How to Make China Help Bring the War in Ukraine to an End

China's attitude towards the War in Ukraine can be described as "pro-Russian neutrality." This awkward stance has gone against high hopes, particularly in Europe, that the war could be China's moment to improve its tarnished international image by condemning Russia's aggression. However, such hopes have been unrealistic, and they have also not been substantiated by policy measures expedient to incentivising China's support. Following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, China has all in all manoeuvred cautiously. While China has lent Moscow its rhetorical support, it has shied away from providing material assistance. This shows that the war has put Beijing in a difficult position, in which it seeks to balance diverging international interests and maintain control over a challenging domestic environment. Ultimately, for China preserving its close ties with Russia takes precedence over not exacerbating its tense relations with the West. This is because the Kremlin is China's single-most important partner in its global strategic rivalry with the United States. From Beijing's viewpoint, this rivalry has only intensified further under the Joe Biden administration, which is why it has now become locked in as the key determinant of China's foreign policy. As the war is dragging on and might produce a number of outcomes unfavourable to China's own aspirations, the country's leaders have an interest in de-escalation and a negotiated settlement. This does not mean that China would be willing - or well-placed - to act as a mediator. It does mean, however, that China could help nudge Russia towards ending the war. In a world of escalating US-China rivalry, thinking the latter will abandon Russia over Ukraine is fanciful. But China is likewise interested in de-escalation. Therefore, China's leaders might still be swayed to play a more constructive role regarding bringing the war to an end. For that to happen, however, European decision makers would need to change course and try offering Beijing tangible inducements instead of solely delivering threats

Iapodian three-looped fibulae

Raziskava je posvečena tropentljastim fibulam (sl. 1), ki so značilne za žensko nošo na področju Japodov (sl. 2). Analiza pridanega nakita v grobovih iz Kompolja in Prozorja je pokazala (sl. 3), da predstavljajo tovrstne fibule v primerjavi z drugimi vrstami fibul izredno tradicionalni in konservativni kos nakita, ki je ostal v rabi več stoletij in je zato moral imeti posebni označevalni pomen za identiteto njihovih nosilk. Iz kombinacij tropentljastih fibul s kapami tipov I, II in III po Drechsler-Bižićevi in z različnimi iglami (sl. 4, 5) ter iz njihove lege v grobovih sklepamo, da so rabile za spenjanje naglavnega pokrivala bodisi kape bodisi rute. S primerjavami z dekliško in žensko nošo dinarskega tipa, značilno za severno Dalmacijo vključno z jugovzhodnim delom Velebitskega pogorja in tudi za Bosno pa smo poskušali pokazati, na kakšen način so se nosile japodske tropentljaste fibule (sl. 6–8).The discussion focuses on three-looped fibulae (Fig. 1), a significant element of the female attire in the Iapodian territory (Fig. 2). The analysis of jewelry in the graves from Kompolje and Prozor has shown (Fig. 3) that this type of fibula is an exceptionally traditional and conservative piece of jewelry when compared with the other types. It remained in use through several centuries and must have been an important indicator of the identity of the women who wore them. We can conclude from the combinations of three-looped fibulae and caps of types I, II and III after Drechsler-Bižić and various pins (Fig. 4, 5), as well as from their position in graves that they were used for fastening the head covering, whether a cap or a kerchief. We attempted to demonstrate the way the Iapodian three-looped fibulae were worn on the example of the girls’ or women’s attire of the Dinaric type, characteristic for northern Dalmatia including the southeastern part of the Velebit Mountain, as well as for Bosnia (Fig. 6–8)

The council of the employees in the Albanian Commercial Law

Law No. 9901/2008 on “Entrepreneurs and Commercial Companies”, marked a milestone in the reform of the commercial law in Albanian. Among other novelties, the Law introduced a new approach in regard to the employees and their participation in co determination. Actually, the involvement of the employees were not that unfamiliar in the former Albanian Commercial Legislation thought the social responsibility was. The Law brought in a new approach which was widely inspired from the EU Law, by establishing the Council of the Employees for any commercial company having more than 50 employees. It is true that unlike the trade unions, it is the company that bears the costs of the establishment and functioning of these councils, but besides the costs, it would mean to grant importance to the employees, as stakeholders of the corporate, by being part of the decision making process with regard to the use of special funds or actives of the company or to the allocation of the divided that the General Assembly resolves to allocate to the employees. This article will explore the legal provisions of the Law in regard to the Council of the Employees, its establishment, functioning and entitlement and how these provisions are enforced in practice from the companies in Albania

Teaching preschool children reading and writing based on the new educational standard

The article analyzes modern changes in preschool preparation of children in native language. The author investigates the problem of learning reading and writing by preschool children and ways to overcome them. The article outlines the main skills that are needed to teach children to further studying the mother tongue at school, it substantiates the need. The author proposes and organizes didactic means of forming the preschoolers’ skills necessary for proper reading and writing, and proves them on the basis of the analysis of foreign and domestic studie

New Concerns, More Cooperation? How Non-Traditional Security Issues Affect Sino-Indian Relations

