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Log in to manage your products and services from The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune.
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Create an account '
Subscribed through iTunes and need an NYTimes.com account?
Learn more '
Log in to manage your products and services from The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune.
Don't have an account yet?
Create an account '
Subscribed through iTunes and need an NYTimes.com account?
Learn more '
Log in to manage your products and services from The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune.
Don't have an account yet?
Create an account '
Subscribed through iTunes and need an NYTimes.com account?
Learn more '
Log in to manage your products and services from The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune.
Don't have an account yet?
Create an account '
Subscribed through iTunes and need an NYTimes.com account?
Learn more '
NEWS President Obama, who has begun a weeklong trip to Africa, had been hoping to meet with the ailing Nelson Mandela, as he did in 2005, when he was a senator. Michael D. Shear reports from Dakar, Senegal.
As European leaders from 27 countries once again trudged off to Brussels on Thursday, this time to discuss how to help their millions of unemployed, few could have any illusion about whose wishes carried the most weight: those of Chancellor Angela Merkel and her country, Germany. Alison Smale reports from Berlin.
European finance ministers made progress early Thursday morning toward a long-sought uniform approach to bank regulation on the Continent with an agreement to require shareholders and creditors to take significan t losses when banks collapse. James Kanter and Jack Ewing report from Brussels.
Ireland slid into its second recession in three years during the first quarter, the government reported Thursday. Liz Alderman and David Jolly report.
France can no longer rely on tax increases to fix its finances. That was the conclusion on Thursday of the state auditor who warned that President François Hollande's government would have no choice but to cut billions of euros in spending if it was to meet European Union deficit targets by 2015. David Jolly reports from Paris.
As the Senate v oted on an immigration bill that would let Silicon Valley companies import engineers from abroad, the labor lobby says eligible workers in the United States are being passed over. Somini Sengupta reports from San Francisco.
EDUCATION The weeklong test called the baccalauréat is the sole element considered in awarding high school diplomas, but critics say it has evolved into an exceptionally inefficient way to weed out the least proficient students. Scott Sayare reports from Paris.
FASHION The opening of the spring 2014 men's season in Paris ranged from Raf Simon's “baby boy†to Kim Jones's American road trip at Louis Vuitton. Suzy Menkes on the shows.
ARTS Starting on Monday, tickets are going to replace the popular metal tags used as admission to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Michael Silverberg and Randy Kennedy report.
Images of players slipping and falling have been the predominant ones from the first four days of Wimbledon. On Thursday another ingredient was added to the embarrassing slide show: rain. Naila-Jean Meyers on tennis.
Mark Webber, 36, a driver for the reigning world champion Red Bull team, said Thursday that he is retiring from Formula One at the end of the season. He will join Porsche in a multiyear contrac t to race in its new sports car program starting in 2014. His main challenge will be the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Brad Spurgeon reports from Stuttgart.
BEIJING - On Tuesday, shortly before China escalated its criticism of the United States over its global surveillance programs, saying they showed not just the “hypocrisy†but also the “true face†of the U.S., a Beijing lawyer named Xie Yanyi filed a public information request with the police asking about China's own surveillance operations.
Mr. Xie wanted to know: How was the state protecting citizens' rights to online and communications privacy? By what laws was surveillance taking place? Who granted the permission to monitor citizens? Were such activities approved by the National People's Congress, China's parliament? (Here it is in English.)
“China has only been accusing the United States,†but is silent about its own surveill ance, Mr. Xie said in a Skype interview. “I don't oppose the government legally managing the public's interest,†said Mr. Xie. “But it should not overstep its powers. I hope this will make people face the problem here too. China's surveillance system is extremely wild, there are no rules governing it that are worth speaking of.â€
Mr. Xie, a lawyer at the Beijing Kaitai Law Firm, who said he filed the request as a private citizen, said there were three programs in particular he wanted to know more about: Golden Shield, Great Wall and Green Dam.
Golden Shield is over a decade old, an overarching monitoring network spun by the state that encompasses the colloquially-named Great Firewall of Internet censorship (today it's made up of many different projects with different names); Green Dam is a now-defunct program to install software on computers to filter information. It wasn't immediately clear if Great Wall was a separate program, or if Mr. Xie was referring to the Great Firewall.
Chinese surveillance is extensive and invasive, say security researchers, dissidents and rights activists. Cities are installing large-scale, anti-crime systems that encompass telephone, text message, Internet and car number plate monitoring, facial recognition software and a range of other technology, according to this report about one such “Safe City†program called “Project 3.20,†in the central-eastern cities of Taizhou and Jianjiang.
Since Mr. Snowden's leaks earlier this month, Chinese state-run media have loudly criticized the cybermonitoring practices of the U.S., especially following allegations that the N.S.A. hacked into at least one backbone of China's Internet, at Tsinghua University, and targeted people and organizations in Hong Kong and the mainland of China.
It has all got ordinary Chinese talking, said Mr. Xie â€" many for the first time. Because it was h appening elsewhere, and the state itself was talking about it, ordinary people could join in the discussion. “You could call this an ‘enlightenment moment' for many people,†he said.
“After Prism started we could openly talk about it, on bulletin boards, on Weibo,†or China's popular microblogs. “Most people were critical about the U.S. and supported Snowden. They felt the U.S. had overstepped its boundaries,†he said. “The Chinese government was very happy.â€
Then the discussion started shifting to take in China's own surveillance issues. “After a while people began to talk about domestic surveillance,†Mr. Xie said. Some comments were “strongly controlled,†or censored, he said.
While state media have focused its criticisms on U.S. “hypocrisy,†and not criticized the intrinsic concept of surveillance, recent remarks by a Ministry of National Defense spokesman, Col. Yang Yujun, and a surge of commentary in state-run media “ap pear aimed at persuading Chinese citizens that their government holds the moral high ground in Internet issues,†wrote my colleague Chris Buckley.
One cybersecurity expert disagreed that it does.
“There are some stark differences between the United States and China when it comes to surveillance, transparency, and the rule of law, particularly as it relates to access to information requests,†said Greg Walton, an Internet specialist formerly at the University of Toronto, now a cybersecurity consultant based in India.
“Mr. Xie won't receive meaningful answers to his request for information because of absurd state secrets laws that trump regulations on open government,†Mr. Walton predicted. “Human rights researchers in the West know remarkably little about the surveillance state in China. The Chinese people know very little.â€
Mr. Xie said a key aim of the information request is not only to learn more about his government's surveillance activities and their legality, but also to try to further what he says is a global cause: the need for a new security architecture aimed at protecting citizens' rights to privacy. That included protecting intellectual property rights, he said. A key U.S. complaint against China has been that China has for years engaged in economic espionage.
“We are all facing a new challenge,†he said. “We need a United Nations treaty, an international framework for this.â€
Said Mr. Walton via Skype chat from India: “It is hypocritical for China to use Mr. Snowden's leaks to attack the U.S. internet freedom agenda, just as it is hypocritical for the U.S. to restrict the ‘rules of the road' to the theft of intellectual property - claiming that it doesn't engage in economic espionage against its competitors - or even allies.†He said, “According t o the European Parliament, for example, the N.S.A. has spied on Airbus to the benefit of Boeing and McDonnell-Douglas.â€
“We are all in this together, and where we do need international norms first and foremost is in defense of the right to openly debate and discuss global issues such as surveillance,†he said. “Civil society has got to be protected from state-sponsored espionage - and in this area China has a dreadful record - a decade of aggressive digital spying against anyone who they feel challenges them - from the Dalai Lama to foreign correspondents, scholars to human rights activists.â€
LONDON - A mundane errand this week took me back to Fleet Street, the birthplace and erstwhile beating heart of Britain's newspaper industry.
The old febrile buzz is long gone, along with the news organizations that once lined the narrow London thoroughfare.
It was hard not to agree with Roy Greenslade, a veteran media correspondent, writing in The Guardian this week.
“For those of us who spent years working in and around Fleet Street it is sad to go back,†he wrote, “especially since the most frequent reason to return is to attend funerals and memorial services at St. Bride's church.â€
Countless obituaries for London's Inky Way have been written since Rupert Murdoch led a steady exodus from the neighborhood by relocating The Times of London and his other newspapers in 1986 in the c ourse of a bruising war with the then-powerful print unions.
This week the BBC threw another spadeful of dirt on the grave by decreeing in its latest style guide that Fleet Street was no longer a useful synonym for the print media.
