Some news and views noted along the way while browsing.
- How to Get Censored on China’s Twitter – “The word ‘tank.’ Photos and names of Chinese dissidents. Images of rubber ducks. Any mention of Tibetan protests or Bo Xilai, the disgraced senior member of China’s Communist Party. Political cartoons. Every day, more than 100 million items are posted to Sina Weibo, the microblogging service sometimes called ‘China’s Twitter.’ And every day, teams of censors comb through the posts in search of anything that challenges what the government likes to call a ‘harmonious society’.”
- Pleas but no progress at climate talks - “The climate conference in Warsaw began under the shadow of last week’s disaster in the Philippines. But despite passionate appeals, the conference moves into its second week without any significant progress.”
- Economics explains our world – but economics degrees don’t – “We impose a curriculum that is increasingly remote from what economists now know, and more distant still from the pressing problems that drew our students to economics in the first place.”
- Football Violence: Neo-Nazis and Hooligans Find Common Ground
- Too terrified to testify - “Kenyans who are called as witnesses in the Ruto, Sang and Kenyatta trials at the International Criminal Court fear for their lives. That’s one good reason they don’t show up in The Hague.”
- We risk more Haiyans if we ignore climate change – “As the Philippines recovers, fossil-fuel lobbies focus on the short term, writes Jeffrey Sachs.”
- The Adventures of Doris Lessing ”It is as if some gauze or screen has been dissolved away from life, that was dulling it, and like Miranda you want to say, What a brave new world! You don’t remember feeling like this, because, younger, habit or the press of necessity prevented. You are taken, shaken, by moments when the improbability of our lives comes over you like a fever. Everything is remarkable, people, living, events present themselves to you with the immediacy of players in some barbarous and splendid drama that it seems we are part of. You have been given new eyes “—Doris Lessing, Time Bites
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