The Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), the largest opposition, won most votes at last month's legislative elections, as negotiations to build coalitions heat up ahead of July's presidential polls.

Deputy Foreign Minister Pham Quang Vinh (Photo: VNA)

It will rally the heads of state from around the continent to seek solutions to challenges in the plans drawn by the African Union (AU), which many people do not see as inclusive enough.

The prolonged political unrest led to Thailand's lower economic growth

Scientists from around the world have gathered in Wellington this week to discuss new standards for understanding the world's ocean ecosystems that could lead to new approaches to managing fisheries and other marine exploitation. More than 50 scientists from the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia and New Zealand have been looking at a mathematical modelling system known as MICE (Models of Intermediate Complexity in Ecosystems), which helps to measure wider interactions in marine ecosystems, said Alistair Dunn, a fisheries scientist for the New Zealand government's National Institute of water and Atmospheric Research. While scientists already knew a lot about the behavior of separate components of ocean ecosystems, such as individual fish species, and how they responded to impacts like fishing, they still knew little about how the changes in one population or part of the ecosystem would impact the rest. "These mathematical models allow us to explore how different theories of change will impact the future, and will be used to develop management strategies that are robust to future uncertainty," Dunn said in an e-mail interview with Xinhua. "For example, if an exploited fish species is a prey of another exploited species, we can model this effect and see what happens when we include this interaction, and how our management of one species might affect the other one. Eventually we hope to determine how best to manage groups of fished species together, recognizing how they are linked," he said. "While this is a fairly simple example that has been well studied, it becomes more difficult when we expand the links that we consider -- for example, complex interacting food webs; changes in species distributions as a result of environmental variability; human influences such as pollution, erosion and sedimentation on our coastal marine systems; benthic impacts of fishing and ocean mining and climate change effects such as ocean acidification and warming." MICE models had real potential to provide scientific and objective advice to policy makers. They had already been used in some instances as decision-making tools by policy makers internationally, such as linking the effect of fishing prey species and their larger fish predators in the Baltic Sea as a way of better estimating sustainable fishing levels, he said. "Managing our marine systems requires us to trade-off some impact against use. We rely on our marine systems for a range of uses including food, employment, cultural identity and recreation. These tools allow use to consider these trade-offs to ensure we are making the best use of our resources while ensuring sustainability," said Dunn. Humans were an important part of the ecosystem and were always present in the models. "Models that ignore either the human impact on ecosystems or utilization of the ecosystem by people have limited utility. MICE models explicitly include human factors. MICE are used to provide advice to managers on the effects of different potential decisions, " said Dunn. "MICE allows us to address question such as: How will the system respond to change? How will our objectives be met under different scenarios? What factors have the most influence on outcomes?" Scientists were still learning how to best deploy the new methods and were still learning the consequences of the new approach, including how to best present complex scientific ideas and model results to managers and policy advisors. "The main challenge the workshop is addressing is how to develop and implement these new tools. The workshop brings some of the best and brightest minds in the world together, allowing us to learn from each other and make progress towards making these models the new standard."                                                                                                                                                             Xinhuanet

The U.S. Federal Reserve announced on Wednesday that it will continue to reduce the amount of money it is pumping into the recovery since May, as it sees consistent improvement in the world's largest economy. The Fed decided to continue trimming the monthly bond purchase by 10 billion U.S. dollars to 45 billion U.S. dollars since May, according to a statement released after a meeting of its Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) Wednesday. "Growth in economic activity has picked up recently, after having slowed sharply during the winter in part because of adverse weather conditions," the statement said. The Committee sees the risks to the outlook for the economy and the labor market as nearly balanced, and there is sufficient underlying strength in the broader economy to support ongoing improvement in labor market, it noted. The Committee reaffirmed that a highly accommodative stance of monetary policy remains appropriate. With that policy accommodation, economic activity will expand at a moderate pace and labor market conditions will continue to improve gradually. "It likely will be appropriate to maintain the current target range for the federal funds rate for a considerable time after the asset purchase program ends, especially if projected inflation continues to run below the Committee's 2 percent longer-run goal, and provided that longer-term inflation expectations remain well anchored," according to the statement. The U.S. economy grew by a scant 0.1 percent in the first quarter, as the brutally cold weather dampened private investment and personal consumption of goods, the Commerce Department reported Wednesday. Even so, economists expected the economy would regain momentum in the coming months as the weather began to warm up. The fundamentals of the economy remains sound. Fed noted labor market indicators were mixed but on balance showed further improvement. The unemployment rate, however, remains elevated. "Household spending appears to be rising more quickly. Business fixed investment edged down, while the recovery in the housing sector remained slow," it said. Fed noted fiscal policy is restraining economic growth, although the extent of restraint is diminishing. Inflation has been running below the Committee's longer-run objective, but longer-term inflation expectations have remained stable. About when to begin to remove policy accommodation, Fed said it will take a balanced approach consistent with its longer-run goals of maximum employment and inflation of 2 percent. Even after employment and inflation are near mandate-consistent levels, economic conditions may, for some time, warrant keeping the target federal funds rate below levels the Committee views as normal in the longer run, it said. The next FOMC meeting is scheduled to begin on June 17.                                                                                                                                                                                               Xinhuanet

Thailand’s caretaker Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra and the Election Commission have agreed to hold a fresh general election on July 20, after a previous one held in February was nullified by the Constitutional Court due to disruption by protesters.

Visitors to a relic site in Indonesia (Photo: indonesia.travel)

Malaysia welcomes US President Barack Obama (Source: AFP)

The ninth day into search, 12 more bodies were retrieved from the submerged vessel Wednesday, raising the total death toll to 171. The number of missing was 131, with those rescued remaining fixed at 174.

A prolific writer who started out as a newspaper reporter, Garcia Marquez's masterpiece was "One Hundred Years of Solitude," a dream-like, dynastic epic that helped him win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.