Mr. Greenslade hoped the broadcaster's diktat would be cheerfully ignored by its employees.
Fleet Street was home to the British press for 300 years, and the name is likely to linger as shorthand for the industry for as long as its journalistic ghosts continue to haunt it.
The bigger question, in Britain as elsewhere, is whether newspapers will survive as tangible printed products or whether output will eventually go exclusively online. At least one prestigious European title is actively considering whether to make the leap.
In an era of Twitter and 24-hour broadcast coverage, it might a ppear to make little sense to continue selling a product that offers yesterday's news.
But newspapers have somehow managed to survive predictions of their demise.
When I started out in the late 1960s, a venerable copy editor - he was old enough to have covered the Spanish Civil War - marveled that anyone should opt to join a dying industry.
He confidently predicted that, within a decade, readers would be receiving their news via teletype that would spew from a box located beneath their television sets.
He may have been a bit off the mark with the technology. But his belief that some kind of radical change was in store matched that of contemporary media gurus such as Canada's Marshall McLuhan, who foresaw how new methods of communication would change how people viewed the world.
The Internet is just one technology that has since changed the game for journalists and their employers. Cell and satellite phones now ensure instant communication between newsdesks and their reporters, wherever they are in the world.
That has increased the pressure to respond instantly to the latest breaking news, sometimes inevitably reducing the time for what we used to like to think was cool journalistic reflection.
That is not to say that deadlines were not always an issue.
Once upon a time, you never left the office without a pocketful of change for the phone booth or, if the assignment was to some wild foreign outpost, without a wad of cash to bribe a telex operator to jump your copy to the top of the pile.
My colleague Alan Cowell has written how, as a Reuters correspondent in Africa, he once resorted to carrier pigeon to get his story out.
The other golden rule was that you didn't get a story by sitting in the office. Some Fleet Street old-timers in terpreted that as meaning they could sit out their shifts in a nearby pub and have the bartender mediate their contacts with the desk.
Nowadays, print journalists are more likely to spend their time soberly glued to screens, fielding developments online or via television.
Ray Snoddy, a veteran British media watcher, lamented back in 2007 the emergence of a new newspaper culture created by downsizing, lower wages and multi-skilling.
“Newspapers are becoming the new slave traders,†he said, “and journalists will become people who never get out and are attached to a computer screen â€" and that's the future of journalism and newspapers.â€
He was speaking at one of those Fleet Street events where survivors gather, like miscreants returning to the scene of the crime, and inevitably end up exchanging anecdotes about the good old days.
Reunions can sometimes de scend into mawkish remembrances of times past in which, through rose-colored spectacles, the older generation looks back at a golden age of effortless “hold the front page†exclusives, hammered out on ancient typewriters in a glorious miasma of cigarette smoke and booze.
Maybe it wasn't quite like that. Still, the old Fleet Street, a 24/7 bottleneck of newsprint trucks, thundering presses, crowded pubs and all-night cafes, did have a certain something.
That's all gone. But even now, for journalists of a certain age, the smell of ink can be as evocative as the smell of greasepaint to an actor.
PARIS-A friend who has lived and worked on three continents offered some advice when I moved to Paris for a job three years ago.
Her observation of the arc of a stint overseas was that the first year of navigating a new city, a new culture, a new language and a new job - is thrilling but challenging.
“You'll get tired,†she said. “It's exciting to live abroad but it's exhausting when everything is new. You'll want to do all kinds of things - you'll want to travel. But pace yourself. Make sure you have one day a week, or weekend, with no plans at all.â€
The second year, she continued, you'll know much better what you're doing and you'll really be able to enjoy yourself. The third year, she said, was when your thoughts start to turn to the next assignment, your next move, whether it's to another new country or back home.
All of that has been true for me. In six weeks I'll move back to New York - home. I'm looking forward to it, of course, to being back among my family and friends, celebrating American holidays, operating in my own language. But after three years, Paris has become, in its own way, also home. What will I miss?
Everything predictable: My new friends here, French and Anglo. The unparalleled beauty of the city. The ubiquitous and exquisite flower shops. Going everywhere on a bicycle - to work, to shop, out to dinner, to the movies. The ease of getting around Europe. Running on the soft paths of Luxembourg Gardens. The museums. The ballet. The American musicals at Châtelet. That gorgeous Beaux-Arts glass house on the Seine, the Grand Palais.
Did I forget food?
It's not the restaurants I'll miss most, although I certainly have some favorites - comfor table neighborhood places, some with just a few dishes on the night's menu, written on a chalkboard, the meals dependent on the available seasonal produce, the wine choices dependent on the meal.
And that produce! I love the markets- both the market street I frequent, bustling, touristy rue Cler, and the many covered markets that pop up in various neighborhoods early in the morning and pack up after lunch. The first cherry tomato I popped into my mouth in France was a revelation. Peaches are rich and velvety, chosen by the fruit sellers by feel and smell for the day you plan to eat it. Pour aujourd'hui ou demain? they ask. The soup man at the market on the Boulevard Raspail offers me tastes without being asked.
But what I will miss most about Paris is the most obvious of all. I unabashedly, unapologetically adore the Eiffel Tower. Turn a corner and it pops into view, from all kinds of unexpected places. It's always the same; it's never the same. It changes depe nding on the time of day, the weather, the vantage point, whether it's twinkling. When I've felt most defeated, and I have - by the French bureaucracy, by the language, by the distance from my loved ones, by the strangeness of having altered my life so drastically in my 50s, by the rain - the Eiffel Tower suddenly appears and I feel better. It makes you look at the sky differently.
On those unplanned days my friend had recommended, usually Sunday, I explore the city by bicycle in the morning, when the streets are empty. The church bells haven't begun to ring, but the boulangers are up. I'll miss those rides, and the quiet, and the light on the buildings, and that glorious scent of bread.
How about you? If you have been posted abroad tell us where you lived and what you miss most about it.
PARISâ€"A friend who has lived and worked on three continents offered some advice when I moved to Paris for a job three years ago.
Her observation of the arc of a stint overseas was that the first year navigating a new city, a new culture, a new language and a new job â€" is thrilling but challenging.
“You’ll get tired,†she said. “It’s exciting to live abroad but it’s exhausting when everything is new. You’ll want to do all kinds of things â€" you’ll want to travel. But pace yourself. Make sure you have one day a week, or weekend, with no plans at all.â€
The second year, she continued, you know much better what you’re doing and really be able to enjoy yourself. The third year, she said, was when your thoughts start to turn to the next assignment, your next move, whether it’s to another new country or back home.
All of that has been true for me. In six weeks I’ll move back to New York â€" home. I’m looking forward to it, of course, to being back among my family and friends, celebrating American holidays, operating in my own language. But after three years, Paris has become, in its own way, also home. What will I miss?
Everything predictable: My new friends here, French and Anglo. The unparalleled beauty of the city. The ubiquitous and exquisite flower shops. Going everywhere on a bicycle â€" to work, to shop, out to dinner, to the movies. The ease of getting around Europe. Running on the soft paths of Luxembourg Gardens. The museums. The ballet. The American musicals at Châtelet. That gorgeous Beaux-Arts glass house on the Seine, the Grand Palais.
Did I forget food?
It’s not the restaurants I’ll miss most, although I certainly have some favorites â€" comfortable neighborhood places, some with ju! st a few dishes on the night’s menu, written on a chalkboard, the meals dependent on the available seasonal produce, the wine choices dependent on the meal.
And that produce! I love the marketsâ€" both the market street I frequent, bustling, touristy rue Cler, and the many covered markets that pop up in various neighborhoods early in the morning and pack up after lunch. The first cherry tomato I popped into my mouth in France was a revelation. Peaches are rich and velvety, chosen by the fruit sellers by feel and smell for the day you plan to eat it. Pour aujourd’hui ou demain? they ask. The soup man at the market on the Boulevard Raspail offers me tastes without being asked.
But what I will miss most about Paris is the most obvious of all. I unabashedly, unapologetically adore the Eiffel Tower. Turn a corner and it pops into view, from all kinds of unexpected places. It’s always the same; it’s never the same. It changes depending on the time of day, the weather, the vantage point. Whe I’ve felt most defeated, and I have â€" by the French bureaucracy, by the language, by the distance from my loved ones, by the strangeness of having altered my life so drastically in my 50s, by the rain â€" the Eiffel Tower pops into view and I feel better. It makes you look at the sky differently.
