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We hear that Tibetans suffer “demographic aggression” and “cultural genocide”. But we do not hear those terms applied to Spanish and French policies toward the Basque minority. We do not hear those terms applied to the US annexation of the Kingdom of Hawaii in 1898. And Diego Garcia? In 1973, not so long ago, the UK forcibly deported the entire native Chagossian population from the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia. People were allowed one suitcase of clothing. Nothing else. Family pets were gassed, then cremated. Complete ethnic cleansing. Complete cultural destruction. Why? In order to build a big US air base. It has been used to bomb Afghanistan and Iraq, and soon maybe to bomb Iran and Pakistan. Diego Garcia, with nobody there but Brits and Americans, is also a perfect place for rendition, torture and other illegal actions.

The Chinese Context The Chinese government is responsible for the well-being and security of one-fourth of humanity. Race riots and rebellion cannot be tolerated, not even when done by Buddhist monks. Chinese Civilization was already old when the Egyptians began building pyramids. But the last 200 years have not gone well, what with two Opium Wars forcing China to import drugs, and Europeans seizing coastal ports as a step to complete colonial control, then the Boxer Rebellion, the collapse of the Manchu Dynasty, civil war, a brutal invasion and occupation by Japan, more civil war, then Communist consolidation and transformation of society, then Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Such events caused tens of millions of people to die. Thus, China’s recent history has good reasons why social order is a higher priority than individual rights. Race riots and rebellion cannot be tolerated. Considering this context, China’s treatment of its minorities has been exemplary compared to what the Western world has done to its minorities. After thousands of years of Chinese dominance, there still are more than 50 minorities in China. After a few hundred years of European dominance in North and South America, the original minority cultures have been exterminated, damaged, or diminished.

China’s one-child-policy seems oppressive to Westerners, but it has not applied to minorities, only to the Han Chinese. Tibetans can have as many children as they choose. If Han people have more than one child, they are punished. There is a similar preference given to minorities when it comes to admission to universities. For example, Tibetan students enter China’s elite Peking University with lower exam scores than Han Chinese students. China is not a perfect nation, but on matters of minority rights, it has been better than most Western nations. And China achieved this in the historical context of restoring itself and recovering from 200 years of continual crisis and foreign invasion.

One of the distinctive traits about Iceland’s disaster, and Wall Street’s, is how little women had to do with it. Women worked in the banks, but not in the risktaking jobs. As far as I can tell, during Iceland’s boom, there was just one woman in a senior position inside an Icelandic bank. Her name is Kristin Petursdottir, and by 2005 she had risen to become deputy C.E.O. for Kaupthing in London. “The financial culture is very male-dominated,” she says. “The culture is quite extreme. It is a pool of sharks. Women just despise the culture.” Petursdottir still enjoyed finance. She just didn’t like the way Icelandic men did it, and so, in 2006, she quit her job. “People said I was crazy,” she says, but she wanted to create a financial-services business run entirely by women. To bring, as she puts it, “more feminine values to the world of finance.” Today her firm is, among other things, one of the very few profitable financial businesses left in Iceland. After the stock exchange collapsed, the money flooded in. A few days before we met, for instance, she heard banging on the front door early one morning and opened it to discover a little old man. “I’m so fed up with this whole system,” he said. “I just want some women to take care of my money.”

THE MCCAIN NEGATIVE WORDCLOUDWords Not in McCain’s Tech Policy | blog |social network | collaboration | hyperlink | democracy | google | wikipedia | open access | open source | standards | gnu | linux | | BitTorrent | anonymity | facebook | wiki | free speech | games | comcast | media concentration | media | lolcats |

Even if we ignore the cultural, social, and democratic aspects of the Net, even if we consider the Net to be nothing but a way to move content to “consumers” (his word), McCain still gets it wrong. There’s nothing in his policy about encouraging the free flow of ideas. Instead, when McCain thinks about ideas, he thinks about how to increase the walls around them by cracking down on “pirates” and ensuring ” fair rewards to intellectual property” (which, technically speaking, I think isn’t even English). Ideas and culture are, to John McCain, business commodities. He totally misses the dramatic and startling success of the Web in generating new value via open access to ideas and cultural products. The two candidates’ visions of the Internet could not be clearer. We can have a national LAN designed first and foremost to benefit business, and delivered to passive consumers for whom the Net is a type of cable TV. Or, we can have an Internet that is of the people, by the people, for the people. Is it going to be our Internet or theirs?

“Senator McCain’s technology plan doesn’t put Americans first—it is a rehash of tax breaks and giveaways to the big corporations and their lobbyists who advise the McCain campaign. This plan won’t do enough for hardworking Americans who are still waiting for competitive and affordable broadband service at their homes and businesses. It won’t do enough to ensure a free and open Internet that guarantees freedom of speech. It won’t do anything to ensure that we use technology to bring transparency to government and free Washington from the grip of lobbyists and special interests. Senator McCain’s plan would continue George Bush’s neglect of this critical sector and relegate America’s communications infrastructure to second-class status. That’s not acceptable,” said William Kennard, Former Chairman, Federal Communications Commission.

Still, Belgian artist Wim Delvoye was another who attracted the attention of the cultural police. His proposal to display several pigs tattooed in Disney and Louis Vuitton logos was rejected by the cultural bureau, which said that it didn't consider live animals to be art.

