BEIJING — When vicious inter-ethnic violence broke out in Urumqi last year, Chinese authorities flooded the city with security forces. But next came an unexpected step: they cut off internet access across the vast north-western region of Xinjiang. Controlling the information flow was as crucial as controlling the streets, it seemed. Eight months on, the net remains largely inaccessible in Xinjiang, though officials claim it will soon be restored. The small number of sites that were recently unblocked are heavily censored; only a severely restricted email service is available. The internet blackout is partly an anomaly, made possible by the region’s poverty and remoteness. It is hard to imagine the authorities gambling with Shanghai or Beijing’s internationalised economies. But it also reflects the government’s wider approach to the internet: real fear at the speed with which information or rumours can spread and people can organise. And an absolute determination to tame it. The cut-off lies at the extreme end of a spectrum of controls that experts say constitute the world’s most sophisticated and extensive censorship system – and one that is growing. Google’s decision to shut its mainland search service rather than continue to self-censor has […]
A federal judge on Monday struck down patents on two genes linked to breast and ovarian cancer. The decision, if upheld, could throw into doubt the patents covering thousands of human genes and reshape the law of intellectual property United States District Court Judge Robert W. Sweet issued the 152-page decision, which invalidated seven patents related to the genes BRCA1 and BRCA2, whose mutations have been associated with cancer. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Public Patent Foundation at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York joined with individual patients and medical organizations to challenge the patents last May: they argued that genes, products of nature, fall outside of the realm of things that can be patented. The patents, they argued, stifle research and innovation and limit testing options. Myriad Genetics, the company that holds the patents with the University of Utah Research Foundation, asked the court to dismiss the case, claiming that the work of isolating the DNA from the body transforms it and makes it patentable. Such patents, it said, have been granted for decades; the Supreme Court upheld patents on living organisms in 1980. In fact, many in the patent […]
MALMO, SWEDEN — Marcus Eilenberg is a Swedish Jew whose family roots in Malmo run deep. His paternal grandparents were Holocaust survivors who found shelter in this southern Swedish city in 1945. His wife’s parents fled to Sweden from communist Poland in the 1960s. Now the 32-year-old law firm associate feels the welcome for Jews is running out, and he is moving to Israel with his wife and two children in May. He says he knows at least 15 other Jews who are leaving for a similar reason. That reason, he says, is a rise in hate crimes against Jews in Malmo, and a sense that local authorities have little desire to deal with a problem that has exposed a crack in Sweden’s image as a bastion of tolerance and a haven for distressed ethnic groups. Anti-Semitic crimes in Europe have usually been associated with the far right, but Shneur Kesselman, an Orthodox rabbi, says the threat now comes from Muslims. ‘In the past five years I’ve been here, I think you can count on your hand how many incidents there have been from the extreme right,’ he said. ‘In my personal experience, it’s 99 percent […]
Talk of a ‘special relationship’ between Britain and the United States should be dropped, a House of Commons committee said Sunday, adding the Iraq war carried important lessons for Anglo-US ties. The House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee said Britain should be ‘more willing to say no’ to the United States and warned that London will probably not be able to influence Washington as much in future. ‘The UK must continue to position itself closely alongside the US but there is a need to be less deferential and more willing to say no where our interests diverge,’ the committee chairman, Labour’s Mike Gapes, said, summing up the report. He added that the phrase ‘special relationship’ — first coined by Winston Churchill in 1946, the year after World War II — was ‘potentially misleading, and we recommend that its use should be avoided’. ‘British and European politicians have been guilty of over-optimism about the extent of influence they have over the US,’ he said. ‘We must be realistic and accept that globalisation, structural changes and shifts in geopolitical power will inevitably affect the UK-US relationship’. In the report itself, the committee of members of […]
WASHINGTON — Snow falls resolutely on a Saturday morning in Washington, but the festively lit basement of a church near the US Capitol is packed. Some 200 female members have invited an equal number of women for tea, cookies, conversation – and 16th-century evangelism. What newcomers at Capitol Hill Baptist Church (CHBC) hear is hardly ‘Christianity for Dummies.’ Nor is it ‘Extreme Makeover: Born-Again Edition.’ Instead, a young woman named Kasey Gurley describes her disobedience and suffering in Old Testament terms. ‘I worship my own comfort, my own opinion of myself,’ she confesses. ‘Like the idolatrous people of Judah, we deserve the full wrath of God.’ She warns the women that ‘we’ll never be safe in good intentions,’ but assures them that ‘Christ died for us so we wouldn’t have to.’ Her closing prayer is both frank and transcendent: ‘Our comfort in suffering is this: that through Christ you provide eternal life.’ It is so quiet you can hear an oatmeal cookie crumble. IN PICTURES: Calvinism at Capitol Hill Baptist Church Welcome to the austere – and increasingly embraced – message of Calvinism. Five centuries ago, John Calvin’s teachings reconceived Christianity; midwifed Western ideas about […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
