The Night Shift: Jon Stewart Confronts the Arizona Shootings, Makes a Passionate Appeal For Sanity and Hope

Posted by Steven James Snyder Tuesday, January 11, 2011 at 11:41 am

Talk about a hard night to be a late night comedian. Given the very public violence of the weekend, and the attempted assassination of a sitting United States congresswoman, more than a few media observers wondered aloud as to how the nation's funny men would return to the air Monday night. In the case of almost all late night shows, the incident was all but dropped from the dialogue – a downer so profound that it would surely render all skits and punch lines irrelevant.

But then there was Jon Stewart, who all but tore up his script for a show that was far more sober, and emotional, than surely most of his fans was expecting — a show that attempted to not only understand what could drive a man to murder but how a nation could find solace in the mourning, in ensuring that their deaths were not in vain. Video after the jump.

Now Stewart loves to downplay his role as serious news commentator. From his very public takedown of CNN's Crossfire to his on-air sparring with Bill O'Reilly, he has derided the news punditry even as he has attempted to distance himself from their sphere.

He says he's just a goofy dork on a silly network, with prank-calling puppets as his lead-in. But when it comes to events like Sept. 11, the Iraq War and Monday night's post-assassination processing, Stewart has increasingly been turned to as not just the man to mock the absurdity of our media-political machine, but also to make sense out of the madness. Whether he recognizes his role or not, Stewart has become an influential barometer as to the seriousness of an offense (Rick Sanchez), the merits of an argument (John McCain, on “Don't Ask, Don't Tell”) and the hypocrisy of lawmakers (the 9/11 health care bill). And every once in a while, in moments of startling sincerity and intimacy, he has also embraced the challenge of trying to process a nation's fear and pain.

In fact, over the span of a decade, he's done the latter so well that we now look to him for our dose of sanity amidst the chaos:

Now granted, Stewart's show differs from his late-night counterparts in that he's often editorializing on timely news events, rather than trying to offer a place of mindless reprieve. So I wouldn't necessarily expect every late night show to chuck out the script and speak from the heart – though it would have been nice Monday night to see a little more public discussion of the news that absolutely everyone has been talking about. Heck, there was a moment of silence observed across America Monday; wouldn't it have been nice to see the late night hosts take just a minute or two away from the Beckham jokes (Conan) or the "no pants subway ride" commentary (Letterman)?

These shows are a reprieve, yes, but they don't operate in a vacuum.

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Everybody Loves Cash. Just Don't Try to Give Anyone Some

Why are people so uncomfortable giving the most useful, most practical, and arguably most fun gift of all?

In an op-ed for the NY Times, a Princeton sociology professor traces the history of our ambivalence with giving cash as a gift. Looking back to Vaudeville acts that spoofed the idea of removing price tags before giving a gift—what would happen if you try to do the same with a $50 bill, to disguise how much it's worth?—and to Ladies' Home Journal stories from a century ago discussing artful (and inappropriate) ways to give cash, Princeton's Viviana A. Zelizer, who wrote Economic Lives: How Culture Shapes the Economy, writes that gift-givers have been struggling with the idea of giving cash for decades. Here's one example of what she's found:

In the December 1909 Ladies' Home Journal, for instance, the writer Lou Eleanor Colby said she had found a way to “disguise the money so that it would not seem just like a commercial transaction.” She explained how she had incorporated $10 for her mother into artwork. She inserted dollar bills into two posters; one showed five sad bills not knowing where to go, and the other depicted the happy ending: “five little dollars speeding joyfully” toward her mother's purse.

Whoah. This makes it seem super easy to tromp down to the mall to pick out a gift.

Speaking of which, there's a perception that buying gifts shouldn't be easy. No matter how useful a gift is—and there's no more useful gift than cash—if a gift is considered too easy to select—and there's nothing easier to give than something you already have in your wallet—it doesn't come across as thoughtful. Cash is almost literally a no-brainer of a gift; it is not deemed thoughtful. It might make total sense for all parties involved, but it is not considered thoughtful.

