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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.