On those unplanned days my friend had recommended, usually Sunday, I explore the city by bicycle in the morning, when the streets are empty. The church bells haven’t begun to ring, but the boulangers are up. I’ll miss those rides, and the quiet, and the light on the buildings, and that glorious scent of bread.
How about you? If you have been posted abroad tell us where you lived and what you miss most about it.
LONDON â€" A mundane errand this week took me back to Fleet Street, the birthplace and erstwhile beating heart of Britain’s newspaper industry.
The old febrile buzz is long gone, along with the news organizations that once lined the narrow London thoroughfare.
It was hard not to agree with Roy Greenslade, a veteran media correspondent, writing in The Guardian this week.
“For those of us who spent years working in and around Fleet Street it is sad to go back,†he wrote, “especially since the most frequent reason to return is to attend funerals and memorial services at St. Bride’s church.â€
Countless obituaries for London’s Inky Way have been written since Rupert Murdoch led a steady exodus from the neighborhood by relocating The Times of London and his other newspapers in 1986 in the course of a bruising war wth the then-powerful print unions.
This week the BBC threw another spadeful of dirt on the grave by decreeing in its latest style guide that Fleet Street was no longer a useful synonym for the print media.
Mr. Greenslade hoped the broadcaster’s diktat would be cheerfully ignored by its employees.
Fleet Street was home to the British press for 300 years, and the name is likely to linger as shorthand for the industry for as long as its journalistic ghosts continue to haunt it.
The bigger question, in Britain as elsewhere, is whether newspapers will survive as tangible printed products or whether output will eventually go exclusively online. At least one prestigious European title is actively considering whether to make the leap.
In an era of Twitter and 24-hour broadcast coverage, it might appear to make little sense to continue selling a p! roduct that offers yesterday’s news.
But newspapers have somehow managed to survive predictions of their demise.
When I started out in the late 1960s, a venerable copy editor â€" he was old enough to have covered the Spanish Civil War â€" marveled that anyone should opt to join a dying industry.
He confidently predicted that, within a decade, readers would be receiving their news via teletype that would spew from a box located beneath their television sets.
He may have been a bit off the mark with the technology. But his belief that some kind of radical change was in store matched that of contemporary media gurus such as Canada’s Marshall McLuhan, who foresaw how new methods of communication would change how people viewed the world.
The Internet is just one technology that has since changed the game for journalists and their employers. Cell and satellite phones now ensure instant communication between newsdesks and their reportes, wherever they are in the world.
That has increased the pressure to respond instantly to the latest breaking news, sometimes inevitably reducing the time for what we used to like to think was cool journalistic reflection.
That is not to say that deadlines were not always an issue.
Once upon a time, you never left the office without a pocketful of change for the phone booth or, if the assignment was to some wild foreign outpost, without a wad of cash to bribe a telex operator to jump your copy to the top of the pile.
My colleague Alan Cowell has written how, as a Reuters correspondent in Africa, he once resorted to carrier pigeon to get his story out.
The other golden rule was that you didn’t get a story by sitting in the office. Some Fleet Street old-timers interpreted that as meaning they could sit out their shifts in a nearby pub and have the bartender med! iate thei! r contacts with the desk.
Nowadays, print journalists are more likely to spend their time soberly glued to screens, fielding developments online or via television.
Ray Snoddy, a veteran British media watcher, lamented back in 2007 the emergence of a new newspaper culture created by downsizing, lower wages and multi-skilling.
“Newspapers are becoming the new slave traders,†he said, “and journalists will become people who never get out and are attached to a computer screen - and that’s the future of journalism and newspapers.â€
He was speaking at one of those Fleet Street events where survivors gather, like miscreants returning to the scene of the crime, and inevitably end up exchanging anecdotes about the good old days.
Reunions can sometimes descend into mawkish remembrances of times past in which, through rose-colored spectacles, the older generation looks back at a golden age of efortless “hold the front page†exclusives, hammered out on ancient typewriters in a glorious miasma of cigarette smoke and booze.
Maybe it wasn’t quite like that. Still, the old Fleet Street, a 24/7 bottleneck of newsprint trucks, thundering presses, crowded pubs and all-night cafes, did have a certain something.
That’s all gone. But even now, for journalists of a certain age, the smell of ink can be as evocative as the smell of greasepaint to an actor.
NEWS President Obama, who has begun a weeklong trip to Africa, had been hoping to meet with the ailing Nelson Mandela, as he did in 2005, when he was a senator. Michael D. Shear reports from Dakar, Senegal.
As European leaders from 27 countries once again trudged off to Brussels on Thursday, this time to discuss how to help their millions of unemployed, few could have any illusion about whose wishes carried the most weight: those of Chancellor Angela Merkel and her country, Germany. Alison Smale reports from Berlin.
European finance ministers made progress early Thursday morning toward a long-sought uniform approach to bank regulation on the Continent with an agreement to require shareholders and creditors to take significant losses when banks collapse. James Kanter and Jack Ewing report from Brussels.
Ireland slid into its second recession in three years during the first quarter, the government reported Thursday. Liz Alderman and David Jolly report.
France can no longer rely on tax increases to fix its finances. That was the conclusion on Thursday of the state auditor who warned that President François Hollande’s government would have no choice but to cut billions of euros in spending if it was to meet European Union deficit targets by 2015. David Jolly reports from Paris.
As the Senate voted on an immigration bill that would let Silicon Valley ! companies import engineers from abroad, the labor lobby says eligible workers in the United States are being passed over. Somini Sengupta reports from San Francisco.
EDUCATION The weeklong test called the baccalauréat is the sole element considered in awarding high school diplomas, but critics say it has evolved into an exceptionally inefficient way to weed out the least proficient students. Scott Sayare reports from Paris.
FASHION The opening of the spring 2014 men’s season in Paris ranged from Raf Simon’s “baby boy†to Kim Jones’s American road trip at Louis Vuitton. Suzy Menkes on the shows. /p>
ARTS Starting on Monday, tickets are going to replace the popular metal tags used as admission to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Michael Silverberg and Randy Kennedy report.
Images of players slipping and falling have been the predominant ones from the first four days of Wimbledon. On Thursday another ingredient was added to the embarrassing slide show: rain. Naila-Jean Meyers on tennis.
Mark Webber, 36, a driver for the reigning world champion Red Bull team, said Thursday that he is retiring from Formula One at the end of the season. He will join Porsche in a multiyear contract to race in its new sports car program starting in 2014. His main challenge will be the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
BEIJING â€" On Tuesday, shortly before China escalated its criticism of the United States over its global surveillance programs, saying they showed not just the “hypocrisy†but also the “true face†of the U.S., a Beijing lawyer named Xie Yanyi filed a public information request with the police asking about China’s own surveillance operations.
Mr. Xie wanted to know: How was the state protecting citizens’ rights to online and communications privacy? By what laws was surveillance taking place? Who granted the permission to monitor citizens? Were such activities approved by the National People’s Congress, China’s parliament?
“China has only been accusing the United States,†but is silent its own surveillance, Mr. Xie said in a Skype interview. “I don’t oppose the government legally managing the publc’s interest,†said Mr. Xie. “But it should not overstep its powers. I hope this will make people face the problem here too. China’s surveillance system is extremely wild, there are no rules governing it that are worth speaking of.â€
Mr. Xie, a lawyer at the Beijing Kaitai Law Offices, who said he filed the request as a private citizen, said there were three programs in particular he wanted to know more about: Golden Shield, Great Wall and Green Dam.
Golden Shield is the over a decade old, an overarching monitoring network spun by the state that encompasses the colloquially-named Great Firewall of Internet censorship (today its made up of many different projects with different names); Green Dam is a now-defunct program to install software on computers to filter information. It wasn’t immediately clear if Great Wall was a separate program, or if Mr. Xie was referring to the Great Firewall.
Chinese surveillance is extensive and invasive, say security researchers, dissidents! and rights activists. Cities are installing large-scale security systems that encompass telephone, text message, Internet and car number plate monitoring, facial recognition software and a range of other methods, according to this report about one such “Safe City†program called “Project 3.20,†in the central-eastern cities of Taizhou and Jianjiang.
