Reacting to departing U.S. Ambassador Gary Locke’s February 27 farewell news conference in Beijing, the state-run China News Service published a critique by Wang Ping that called Ambassador Locke a “banana.”
Kaiser Kuo:
Hyeon-Ju Rho is an American public interest lawyer who has advocated for the rights of vulnerable groups in the U.S. and abroad. She began her career as a trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice as part of the Attorney General’s Honors Program, and later practiced poverty law as a staff attorney at the Urban Justice Center in New York City. Hyeon-Ju has also supported social justice movements internationally, as the Country Director of the American Bar Association Rule of Law Initiative program in China. Hyeon-Ju is a graduate of Swarthmore College and New York University Law School, where she was a Root-Tilden-Kern Public Interest Scholar and co-founder of the annual Korematsu Lecture honoring Asian American contributions to the law.
Veerabhadran Ramanathan is a Distinguished Professor of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California at San Diego and UNESCO Professor of Climate and Policy at TERI University, Delhi, India.
Ramanathan discovered the greenhouse effect of halocarbons, particularly CFCs, in 1975. Along with R. Madden, in 1980 he predicted that global warming would be detected by 2000. In 1985, he led the first international NASA/WMO/UNEP assessment on the climate effects of non-CO2 greenhouse gases and concluded that they are as important as CO2 to global climate change. He was among a team of four that developed the first version of the U.S. community climate model in the 1980, and Ramanathan has done other significant work in the field of climate change.
He now leads Project Surya, which mitigates black carbon and other climate warming emissions from solid biomass cooking in South Asia and Kenya and documents their effects on public health and the environment. Teaming up with California Air Resources Board, he has initiated a World Bank sponsored project to reduce soot emissions from the transportation sector in India.
He has won numerous prestigious awards including the Tyler prize, the Volvo Prize, the Rossby Prize, and the Zayed prize. He was the 2013 Science and Innovation Laureate of the United Nations Champions of Earth. He has been elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, American Philosophical Society, the Pontifical Academy by Pope John Paul II, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He serves in Pope Francis' Council for the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
On January 3, the film critics of The New York Times published their Oscar nominations wish list. Many of their wishes came true and on Sunday night, March 2, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will broadcast its annual celebration of Hollywood and bestow golden statuettes on the handful of films its members voted the best made in 2013.
This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy are joined by Damien Ma, author of In Line Behind a Billion People, a new book for China-watchers looking at how China’s lack of affordable housing, its food and air pollution, and the country’s poor education system, as well as its pervasive “moral scarcity” are going to affect global politics as well as China’s own further drive to modernization over the next twenty years.
