China's Plan to Win in a Post-Pandemic World - The New York Times - 0 views
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China unveiled a road map for cementing its rise in a post-Covid world as it opened one of its biggest political events of the year on Friday, casting its success against the coronavirus as evidence of the superiority of its top-down leadership while warning of threats at home and abroad.
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The message on Friday was one of optimism about the strength of its economy and the solidarity of its people, and of struggle against an array of challenges: a hostile global environment, demographic crises at home and resistance to its rule of Hong Kong.
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According to the plan, the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s mini-Constitution, will be amended to change the process of selecting the territory’s chief executive and the legislature.
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Victims of Myanmar's Army Speak: 'It's Better to Walk Through a Minefield' - The New Yo... - 0 views
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The military and its brutal practices are an omnipresent fear in Myanmar, one that has intensified since the generals seized full power in a coup last month. As security forces gun down peaceful protesters on city streets, the violence that is commonplace in the countryside serves as a grisly reminder of the military’s long legacy of atrocities.
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The crackdown widened on Monday in the face of a general strike, with security forces seizing control of universities and hospitals and annulling press licenses of five media organizations. At least three protesters were shot dead.
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During the last three years, the Tatmadaw has waged war intermittently against ethnic rebel armies in three states, Rakhine, Shan and Kachin. The most intense fighting has been in Rakhine, where the Arakan Army, an ethnic Rakhine force, is seeking greater autonomy.
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China adopts new laws to ensure only 'patriots' can govern Hong Kong | Hong Kong | The ... - 0 views
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China’s rubber stamping parliamentary body has unanimously – bar one abstention and to sustained and loud applause – approved new laws ensuring that only people it deems “patriots” can govern Hong Kong, in a move critics say signals the end of the city’s remaining autonomy.
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approved new domestic amendments and budgets, and the 14th five-year-plan, intended to strengthen and expand China’s domestic technology industry and market, and reach new GDP and population targets amid economic uncertainty and declining birth rates.
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approved a decision to amend Hong Kong’s mini constitution, the basic law, and the electoral system to ensure that people opposed to the Chinese Communistparty and its rule over Hong Kong are ineligible to sit in the city’s parliament.
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China travel: Americans and other Westerners are increasingly scared of traveling there... - 0 views
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More than a dozen academics, NGO workers and media professionals CNN spoke to, who in pre-Covid times regularly traveled to China, said they were unwilling to do this once the pandemic restrictions lifted, over fears for their personal safety.
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As President Xi breeds a culture of nationalism and forges increasingly hostile relations with Western governments, some fear that if a diplomatic spat between their government and Beijing occurred while they were in China they could become a target.
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the detention of two Canadians in China in December 2018 as a turning point in their thinking. Michael Kovrig, an NGO worker and former diplomat, and Michael Spavor, who organized trips to North Korea, including for NBA player Dennis Rodman, were detained just after Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou was arrested in Vancouver on charges filed in the United States.
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All The Things You Never Even Knew You Wanted To Know About Neil Postman - NeilPostman.org - 0 views
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here are some Big Ideas that have stuck out to me:
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The medium is the message. Borrowing from McLuhan, he explained that every medium — TV, radio, typography, oral transmission — changes and biases the message itself
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The written word, for example, tends to bias the message towards linear thinking, logic, exposition, and delayed response.
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Opinion | Michel Foucault's Ideas and the Right, Left Debate - The New York Times - 0 views
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If Foucault’s thought offers a radical critique of all forms of power and administrative control, then as the cultural left becomes more powerful and the cultural right more marginal, the left will have less use for his theories, and the right may find them more insightful.
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political ambiguity, Shullenberger notes, has often attached to interpretations of Foucault’s ideas, which in his lifetime made enemies on the Marxist left and found strange affinities with Islamic radicalism and neoliberalism.
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you could say that the French philosopher was a satanic figure in multiple senses of the term: personally a wicked hedonist who rejected limits on adult appetites (whether or not the Tunisia allegations are true, Foucault explicitly argued for the legitimacy of pederasty) and philosophically a skeptical accuser, like the Satan who appears in the Book of Job, ready to point the finger at the cracks, cruelties and hypocrisies in any righteous order, to deconstruct any system of power that claims to have truth and virtue on its side.