Since Mr. Snowden’s leaks earlier this month, Chinese state-run media have loudly criticized the cybermonitoring practices of the U.S., especially following allegations that the N.S.A. hacked into at least one backbone in China’s Internet, at Tsinghua University, and targeted people and organizations in Hong Kong and the mainland of China.
Its all got ordinary Chinese talking, said Mr. Xie - many for the first time. Because it was happening elsewhere, and the state itself was talking about it, ordinary people could join in the discussion. “You could call this an ‘enlightenment moent’ for many people,†he said.
“After Prism started we could openly talk about it, on bulletin boards, on Weibo,†China’s popular microblogs. “Most people were critical about the U.S. and supported Snowden. They felt the U.S. had overstepped its boundaries,†he said. “The Chinese government was very happy.â€
Then the discussion shifted to take in China’s own surveillance issues. “But after a while people began to talk about domestic surveillance,†with some of what is being said about China’s system censored, or “strongly controlled,†he said.
While China has so far focused its criticisms on U.S. “hypocrisy,†and not criticized the intrinsic concept of surveillance, recent remarks by a Ministry of National Defense spokesman, Col. Yang Yujun, and a surge of commentary in state-run media “appear aimed at persuading Chinese citizens that their government holds the moral high ground in Internet issues,†wrote my colleague Chris Buckley.
One cybersecurity expert disagreed that it does.
“There are some stark differences between the United States and China when it comes to surveillance, transparency, and the rule of law, particularly as it relates to access to information requests,†said Greg Walton, an Internet specialist formerly at the University of Toronto, now a cybersecurity consultant based in India.
“Mr. Xie won’t receive meaningful answers to his request for information because of absurd state secrets laws that trump regulations on open government,†Mr. Walton predicted. “Human rights researchers in the West know remarkably little about the surveillance state in China. The Chinese people know very little.â€
Mr. Xie said a key aim of the information request is not only to learn more about his government’s surveillance activities and their legality, but also to try to further what he says is a gloal cause: the need for a new security architecture aimed at protecting citizens’ rights to privacy. That included protecting intellectual property rights, he said. A key U.S. complaint against China has been that China has for years engaged in the large-scale theft of commercial and military secrets.
“We are all facing a new challenge,†he said. “We need a United Nations treaty, an international framework for this.â€
Said Mr. Walton via Skype chat from India: “It is hypocritical for China to use Mr. Snowden’s leaks to attack the U.S. internet freedom agenda, just as it is hypocritical for the U.S. to restrict the ‘rules of the road’ to the theft of intellectual property â€" claiming that it doesn’t engage in economic espionage against its competitors â€" or even allies.†He said, “According to the European Parliament, for example, the N.S.A. has spied on Airbus to the benefit of Boeing and McDonnell-Douglas.â€
“We are all in this together, and where we do ! need inte! rnational norms first and foremost is in defense of the right to openly debate and discuss global issues such as surveillance,†he said. “Civil society has got to be protected from state-sponsored espionage â€" and in this area China has a dreadful record â€" a decade of aggressive digital spying against anyone who they feel challenges them â€" from the Dalai Lama to foreign correspondents, scholars to human rights activists.â€
NEW YORKâ€" Sometimes it does seem there’s a war over women’s bodies, and nowhere does this seem more dangerous than in the large number of regions where abortion is illegal, unsafe and life-threatening.
In the United States, anti-abortion forces have lately succeeded in their drive to chip away at a woman’s right to choose, as I write in my latest Female Factor column, but women in several regions of the world face bigger obstacles.
Much of Latin America, Africa and Asia - approximately 25 percent of the world’s population - have highly restrictive abortion laws. Few countries across the swath of southern continents, from Africa to Southeast Asia, have enacted abortion rights laws and measures to protect women’s reproductive health.
In deeply Roman Catholic and patriarchal Latin America, where anti-abortion church dogma and macho traditions predominate, abortion on demand is allowed nationally only in Cuba,Guyana, Puerto Rico and Uruguay (and in Mexico City, but not in the rest of Mexico).
Yet the region has the highest estimated rates of abortions in the world, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive-health research and policy organization based in New York.
Some 4.4 million abortions were performed in Latin America in 2008, and 95 percent of those were unsafe, Guttmacher reported.
In most of those countries women seeking abortions go to midwives and other practitioners who use unsafe techniques, and some women perform abortions on themselves with drugs and other abortion-inducing methods. More than one thousand women in the region die and one million are hospitalized each year after undergoing backstreet abortions, according to the World Health Organization.
Such conditions came to the world’s attention recently with the case of a Salvadoran woman called “Beatriz,†who had lupus and kidney failure while pregnant with! a 26-week-old baby who was missing parts of its brain and was certain to die once removed from the womb. Beatriz was doomed as well, likely to die giving birth.
With the mother’s life at risk and the unborn child certain to die, El Salvador’s Supreme Court decided to abide by Salvadoran law and ruled that Beatriz did not have a right to an abortion, not even to save her life.
But at the last minute a compromise was reached. Beatriz was allowed to have the child by Caesarean section. Since she was past 20 weeks of pregnancy, the procedure was considered an “induced birth,†not an abortion. The child was delivered and died within hours, but Beatriz survived.
“Over the last decade, throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, there has been a clear offensive against the rights of women,’’ Erika Guevara, the director for Latin America and the Caribbean for the Global Fund for Women, told me last week. “Anti-abortion laws, in particular, have been used as a way to attack womenâ€s rights and diminish their political and social strength and influence.â€
But, she said, “Things are slowly starting to change for the better.†In 2007, abortion was legalized in Mexico City, and in 2012, Uruguay approved legal abortions in all circumstances, though only during the first trimester of pregnancy.
“Progress comes with serious reservations,’’ she said in an email. In Uruguay, “women seeking abortion services are required to present their case before an interdisciplinary panel comprised of three professionals - a doctor, a psychologist and a social worker - and listen to advice about alternatives including adoption and support services. Women must then wait for five days to reflect on the consequences of their decision.â€
The situation for women may be worse in parts of Africa.
“Unfortunately, in many places, such as Ethiopia and Tanzania, women are dying simply because they did not have access to safe abortion or contraception to prevent unwanted ! pregnancy! ,†Pamela W. Barnes, president and chief executive of EngenderHealth, a global women’s health nonprofit, said last week.
What she has seen on the ground in the 20 countries where EngenderHealth works has taught her that access to contraception and to abortions are critical to women’s health, she said.
“Maternal health can only be achieved if a woman can prevent an unwanted pregnancy in the first place through family planning and access to safe abortion,’’ she noted. “Millions of lives are at stake.â€
The German photographer Kai Wiedenhöfer was a student when the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989. It was the most “positive and exciting political event that I witnessed in my life,†he said. “It deeply moved me and never left me.â€
Twenty-three years later Mr.Wiedenhöfer, now 47, is preparing to plaster 36 photographs on 364 meters of one the longest remaining portions of the Berlin wall that divided the city for 28 years. His exhibition, “Wall on Wall,†will be at Mühlenstrasse, on a part of the wall overlooking the River Spree. The photos show walls that divide people, cultures and territories in Ireland, Iraq, Cyprus, Palestine, Morocco, North and South Korea and between the U.S. and Mexican border.
Mr.Wiedenhöfer first thought of exhibiting his images on the Berlin Wall when he photographed the wall built by the Israeli government in occupied Palestinian territories in 2003, returning every six months to document the construction. The series of panoramic photographs depict life in the shadow of the wall (they were published in a book in 2007). The photographer had concluded that barriers are “proof of human weaknesses and errors, the inability of human beings to communicate with each other.â€
Neil Burgess, an agent based in Britain who represents photographers such as Sebastiao Salgado and Annie Leibovitz, is a longtime supporter of Mr.Wiedenhöfer’s work and is assisting him with the project. Adrienne Goehler, a former cultural minister of the Berlin government and former head of the academy of fine arts in Hamburg, is curating the exhibition.
It took Mr.Wiedenhöfer five years to receive permission for the project from the city of Berlin. The permit was finally granted when Mr.Wiedenhöfer’s propos! al included a variety of images of walls taken between 2006 and 2012 after his experience in Palestine. The aim, he said, is to stress that walls and border fences are no solution to today’s global political and economic problems.
The back and forth with the Berlin municipality did take a toll on Mr.Wiedenhöfer and Ms. Goehler, however.