(Side note: Another LHJ story advised husbands that it was OK to give their wives checks, but only if they were presented in a new purse or sewing basket. I'd love to see what would happen if a husband tried to write a check to his wife today. Even if it was handed over in some fancy disguise, few wives I know of would be happy with a gift that's not all that different than paying the gas bill.)

In the Vaudeville act discussed by Zelizer, a woman winds up crying because she's unhappy with the idea her Christmas gift (cash) would be used to pay for groceries for her daughter's family. There's nothing new, then, with the idea that gift-givers want to hand their recipients something that's less than practical—something unique, that the recipient wouldn't have purchased otherwise, like groceries. Likewise, many recipients tend to most enjoy gifts that they wouldn't have bought for themselves because they weren't worth the money, or they'd cause too much guilt from self-gifting.

This is one seriously whacked-out game we play in our minds, all brought about because society has embraced certain concepts of gift appropriateness, with the help of various marketing forces. Today, gift-givers uncomfortable with giving cash defer to the gift card, which supposedly is more thoughtful, but is really just a modern-day way to disguise a cash gift.

Whereas giving cash makes sense but is not considered thoughtful, however, giving a gift card is considered thoughtful but often makes no sense.

For evidence of how little economic sense it makes to give gift cards, check out a recent SmartMoney experiment in which a reporter tried to trade in three $25 gift cards for cash at different gift-card exchange websites. At first, a service called CardWoo gives her 50% of the cards' value. Other exchange sites were paying 60% to 80% of the card's value.

The popularity of these sites should make it apparent that not all gift cards are considered by the recipients to be thoughtful. They're clearly much rather have cash. And while I haven't talked to all of the people who use these sites, it's fair to assume that they'd rather have had the full amount paid by the gift giver rather than some fraction of a gift card in cash. Which would you rather have: a $100 gift card that you might be able to trade in for $60 or $70 in cash, or a plain old $100 bill?

The SmartMoney story estimates that roughly $8 billion worth of gift cards went unused last year. Another study shows that people using gift cards shop less carefully than if they were spending their own money. Gift-card shoppers were 2.5 times more likely to pay full price compared to shoppers paying their own bills—likely because they simply want to use up the gift card asap, lest they forget about it and add to that $8 billion figure above.

So, before purchasing a gift card, take into consideration how well you know the recipient and whether the card will actually be used in a sensible, enjoyable manner. Too often nowadays, gift cards wind up being gifts—to the retailers, and to various middlemen when recipients try to swap the plastic for what they really wanted: cash.

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AT&T 1993 "You Will" Ads

Happy New Year! While most of you are making resolutions and predicting what's going to happen, Buzzfeed has uncovered this gem from 1993 about the future of technology according to AT&T. See if any of these "ideas" have become reality. The company said, "You will." And, we did.

We're borrowing books from thousands of miles away with our e-readers, watching movies on demand and navigating without stopping for directions using our GPS devices. Of course, they also predicted that our laptops would stay just as heavy and we'd still be super reliant on sending faxes, but except for not predicting that AT&T would be ranked the worst cell phone service of 2010, the company pretty much got everything right. By the way, is that guy sending a fax from a tablet? How did they even know tablets would exist? I think AT&T should try making a commercial to tell us what will happen in the next decade. If they get it right the next time around, they must have a time machine or something.

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As Sudan Prepares to Split, Tensions Rise in Abyei

By Alan Boswell / Juba Sunday, Jan. 09, 2011

For Peter Atem, the day southern Sudan sealed its independence could not come soon enough. As midnight arrived in the southern capital of Juba, Atem was already in a queue outside a polling station — even though it would not open until 8 a.m. — so eager was he to vote in a referendum to split his homeland from northern Sudan. After waiting all night, his spirits are undimmed. "Independence is what we have been fighting for," he declares. "We are here to say bye-bye."

