Trump’s attempted manipulations of official metrics degrade our democracy, economy and public safety.

6 February 2014 , Volume 70, Number 1

From the point of view of a Saudi policy-maker, the country, the region and the world look to be increasingly complex places

On April 4, 1990, the Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China was adopted by the Seventh National People’s Congress (NPC) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The Basic Law enshrines the basic policies of the PRC regarding the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) and provides a solid constitutional basis for the implementation of “one country, two systems”. Looking back, we must not forget the purpose and mission of the Basic Law.

The Basic Law clearly states that Hong Kong has been part of the territory of China since ancient times and is an inalienable part of the PRC. It is a Special Administrative Region enjoying a high degree of autonomy under the Central People’s Government. Upholding national unity and territorial integrity, maintaining the prosperity and stability of Hong Kong, and taking account of history and realities, the “one country, two systems” principle was put forth by Mr Deng Xiaoping as a way to preserve the characteristics and strengths of Hong Kong as much as possible and to enable Hong Kong citizens to maintain their way of life.

In the 22 years since her return to the motherland, Hong Kong has weathered different challenges and, on the whole, the implementation of “one country, two systems” has been successful. Leveraging on our strengths in free market economy, rule of law, independent judiciary and the free flow of information and with our country’s strong support, Hong Kong has developed into an international financial, trade and transportation centre and attracted more than 9,000 overseas and Mainland companies to establish offices here, with many of them making Hong Kong as their regional headquarters in Asia-Pacific.

International financial centre

Article 109 of the Basic Law confirms Hong Kong’s status as an international financial centre and stipulates that the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region shall provide an appropriate economic and legal environment for the maintenance of such status. Specifically, under the Basic Law:

- The Hong Kong dollar is the legal tender of the HKSAR and the linked exchange rate system has been maintained. With the strong support of the Central Government, Hong Kong has been able to maintain financial stability even during turbulent times. Riding on our country’s reform and opening up, Hong Kong has also developed into the world’s largest offshore renminbi centre.

 - The free flow of capital is protected and has attracted a large number of foreign direct investment and companies using Hong Kong as an ideal platform for initial public offerings and fundraising. Over the past 10 years, Hong Kong has topped the annual global IPO rankings six times.

- Hong Kong maintains a simple and low tax system, which is key to Hong Kong’s success as an international financial, trading and business centre. The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government is free to implement tax measures according to policy needs under its independent tax system. Since I took office, I have put in place initiatives such as the two-tier profits tax system and tax deduction for research and development expenditure to enhance Hong Kong’s competitiveness.

Rule of law and independent judiciary

The Basic Law preserves and guarantees Hong Kong’s long-established and trusted common law system and allows the HKSAR to enjoy independent judicial power, including that of final adjudication. The rule of law and an independent judiciary, which are held dearly by Hong Kong people, are constitutionally protected. The Basic Law stipulates that judges shall be appointed by the Chief Executive on the recommendation of an independent commission; for the appointment of judges of the Court of Final Appeal (CFA) and the Chief Judge of the High Court, the Chief Executive shall obtain the endorsement of the Legislative Council and report such appointment to the Standing Committee of the NPC for the record. Last month, I accepted the recommendation of the Judicial Officers Recommendation Commission to appoint the Honourable Justice Andrew Cheung, Permanent Judge of the CFA, to succeed The Honourable Chief Justice Geoffrey Ma who will retire next year.

The Basic Law also allows the CFA to draw on the experience of judges from other common law jurisdictions. Currently, 15 eminent judges from the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada are sitting on the CFA as non-permanent judges. Their participation shows that our rule of law and independent judiciary are well recognised.

Rights and freedoms of residents

The fundamental rights and freedoms of Hong Kong residents are fully protected by the Basic Law. Under Chapter 3, Hong Kong residents shall have freedom of speech, of the press and of publication; freedom of association, of assembly, of procession and of demonstration; freedom of the person; freedom of communication; freedom of religious belief; freedom of choice of occupation; freedom to engage in academic research, literary and artistic creation, and other cultural activities; freedom of marriage and so forth. However, as pointed out by our courts in their judgments, freedom is not absolute; one should respect the rights and freedoms of other people and be subject to law when exercising such freedoms.

Developing external affairs

Hong Kong has always been a bridge between the East and the West. The Basic Law allows the HKSAR to maintain and develop relations with foreign states and regions and relevant international organisations in the appropriate fields, including economic, trade, financial and monetary, shipping, communications, tourism, cultural and sports fields on its own, using the name Hong Kong, China. The HKSAR has participated in the World Trade Organization, the World Meteorological Organization, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation and many others in the name Hong Kong, China and has entered into hundreds of bilateral agreements with other countries, including Free Trade Agreements, Investment Promotion & Protection Agreements and Comprehensive Double Taxation Agreements. Hong Kong athletes can also represent Hong Kong in international competitions.