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How the 'good war' went bad: elite soldiers from Australia, UK and US face a reckoning ... - 0 views
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As the post-9/11 Afghanistan conflict dragged deep into its second decade, with persistent rumours alleging impropriety, brutality, and even possible war crimes swirling among Australia’s tight-knit defence community, Dr Samantha Crompvoets, a civilian sociologist, was commissioned to investigate alleged cultural failings within its special forces.
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Roberts-Smith, a former SAS corporal, is suing the Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, and the Canberra Times over a series of 2018 articles he claims defamed him because they portrayed him as committing war crimes while on deployment in Afghanistan. He strenuously denies all allegations and has previously rejected them as malicious and deeply troubling.
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US soldiers were convicted over the deaths of two unarmed Afghan civilians on Bagram airbase in 2002. Two soldiers from a self-declared “kill team” pleaded guilty to murder while deployed, while Staff Sergeant Robert Bales pleaded guilty to the murder of 16 Afghan civilians during a shooting spree in Kandahar province in 2012. Members of the storied Seal Team 6 have been accused of war crimes, including beheading and mutilating slain enemies.
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Opinion: Don't Help China By Hyping Risk Of War Over Taiwan : NPR - 0 views
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China's actions no doubt have earned scrutiny. In recent years, Beijing has grown impatiently aggressive in pursuit of its ambitions. China has drawn blood along the contested Indian border, threatened Vietnam, expanded its military presence in the South China Sea, increased the tempo of its operations near the Senkaku Islands and trampled Hong Kong's autonomy — to say nothing of the atrocities it is perpetrating against its own citizens in Xinjiang and elsewhere.
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As troubling as the trend-lines of Chinese behavior are, it would be a mistake to infer that they represent a prelude to an unalterable catastrophe. China's top priority now and in the foreseeable future is to deter Taiwan independence rather than compel unification. Beijing remains confident in its capacity to achieve this near-term objective, even as it sets the groundwork for its long-term goal of unification. Indeed, based on polling on attitudes regarding defense, we believe the people of Taiwan already are sober to the risks of pursuing independence.
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China has targeted Taiwan economically, sought to induce a brain drain of Taiwan's top engineers to the mainland, isolated Taiwan on the world stage, fomented social divisions inside Taiwan, launched cyberattacks and undertaken displays of military force.
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Texas Voting Bill Nears Passage as Republicans Advance It - The New York Times - 0 views
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The Republican-controlled Texas Legislature was racing against the clock on Sunday night to pass a sweeping overhaul of the state’s election laws that would rubber-stamp some of the most rigid voting restrictions in the country, but Democrats were pledging an all-out fight to try to stall the bill and prevent it from passing by a midnight deadline.
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Earlier on Sunday, after a legislative power play by Republicans that led to an all-night session and hours of impassioned debate and objections from Democrats, the Senate passed the bill.
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Mr. Abbott, who could call a special session as early as June, has previously stated that an election overhaul was one of his top priorities for this legislative session, and he was widely expected to sign whatever bill Republicans passed.
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Valedictorian Paxton Smith Gives Defiant Speech Against Texas' New Abortion Law : NPR - 0 views
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The speech that high school valedictorian Paxton Smith pulled from inside her graduation gown was not the one she had shown the school. So she took a deep breath before launching into it, wondering whether she would be allowed to share her thoughts about Texas' new restrictive abortion law.
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"I cannot give up this platform to promote complacency and peace, when there is a war on my body and a war on my rights,"
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Despite swapping her text, Smith finished her speech and got a rousing cheer from her classmates and staff. In the days since her address on Sunday, video of the event has gone viral, and Smith has been praised for speaking her mind.
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Opinion | China Doesn't Respect Us Anymore - for Good Reason - The New York Times - 0 views
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“New Rule: You’re not going to win the battle for the 21st century if you are a ‘silly people.’ And Americans are a silly people,” said Maher. “That’s the classic phrase from ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ — when Lawrence tells his Bedouin allies that as long as they stay a bunch of squabbling tribes, they will remain ‘a silly people.’ …
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“We all know China does bad stuff. They break promises about Hong Kong autonomy; they put Uyghurs in camps and punish dissent. And we don’t want to be that. But it’s got to be something between authoritarian government that tells everyone what to do and a representative government that can’t do anything at all.”
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Maher added: “On a national level, we’ve been having Infrastructure Week every week since 2009, but we never do anything. Half the country is having a never-ending ‘woke’ competition. … The other half believes we have to stop the lizard people, because they’re eating babies. … China sees a problem and they fix it. They build a dam. We debate what to rename it.”