For 50 years, the Africans of southern Sudan have struggled against the country's Arab-run central government in the north. The southerners have suffered through war, famine and even slavery in a conflict that is one of the world's costliest: some 2 million Sudanese died in the wars that ran from 1955 to 1972 and from 1983 to 2005. That dark history only made the arrival of Sunday's vote — the culmination of a cease-fire and peace process that both sides agreed to in 2005 — all the brighter. A festive mood reigned in Juba, where young men danced, sang and waved the southern Sudanese flag. But while there is no doubt how the referendum will turn out (it's almost impossible to find support for retaining northern Sudanese rule), many issues still need to be resolved before the south secedes, including how to split the country's oil fields, foreign debt and, most contentious of all, the land itself. Where to draw the line between north and south? (See pictures of southern Sudan heading to the polls.)

The border is disputed in at least seven places, the most dangerous of which is the town of Abyei, which for years has endured sporadic violence between the two sides. The town was promised its own poll on which side of the border it would be on, but that vote has been postponed due to a dispute over whether Misseriya northern nomads who pass through the area each year should be allowed to vote alongside Abyei's resident Ngok Dinka tribe. Sparks are flying once again.

Fighting between southern police and a Misseriya militia began on Jan. 7 and continued through a third day, multiple sources tell TIME. Nine police officers from the southern side were reported killed during three clashes on Jan. 8, according to a U.N. official, while casualty figures on the northern side were unknown. Clashes continued near the village of Maker Abior on Jan. 9. (Comment on this story.)

The violence appears to stem from well-organized attacks by a Misseriya militia that could number into the hundreds, said the U.N. official, who admitted that the situation was "shrouded in fog." The fighters seem to be targeting the southern police posts that have formed a security cordon around Abyei. Many suspect that the well-armed Abyei police are actually specially trained military soldiers in the southern Sudanese army. Under the peace deal, both sides' militaries had to withdraw outside Abyei's boundaries. Southern officials accuse northern authorities of arming the Misseriya groups.

"Everybody is concerned about Abyei," former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who is leading a referendum-observation mission, tells TIME while sitting under a tree at one of the many dirt-floored polling stations in Juba. "It's been a flashpoint for the past 15 to 20 years."

Actor and Sudan activist George Clooney, who visited the town on Saturday, assesses the situation more bluntly, telling TIME that if Abyei is not resolved, "then this whole thing falls apart." (See pictures of George Clooney in Sudan.)

Deng Alor, Sudan's former Foreign Minister and the current Minister of Regional Cooperation in the south, is from Abyei, as are a number of other senior political and military officials in the south. "I hope we don't go to war because of Abyei," he says. "But it is definitely part of the process of liberation."

With tension high in Abyei, and with both sides pouring weapons and soldiers into the area, the smallest incident could lead to a wider war. Yet so far, the violence seems contained. Southern officials have vowed to not be provoked into taking action during the referendum. In the north, offers from the U.S. to remove Khartoum from its list of state sponsors of terrorism — as well as focused mediation by the African Union, the European Union and China — appear to have persuaded President Omar Hassan al-Bashir's regime to choose peace, at least outside Abyei. (See what could happen for the two territories following a split.)

Which, after so many years of war, is a tantalizing prospect for most southerners. By 10 a.m., Atem has reached the front of the voting line. He relates how the south endured centuries of suppression and colonization — by the Ottomans, the Egyptians, the British and the Arabs. He himself joined the rebels in 1986. After all that time, he asks, what is 10 more hours? "Because now," he says, "we'll be free."

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The little red book that swept France

The latest call to (non-violent) arms has turned a 93-year-old war hero into a publishing phenomenon. John Lichfield reports

Monday, 3 January 2011

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Stéphane Hessel, centre, at a rally in Paris with the singer Jane Birkin and the writer Dan Franck.

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Take a book of just 13 pages, written by a relatively obscure 93-year-old man, which contains no sex, no jokes, no fine writing and no startlingly original message. A publishing disaster? No, a publishing phenomenon.

Indignez vous! (Cry out!), a slim pamphlet by a wartime French resistance hero, Stéphane Hessel, is smashing all publishing records in France. The book urges the French, and everyone else, to recapture the wartime spirit of resistance to the Nazis by rejecting the "insolent, selfish" power of money and markets and by defending the social "values of modern democracy".

