normblog You know those lists of books you get hit with from time to time and of which, for some reason, there have been a lot lately? In the last few days we have had '100 books to love' and 'The books we secretly love - our 50 favourite page-turners' from, respectively, The Sunday Times and The Times (both £). And before that there was the '100 novels everyone should read', and - with inflation - the '1000 novels everyone must read', and '100 Books To Read Before You Die'. While I'm sure these lists are meant to be helpful, guiding us towards books we might want to try, they can also be a bit oppressive, don't you find? All of which is by way of introducing another such list of books that I recently fell upon and that has an interesting feature I want you to consider. That's it.
RConversation Last month the U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk sent a letter to the Chinese government requesting information about its censorship practices. The middle kingdom’s response: a polite middle finger. Foreign ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu declared that Chinese censorship follows “international practice.” Her response is specious given that China operates the world’s most elaborate and opaque system of Internet censorship, as I describe in Chapter 3 of my forthcoming book. Yet Congress has been hard at work to bolster its legitimacy, however inadvertently. The House Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on SOPA at 10am on Wednesday morning (a few hours from now). Opposition to SOPA is widespread, bipartisan, and international. The New America Foundation (where I am a senior fellow) has signed an open letter to the House Judiciary Committee, along with a list of human rights, civil liberties and public interest groups. We do not dispute that there are hubs of online infringement.
Danwei Natalia Antonova China Herald China Hearsay | China law, business and economics commentary Liberal England Ministry of Tofu EmailEmail From MITBBS and Yahoo Xinwen lianbo (新闻联播), or News Broadcast, on China Central Television (CCTV), comes under fire again for its report of an air force training exercise on January 23. A net user who went by the name “刘毅” (Liu Yi) pointed out that the jet that the J-10 “hit” is an F-5, a US fighter jet. On the left are screenshots of CCTV News; on the right are screenshots of Top Gun. Comments from MITBBS: loveast: ? hopemore: It’s not about real fight. forestzhao: Chinese version of Top Gun zhcs: Ai, what a tragedy. zengm:Is it for real? grass007: …A disgrace indeed… Comments from PCHome: 弄潮儿daliujia: It’s just borrowing. 锦衣夜行liubeibeig: A country that is always daydreaming.. 职业相亲男roger007: The so-called goof. 晓晨zhouchenno1：Only editing of our country has improved. 地平线yougds：In this rubbish country, the sooner you die, the sooner your soul ascends. Related articles:
chinaSMACK - Hot internet stories, pictures, & videos in China Davids Medienkritik Let's face it: Media tend to over-report the most vile and extreme aspects of our society. "If it bleeds - it leads" is much more than a cliche - it is a journalistic fact of life. The danger with the daily sensationalism is that it skews the viewer's perception of reality. Interesting thought experiment: What if you were a foreign correspondent...? Imagine you are an American correspondent in Germany. Beyond that - your editors oblige you to bring stories only on a narrow band of pet issues that they have predetermined are of "interest" to the readership. The pet issues and big politics are all they want. The editors supplement your work by sprinkling-in stories cut-and-pasted from news wires on Germans behaving badly worldwide. One week - your publication runs a cover depicting a giant spider drapped in a German flag and wearing lederhosen sucking the blood of a lifeless blue collar American trapped in its web. Turn the mirror around... Now let us turn this script around.
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