the strengthening of the capacities on both sides of the border, the setting up of trained mobile units and new equipment (automated recognition tools, scanners, night vision equipment, etc) to the need to review the way customs penalties currently apply throughout the EU and to enhance international cooperation, in particular with the Union’s Eastern neighbours.