Category Archives: Trang tiếng Anh

Trang tiếng Anh

Desire without suffering

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Hi everyone,

The Buddha has taught that desire is the cause of suffering. If we no longer desire, we no longer suffer.

This is hard to do. If we no longer have any desire, can we be sure we are still passionate about life? still wanting to live? The truth is, desires and wishes are the goals motivating us towards achieving them – a university degree, a good job, opening a store – and that’s what makes like fun, lively, and active. Without those wishes, those dreams to follow, life would have been very dull… like dead.

This is our big problem. How to follow our dreams without being drawn into the cycle of suffering, as the Buddha has taught?

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Biển Đông, Trang tiếng Anh

The Significance of the 2012 ASEAN Economic Ministers Meeting

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By Gregory Poling and Phuong Nguyen
Center for Strategic and International Studies
August 29, 2012

The ASEAN Economic Ministers Meeting (AEM) and related meetings are taking place in Siem Reap, Cambodia, from August 25 to September 1. Economic and trade ministers from the 10 ASEAN member countries, together with their counterparts from dialogue partners China, South Korea, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, India, Canada, Russia, and the United States, are gathering to discuss economic cooperation and trade liberalization within the ASEAN countries and between ASEAN and its foreign partners. This will be the highest-level ASEAN meeting since the failure of the foreign ministers to issue a joint communiqué at the contentious ASEAN Ministerial Meeting in Phnom Penh in July.

Q1: What is the AEM and what has it accomplished?

Continue reading The Significance of the 2012 ASEAN Economic Ministers Meeting →

Biển Đông, Trang tiếng Anh

US Council on Foreign Relations: Armed Clash in the South China Sea (Contingency Planning)

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Armed Clash in the South China Sea

Contingency Planning Memorandum No. 14

Author: Bonnie S. Glaser, Senior Fellow, Center for Strategic and International Studies

Publisher Council on Foreign Relations PressRelease Date April 2012

Introduction

The risk of conflict in the South China Sea is significant. China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, and the Philippines have competing territorial and jurisdictional claims, particularly over rights to exploit the region’s possibly extensive reserves of oil and gas. Freedom of navigation in the region is also a contentious issue, especially between the United States and China over the right of U.S. military vessels to operate in China’s two-hundred-mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ). These tensions are shaping—and being shaped by—rising apprehensions about the growth of China’s military power and its regional intentions. China has embarked on a substantial modernization of its maritime paramilitary forces as well as naval capabilities to enforce its sovereignty and jurisdiction claims by force if necessary. At the same time, it is developing capabilities that would put U.S. forces in the region at risk in a conflict, thus potentially denying access to the U.S. Navy in the western Pacific.

Continue reading US Council on Foreign Relations: Armed Clash in the South China Sea (Contingency Planning) →

Trang tiếng Anh

The terrible legacy of Agent Orange

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The Independent

Forty years after war ended, Washington begins decontamination of worst-affected areas in Vietnam
Sunday 12 August 2012
 Tran Thi Hoan, 26, studied medicine only to be told that she couldn’t become a doctor because of a war fought 20 years before she was born. The ostensible reason was that she had no legs or left hand, but the main reason, and the cause of so much misery blighting the lives of millions of other Vietnamese, is the 20 million gallons of Agent Orange sprayed in her country by US forces in the Sixties.
Trang tiếng Anh

The Bully of the South China Sea

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wallstreet journal
China’s broad territorial claims have no legal merit, and the U.S. is the only power strong enough to push back.

Last Friday, a U.S. State Department spokesman stated that Beijing’s recent decision to upgrade tiny Sansha City in the disputed Paracel Islands to a “prefecture-level city” and establish a military garrison there runs “counter to collaborative diplomatic efforts to resolve differences and risk further escalating tensions in the region.” That muted protest was just the excuse Beijing wanted to play a round of Down With American Imperialism. The Foreign Ministry called in a U.S. Embassy official for a tongue-lashing Saturday. State-run media also went to town, telling the U.S. to “shut up” and stop “instigating” conflict in the region.

Why the irruption of ire? Partly it’s because Beijing’s various factions need to look tough on sovereignty issues ahead of the upcoming Party Congress. The Congress will pick the next generation of Party leaders.

