Arunachal Pradesh archers 'grounded' over stapled Chinese visas, anger in India

Arunachal archers Mihu Maselo and Yumi Sorang were stopped due to stapled Chinese visas

New Delhi: China's stapled visas for two young archers from Arunachal Pradesh, which stopped them from going for a world championship that starts on Saturday, has sparked anger in India.

Arunachal Chief Minister Nabam Tuki has said he will ask Foreign Minister Salman Khurshid to take up the incident with China.

Maselo Mihu and Sorang Yumi were the only two archers in the 30-member squad to be given stapled visas, issued by China as a mark that Arunachal Pradesh is 'disputed."

They were stopped by immigration authorities just as they were boarding last night's flight to China for the Youth World Archery Championship in Wuxi, and told that the stapled visas would not be accepted.

The girls were 'shocked and heartbroken', said an airport official.

"When we reached the airport, we didn't know we had a stapled visa. We were told that is not allowed and we can't go. The others went, we were left...we felt sad," said Sorang Yumi. Both girls are now at a guest house in the capital.

Minority Affairs Minister Ninong Ering, an MP from Arunachal Pradesh, lashed out against China and said India should boycott cross-border trade with the country.

"Stapled visas are a disgrace to us. We want to have trade relations with china; that doesn't mean china has a claim over us," Mr Ering said.

"If the issue surfaces again, we need to boycott any kind of cross-border relations with China. Are they thinking of us as third-grade citizens?"

Former Arunachal Pradesh MP Kieren Rejiju today resigned from the Archery Association of India in protest. "The rejection of the two young girls due to stapled Visas is another humiliation to us," he said.

China's practice of issuing stapled Visas to residents of Arunachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir, which it considers disputed, has long been a bone of contention between Beijing and New Delhi. India says these visas are invalid, and has taken it up with China.

The row erupted in 2011, when two weightlifters from Arunachal Pradesh were prevented by immigration officials from boarding a flight from New Delhi to Beijing because of the stapled visas issued by the Chinese Embassy on their passports.

46 per cent global wealth owned by richest 1 per cent: Credit Suisse

Zurich: Global wealth has risen by 68 per cent over the past 10 years to reach a new all-time high of $241 trillion and the United States accounts for nearly three quarters of the increase, Credit Suisse said in its World Wealth Report.

Average global wealth has hit a peak of $51,600 per adult but this is spread very unevenly, with the richest 10 per cent owning 86 per cent of the wealth, analysts at the Credit Suisse Research Institute said.

The top 1 per cent alone owns 46 per cent of all global assets.

The report further said that global wealth may jump another 40 per cent by 2018 to reach $334 trillion.

The richest nations, with wealth per adult of more than $100,000, are concentrated in North America, Western Europe and among the rich Asia-Pacific and Middle Eastern countries.

They are headed by Switzerland, where average adult wealth amounts to $513,000, followed by Australia, Norway and Luxembourg.

However, two thirds of adults in the world have assets worth less than $10,000 and together account for just 3 per cent of global wealth.

Since mid-2012, the number of millionaires worldwide has risen by nearly two million, the vast majority of them in the United States, the report said. By contrast, Japan lost 1.2 million millionaires during the same period.

The rise in US wealth has been driven by a recovery in house prices and a bull equity market.

In Japan, the central bank's aggressive monetary policy drove the yen/dollar exchange rate down by 22 per cent, leading to a drop in household wealth of $5.8 trillion this year alone, equivalent to 20 percent of Japanese net worth, the report said.

Despite its strong economic growth over the past decades, Chinese hold barely 9 per cent of global wealth while accounting for more than a fifth of the global adult population.

For Africa and India, the population share exceeds the wealth share by a factor of ten, the report showed.

Credit Suisse said there were 98,700 individuals with net worth exceeding $50 million, more than half of them in the United States. Europe ranked second, home to nearly 25,000.

The biggest emerging markets, the so-called BRIC countries - Brazil, Russia, India, and China - are each estimated to have around 5,830 such ultra-high net worth individuals.

Nevertheless, the number of billionaires in the BRICs has risen from 5 percent of the world's total in 2000 to 19 per cent in 2010. Between 2000 and 2010, the number of billionaires in China alone rose from 1 to 64, the study showed.

By contrast, the number of billionaires in older developed countries such as France and Japan fell in that period.

हैरतअंगेजः दो साल के लड़के ने दिया भाई को जन्म

चीन में डॉक्‍टरों की हैरत का तब ठि‍काना नहीं रहा जब उन्‍हें ये पता चला कि दो साल का ये बच्‍चा पेट से है।
मेट्रो की खबर के अनुसार, दरअसल इस दो साल के बच्‍चे के भीतर उसी के जुड़वा भाई का अल्प-विकसित भ्रूण था।

India no country for old men: UN report

Geneva: India stands a dismal 73rd in the list of 91 countries, according to a UN-backed study on the wellbeing of the elderly in a rapidly ageing world.

Global AgeWatch Index 2013 released the rankings, based on data from the World Health Organisation and other agencies on older people's incomes, health, education, employment and their environments.

Sweden is the best place to grow old and Afghanistan the worst, according to the study that warns many countries are ill-prepared to deal with the old age time bomb.

In a rapidly greying world, the Global AgeWatch Index - the first of its kind - found that Sweden, known for its generous welfare state, followed by Norway and Germany were best equipped to deal with the challenges of an ageing population.

How countries care for their senior citizens will become increasingly important as the number of people over the age of 60 is set to soar from some 809 million today to more than two billion by 2050 - when they will account for more than one in five people on the planet, the report said.

"The 21st century is seeing an unprecedented global demographic transition, with population ageing at its heart," the authors of the study said.

The survey ranked many African and South Asian countries as the worst places to be retired, with Tanzania, Pakistan and Afghanistan rounding out the bottom three.

The index was compiled by the HelpAge International advocacy group and the UN Population Fund in a bid to provide much-needed data on ageing populations worldwide.

Praise for Bolivia, Sri Lanka

It ranked the social and economic wellbeing of the elderly in 91 countries, by comparing data from the World Health Organisation and other global agencies on older people's incomes, health, education, employment and their environments.

While the world's richest countries - including Western European nations, the US and Japan - predictably ranked highly, the report somewhat surprisingly found that a number of lower-income countries had put in place policies that significantly improved the quality of life for their elderly.

Bolivia, which offers free healthcare to its older citizens despite being one of the poorest surveyed countries, and Sri Lanka, with its long-term investments in health and education, were among those singled out for praise.

HelpAge's chief executive Silvia Stefanoni said a lack of urgency in the debate about older people's wellbeing "is one of the biggest obstacles to meeting the needs of the world's ageing population".

"By giving us a better understanding of the quality of life of women and men as they age, this new index can help us focus our attention on where things are going well and where we have to make improvements," she said in a statement.

The study also noted that some of the top-ranking countries had introduced successful policies to care for the elderly at a time when they were still emerging economies.

Sweden for instance put in place its universal pension system a century ago, while Norway introduced its system in 1937, it said.

"Limited resources need not be a barrier to countries providing for their older citizens," the report said.

The emerging economies of Brazil and China ranked 31st and 35th in the survey, while South Africa, India and Russia came in much lower at 65, 73 and 78 respectively.

On a positive note, the survey found that some countries and regions that were ageing the fastest were already preparing for the democratic shift.

Latin American countries, which face a doubling of their elderly populations by 2050, are well represented among the top 30, the index showed, with Chile and Uruguay in 19th and 23rd place.

But some eastern European countries still have much work to do, it showed, with Moldova ranking 76th and Montenegro at 83rd place.