The book, which costs €3, has sold 600,000 copies in three months and another 200,000 have just been printed. Its original print run was 8,000. In the run-up to Christmas, Mr Hessel's call for a "peaceful insurrection" not only topped the French bestsellers list, it sold eight times more copies than the second most popular book, a Goncourt prize-winning novel by Michel Houellebecq.

The extraordinary success of the book can be interpreted in several ways. Its low price and slender size – 29 pages including blurbs and notes but just 13 pages of text – has made it a popular stocking-filler among left-wing members of the French chattering classes. Bookshops report many instances of people buying a dozen copies for family and friends.

But Mr Hessel and his small left-wing publisher (which is used to print runs in the hundreds) say that he has evidently struck a national, and international nerve, at a time of market tyranny, bankers' bonuses and budget threats to the survival of the post-war welfare state. They also suggest that the success of the book could be an important straw in the wind as France enters a political cycle leading to the presidential elections of May 2012.

In a New Year message Mr Hessel, who survived Nazi concentration camps to become a French diplomat, said he was "profoundly touched" by the success of his book. Just as he "cried out" against Nazism in the 1940s, he said, young people today should "cry out against the complicity between politicians and economic and financial powers" and "defend our democratic rights acquired over two centuries".

In a party-political aside which might or might not undermine his new status as political prophet, Mr Hessel went on to imply that "resistance" should begin with a rejection of President Nicolas Sarkozy and a vote for the Parti Socialiste.

The book has not pleased everyone. It also contains a lengthy denunciation of Israeli government policies, especially in the Gaza Strip. Although the final chapter calls vaguely for a "non-violent" solution to the world's problems, the book also suggests that "non-violence" is not "sufficient" in the Middle East. Mr Hessel, whose father was a German jew who emigrated to France, has been accused by French jewish organisations of "anti-semitism".

Mr Hessel was born in Berlin in 1917. He emigrated to France with his family when he was seven. He joined General Charles de Gaulle in London in 1941 and was sent back to France to help organise the resistance. He was captured, tortured and sent to concentration camps in Germany. After the war, he helped to draft the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.

Jean-Pierre Barou, the joint head of the small Montpellier-based publishing house Indigène, which commissioned the book, said Mr Hessel had revealed a "deep sense of indignation in France".

As a political tract, the book contains no especially original analysis of the world's problems.

"They dare to tell us that the State can no longer afford policies to support its citizens," Mr Hessel says. "But how can money be lacking ... when the production of wealth has enormously increased since the Liberation (of France), at a time when Europe was ruined? The only explanation is that the power of money ... has never been so great or so insolent or so selfish and that its servants are placed in the highest reaches of the State."

The originality of the book is the suggestion that an organised "Resistance" is now called for, just like in 1940. "We, veterans of the resistance ... call on young people to revive and pass on the heritage and ideals of the Resistance," the book says.

How people should resist the power of money and the markets – by peaceful means, the book insists – is not made entirely clear.

A message of resistance

* "I would like everyone – everyone of us – to find his or her own reason to cry out. That is a precious gift. When something makes you want to cry out, as I cried out against Nazism, you become a militant, tough and committed. You become part of the great stream of history ... and this stream leads us towards more justice and more freedom but not the uncontrolled freedom of the fox in the hen-house."

* "It's true that reasons to cry out can seem less obvious today. The world appears too complex. But in this world, there are things we should not tolerate... I say to the young, look around you a little and you will find them. The worst of all attitudes is indifference..."

* "The productivist obsession of the West has plunged the world into a crisis which can only be resolved by a radical shift away from the 'ever more', in the world of finance but also in science and technology. It is high time that ethics, justice and a sustainable balance prevailed..."

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Rocky exoplanet milestone in hunt for Earth-like worlds

By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News, Seattle

An artist's conception shows how the star-facing side of Kepler 10b may look

Continue reading the main story

Related stories

• Kepler spies Saturn-sized worlds
• Distant world 'has rocky surface'
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Astronomers have discovered the smallest planet outside our Solar System, and the first that is undoubtedly rocky like Earth.

Measurements of unprecedented precision have shown that the planet, Kepler 10b, has a diameter 1.4 times that of Earth, and a mass 4.6 times higher.