The implementation of “one country, two systems” fully demonstrates that it is the best institutional arrangement to maintain Hong Kong’s long-term prosperity and stability. As a pioneering initiative, its application entails an evolving process and we have to effectively and fully apply this principle in order to maintain the prosperity and stability of Hong Kong, to meet the aspirations of our citizens and to meet the fundamental interests of our country. I encourage all Hong Kong citizens to learn more about the Basic Law, including the institutional safeguards, and the rights and duties of Hong Kong residents. In so doing, we should consider how best we can continue to leverage on Hong Kong’s advantages, allowing Hong Kong to advance with the country and enabling every Hong Kong resident to realise their goal.

Chief Executive Carrie Lam wrote this op-ed entitled The Basic Law - Best Safeguard for the Prosperity & Stability of Hong Kong on April 4.

Host Matt Egan is joined by Online Editor at Techworld.com Scott Carey to break down Microsoft's mega acquisition of LinkedIn. Staff Writer at PC Advisor Chris joins in to discuss all of the news coming out of E3 and how Xbox and Playstation are set to battle it out again this summer, or will Nintendo and Zelda steal the show? (13:00). Finally, David Price comes on to talk about all of the news coming out of Apple's WWDC developer conference this week, from Hair Force One to watchOS, tvOS, macOS and iOS (26:30) And please do share, rate and review the UK Tech Weekly Podcast.  

See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

"I know how unpopular it is to be seen as helping banks right now, especially when everyone is suffering in part from their bad decisions. I promise you, I get it. But I also know that in a time of crisis, we cannot afford to govern out of anger."

Musée d'Orsay -- Exhibitions.

Libraries -- Philosophy.

Caterpillars -- Australia, Southern -- Identification -- Pictorial works.

Berlin : Hirschwald, 1887.

Bruxelles (rue de l'Industrie) : Félix Callewaert père, éditeur, 1875.

The women's basketball committee will start using the NCAA Evaluation Tool instead of RPI to help evaluate teams for the tournament starting with the upcoming season. “It’s an exciting time for the game as we look to the future,” said Nina King, senior deputy athletics director and chief of staff at Duke, who chair the Division I Women’s Basketball Committee next season. “We felt after much analysis that the women’s basketball NET, which will be determined by who you played, where you played, how efficiently you played and the result of the game, is a more accurate tool and should be used by the committee going forward.”

Ying Chen, J. S. Marron, Jiejie Zhang.

Source: The Annals of Applied Statistics, Volume 13, Number 3, 1590--1616.

Abstract:
Electricity prices are high dimensional, serially dependent and have seasonal variations. We propose a Warping Functional AutoRegressive (WFAR) model that simultaneously accounts for the cross time-dependence and seasonal variations of the large dimensional data. In particular, electricity price curves are obtained by smoothing over the $24$ discrete hourly prices on each day. In the functional domain, seasonal phase variations are separated from level amplitude changes in a warping process with the Fisher–Rao distance metric, and the aligned (season-adjusted) electricity price curves are modeled in the functional autoregression framework. In a real application, the WFAR model provides superior out-of-sample forecast accuracy in both a normal functioning market, Nord Pool, and an extreme situation, the California market. The forecast performance as well as the relative accuracy improvement are stable for different markets and different time periods.

Pattern separation and completion are fundamental hippocampal computations supporting memory encoding and retrieval. However, despite extensive exploration of these processes, it remains unclear whether and how top-down processes adaptively modulate the dynamics between these computations. Here we examine the role of expectation in shifting the hippocampus to perform pattern separation. In a behavioral task, 29 participants (7 males) learned a cue-object category contingency. Then, at encoding, one-third of the cues preceding the to-be-memorized objects, violated the studied rule. At test, participants performed a recognition task with old objects (targets) and a set of parametrically manipulated (very similar to dissimilar) foils for each object. Accuracy was found to be better for foils of high similarity to targets that were contextually unexpected at encoding compared with expected ones. Critically, there were no expectation-driven differences for targets and low similarity foils. To further explore these effects, we implemented a computational model of the hippocampus, performing the same task as the human participants. We used representational similarity analysis to examine how top-down expectation interacts with bottom-up perceptual input, in each layer. All subfields showed more dissimilar representations for unexpected items, with dentate gyrus (DG) and CA3 being more sensitive to expectation violation than CA1. Again, representational differences between expected and unexpected inputs were prominent for moderate to high levels of input similarity. This effect diminished when inputs from DG and CA3 into CA1 were lesioned. Overall, these novel findings strongly suggest that pattern separation in DG/CA3 underlies the effect that violation of expectation exerts on memory.

SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT What makes some events more memorable than others is a key question in cognitive neuroscience. Violation of expectation often leads to better memory performance, but the neural mechanism underlying this benefit remains elusive. In a behavioral study, we found that memory accuracy is enhanced selectively for unexpected highly similar foils, suggesting expectation violation does not enhance memory indiscriminately, but specifically aids the disambiguation of overlapping inputs. This is further supported by our subsequent investigation using a hippocampal computational model, revealing increased representational dissimilarity for unexpected highly similar foils in DG and CA3. These convergent results provide the first evidence that pattern separation plays an explicit role in supporting memory for unexpected information.

Thieves pilfered "The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring 1884" from the Singer Laren in the early hours of Monday morning

The BS6 Mahindra Scorpio drops the entry-level variant as well as is now available only with one diesel engine and 6-speed manual transmission combination.

Your generous attitude would be a blessing in disguise as you are likely to be liberated from many vices like doubt, disloyalty, depression, lack of faith, greed, attachment, egoism, and jealousy. You'll come to understand the fact today that investing often proves to be very beneficial for you, as any old investment made by you an offer profitable returns. The family's situation won't be normal as you think. Today, there is a possibility of an argument or dispute within the family. Hence, control yourself in such a case. Time to refresh your friendship by reminding good times you shared. Travel undertaken for business purpose will prove to be beneficial in the long run. You keep getting jokes on married life over social media, but today you will get really emotional when the startling beautiful facts about your married life will come afore you. If you are married, then you may hear any complaint related to your children, which can make you upset.

The way you need blocks of different sizes and styles to build great Lego masterpieces, a complex WSP-based design requires stitching together routing regions with multiple patterns that follow different WSSPDef periods. Let's see how you can achieve this. (read more)

Brazil’s yellow cururu toads eat scorpions, and they can survive five times the dose of scorpion venom that would kill a mouse – the same as 10 stings

Title: Caterpillar Invasion in London Puts People at Risk of Deadly Allergic Reactions
Category: Health News
Created: 4/30/2018 12:00:00 AM
Last Editorial Review: 5/1/2018 12:00:00 AM

Background

Expression of SerpinB2, a regulator of inflammatory processes, has been described in the context of macrophage activation and cellular senescence. Given that mechanisms for these processes interact and can shape kidney disease, it seems plausible that SerpinB2 might play a role in renal aging, injury, and repair.

Recent progress has been made in identifying genomic regions implicated in trait evolution on a microevolutionary scale in many species, but whether these are relevant over macroevolutionary time remains unclear. Here, we directly address this fundamental question using bird beak shape, a key evolutionary innovation linked to patterns of resource use, divergence, and speciation, as a model trait. We integrate class-wide geometric-morphometric analyses with evolutionary sequence analyses of 10,322 protein-coding genes as well as 229,001 genomic regions spanning 72 species. We identify 1434 protein-coding genes and 39,806 noncoding regions for which molecular rates were significantly related to rates of bill shape evolution. We show that homologs of the identified protein-coding genes as well as genes in close proximity to the identified noncoding regions are involved in craniofacial embryo development in mammals. They are associated with embryonic stem cell pathways, including BMP and Wnt signaling, both of which have repeatedly been implicated in the morphological development of avian beaks. This suggests that identifying genotype-phenotype association on a genome-wide scale over macroevolutionary time is feasible. Although the coding and noncoding gene sets are associated with similar pathways, the actual genes are highly distinct, with significantly reduced overlap between them and bill-related phenotype associations specific to noncoding loci. Evidence for signatures of recent diversifying selection on our identified noncoding loci in Darwin finch populations further suggests that regulatory rather than coding changes are major drivers of morphological diversification over macroevolutionary times.

Chlorotoxin, a small peptide component of scorpion venom, may help pinpoint glioblastoma cells for destruction when engineered into a chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy. The concept has shown efficacy in mice, without off-target toxicity, and will soon be assessed in patients.

Police have cordoned off a busy road in south east London after a double stabbing in broad daylight.

Let's spotlight a new appreciation for Jordan's greatness, the art of rebounding and the Trae Young-John Collins duo.

What day is it, again? COVID-19 has put our lives at a standstill. Here’s why that can make the whole experience seem longer.

Donald Charles Collier III, 45, of Carpinteria, Calif., pleaded guilty today before U.S. District Judge George H. Wu to one count of mailing child pornography.

Donald Collier, 45, was sentenced today to nine years in prison for mailing child pornography.

Caterpillar Inc. has agreed to pay a $2.55 million civil penalty to settle alleged Clean Air Act violations for shipping more than 590,000 highway and non-road engines without the correct emissions controls.

With crickets in decline, some scientists say that the insects' summer crooning may become a thing of the past.

Our photo of the day illustrates the whimsical world of camouflage.

Our photo of the day illustrates why the word 'caterpillar' (literally, shaggy cat) makes perfect sense.

Our well-coiffed photo of the day comes from the rain forest of Ecuador.

Experts blame urban sprawl for the increased number of attacks.

Our photo of the day comes from the romantic rain forest of Ecuador.