“It almost drove us crazy,†said Ms. Goehler. “We had all kinds of offers to do the exhibition if we left out the wall in the West Bank. The most astonishing fact was that officials had this idea that walls have only one narrative. What is most important for me is the human aspect â€" that these walls are separating people.â€
In all, Mr.Wiedenhöfer made 21 trips for his project, which is also planned as a book, to be published in German and English, called “Co-Frontiers.â€
Mr.Wiedenhöfer worked in Northern Ireland in the 1990s,and was dismayed, when he returned to Belfast in 2008, to see construction of what are called “peace lines†stretching over 34 kilometers. Images of this stark barrier and othersâ€"the highly controlled wall and border between North and South Korea; the dilapidated wall in Nicosia, Cyprus; barriers in Ceuta and Melilla â€" fragments of Spain in Morocco; a wall in Baghdad built by the U.S. Army, or the nine-meter high concrete wall snaking through the West Bank are among the images that will be on view.
Taken with large-format panoramic cameras, Mr.Wiedenhöfer’s photographs will be next to a seg! ment of t! he wall that has recently became a subject of intense controversy: Developers hope to tear down a portion of it in order to erect luxury apartment buildings; protesters have been fighting to retain the wall as a historical monument.
Given the history of tagging and street art on the wall, Ms. Goehler said she would be very interested in the public’s reaction. Mr.Wiedenhöfer recently conducted a three-week experiment in Berlin exhibiting his photograph of the barrier in Tijuana; it was left undamaged.
“Nothing happened, people respected it,†said Ms. Goehler, who hopes the exhibition will travel to countries where there are walls. “I would be so happy if my prognosis were correctâ€"that people can make the difference between quality and junk. It is an open and collective process, a space for debate.â€
“The Berlin Wall was proof that peace begins only when they fall.†Said Mr.Wiedenhöfer.
“Wall onWall†will be on view through July.
BEIJING â€" Is a little bit of fresh air blowing in Tibet after more than two decades of rigid policies by Beijing, and, recently, about 120 self-immolations by Tibetans protesting those policies?
Maybe. Here are some startling comments by Tsering Namgyal, a writer and journalist based in New York, in Asia Sentinel earlier this week (Mr. Namgyal was citing the Tibetan language website Khabda.org.)
“In an abrupt and unexpected reversal of policy, Chinese government officials have told monks in some Tibetan areas that they are now free to ‘worship’ the Dalai Lama as a ‘religious leader,’†Mr. Namgyal wrote.
The policy is being described as an “experiment,†Mr. Namgyal wrote. Some monks have been told they can stop criticizing the Dalai Lama, as they have ofte been required to in the past, and can stop describing him as a “wolf in monk’s robesâ€, said Mr. Namgyal, referring to an announcement apparently made during a meeting on June 14 at a Buddhist school in Qinghai province during the appointment of a new Communist Party secretary. The meeting was attended by high-ranking ethnic Tibetan and Chinese officials, said Mr. Namgyal.
The possible goal? To separate the Dalai Lama’s religious and political roles.
“‘As a religious person, from now on you should respect and follow His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama,†the new policy document cited by Mr. Namgyal ran, “but in terms of politics you are not allowed to do so. Politics and religion should go separate ways.â€
Then today there was a report that the United States ambassador to China, Gary Locke, is in Tibet this week - significant, as it would be a first trip by a U.S. ambassador to the Tibetan Autonomous Reg! ion since 2010, according to the Web site Phayul.com, which cited a U.S. embassy spokesman Nolan Barkhouse.
A call seeking comment from the U.S. embassy in Beijing wasn’t immediately returned. Phayul, a news site run by exiled Tibetans, said Mr. Locke would be in Tibet until Friday.
“Ambassador Locke is accompanied by his family members and other embassy officials, including the U.S. Consulate General to Chengdu,†Phayul.com cited Mr. Barkhouse as saying. “The purpose of the visit is to familiarize with local conditions.†Mr. Locke met with local officials and raised concerns over the human rights situation in the region, it cited Mr. Barkhouse as saying.
Next Saturday, July 6, is the exiled Dalai Lama’s 78th birthday. For decades, hardline policy makers in Beijing are said to have believed that the eventual death of the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetans who has lived in exile since March 1959 after fleeing China’s tightening grip on Tibet (on this official homepag it says he and his aides feared his assassination), would help solve its problems in Tibet.
There has been speculation whether the new president, Xi Jinping, whose family has ties to Tibet and whose father is pictured here meeting with the Dalai Lama’s brother, 26 years ago, would be able to craft a new policy.
Mr. Xi’s predecessor, Hu Jintao, a party leader of Tibet before becoming president, was seen as a conservative on the Tibet issue.
Earlier this month, a voice from within the party establishment spoke about Tibet in an interview with the Hong Kong-based news magazine Yazhou Zhoukan. Jin Wei, a researcher at the Central Party School in Beijing, appeared to urge a more flexible policy.
As the power-holder in the region, the Communist Party - which is officially atheist and has long appeared to believe that economic development would undermine opposition in Tibet - must accept the central importance of non-material values to Tibetans, she was quoted as saying in the interview on this blog, in Chinese.
“If there can be new thinking and breaking through the deadlock, not only would it further social stability and avoid the creation of hard-to-heal ethnic wounds, it would have a positive influence on other ethnic minorities in the country,†Ms. Jin said. And help improve China’s international image, she added.
Tibet isn’t the only part of this vast country where Beijing is having real trouble. Yesterday, 27 people were killed in Xinjiang, the far-western, mostly Muslim region, in a dawn “riot†that official media attributed to “knife-wielding mobs†but Chinese analysts cited by the Global Times, a newspaper that is part of the People’s Daily Group, to “terroristsâ€.
Meanwhile, in a new report, Human Rights Watch says millions of Tibetans have been rehoused and relocated since 2006 as part the “Build a New Socialist Countryside†and “New Socialist Villages†campaigns. This link provides aerial images of what the group says is the Tibetan countryside before and after, showing changes.
The 115-page report, “’They Say We Should Be Grateful’: Mass Rehousing and Relocation in Tibetan Areas of China,†documents extensive rights violations, the group said.
NEWS In a pair of major victories for the gay rights movement, the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled that married same-sex couples were entitled to federal benefits and, by declining to decide a case from California, effectively allowed same-sex marriages there. Adam Liptak reports from Washington.
President Obama’s aspirations for changing Africa have been strained by mounting security threats, spotty human rights records and by his notable absence from the continent where his father was born. Michael D. Shear, Nicholas Kulish and Lydia Polgreen.
The South African government is struggling with the issue of how to reconcile the voracious, concern-driven appetite for news of Nelson Mandela’s health with the deep sensitivities ofSouth Africans for whom he is much more than a simple leader. Declan Walsh reports from Johannesburg.
The Europe-wide scandal surrounding the substitution of cheaper horse meat in what had been labeled beef products caught the most attention from consumers, regulators and investigators this year. But in terms of food fraud, regulators and investigators say, that is just a hint of what has been happening as the economic crisis persists. Stephen Castle and Doreen Carvajal report.
Ecuador signaled it may take its time with Edward J. Snowden’s application for asylum, raising the possibility that Mr. Snowden, the fugitive former security contractor wanted in the United States, could spend weeks in legal limbo. David M. Herzenhorn and Rick Gladstone report.
ARTS A district court in Amsterdam has ordered the Anne Frank House to return a collection of archives to the Frank family foundation. Scott Sayare reports.
“The Springtime of the Renaissance†at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence explains the development of painting and the other arts in Florence during the period. Roderick Conway Morris reviews the exhibition.
SPORTS On one of the strangest days at Wimbledon, Roger Federer lost to a 116th-ranked player, Maria Sharapova was defeated by a qualifier, and several players dropped out because of injuries. Nila-Jean Meyers on tennis.
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LONDON - “We seek him here, we seek him there . . .†A BBC news reader was not alone in borrowing a line from “The Scarlet Pimpernel†to describe America's so-far-fruitless quest to pin down the whereabouts of the elusive Edward J. Snowden.
European media and the Twittersphere could not resist reflecting on Washington's discomfiture on Tuesday as the location of the former U.S. intelligence contractor remained unknown after his flight to Moscow from Hong Kong.
“Edward Snowden, the Invisible Man,†France's Libération headlined a news-agency story describing a plethora of contradictory reports about Mr. Snowden's fate since he left Hong Kong for the Russian capital on Sunday.