However, because it orbits its host star so closely, the planet could not harbour life.

The discovery has been hailed as "among the most profound in human history".

The result was announced at the 217th annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, US, by Nasa's Kepler team.

The Kepler space telescope, designed to look for the signs of far-flung planets, first spotted the planet 560 light years away, alongside hundreds of other candidate planets.

Kepler relies on the "transiting" technique, which looks for planets that pass between their host star and Earth.

A tiny fraction of the star's light is blocked periodically, giving a hint that the star has a planet orbiting it.

The radius of the planet correlates to exactly how much light is blocked when it passes.

Follow-up measurements by a telescope at the Keck observatory in Hawaii confirmed the find of Kepler 10b by measuring how the planet pulls to and fro on its parent star as it orbits.

These measurements also bore out the fact that the parent star was about eight billion years old - a grandfather among stars of its type.

Crucially, this meant that the star was free of the optical and magnetic activity that have introduced some uncertainty into the measurements of previous candidates for rocky exoplanets, such as Corot-7b, announced in early 2009.

Ever-expanding fields

This cosmic dance causes tiny changes in the colour of the starlight that is measured by telescopes.

Continue reading the main story

“Start Quote

This report... will be marked as among the most profound scientific discoveries in human history”

End Quote Geoffrey Marcy University of California Berkeley

However, what completed the suite of measurements for the Kepler team was the use of asteroseismology - a study of distant stars that is akin to the study of earthquakes on the Earth.

The oscillations that occur within a star - as within the Earth - affect the frequencies of the light that the star emits in a telltale sign of the star's size.

With the size of the host star, the details of the planet's and star's mutual dance, and the planet's radius, the density of the planet can be calculated.

"All of our very best capabilities have converged on this one result and they all converge to form a picture of this planet," said Natalie Batalha, a San Jose State University professor of astrophysics who helps lead the Kepler science mission for Nasa.

Hot rocks

Professor Batalha told BBC News that the result was unique in an ever-expanding field of exoplanet discoveries, with smaller and smaller exoplanets discovered as experimental methods improve.

"We're always pushing down toward smaller and less massive, so it's natural that we're arriving there," she said.

"But perhaps what's not so natural is that we've pinned down the properties of this planet with such fantastic accuracy that we're able to say without a doubt that this is a rocky world, something that you could actually stand on."

One could, that is, if it were not so close to its host star that its daytime temperature exceeds 1,300C - so Kepler 10b is not a sensible candidate to host life. However, as Professor Batalha explained, it is a significant step in Kepler's mission.

"We want to know if we're alone in the galaxy, simply put - and this is one link in the chain toward getting to that objective.

"First we need to know if planets that could potentially harbour life are common, and we don't know if that's true - that's what Kepler is aiming to do."

A pioneer of the hunt for exoplanets, Geoffrey Marcy, from the University of California Berkeley, said that Kepler 10b represented "a planetary missing link, a bridge between the gas giant planets we've been finding and the Earth itself, a transition... between what we've been finding and what we're hoping to find".

"This report... will be marked as among the most profound scientific discoveries in human history," he said.

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Sloan data yields biggest colour night-sky image ever

By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News, Seattle

Successive zooming in on the image of the Southern Galactic Cap (lower left) shows the Messier 33 galaxy (upper left; a further magnification at centre), and even the NGC 604 "stellar nursery"

Continue reading the main story

Related stories

• Sky survey yields new cosmic haul
• Science sizes up 'ghost particle'
• Dark matter 'beach ball' unveiled

Astronomers have released the largest ever colour image of the whole sky, stitched from seven million images, each made of 125 million pixels.

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey's latest effort tops its own record, published publicly for professional astronomers and "citizen scientists" alike.

Data from Sloan has helped to identify hundreds of millions of cosmic objects.

The release was announced at the 217th annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, US.

Researchers have released an animation on YouTube demonstrating how the incredibly high-resolution image is represented on the celestial sphere.

Michael Blanton, a New York University physicist who presented the work on behalf of the Sloan team, told the conference that it was difficult to overstate the breadth of data Sloan provided.

"There's something like 3,500 papers that have been written on the basis of this data set," he said.