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Trang tiếng Anh

International Friendship Day

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HAPPY INTERNATIONAL FRIENDSHIP DAY 
(Sunday Aug 5, 2012)

 

Inline image 1

 

International Friendship Day was originally promoted by Joyce Hall, the founder of Hallmark cards in 1919, and intended on first Sunday of August to be a day where people celebrated their friendships by sending cards.

The first Sunday in August was chosen as the centre of the largest lull in holiday celebrations.

Friendship Day was promoted by the greetings card National Association during the 1920s but met with consumer resistance – given that it was rather too obviously a commercial gimmick to promote greetings cards.By the 1940s the number of Friendship Day cards available in the US had dwindled and the holiday largely died out there. There is no evidence to date for its uptake in Europe, however it has been kept alive and revitalised in Asia where several countries adopted the tradition of dedicating a day to friends.

Today, Friendship Day is enthusiastically celebrated in a number of countries across the world.


This year, it’s Sunday August 5.

 

Bang giao quốc tế, Trang tiếng Anh

U.S. Moves to Strengthen ASEAN by Boosting the Lower Mekong Initiative

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CSIS

http://www.state.gov/p/eap/mekong/
By Ernest Z. Bower, Prashanth Parameswaran
Jul 24, 2012

 

During her visit to Southeast Asia earlier this month, U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton revealed an important tactic in the U.S. effort to strengthen its engagement with ASEAN: boosting the Lower Mekong Initiative (LMI). The LMI is part of a larger U.S. strategy that involves locking mainland ASEAN countries—Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam—into patterns of cooperation and capacity building supported by the United States, ASEAN, and other partners who can bring technology, expertise, and financial resources to the table.

Continue reading U.S. Moves to Strengthen ASEAN by Boosting the Lower Mekong Initiative →

Biển Đông, Trang tiếng Anh

Senator Webb: China’s Military and Governmental Expansion into South China Sea May Be a “Violation of International Law”

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For Immediate Release:                          Contact: Will Jenkins – 202-224-4024
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
Senator Webb:
China’s Military and Governmental Expansion into South China Sea May Be a “Violation of International Law”

 

Calls on State Department to Clarify Situation
 

 

Washington, DC—Senator Jim Webb, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations East Asian and Pacific Affairs Subcommittee, today said China’s recent actions to unilaterally assert control of disputed territories in the South China Sea may be a violation of international law. He urged the U.S. State Department to clarify this situation with China and report back to Congress.

 
Continue reading Senator Webb: China’s Military and Governmental Expansion into South China Sea May Be a “Violation of International Law” →

Trang tiếng Anh

One-way positivity

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We often talk about “one-way”, yet perhaps we don’t have the habit of practicing one-way positivity, but usually two-way.

We are not positive towards those we have low opinion of – those we consider bad and awful.

We are not positive towards things that we deem ugly, lousy.

We are not positive towards difficult circumstances.

…

But please don’t forget that the correct positivity is not our mental reaction to external conditions, but rather it is our mind’s constant attitude. People who have positivity in their blood will always be positive.

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Biển Đông, Trang tiếng Anh

China’s hardening stance: Beijing creates new municipality to govern disputed waters

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Asia360News

New and Reinforced

Image: Japan Coast Guard/AFPChina stepped up its patrols near the Diaoyu Islands.

Beijing creates new municipality to govern disputed waters in hardening stance over South China Sea

BEIJING — In the latest sign that China will not back down on its territorial claims in the South China Sea, the government is creating a new prefecture-level ‘city’ called Sansha to govern the more than 200 islets, sandbanks and reefs there, including disputed areas.

The municipality of Sansha, which will also have a military force, will oversee the three islands of Xisha and Nansha — which are also claimed by Vietnam — as well as Zhongsha. The waters around the islands are also the subject of overlapping territorial claims.

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Biển Đông, Trang tiếng Anh

China reveals its hand on ASEAN in Phnom Penh

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By Ernest Bower, Senior Adviser and DirectorSoutheast Asia Program
Center for Strategic and International Studies

For the first time in its 45-year history, ASEAN’s foreign ministers failed to issue a joint communiqué following their annual consultations last week in Phnom Penh. It is important to understand this high-profile failure. What happened? And what does it mean for ASEAN and for the strategies of the United States and other countries with strong interests in the Asia Pacific?

