Dalai Lama: No More ‘Wolf in Monk’s Robes’?

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 robes”, 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.”

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 “terrorists”.

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.

IHT Quick Read: June 27

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.

Study Asks if Tainted Chinese Herbs Are Harming, Not Healing

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Buying Food That\'s Past Its Prime to Save the Planet

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IHT Quick Read: June 25

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Snowden\'s Whereabouts: No Laughing Matter

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.”

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.”

IHT Quick Read: June 26

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.

U.S. Is a ‘Hacker Empire,\' Says Chinese Military Analyst

BEIJING - For more than an hour Wednesday morning, a Chinese military analyst excoriated the United States over what state-run media here calls “Prismgate”  - 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.”

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.”

“Before, 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.”

“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.”

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.”

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.”

“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.”

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.”

“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.

Sprechen Sie Denglish?

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.”

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.”

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.

For China\'s Cosmopolitans, the Challenge of Choosing a High School

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.

Tangled Passages

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.”

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.”

---

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.

---

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.”

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.”

 
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.

---

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.

---

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 “were”; recast the sentence. Also, we meant “uninterested,” not “disinterested,” which in careful usage means unbiased or impartial.

---

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.

---

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.”

---

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.”

Pretty clear that The Sunday Times is a newspaper.

For China’s Cosmopolitans, the Challenge of Choosing a High School

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 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 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.

Sprechen Sie Denglish?

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.”

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” 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.”

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.

Sprechen Sie Denglish?

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.”

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” 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.”

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.

U.S. Is a ‘Hacker Empire,’ Says Chinese Military Analyst

BEIJING â€" For more than an hour Wednesday morning, a Chinese military analyst excoriated the United States over what state-run media here calls “Prismgate”  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, a professor at the Academy of Military Science, called the U.S. a “hacker empire.”

America stole people’s secrets, including economic secrets, he said.

“America has many faces,” Mr. Wang said, in comments that were often highly colorful and colloquial, perhaps reflecting the fact they were likely aimed for consumption by millions of ordinary Chinese.

It played many roles, including as protector of Internet freedoms and symbol of online morality and security, he said. But, “as common folk hee say, no matter how often you ‘play a role,’ eventually the stuffing comes out,” he said. “Prismgate has shown us America’s stuffing.”

“Before, 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 morality admonition, said: “Persisting in evil brings about one’s own destruction.”

“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.”

Mr. Wang said there were about 1,000 military and civilian online hackers working to mined China’s secrets in the N.S.A’s secretive eavesdropping organization, the Office of Tailored Access Operations, or TAO. That was reported early in June by Foreign Policy magazine, which said 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.”

Mr. Wang is not a ranking state official, but his workplace - the country’s top military academy in Beijing - and the venue of the comments made them significant.

A drumbeat of criticism had been growingearlier 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 work for the U.S. government, saying it amounted to a campaign of industrial espionage aimed at leapfrogging development and beating the West with legally or illegally procured technology.

So 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.”

“So ! ‘framin! g’ 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 mney ‘empire,’” he said.

All China could do was protect itself by strengthening its own online security, he said.

In mid-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 practically, “they would not know how to distribute the spoils fairly.”

In an email, Mr. Mulvenon said that “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.”

“By contrast, 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 i! t to? Cis! co? 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.

U.S. Is a ‘Hacker Empire,’ Says Chinese Military Analyst

BEIJING â€" For more than an hour Wednesday morning, a Chinese military analyst excoriated the United States over what state-run media here calls “Prismgate”  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, a professor at the Academy of Military Science, called the U.S. a “hacker empire.”

America stole people’s secrets, including economic secrets, he said.

“America has many faces,” Mr. Wang said, in comments that were often highly colorful and colloquial, perhaps reflecting the fact they were likely aimed for consumption by millions of ordinary Chinese.

It played many roles, including as protector of Internet freedoms and symbol of online morality and security, he said. But, “as common folk hee say, no matter how often you ‘play a role,’ eventually the stuffing comes out,” he said. “Prismgate has shown us America’s stuffing.”

“Before, 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 morality admonition, said: “Persisting in evil brings about one’s own destruction.”

“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.”

Mr. Wang said there were about 1,000 military and civilian online hackers working to mined China’s secrets in the N.S.A’s secretive eavesdropping organization, the Office of Tailored Access Operations, or TAO. That was reported early in June by Foreign Policy magazine, which said 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.”

Mr. Wang is not a ranking state official, but his workplace - the country’s top military academy in Beijing - and the venue of the comments made them significant.

A drumbeat of criticism had been growingearlier 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 work for the U.S. government, saying it amounted to a campaign of industrial espionage aimed at leapfrogging development and beating the West with legally or illegally procured technology.

So 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.”

“So ! ‘framin! g’ 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 mney ‘empire,’” he said.

All China could do was protect itself by strengthening its own online security, he said.

In mid-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 practically, “they would not know how to distribute the spoils fairly.”

In an email, Mr. Mulvenon said that “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.”

“By contrast, 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 i! t to? Cis! co? 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.