"A few dozen of them are being presented right now, this week at this meeting. They cover topics from the very smallest stars to the most massive black holes in the universe."

Marek Kukula, Royal Greenwich Observatory: "You can see individual stars, galaxies - the detail is incredible"

Nearly half a billion stars and galaxies have already been discovered and described thanks to Sloan images, and the new release is sure to significantly increase that number.

Sloan data is also behind the Google Sky service, which allows users to scan the heavens in the same way as scanning their local streets, and the Galaxy Zoo project, which has allowed astronomy enthusiasts to characterise galaxies from their own computers.

Digital record

The workhorse behind the data set, a camera comprising 125 million pixels that long held the record for highest-resolution camera in the world, has been retired.

Studies will now focus on spectrometry - unpicking new data on the basis of the colours of light that the upgraded equipment.

They include:

• the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, which will study the periodic ripples that were left behind in the early days of the Universe
• the Sloan Extension for Galactic Understanding and Exploration that measures the evidence of small galaxies on the edge of our Milky Way being swallowed up

• the APO Galactic Evolution Experiment, which will study red giant stars within our Galaxy to better understand the Milky Way's overall chemical recipe

• the Multi-object APO Radial Velocity Exoplanet Large-area Survey, which will spot giant planets outside our Solar System in a bid to better model how planets form

But even the data that is already available, thanks to Tuesday's release, will keep astronomers of both the professional and the amateur variety busy.

"You can compare it to the National Geographic Palomar Survey of the late 1950s," Dr Blanton said.

"This is something that 50 years later is still a really important reference to astronomers; we use it ourselves to better understand our own images. SDSS is the digital version of that."

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A very odd choice of words "dog destroyed"

"A force spokesman said the child's injuries are "serious but not life-threatening".

The dog, which was a family pet, will be destroyed. No details about the dog's breed have been revealed."

Source

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Commentary

A very odd choice of words....

Usually it's objects, not living things, which are "destroyed".

I wish the best for the toddler and hope that they recover swiftly.

China's Hu says 'a lot to be done' on human rights

Mr Hu spoke at a joint news conference on the first full day of his state visit to the US

Continue reading the main story

Hu Jintao in Washington

• Two presidents' conjuring trick
• Frei: US status anxiety over China
• China 'mistaken over US decline'
• What each side wants from talks

Chinese President Hu Jintao has acknowledged that "a lot still needs to be done" in China over human rights.

Mr Hu was speaking at a rare joint news conference with US President Barack Obama on the first full day of his state visit to the US.

Asked to justify China's human rights record, Mr Hu said China had "made enormous progress recognized in the world".

Mr Obama said he saw China's "peaceful rise" as good for the United States.

"The US has an interest in seeing hundreds of millions of people lifted out of poverty," Mr Obama said.

Mr Hu has arrived at the White House for a star-studded state dinner, and was ushered into the building by Mr Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama.

The opulent affair came following a long day of meetings and a press conference, at which the US president hailed relations with China and said the two countries had a huge stake in each other's success.

At a White House ceremony in the morning to greet Mr Hu, Mr Obama said the US and China would be more prosperous and secure when they worked together.

Mr Hu said co-operation should be based on mutual respect, and they should respect each other's development paths.

The two leaders' talks at the White House tackled issues from currency and trade to defence and security.

US officials revealed that a $45bn (£28bn) export deal had been signed with China, including Beijing's $19bn purchase of 200 Boeing aircraft.

Mr Obama said the deals would help create more than 200,000 jobs in the US.

'Source of tension'

President Barack Obama: ''I have been very candid with President Hu''

Mr Obama admitted that differences on human rights issues were "occasionally a source of tension" between the US and China.

"I believe part of justice and part of human rights is people being able to make a living and having enough to eat and having shelter and having electricity," he said.

"We welcome China's rights.

"We just want to make sure that [its] rise occurs in a way that reinforces international norms, international rules, and enhances security and peace as opposed to it being a source of conflict either in the region or around the world."