What Happened?

The ASEAN foreign ministers spent hours reviewing a substantive agenda that by all accounts represented the growing maturity of ASEAN and its relevance not only to its 10 member countries but to its dialogue partners from around the world. The depth and range of the discussions underlined the conclusion that ASEAN is making progress and maturing to a level where it can address the most pressing issues in the region. Its discussions last week touched on a broad array of concerns—from economic cooperation and integration to political and security alignment to social and cultural cooperation. Even politically sensitive issues such as North Korea, bilateral tensions between ASEAN countries, and the disputes in the South China Sea were fully discussed.

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Trang tiếng Anh

International Monetary Fund: Regional Economic Outlook – Asia and Pacific

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World Economic and Financial Surveys

Regional Economic Outlook:
Asia and Pacific

Managing Spillovers and Advancing Economic Rebalancing

April 2012
©2012 International Monetary Fund

DOWNLOAD FULL TEXT HERE

Barring the realization of downside risks to the global economy, growth in the Asia and the Pacific region is expected to gain momentum over the course of 2012, according to this report, and now projected at 6 percent in 2012, rising to about 6½ percent in 2013. Stronger economic and policy fundamentals have helped buffer the region’s economies against the global financial crisis, by limiting adverse financial market spillovers and ameliorating the impact of deleveraging by European banks, but a sharp fall in exports to advanced economies and a reversal of foreign capital flows would have a severe impact on the region. The region’s policymakers now face the difficult task of calibrating the amount of insurance needed to support stable, noninflationary growth. Some Asian and Pacific economies can afford to lengthen the pause in the normalization of their macroeconomic policies that was initiated when the global recovery stalled late in 2011; others may need a faster return to more neutral policy stances. Similarly, the pace of fiscal consolidation should be calibrated to country-specific circumstances. Additional chapters in the report discuss whether China is rebalancing and the particular challenges facing Asian low-income and small island economies.

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Trang tiếng Anh

Speaking fast

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Hi everyone, 

Our speaking usually goes at our natural velocity, stemming from our personality – people who think as fast as lightning usually speak fast, those who think more slowly often speak softly, or in contrast, people who do not think tend to speak fast, those who think regularly speak slowly. Speaking velocity also depends on region: Busy areas like New York or Washington DC have more fast speakers than less busy areas such as Alabama or Tennessee.

Yet this is an important point: oftentimes when meeting a slower speaker, the fast speaker may make the other one scared, or annoyed, and lose sympathy. Speaking fast usually makes people with a slow talking habit nervous as they feel that they cannot catch up with the speaker – if we are a fast speaker due to our empty head then they will be annoyed with our empty head, if we speak fast due to our intelligence then they will be scared of our smartness.

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Trang tiếng Anh

Falling prices point to further global slowdown

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By John W. Schoen, Senior Producer

The slowing global economy is putting downward pressure on costs for businesses and consumers alike. It’s also squeezing profits and incomes.

The weak job market has helped keep wage costs flat since the recession ended three year ago. Now, with widening evidence that the global economy is entering a new slowdown, the cost of a wide range of commodities from oil to copper to coffee is falling rapidly.

While that’s good news for consumers, the across-the-board price drops are further evidence that demand is drying up as the world economy continues to slow. China’s once booming economy has cooled sharply this year. That has driven prices down sharply in the world’s second-largest economy and has raised worries about deflation, which can be as intractable a problem as too much inflation.

Recent data on factory production and job growth point to a further slowing in an already weak U.S. economy. And the ongoing financial turmoil in Europe has sparked a widening recession that shows no signs of easing.

Continue reading Falling prices point to further global slowdown →

Trang tiếng Anh

Ao dai in my heart

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There ‘s something you have known very early since you were a child. And there ’s something deep inside your heart when it was a part of your life, your memories. The Ao dai has come to my heart by that way!

I saw people wear Ao dai, but never thought about it ‘till the day when I was in my lovely white uniform for the first time. It was and still is our national custom. Amazing! A beautiful white light color shone on me. I felt a wind of change, something new just blew through my heart. I looked at myself in the mirror. I was thrilled and I was excited awaiting the beginning of the new school year.

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