The richest 1 percent are likely to control more than half of the globe's total wealth by next year, the charity Oxfam reported in a study released on Monday.
The 80 wealthiest people in the world altogether own $1.9 trillion, the report found, nearly the same amount shared by the 3.5 billion people who occupy the bottom half of the world's income scale. (Last year, it took 85 billionaires to equal that figure.) And the richest 1 percent of the population, who number in the millions, control nearly half of the world's total wealth, a share that is also increasing.

The November 2014 (Vol. 3, No. 2) print issue of Cross-Currents features a set of articles on "Stories and Histories from the China-Vietnam Border" guest edited by Hue-Tam Ho Tai (Harvard). See complete table of contents below. To order individual copies of this issue, or to subscribe to the journal, please visit the University of Hawaiʿi Press website. (http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/p-8886-cross-currents-east-asian-history-c...).
These articles were also published in the June 2014 online issue of Cross-Currents and are archived here on our open-access website.
You also might interested in our extensive review of Nick Turse's Kill Anything That Moves (Picador, 2013) by Peter Zinoman (UC Berkeley) and Gary Kulik (former editor of American Quarterly).

The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love's Prophet
by Lawrence J. Friedman, assisted by Anke M. Schreiber
Columbia University Press, 2014

Even before opening Lawrence J. Friedman's biography, The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love's Prophet, readers are alerted by its title to the enormousness of the task of conveying the range and reach of this once celebrated intellectual. Erich Fromm was a Heidelberg University-trained sociologist, a psychoanalyst who helped found and direct psychoanalytic institutes in the United States and Mexico, author of more than a dozen books—many of them best sellers—a social commentator, and a political activist who promoted worldwide socialist humanism and nuclear disarmament. For college students and the educated reading public from the mid 1940s through the late '60s, Escape from Freedom (1941), The Sane Society (1955), and The Art of Loving (1956) were often their first introduction to psychoanalytic, Marxist, and sociological constructs that Fromm incorporated and popularized in his reader-friendly prose.

The Facebook co-founder made a New Year's resolution to read a book every other week, and on Friday he invited his 30 million Facebook followers to join him in what could become the world's largest book club.
The group's first book will be Moisés Naim's The End of Power,which argues that once-powerful positions have lost their dominance.

The Murty Classical Library of India, whose first five dual-language volumes will be released next week, will include not only Sanskrit texts but also works in Bangla, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Persian, Prakrit, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu and other languages. Projected to reach some 500 books over the next century, the series is to encompass poetry and prose, history and philosophy, Buddhist and Muslim texts as well as Hindu ones, and familiar works alongside those that have been all but unavailable to nonspecialists.

MOSCOW — In many ways, the movie "Leviathan" is Russia's greatest cinematic accomplishment in years, maybe decades. The Golden Globewinner this month for best foreign film, it provides an unrelenting, vodka-soaked portrait of small-town corruption that has been praised by critics and filmmakers throughout the world — everywhere, it seems, but Russia.
Well before its long-delayed general release here on Feb. 5 it has polarized the country, acclaimed by many as an accurate rendering of life in the Putin era and condemned by others as enemy-of-the-state propaganda that should be banned.

The narrative of "Timbuktu" is a weave of anecdotes and subplots, but it returns frequently to the tent in the dusty hills outside the city where Kidane (Ibrahim Ahmed) lives with his wife, Satima (Toulou Kiki), and their daughter, Toya (Layla Walet Mohamed), tending cows and drinking tea. The presence of the heavily armed fanatics running Timbuktu sends a dispute involving Kidane and one of his neighbors spinning toward tragedy and horror, but Kidane is more than just an innocent victim, in just the way that Mr. Sissako's film is more than a simple polemic. He is a symbol of decency and tolerance, of everything the extremists want to destroy, precisely because he is an intriguing, fully rendered individual. And "Timbuktu" is a political film in the way that "The Bicycle Thief" or "Modern Times" is a political film: It feels at once timely and permanent, immediate and essential.

TT - Hai năm trở lại đây, đã có thêm nhiều trẻ được dùng loại văcxin ngừa rotavirus gây bệnh tiêu chảy do VN sản xuất, do giá thành đã giảm tới 70% so với văcxin nhập ngoại.
Thành tựu này là của nhóm nghiên cứu thuộc Trung tâm Nghiên cứu sản xuất văcxin và sinh phẩm y tế (Bộ Y tế), đứng đầu là PGS-TS Lê Thị Luân - phó giám đốc trung tâm. Đây là lần đầu tiên có một văcxin do VN nghiên cứu sản xuất thành công từ khâu chọn chủng virút, tiêu chuẩn hóa chủng, xây dựng quy trình sản xuất...

Nhân dịp Tổng kết 10 năm đào tạo chuyên ngành An toàn thông tin giai đoạn 2004-2014 của Học viện Mật Mã, Đại tá, TS. Nguyễn Nam Hải, Giám đốc Học viện cho biết, 10 năm qua, Học viện đã thực hiện nghiên cứu 260 đề tài về An toàn thông tin, trong đó có 70 tài cấp Ban và 2 đề tài cấp Nhà nước.
Học viện Kỹ thuật Mật mã (KTMM) là trung tâm đào tạo nguồn nhân lực của Ngành Cơ yếu Việt Nam và cơ sở đào tạo đầu tiên trong cả nước đề xuất và được Bộ GD-ĐT cho phép mở chuyên ngành đào tạo kỹ sư An toàn thông tin.

The vast majority of students at American public colleges do not graduate on time, according to a new report from Complete College America, a nonprofit group based in Indianapolis.
At most public universities, only 19 percent of full-time students earn a bachelor’s degree in four years, the report found. Nationwide, only 50 of more than 580 public four-year institutions graduate a majority of their full-time students on time. The problem is even worse at community colleges, where 5 percent of full-time students earned an associate degree within two years, and 15.9 percent earned a one- to two-year certificate on time.
The report did not include statistics from private colleges and universities.