Continue reading the main story

“Start Quote

We have an enormous stake in each other's success - we will be more prosperous and more secure when we work together”

End Quote Barack Obama US president

• Two presidents' conjuring trick
• In pictures: Hu Jintao visits the US
• See Also blog: US media react

Mr Obama said that although the two nations may demonstrate differences when it comes to these issues, it does not prevent them from co-operating in other "crucial areas".

Mr Hu said China was willing to continue a conversation about human rights on the basis of mutual respect and non-interference in China's internal affairs.

"China is a developing country with a huge population and also a developing country in a crucial stage of reform," the Chinese president and Communist Party leader said.

Mr Hu added that China "faces many challenges in social and economic development. A lot still needs to be done in China on human rights."

Mr Hu at one point did not respond to an American reporter's question about human rights issues, saying later that difficulties in translation and technical equipment caused the error.

Mr Obama said earlier on Wednesday that Mr Hu's trip to the US was the basis for the next 30 years of ties between the two nations.

The two presidents promised to co-operate in their dispute over China's currency, the yuan, which the US says is kept artificially low to help Chinese exporters.

Mr Obama said the yuan's value must be driven by the market, and that there needed to be a level playing field in trade.

Continue reading the main story

The US buys far more than it sells to China - the US claims this is because China has kept its currency artificially weak. In fact trade with China accounts for 14.3% of all US trade - the States only does more trade with Canada.

Until the 1990s, the US economy grew strongly while China remained relatively stagnant. Since 2000 China's growth rate has surged, driven by economic reforms, a huge workforce and massive investment.

The US defence budget is the biggest in the world at around $700bn. China has the second largest - but its official military budget has soared since 1999 as the country's economy has grown.

China is the most populous country in the world ahead of India and the US. Its huge population has helped drive economic growth but it has also put huge stress on resources and air and water pollution are big problems.

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Mr Obama said China was a top market for American exports, supporting nearly a half a million US jobs, adding that it was important for the two nations to co-operate while remaining competitive.

During the ceremony on Wednesday morning, Mr Obama cited President Jimmy Carter's meeting with Chinese leader Deng Xiao Ping in 1979 which normalised relations between the two countries, frozen for the previous 30 years.

Continue reading the main story

Hu Jintao's itinerary

• 18 Jan: Arrives in Washington, has private dinner with US President Barack Obama
• 19 Jan: Series of bilateral meetings followed by joint press conference; lunch with Vice-President Joe Biden; formal state dinner
• 20 Jan: Visits Capitol Hill to meet congressional leaders; departs for Chicago
• 21 Jan: Leaves Chicago for Beijing

• China's media positive over Hu's US visit
• What China and the US want from visit

The White House is laying out a full formal reception with lunch at the state department, a state dinner at the White House, and meetings with some of America's most powerful business leaders from firms like General Electric, Coca-cola and Boeing.

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who was a guest at the lunch and state dinner, told the BBC's Newsnight programme: "America has to live with the China that exists.

"Whether we have to be afraid of it or not, will depend on the politics that we both pursue."

The Chinese president's visit is likely to be Mr Hu's last state trip to the US before a handover of power is completed in China in 2013.

Later in the week, Mr Hu is expected to travel to Chicago, where some predict he will sign a series of trade and investment agreements.

The US is encouraging China to buy tens of billions of dollars of aircraft, car parts, agricultural goods and beef.

Trade between the US and China is worth $400bn, up from $100m 30 years ago, when the US last formalised relations with the communist state.

China also holds the world's largest foreign currency reserves at $2.85tn and a major share of US government debt.

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JFK's inaugural speech: Six secrets of his success

By Max Atkinson Rhetoric expert

The poetic "ask not" quotation is among the speech's most memorable lines

President John F Kennedy would have been delighted to know that his inaugural address is still remembered and admired 50 years later.

Like other great communicators - including Winston Churchill before him and Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama since then - he was someone who took word-craft very seriously indeed.

Continue reading the main story

Recipe for Success

• 1. Contrasts
• 2. Three-part lists
• 3. Contrasts combined with lists
• 4. Alliteration
• 5. Bold imagery
• 6. Audience analysis

He had delegated his aide Ted Sorensen to read all the previous presidential inaugurals, with the additional brief of trying to crack the code that had made Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg address such a hit.