Introduction to Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 3/2016: Non-Traditional Security in Sino–Indian Relation

\u27Whose Goals Am I Meeting?\u27 Policy and Practice Dilemmas in Adult Basic Education (ABE) in the Era of Accountability

For the last two decades, federal legislation and Massachusetts’ state ABE policies have linked adult learners’ educational outcomes to performance systems and accountability requirements. These outcomes, represented as ‘goals’, reflect an emphasis on return-on-investment strategies and outcome-based accountability measures. Greatest emphasis is placed on that subset of adult learners’ goals that are easily measured, attainable, and that are associated with public outcomes. This dissertation, in contrast, seeks to understand the goal setting process from the perspective of learners and local ABE stakeholders. Using a novel, mixed-method approach, this dissertation presents ABE learners’ goal setting as a decision problem in order to reveal and disentangle the conflicting preferences fueled by outcome-based accountability requirements. The study consists of two thematically related components. A descriptive phase explores internal and external determinants that influence learner goal setting. Findings from this phase inform the exploratory stage of the study, in which I apply a decision analytic framework to identify ABE learners’ and teachers’ preferences and gain insights into stakeholder involvement. This study contributes to both the scholarly literature and practice and policy related to adult basic education by assisting the debate on policies that promote mutual or multiple stakeholders’ accountability, involving discussions on how learners’ perspectives can drive performance at the local level. The study demonstrates that the ABE goal setting problem is amenable to decision analysis, and that findings derived from application of specific decision-analytic methods aid in identifying stakeholder preferences and gain insights into stakeholder involvement. Findings generated by this study provide a useful addition to the growing literature of decision modeling in education. Additionally, it has opened new avenues for comparative research in ABE across states to examine the relationship between implementation of local accountability policies and learners’ goal setting

China in the G20: A Narrow Corridor for Sino–European Cooperation

Since it hosted the G20 summit and since Trump’s ascent to the US presidency, China has promoted its role as a defender of free trade. In line with European interests, China has also become a supporter of G20 attempts to tackle the emerging crisis of globalisation. Indeed, China has many reasons to be a facilitative player in the G20. However, its engagement entails limitations for the G20 going forward. Compared to India, another emerging power, China has assumed an active role in the G20, seeking to put its stamp on the G20 agenda and calling for the forum’s transformation from a crisis-response mechanism to one of long-term economic governance. There are various incentives for China to play this role: the G20’s small but widen­ed membership relative to the G7, the opportunities for status enhancement and for pushing global governance reforms, the loose institutional design, and the focus on issues that China feels comfortable dealing with. However, China’s prospective engagement has limits. We cannot expect China to agree to a widening of the agenda beyond financial and economic issues. Also, it seems unlikely that China would offer the kind of visionary leadership necessary to fill the hegemonic vacuum should the United States continue to disengage from global governance. In the longer term, attempts by the G20 to tackle its perceived lack of legitimacy are unlikely to be welcomed by China. Calls for institutional consolidation, transparency, and accountability in the move towards more representative global institutions go against China’s key motives in supporting the G20. The corridor for Sino–European cooperation in tackling the crisis of globalisation through the G20 is clearly circumscribed: only if the G20 agenda stays focused on core financial and economic issues will China remain a facilitative player in this grouping. The sole way to prevent increasing tension between the G20’s efficiency and its legitimacy is to push for continued reforms of the traditional global institutions, allowing emerging powers a bigger say in the existing international order. If the architecture of global governance cannot be reshaped from within these global institutions, incentives for China to leverage its growing stature within alternative institutions will increase

Randomizing Ensemble-based approaches for Outlier

The data size is increasing dramatically every day, therefore, it has emerged the need of detecting abnormal behaviors, which can harm seriously our systems. Outlier detection refers to the process of identifying outlying activities, which diverge from the remaining group of data. This process, an integral part of data mining field, has experienced recently a substantial interest from the data mining community. An outlying activity or an outlier refers to a data point, which significantly deviates and appears to be inconsistent compared to other data members. Ensemble-based outlier detection is a line of research employed in order to reduce the model dependence from datasets or data locality by raising the robustness of the data mining procedures. The key principle of an ensemble approach is using the combination of individual detection results, which do not contain the same list of outliers in order to come up with a consensus finding. In this paper, we propose a novel strategy of constructing randomized ensemble outlier detection. This approach is an extension of the heuristic greedy ensemble construction previously built by the research community. We will focus on the core components of constructing an ensemble –based algorithm for outlier detection. The randomization will be performed by intervening into the pseudo code of greedy ensemble and implementing randomization in the respective java code through the ELKI data-mining platform. The key purpose of our approach is to improve the greedy ensemble and to overcome its local maxima problem. In order to induce diversity, it is performed randomization by initializing the search with a random outlier detector from the pool of detectors. Finally, the paper provides strong insights regarding the ongoing work of our randomized ensemble-based approach for outlier detection. Empirical results indicate that due to inducing diversity by employing various outlier detection algorithms, the randomized ensemble approach performs better than using only one outlier detector