The Guardian, the British daily that published Mr. Snowden's revelations about the extent of online su rveillance by U.S. and British security agencies, said the quest for the 30-year-old whistleblower descended into farce when he “outpaced the world's biggest intelligence apparatus in a round-the-world chase.â€
An #OurManNOTinHavana hashtag was set up to record the wild goose chase by more than a score of the world's press who took an alcohol-free flight to Havana with nothing to show for their enterprise but photographs of Mr. Snowden's empty seat.
Piers Morgan, CNN's British presenter, found it extraordinary that the full might of U.S. intelligence agencies had failed to catch a geeky guy with a laptop.
Michael Hartt, a London-based New Yorker, suggested that Sarah Palin might have helped, given her past claim to be able to see Russia from Alaska.
The online levity leavened some more serious discussion of an affair that is proving to be a major diplomatic issue for the Obama administration.
In the latest reaction to his revelations, Liberty, a British civil rights group, called on Tuesday for an investigation into whether British intelligence services unlawfully accessed its communications.
Information that Mr. Snowden leaked to the Guardian suggested that Britain's GCHQ intelligence listening post was able to tap into and store Internet data from fiber-optic cables for 30 days in an operation called Tempora.
Since publication of his revelations began, Mr. Snowden has been cast as both hero and villain by commentators in Europe.
Nick Cohen, a British columnist and civil libertarian, this week said Mr. Snowden claimed to be engaged in civil disobedience. If that were the case, he urged him not to run.
“The hardest part of civil disobedience is that you must respect the law as you break it and face the consequences of your actions,†Mr. Cohen wrote in the weekly Spectator.
“I accept it is easy for a journalist sitting in safety in London to urge others to be brave,†Mr. Cohen acknowledged. “But the point remains that if you run away your chances of arousing ‘the conscience of the community' decline.â€
NEWS Ever since flash floods struck a mountainous area of northern India last week, 60 Indian military and civilian helicopters have been navigating fog, rain and treacherous Himalayan valleys looking for survivors and recovering bodies as part of the biggest airborne rescue and recovery operation in the history of the Indian military. As of Tuesday, the operation had rescued more than 12,000 people. The flooding, which began June 16, triggered by monsoons, has killed at least 1,000. But the rescue operation is not without hazards of its own. On Tuesday, a helicopter crashed into a mountain, killing 19 aboard. Hari Kumar reports from Dehradun, India.
President Obama, declaring that “Americans across the country are already paying the price of inaction,†announced sweeping measures on Tuesd ay to reduce greenhouse gas pollution and prepare the nation for a future of rising temperatures. Mark Landler and John M. Broder report from Washington.
When the Taliban opened their political office in Qatar last week, it was the first time in a dozen years that the world had gotten to see members of the insurgents' inner circle - and they seemed different. Urbane and educated, they conducted interviews in English, Arabic, French and German with easy fluency; passed out and received phone numbers; and, most strikingly, talked about peace. Rod Nordland and Alissa J. Rubin report.
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Tuesday appeared to rule out sending Edward J. Snowden back to the United States to face espionage charges, leav ing him in limbo even as Moscow and Washington seemed to be making an effort to prevent a cold-war-style standoff from escalating. David M. Herzenhorn, Ellen Barry and Peter Baker report.
Even as European taxpayers grimace at the escalating cost of bailing out Greece's banking system, the banks' top executives are poised to potentially strike it rich. Landon Thomas Jr. reports from London.
FASHION Giorgio Armani, the maestro of Milan, slimmed down his iconic silhouette for his spring summer 2014 men's wear show. Suzy Menkes writes on the Armani show and others from Milan.
ARTS Kim Cattrall and Daniel Radcliffe can be se en on the London stage in revivals of “Sweet Bird of Youth†and “The Cripple of Inishmaan,†respectively, and both surpass any of the stage work they have done to date. Matt Wolf on London theater.
SPORTS Soccer has been used as a catalyst for the public uprisings against Brazil's social and economic problems. The billions being spent on stadiums for the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games - and the profits that will go out of the country from those events - are clearly a cause of some of the public disaffection. Rob Hughes on soccer.
BEIJING - For more than an hour Wednesday morning, a Chinese military analyst excoriated the United States over what state-run media here calls “Prismgateâ€Â - the revelations of National Security Agency surveillance by Edward J. Snowden, a former N.S.A contractor.
Speaking in a Q&A with Xinhua, the state-run news agency, Wang Changqin, whom Xinhua described only as a “military expert†but elsewhere is identified as a professor at the Academy of Military Science of the People's Liberation Army of China, called the U.S. a “hacker empire.â€
America stole people's secrets, including economic secrets, he said.
“America has many faces,†Mr. Wang said, in comments that were often colorful and colloquial, perhaps reflecting the fact they were likely aimed for consumption by millions of ordinary Chinese.
< p>It played many roles, including as protector of Internet freedoms and symbol of online morality and security, he said. But, “as common folk here say, no matter how often you ‘play a role,' eventually the stuffing comes out,†he said. “Prismgate has shown us America's stuffing.â€â€œBefore, for a variety of reasons, we never had sufficient evidence. But now we have the evidence and everyone knows more than ever: it's not that other people are ‘harming' it,†the U.S., “but that it is ‘harming other people. Especially China,†said Mr. Wang.
He accused U.S. companies of using the fruits of the surveillance to make economic profit, and said, in a speech laced with moral admonition: “Persisting in evil brings about one's own destruction.â€
“This hegemony clearly violates human fairness, justice and the innate sense of right and wrong,†he said. “If America doesn't learn lessons from this, stop its hegemonic behavior and truly return to a harmonious way of dealing with the people of the world, get onto the path of cooperation and win-win, in the end it will ‘drop a rock on its own feet,'†he said, using a proverb. “When you fall on the road of no return that is ‘becoming an empire,' you can't get up again.â€
Mr. Wang said there were about 1,000 military and civilian online hackers mining China's secrets at the N.S.A's secretive eavesdropping organization, the Office of Tailored Access Operations, or TAO. Earlier this month, Foreign Policy magazine reported the office had “successfully penetrated Chinese computer and telecommunications systems for almost 15 years, generating some of the best and most reliable intelligence information about what is going on inside the People's Republic of China.â€
Mr. Wang is not a ranking state official, but his workplace â€" th e country's top military academy in Beijing â€" and the venue of the comments made them noteworthy.
A drumbeat of criticism had been growing earlier this year in the U.S. that China was hacking its military and commercial secrets, including this one in the New York Times that cited three authors of a new book, who do research for the U.S. government, saying it amounted to a campaign of industrial espionage aimed at leapfrogging development and overtaking the West with legally or illegally procured technology.
It was notable that Mr. Wang hit back at the allegations very early in the session, which lasted a little over one hour and was posted live on Xinhua.
“Under the influence of its propaganda, a lot of people believed: China's development wasn't just reliant on ‘hard work,' ‘resourcefulness' and ‘doing one's utmost'†, he said. “Envious and jealous, they inferred that China must have used many ‘crooked roads and paths', the so-called ‘original sin' theory.â€
“So ‘framing' China had the biggest audience. As for the complaints, they used their technology and superior media to cause a bit of noise from time to time: hey my Web site has been attacked, hey that Website has been attacked. Yelling around in that way, yelling that it was a lot, going on a long time, turning up the volume, people who didn't know easily believed it. Not long ago they shouted: the People's Liberation Army hacked us. And that time it wasn't just subordinates who yelled it but the ‘big boss,' Obama, who yelled along, even said, this is ‘stealing America's property',†he said.
“This time, everyone understands: in the end they were yelling themselves hoarse to cover their own thievery!†By tapping in to China's text message networks and the systems backbone at Tsinghua University, one of the country's biggest, as Mr. Snowden alleged in his leaks, “how much Chinese property did they steal!†“America is slipping from being a ‘hacker empire' to being a stealing money empire,†he said.
China had to protect itself by strengthening its own online security, he said.