Fifty years on, the debate about whether he or Sorensen played the greater part in composing the speech matters less than the fact that it was a model example of how to make the most of the main rhetorical techniques and figures of speech that have been at the heart of all great speaking for more than 2,000 years. Most important among these are:

• Contrasts: "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country"
• Three-part lists: "Where the strong are just, and the weak secure and the peace preserved"
• Combinations of contrasts and lists (by contrasting a third item with the first two): "Not because the communists are doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right"

If the rhetorical structure of sentences is one set of building blocks in the language of public speaking, another involves simple "poetic" devices such as:

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• Alliteration: "Let us go forth to lead the land we love"
• Imagery: "The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans"

In general, the more use of these a speaker makes, the more applause they will get and the more likely it is that they will be recognised as a brilliant orator.

But great communicators differ as to which of these techniques they use most.

Presidents Reagan and Obama, for example, stand out as masters of anecdote and story-telling, which didn't feature at all in JFK's inaugural. Mr Obama also favours three-part lists, of which there were 29 in his 10-minute election victory speech in Chicago.

Stark warning

Kennedy, however, used very few in his inaugural address. For him, contrasts were the preferred weapon, coming as they did at a rate of about one every 39 seconds in this particular speech. Some were applauded and some have survived among the best-remembered lines.

He began with three consecutive contrasts:

• "We observe today not a victory of party but a celebration of freedom"
• "Symbolizing an end as well as a beginning"
• "Signifying renewal as well as change"

From the 20 or so he used, other widely quoted contrasts, all of which were applauded, include:

• "If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich"
• "Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate"
• "My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man"

The speech also bristled with imagery, starting with a stark warning about the way the world has changed because "man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life."

People of the developing world were "struggling to break the bonds of mass misery."

Ronald Reagan was a master of anecdote

JFK vowed to "assist free men and free governments in casting off the chains of poverty" and that "this hemisphere intends to remain the master of its own house."

He sought to "begin anew the quest for peace before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity", hoped that "a beachhead of cooperation may push back the jungle of suspicion" and issued a "call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle."

First inaugural designed for the media?

Impressive though the rhetoric and imagery may have been, what really made the speech memorable was that it was the first inaugural address by a US president to follow the first rule of speech-preparation: analyse your audience - or, to be more precise at a time when mass access to television was in its infancy, analyse your audiences.

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The Gettysburg great

Lincoln's short Gettysburg address had caught JFK's eye. Here is a sample of the speech:

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

"Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this."

In the most famous fictional speech of all time, Mark Antony had shown sensitivity to his different audiences in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar by asking his "Friends, Romans, countrymen" to lend him their ears. But Kennedy had many more audiences in mind than those who happened to be in Washington that day.

His countrymen certainly weren't left out, appearing as they did in the opening and towards the end with his most famous contrast of all: "Ask not..." But he knew, perhaps better than any previous US president, that local Americans were no longer the only audience that mattered. The age of a truly global mass media had dawned, which meant that what he said would be seen, heard or reported everywhere in the world.

At the height of the Cold War, Kennedy also had a foreign policy agenda that he wanted to be heard everywhere in the world. So the different segments of the speech were specifically targeted at a series of different audiences:

• "Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill"
• "To those new nations whom we welcome to the ranks of the free"
• "To those in the huts and villages of half the globe"
• "To our sister republics south of the border"
• "To that world assembly of sovereign states, the United Nations"
• "Finally, to those nations who would make themselves our adversary"

The following day, there was nothing on the front pages of two leading US newspapers, The New York Times and the Washington Post to suggest that the countrymen in his audience had been particularly impressed by the speech - neither of them referred to any of the lines above that have become so famous.

The fact that so much of the speech is still remembered around the world 50 years later is a measure of Kennedy's success in knowing exactly what he wanted to say, how best to say it and, perhaps most important of all, to whom he should say it.

Dr Max Atkinson is the author of Lend Me Your Ears: All You Need to Know about Public Speaking and Presentation and Speech-making and Presentation Made Easy

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