Trump has trashed America's most important alliance. The rift with Europe could take de... - 0 views
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The presidency of Donald Trump has left such a wretched stench in Europe that it's hard to see how, even in four years, Joe Biden could possibly get America's most important alliance back on track.
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This week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo canceled a final trip to meet with European and NATO leaders.
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Throughout Trump's term, Europeans have been walking a tightrope, trying to balance outright condemnation of the President's most destructive behavior with not alienating the leader of the Western world.
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Donald Trump declares Syria ceasefire permanent and lifts Turkey sanctions | US news | ... - 0 views
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Donald Trump has announced that the US will lift sanctions on Turkey, taking credit for a ceasefire deal that should end Ankara’s attack on Kurdish-led forces – at the price of ending the Kurds’ dream of local autonomy.
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said on Wednesday that a “small number” of US troops would remain in Syria’s oilfields.
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Trump emphasized that US troops were “safe” and said America would leave other powers to fight each other in the region.
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Opinion | Want to See My Genes? Get a Warrant - The New York Times - 0 views
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While there may be broad public support for a technique that solved serial murders, just because technology allows for a new type of investigation doesn’t mean the government should be allowed to use it in all cases.
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90 percent of Americans of European descent will be identifiable from their DNA within a year or two, even if they have not used a consumer DNA service
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As for easy access, GEDmatch’s website provides exactly this opportunity. Consumers can take profiles generated from other commercial genetic testing services, upload them free and compare them to other profiles. So can the police.
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Anna Wiener Interview: 'Uncanny Valley' - The Atlantic - 0 views
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The problem that needs to be solved there is one of transparency and autonomy. Learning how to code is one way to approach it. But it’s also about education and leveling out that power dynamic.
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I’m hoping that other people in tech read it and they relate to it in some way, and that it articulates an experience that I believe to be common and not just my own. I hope it opens up space for more writing like this, by which I mean writing about tech from the perspective of someone who’s just an average employee and not an executive.
Right fire for right future: how cultural burning can protect Australia from catastroph... - 0 views
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Indigenous fire practitioners have warned that Australia’s bush will regenerate as a “time bomb” prone to catastrophic blazes, and issued a plea to put to use traditional knowledge which is already working across the top end to reduce bushfires and greenhouse gas emissions.
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“A lot of areas will end up regenerating really strongly, but they’ll return in the wrong way. We’ll end up with the wrong species compositions and balance.
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As Australia comes to terms with this season’s catastrophic fires, Indigenous practitioners like Costello are advocating a return to “cultural burning”.
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The Age of Illusions review: anti-anti-Trump but for … what, exactly? | Books... - 0 views
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Winston Churchill supposedly said: “Americans will always do the right thing, only after they have tried everything else.” In his new book, Andrew Bacevich goes far towards proving the second half of that sentence and casts doubt on the first, without offering much in the way of alternatives.
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Yet he defines America’s supposed post-cold war consensus as “globalized neoliberalism”, “global leadership”, “freedom” (as the expansion of personal “autonomy, with traditional moral prohibitions declared obsolete and the removal of constraints maximizing choice”), and “presidential supremacy”. The 2016 election, he writes, presented the “repudiation of that very consensus”.
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In 2016, he writes, “financial impotence was to turn into political outrage, bringing the post-cold war era to an abrupt end. As for the people who shop for produce at Whole Foods, wear vintage jeans and ski in Aspen, they never saw it coming and couldn’t believe it when it occurred.”
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Barr Leaves a Legacy Defined by Trump - The New York Times - 0 views
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Though he sometimes departed from the president, the outgoing attorney general’s term was dominated by how he navigated the Russia investigation and other fraught issues.
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WASHINGTON — Soon after he undercut President Trump’s baseless claims of widespread voter fraud in early December, Attorney General William P. Barr’s time atop the Justice Department hurtled to its end. The president and his allies attacked Mr. Barr in public and private, making clear that he should retract his assessment or spend the last weeks of the administration belittled and possibly fired in humiliating fashion.
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But Mr. Barr also showed flashes of autonomy at the end of his tenure. His reversal on voter fraud broke from the president. He said he saw no need for a special counsel to investigate President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son Hunter as Mr. Trump clamored for one. And Mr. Barr even acknowledged that some of his suspicions about the Obama administration’s examination of Russian election interference were misguided.
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