Earlier in June, not long after Mr. Snowden's allegations became public, James Mulvenon, a vice president at Defense Group Inc., a technology company in the Washington D.C. area, said U.S. firms did not use information gleaned from surveillance operations against terrorist threats for their commercial advantage, because, among other reasons, and speaking only on a practical level, “they would not know how to distribute the spoils fairly.â€
In an email, Mr. Mulvenon said, “most of the countries we deal with have single, state-affiliated ‘national champions' in each sector, so it is easy for their intel services to provide commercial secrets to them.â€
“By co ntrast, the USG faces the prospect of anti-trust lawsuits from the private sector companies that did NOT receive the goods. For example, if the USG stole Huawei's LTE technology, who would they give it to? Cisco? Juniper? Both? What about startups in the 4G sector? Because of this problem, they don't steal commercial secrets for anyone. Of course, the Chinese do not believe us when we tell them this, since the U.S. is the only country in the world with these kind of scruples, but there it is,†said Mr. Mulvenon.
LONDON - Germany is undergoing one of its periodic bouts of angst over the seemingly unstoppable spread of Denglish, an Anglicized hybrid that purists believe is corrupting the national language.
Like the better known Franglais, it is characterized by extensive borrowings of English words for which, in many cases, there are perfectly good native equivalents.
Deutsche Bahn, the national rail network, reignited the debate this week by starting a campaign against the inflationary spread of English and pseudo-English terms among its employees.
It issued staff a booklet of German words and phrases that should henceforth be used in preference to the corresponding Anglicisms. Out go the railway's information “ho tlines†and its “call-a-bike†service, to be replaced by more Teutonic equivalents.
English borrowings are sometimes seen as adding a touch of cool to the otherwise mundane.
Adoption of Denglish has also been particularly prevalent in business and marketing, giving rise to such horrors as “Inhouse-Meeting für Outsourcing-Projekte.â€
The Germans don't always get it right. For them, a cellphone is a “handy,†an apparent Anglicism unknown in the English-speaking world. A “sprayer†is a graffiti artist, and “peeling†means a body scrub.
Snappy German dressers, like their French counterparts, have been wearing a “smoking†- a tuxedo - for years.
But the spate of more modern borrowings is sometimes viewed as indicative of a sinister cultural imperialism on the part of the so-called Anglo-Saxon world.
The British Council, which promotes English-language study abroad, perhaps enhanced that perception when it mischievously asked its German Twitter followers on Wednesday to name their favorite Denglish word.
The German Language Association warned two years ago that German could become a “peripheral†language if steps were not taken to protect it from foreign invasions.
“German has been losing its importance for 100 years,†Holger Klatte, the organization's spokesman, told The Guardian. “Particularly in the areas of technology, medicine, the Internet and the economy, English is becoming ever more important.â€
Like France's language guardians, German purists may be fighting a losing battle against international English. The results of past efforts to rid the language of foreign words had mixed results.
The words “Fernsprecher†for telephone and “Fernsehen†for television are survivors of a Nazi campaign to rid the language of its Latin element.
All lang uages are enriched by foreign borrowings and none is more of a jackdaw than English, a happy jumble of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Old French to which hundreds of words have been added from around the world.
Native English speakers tend to be more relaxed than others about adopting foreign words, which they learn naturally from an early age, even before they get to kindergarten.
BEIJING - The parents at my son's elite, state elementary school here in Beijing spoke eloquently about the difficulty of choosing a high school in my latest Letter from China. These parents are cosmopolitan, educated Chinese. Some have overseas passports, and quite a few spent years living abroad; they value aspects of both places. All want the best for their kids, but here's the crunch: they aren't always sure what the best is when it comes to education.
How do they choose amid competing and very different value systems? It's less, perhaps, to do with ideology - though the state-run system here is heavily ideological in parts - than with issues like happiness. Will my child be happy with the long hours of homework each day that Chinese education traditionally demands? Creativity is another major issue: will rote learning be good for my child, or will it take up time better spent on exploring and “blue-sky thinking� Identity: if my child already has a mixed identity by parentage or having lived overseas, which part do I encourage? Will more, or less, discipline be good for my child? Should my child grow up feeling more Chinese, or more Western?
Somehow, elementary was easy. Choosing a high school feels much more serious.
In different permutations, these concerns are shared by international parents around the world, whether in Beijing or Berlin, Mumbai or Milan. Sometimes a local spouse may have strongly-held opinions that hold sway. But high school leads straight to college, and somehow the choice represents a forking road on which we all fear taking the wrong turn.
International schools that represent a broadly Western education based on liberal values are growing in popularity around the world, according to a recent report by Knight Frank, a real estate consultan cy, the 2013 “Global Corporate Lettings†report. That found that in 2012 there was a net increase of 7.7 percent of students attending such schools.
Yet they can be very expensive, often beyond the means of all but a business elite, the independently wealthy or those employed by major corporations on cozy “expat packages.†For the self-employed, artists and other creative-thinking, curious types moving around the world seeking inspiration and cross-cultural fertilization, it's rarely an option.
In the end, for the cosmopolitan Chinese and non-Chinese parents at my son's school, it may be a question of how much they want their children to be part of the culture, with all its positives and negatives. Still, perhaps here it's easier to opt for the fully local option than in some places. After all, these days, having really good Chinese is a draw everywhere, and Chinese people are thinking about that too.
The usage expert Bryan A. Garner notes that “punctuation problems are often a prime indicator of poor writing,†and he quotes Hugh Sykes Davies on this point: “Most errors of punctuation arise from ill-designed, badly shaped sentences, and from the attempt to make them work by means of violent tricks with commas and colons.â€
No tricks and no violence, please. If you find yourself desperately shoving in commas, dashes and colons to hold a sentence together, start again and simplify. Here are some recent cases in point:
---
They may also wonder why no one, anyone, smacked the director, Zack Snyder, in the head and reminded him that he was midwifing a superhero franchise, as the film's first image, of a yelling, straining woman signals, not restaging the end of days.
Danger! Danger! Eight commas in one sentence! The jumble of phrases and clauses is very difficult to read. There's also a grammatical and logical problem in using the positive “a nyone†in apposition to the negative “no one.â€
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His harshest critics might argue that by exposing American intelligence practices, he gave aid and comfort to Al Qaeda and its allies, with whom the country remains in a military conflict, thanks to the Authorization for Use of Military Force, which Congress passed after Sept. 11, 2001, and is in force now.
The strain of trying to hold the syntax together, clause after clause, finally proves too much. Among other problems, the same “which†cannot serve both as the object of “passed†and as the subject of “is.†Once the case of the relative pronoun is determined in the clause, it can't switch; you have to repeat the pronoun. Better still, start over.
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In Hong Kong, legal experts said the government was likely to turn over Mr. Snowden if it found him and the United States asked, although he could delay extradition, potentially for months, with court challenges, but probably co uld not block the process.
Five commas here, plus the double-reverse of an “although†followed by a “but.â€
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With fields, dusty and dry one moment, muddy and saturated the next, farmers face a familiar fear - that their crops will not make it.
Here the punctuation problem was the cause, not a symptom, of the confusion. The erroneous comma after “fields†makes the sentence difficult to decipher.
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In February, Private Manning pleaded guilty to nine lesser versions of the charges he is facing - and one full one - while confessing in detail to releasing the trove of documents for which he could be sentenced to up to 20 years.
But his plea was not part of any deal and prosecutors are going to trial because they hope to convict him, based on essentially the same facts, of 20 more serious offenses - including espionage and aiding the enemy - that could result in a life sentence.
The pairs of dashes in successive sen tences are just the most obvious sign of trouble. We should have started over with this convoluted passage.
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Ms. Gibson described the growth of the Web site in the United States as steady and that it would integrate all types of experts into its coverage who it may reach through blogs, commenters and types of social media.
At least two problems tangle this sentence. We needed “said†or some other verb to introduce the clause “that it would integrate….†And we wanted “whom†- the object of “may reach†- not “who.â€
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In a Word
This week's grab bag of grammar, style and other missteps, compiled with help from colleagues and readers.
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On Friday, Mr. Marshall's lawyers made an unscheduled appearance before the trial judge, Justice A. Kirke Bartley Jr., to file a sworn affidavit from the juror, Judi DeMarco, in which she recounts the confrontation and says she felt coerced into voting to convict Mr. Marshall.
A redundancy, as all affidavits are sworn.
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KABUL, Afghanistan - First, the British marines tried to pacify it, and lost more soldiers there than anywhere else in Afghanistan.
Marines and soldiers aren't the same.
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Administration officials say that Mr. Obama is likely to make his most fulsome economic arguments against Europe's continued emphasis on budget cutting - and for the relatively successful American model - after the Group of 8 meeting, when he flies to Germany.