The catalogues were not ready on exhibition day because offending pages had to be excised, and exhibitors had hassles obtaining visas because of the Olympic season crackdown. Some had to apply twice from different cities and provide letters of recommendation, but most squeezed in eventually

When you moved into Taiwan's media market, some people saw it as a vote of no confidence against Hong Kong.You're suggesting it was an insurance policy? That was the intention. I couldn't go to the United States and say: "Can you protect me?" Nobody would care. But I knew Beijing was thinking very much about Taiwan, and that they don't want bad press there. So we built the Taiwan business as leverage. If they do anything to us, our Taiwanese readers will know what happened. And Beijing knows that [should they move against us] we will do everything we can to make them pay on Taiwan.

Some experts argue that China does not intend to Westernize or liberalize, but only to modernize. Do you think people in China understand what democracy is and want it?Not at this moment. But anyone who would differentiate between Westernization and modernization is just talking rubbish. Take out the western culture and what else is modern? Nothing. The technology is Western, the trendy culture is Western, all this modernization is Westernization. China is prosperous today because it deals and interacts with the West. No, democracy isn't on normal people's radars yet. China will be open to it only when the economic cycle turns down. And when that happens, China will be in chaos. How so? In other countries, when there is a recession, you have churches, temples, charities, NGOs, civic organizations, unions and other institutions reaching out to help each other. They are shock absorbers. In China, you don't have any of this. Organizations that are not governmental are not allowed. In China, you have two pillars: the market and the government. If the market fails, the government will be dragged down because there is nothing in the middle.

How so? In other countries, when there is a recession, you have churches, temples, charities, NGOs, civic organizations, unions and other institutions reaching out to help each other. They are shock absorbers. In China, you don't have any of this. Organizations that are not governmental are not allowed. In China, you have two pillars: the market and the government. If the market fails, the government will be dragged down because there is nothing in the middle.

China prepared for the Olympics. Is the world prepared for China? Over 5 nights leading up to the opening ceremony, we revealed the controversial politics, history and culture of the world’s newest superpower and host of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. WATCH THE EPISODES HERE! Naked China: Busting Out Naked China: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Naked China: Out of Control Naked China: Fighting for FreedomNaked China: Let the Party Begin

Maidan was a group of tech-savvy pro-democracy activists who used the Internet as a tool to support their movement. Maidan in Ukranian means public square and Maidan’s website features the slogal “You CAN chnage the world you live in. And you can do it now. In Ukraine.”

The main activity of Maidan was election monitoring and networking with other pro-democracy organizations around Eastern Europe.

“websites cannot produce an activist organization.”

一个人可以被骂的毫无尊严,是因为他所处的位置,而不是这个人的品行.媒体关注的焦点,也不是人性如何如何,人民的力量如何如何,而是我们下一步会怎么样.而所谓的反思,随时随地,和事件一起同步,从发生到事后,所以几乎让人感觉不到反思的单独形象.

while most karaoke evenings might be innocent affairs, the risk of finding yourself in a compromising situation was not worth it. He advised me to make a polite excuse to avoid them.

By contrast it is precisely when you ignore your own culture and principles that you risk losing face or risk your Chinese partners thinking you are so weak you can easily be taken advantage of.

70年代生的人，他们曾经狂热过诗歌，最早接触到了流行音乐，照理说，理想主义的成分还是很浓厚的。面对社会突变，其实也是考量一个人内心是否强大的时候。

问：你的漫画颇受争议，因为经常会涉及一些儿童暴力问题，比如说虐待儿童、自杀、强奸和谋杀。那为什么冰岛人会觉得这些有趣呢？

答：我们不会觉得这些话题本身很有趣，但只要把它们放在玩笑或者故事的背景下来理解，就能让他们笑，这通常是由于冲击的效应。而我的画又简单到让读者与故事背后的残酷事实产生距离感。在这种情况下，我们才可以感受到幽默，而非惊恐。冰岛式的幽默通常是很奇怪的。可能是因为寒冷的天气和黑夜过长的关系。根据冰岛古代的“萨迦” (即英雄传说,是散文叙事体文学)所说，谋杀通常会和幽默并论。

问：一个英国教师最近被捕，原因是冒犯伊斯兰教，因为她允许她的苏丹学生用穆罕默得来命名泰迪熊。你会把穆罕默得放到你的作品中吗？答：我从来没有想过把他放在漫画里，因为我对他一点都不了解。我从来不念《可兰经》，而且我到死都不会去读它。我可不想收到任何死亡威胁和信件炸弹。

去年12月份，数百名赞比亚工人堵住了通往该冶炼厂的道路，要求加薪和改善福利，成为最新一起表明赞比亚人对中国的存在感到不安的事件。

中国国家主席胡锦涛去年对非洲进行了为期8天的访问，作为尊重的信号，其间他在赞比亚逗留了两天，这被外界广泛解读为中国担心其名誉蒙受风险的迹象。

即便在安哥拉——中国约70亿美元贷款的接受国，政府也已发出信号，表明自己不想成为中国政府的傀儡。

As the world’s attention turns to Buddhist protests against Chinese rule and cultural domination in Tibet, another neighbor of China is protesting in a less peaceful manner. In Mongolia, anti-Chinese sentiment has taken a nasty turn. The neo-Nazi group Blue Mongolia, for example, shaves the heads of women caught sleeping with Chinese men. “It is for their own good,” says Gansuren Damdinsuren, a Blue Mongolia board member.  “A small nation can only survive by keeping its blood pure.”

想想最近发生的一些事情，比如某个南半球电影节上播放的一部纪录片，我们是不是也太急于跟随权力的声音来下判断了呢？毕竟，我们甚至连那部电影的一个画面都没有看过啊！