There is no uniform definition of superpower, but most writers’ who try to define it include a growing, technologically advanced economy, a military as powerful as any other, and a unified and thriving populace. Can China achieve each of these in the 21st century?

Minxin Pei, a China specialist at Claremont McKenna College in California and a director at the Carnegie Endowment, makes the bearish case in an article for The Diplomat. He points to a large portion of the population living in poor villages, and further predicts that “the likelihood that China’s growth will slow down significantly in the next two decades is real and even substantial.” He points primarily to China as an ageing society, due to its one child per family policy.

China’s bulls point to an economy that has surged 90-fold since 1978, recently passed Japan’s to become the second largest in the world, and was recently projected to surpass the U.S. economy by 2020.

When Portland Mayor Sam Adams recently proposed three new city gun laws and two changes to existing city code, he joined hands with several mayors across the country who are trying to pass gun control laws that state lawmakers would not – or could not.

“It’s amazing to me the denial around the connection between inadequacy in our gun laws and gun crimes on the street. The legislature hasn’t connected those dots,” Adams said. “The absence of meaningful gun law changes must end. I’m intent on changing that.”

But establishing such gun laws is likely to be a tall order.

Advocates for firearms are always quick to challenge proposed laws that put limits on guns and some are already calling Adams’ effort “laughable” and a publicity stunt.

Click here for full article from The Oregonian…

What do you think? Vote! Click here for our Portland/Gun Control Poll…

We operate 10 different Twitter feeds. They are;

@voteglobal – our main catch-all feed and the most followed
@voteglobalpolls – our second most popular feed on which we just tweet about election results, our Polls and the results of our polls
@voteglobalapac – political and election news for the Asia Pacific region
@voteglobaleur – political and election news for Europe
@votegloballatam – political and election news for Latin America
@voteglobalnamer – political and election news for North America (really just US & Canada)
@votegloblafrica – political and election news for Africa
@votgloblmideast – political and election news for the Middle East
@votgloblsthasia – political and election news for the South Asia region
@voteglobalmemb – updates specifically for members of VoteGlobal

You can also follow us on Facebook at http://bit.ly/9Pj5vz

VoteGlobal is looking for volunteers and interns.

VoteGlobal is a not for profit and apolitical site that’s all about spreading democracy globally online. VoteGlobal has been in soft launch while we test the system and get the bugs out. Our main promotion is our Twitter feed which was something we experimented with and found we got good traction in bringing people to vote. Currently we have about 3500 followers across our various Twitter accounts which is not earth shattering but a good start given the modest outreach. There are a few hundred members and we have processed about 18,000 votes.

We are now entering a period in which we want to expand our activity and support a tilt at some serious fund raising. The plan is to approach a number of Foundations that are active in the democracy and political space and seek funding to enable us to grow into a mainstream site and realize our vision. This funding will enable us to hire our editorial staff. In the meantime we are very keen to get more help with content creation (not just in English) and editing along with people to help manage and edit our twitter streams and develop out our other social media strategies.

PLEASE HELP IF YOU CAN – even a few hours here and there will make a big difference. Please email me if you are prepared to volunteer at mjgale@voteglobal.com

As we near the conclusion of our somewhat extended soft launch period we wanted to reach out to everyone that has registered at the site or signed up as a volunteer. If that seems like spam please do go ahead and take yourself off the list by hitting unsubscribe. VoteGlobal is a not for profit and apolitical site that’s all about democracy and choice so we certainly don’t want to be in anyone’s face
Where we are up to
VoteGlobal has been in soft launch while we test the system and get the bugs out. While there are many features we now know we would like to add we at least do know that the basic site functionality works and our polling engine is quite rugged thanks to great work by Chris Jones and we know that people can find their way around and react to the navigation well thanks to all the efforts of Andy Davies who has been the driving force behind turning the vision into reality. We have only had one outage of our service at Amazon though that was problematic in that it was hard to get help from them in finding out what was wrong.

To date we have promoted the site to friends and family only and we have experimented with various social media. We have done a little bit with Facebook and do update our page there with new polls and we did some successful experiments with minor advertising on Facebook too. Mostly however we got wrapped up in running a Twitter feed which was something we experimented with and found we got good traction in bringing people to vote. Currently we have about 3200 followers across our various Twitter accounts which is not earth shattering but a good start given the modest outreach. There are a few hundred members and we have processed about 14,000 votes.

What comes next?

We are now entering a period in which we want to expand our activity and support a tilt at some serious fund raising. The plan is to approach a number of Foundations that are active in the democracy and political space and seek funding to enable us to grow into a mainstream site and realize our vision. We aim to raise enough funding that we can afford to complete all the feature development of the existing site and develop an iphone and other mobile apps but in particular we want to be able to beef up our content. To this end we are keen to hire a paid full time Editor in Chief who can really build out the depth of the site. We have an excellent candidate in mind and there are some great people out there. Over time we see funding the editorial process as a key function so that ultimately whilst we always draw from a strong array of volunteers we also have core full time editors covering each major region and language and specialists in different media channels. We also need to fund some straightforward marketing and buy advertising to promote hot polls.

Over the next 90 days we would like to draw on the generosity of our members to devote time as volunteers so that we can ramp up the activity at VoteGlobal and better demonstrate to potential funders just what a properly funded VoteGlobal could achieve. We are also going to start a press outreach campaign. So to this end we are very keen to get more help with content creation (not just in English) and editing along with people to help manage and edit our twitter streams and develop out our other social media strategies.

PLEASE HELP IF YOU CAN – even a few hours here and there will make a big difference. Please email me if you are prepared to volunteer at mjgale@voteglobal.com

Thank you

April 28, 2010 03:30 PM
by Denis Cummings

Polls show that there is a strong likelihood that no party will win a majority of Parliament seats in the May 6 U.K. general elections. This scenario, which has not occurred since 1974, opens up many possibilities as to which parties the control of the government and who becomes prime minister. Click here to read full article…