Perhaps we meant fullest, broadest or strongest, but not “most fulsome.†From The Times's stylebook:
fulsome means not just abundant but offensively excessive.
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It all began with “An American Family.†Without the dysfunctional Louds and the riveting real-life drama of their household, televised by PBS i n 1973, there may never have been an MTV “Real World,†any “Real Housewives,†“Bachelors†or other inescapable figures from the reality TV landscape.
Use “might,†not “may,†in this contrary-to-fact construction.
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In 1950, a young man, with or without a high school degree, would have found it much easier than it is today to get and keep a job in the auto industry.
As we noted last week, high schools grant diplomas, not degrees.
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Each country adheres to its own Orthodox church, and for decades were simply disinterested in each other.
Two problems here. The singular “each†and “its†don't work with the plural verb “wereâ€; recast the sentence. Also, we meant “uninterested,†not “disinterested,†which in careful usage means unbiased or impartial.
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But some speculated that the drinking that ki lled him wasn't just habitual but targeted; that is, despondent over the state of his career, he deliberately drank himself into a stupor, laid out too long in the sun and willed himself to die.
Lay, not laid, for the past tense of lie.
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The wording of the bill offers broad latitude to the Russian police, who already are engaged in what rights groups say are political prosecutions, to interpret the traditional or nontraditional nature of relationships portrayed in public places where children are present.
It's smoother to put the adverb between the verb parts: “are already engaged.â€
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Andrew Mokete Mlangeni, who was a prisoner at Robben Island with Mr. Mandela, told The Sunday Times newspaper that Mr. Mandela's family “must release him so that God may have his own way.â€
Pretty clear that The Sunday Times is a newspaper.
BEIJING â€" The parents at my son’s elite, state elementary school here in Beijing spoke eloquently about the difficulty of choosing a high school in my latest Letter from China. These parents are cosmopolitan, educated Chinese. Some have overseas passports, and quite a few spent years living abroad; they value aspects of both places. All want the best for their kids, but here’s the crunch: they aren’t always sure what the best is when it comes to education.
How do they choose amid competing and very different value systems? It’s less, perhaps, to do with ideology â€" though the state-run system here is heavily ideological in parts â€" than with issues like happiness. Will my child be happy with the long hours of homework each day that Chinese education traditionally demands? Creativity is another major issue: will rote learning be good for my child, or will it take up time better spet on exploring and “blue-sky thinkingâ€? Identity: if my child already has a mixed identity by parentage or having lived overseas, which part do I encourage? Will more, or less, discipline be good for my child? Should my child grow up feeling more Chinese, or more Western?
Somehow, elementary was easy. Choosing a high school feels much more serious.
In different permutations, these concerns are shared by international parents around the world, whether in Beijing or Berlin, Mumbai or Milan. Sometimes a local spouse may have strongly-held opinions that hold sway. But high school leads straight to college, and somehow the choice represents a forking road on which we all fear taking the wrong turn.
International schools that represent a broadly Western education based on liberal values are growing in popularity around the world, according to a recent report by Knight Frank, a real estate consultancy, the 2013 “Global Corporate Lettings†r! eport. That found that in 2012 there was a net increase of 7.7 percent of students attending such schools.
Yet they can be very expensive, often beyond the means of all but a business elite, the independently wealthy or those employed by major corporations on cozy “expat packages.†For the self-employed, artists and other creative-thinking, curious types moving around the world seeking inspiration and cross-cultural fertilization, it’s rarely an option.
In the end, for the cosmopolitan Chinese and non-Chinese parents at my son’s school, it may be a question of how much they want their children to be part of the culture, with all its positives and negatives. Still, perhaps here it’s easier to opt for the fully local option than in some places. After all, these days, having really good Chinese is a draw everywhere, and Chinese people are thinking about that too.
LONDON â€" Germany is undergoing one of its periodic bouts of angst over the seemingly unstoppable spread of Denglish, an Anglicised hybrid that purists believe is corrupting the national language.
Like the better known Franglais, it is characterized by extensive borrowings of English words for which, in many cases, there are perfectly good native equivalents.
Deutsche Bahn, the national rail network, reignited the debate this week by starting a campaign against the inflationary spread of English and pseudo-English terms among its employees.
It issued staff a booklet of German words and phrases that should henceforth be used in preference to the corresponding Anglicisms. Out go the railway’s information “hotlines†and its “call-a-bke†service, to be replaced by more Teutonic equivalents.
English borrowings are sometimes seen as adding a touch of cool to the otherwise mundane.
Adoption of Denglish has also been particularly prevalent in business and marketing, giving rise to such horrors as “Inhouse-Meeting für Outsourcing-Projekte.â€
The Germans don’t always get it right. For them, a cellphone is a “handyâ€, an apparent Anglicism unknown in the English-speaking world. A “sprayer†is a graffiti artist, and “peeling†means a body scrub.
Snappy German dressers, like their French counterparts, have been wearing a “smoking†â€" tuxedo â€" for years.
But the spate of more modern borrowings is sometimes viewed as indicative of a sinister cultural imperialism on the part of the so-called Anglo-Saxon world.
The British Council, which promotes English-language study abroad, perhaps enhanced that perception when it mischievously asked its German Twitter followers on Wednesday to ! name their favorite Denglish word.
The German Language Association warned two years ago that German could become a “peripheral†language if steps were not taken to protect it from foreign invasions.
“German has been losing its importance for 100 years,†Holger Klatte, the organization’s spokesman, told The Guardian. “Particularly in the areas of technology, medicine, the internet and the economy, English is becoming ever more important.â€
Like France’s language guardians, German purists may be fighting a losing battle against international English. The results of past efforts to rid the language of foreign words had mixed results.
The words “Fernsprecher†for telephone and “Fernsehen†for television are survivors of a Nazi campaign to rid the language of its Latin element.
All languages are enriched by foreign borrowings and none is more of a jackdaw than Englih, a happy jumble of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Old French to which hundreds of words have been added from around the world.
Native English-speakers tend to be more relaxed than others about adopting foreign words, which they learn naturally from an early age, even before they get to kindergarten.
LONDON â€" Germany is undergoing one of its periodic bouts of angst over the seemingly unstoppable spread of Denglish, an Anglicised hybrid that purists believe is corrupting the national language.
Like the better known Franglais, it is characterized by extensive borrowings of English words for which, in many cases, there are perfectly good native equivalents.
Deutsche Bahn, the national rail network, reignited the debate this week by starting a campaign against the inflationary spread of English and pseudo-English terms among its employees.
It issued staff a booklet of German words and phrases that should henceforth be used in preference to the corresponding Anglicisms. Out go the railway’s information “hotlines†and its “call-a-bke†service, to be replaced by more Teutonic equivalents.
English borrowings are sometimes seen as adding a touch of cool to the otherwise mundane.
Adoption of Denglish has also been particularly prevalent in business and marketing, giving rise to such horrors as “Inhouse-Meeting für Outsourcing-Projekte.â€
The Germans don’t always get it right. For them, a cellphone is a “handyâ€, an apparent Anglicism unknown in the English-speaking world. A “sprayer†is a graffiti artist, and “peeling†means a body scrub.
Snappy German dressers, like their French counterparts, have been wearing a “smoking†â€" tuxedo â€" for years.
But the spate of more modern borrowings is sometimes viewed as indicative of a sinister cultural imperialism on the part of the so-called Anglo-Saxon world.
The British Council, which promotes English-language study abroad, perhaps enhanced that perception when it mischievously asked its German Twitter followers on Wednesday to ! name their favorite Denglish word.
The German Language Association warned two years ago that German could become a “peripheral†language if steps were not taken to protect it from foreign invasions.
“German has been losing its importance for 100 years,†Holger Klatte, the organization’s spokesman, told The Guardian. “Particularly in the areas of technology, medicine, the internet and the economy, English is becoming ever more important.â€
Like France’s language guardians, German purists may be fighting a losing battle against international English. The results of past efforts to rid the language of foreign words had mixed results.
The words “Fernsprecher†for telephone and “Fernsehen†for television are survivors of a Nazi campaign to rid the language of its Latin element.
All languages are enriched by foreign borrowings and none is more of a jackdaw than Englih, a happy jumble of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Old French to which hundreds of words have been added from around the world.
Native English-speakers tend to be more relaxed than others about adopting foreign words, which they learn naturally from an early age, even before they get to kindergarten.