Gooch, In Malaysia, English Ban Raises Fears for Future

From http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/10/world/asia/10iht-malay.html?ref=world

Access 7/9/09

In Malaysia, English Ban Raises Fears for Future

Bazuki Muhammad/Reuters

Students attended a morning session at a school in Putrajaya, Malaysia on Thursday.

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By LIZ GOOCH

Published: July 9, 2009

KUALA LUMPUR — P.S. Han, a teacher in Kuala Lumpur, has been using English to teach math and physics to 17-year-olds for the past six years.

From 2012, he will be forced to return to using the national language, Bahasa Malaysia, after the government decided to abandon English for the two subjects in a decision some consider to be motivated by politics rather than education.

“English has been used as the language of science for 300 years,” said Mr. Han, a teacher at St. John’s Institution. “You cannot really convey the scientific concepts to the students in Bahasa Malaysia at a very high level.”

“We have to face the fact that science knowledge is in English.”

The announcement on Wednesday, which came after months of lobbying by Malay nationalists, has raised concerns about whether English standards in the former British colony will slide and whether Malaysia’s competitiveness as a destination for multinational companies may suffer.

English has been the language of instruction for math and science in Malaysia since 2003, when former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad introduced the policy amid concerns that poor English skills were hindering students’ job opportunities.

Mr. Mahathir expressed sadness over the decision to revert to Bahasa Malaysia, saying that the decision would adversely affect children and make it difficult for them to keep abreast of scientific developments, the national news agency Bernama quoted him as saying.

The government cited a decline in students’ math and science grades, particularly in rural areas, as one of the reasons behind the switch.

However, Khoo Kay Kim, emeritus professor of Malaysian history at the University of Malaysia, said that teachers had not been adequately trained before the policy was introduced.

He described Malaysia’s English standards as “pathetic.”

“Fewer and fewer of our professors can now write in English,” he said. “We used to lead Asia in terms of English, and now we have allowed ourselves to slip below other Asian countries.”

Mr. Khoo said it was a “national shame” that the country’s oldest university, the University of Malaysia, had fallen behind other Asian universities in international rankings, a trend he attributed to declining English standards.

He also raised concerns that poor English standards may affect Malaysia’s international competitiveness, saying that multinational companies may struggle to find graduates with good English.

“If less and less Malaysians know English, how are multinational companies going to come into this country?” he said. “If we don’t have the workforce who can fit into multinational companies, how are they going to come here?”

Malaysia’s business community has long been concerned about the reported decline in English standards in schools. “The business community feels that English is imperative for Malaysia’s international competitiveness,” said Michael Yeoh, chief executive the Asian Strategy and Leadership Institute, an independent research organization.

Mr. Yeoh said that more needed to be done to improve English standards, but questions remained over whether teaching science and math in English was the best method.

“We don’t really know exactly how this could impede on the study of English,” he said.

The Malaysian International Chamber of Commerce and Industry welcomed the government’s decision to increase the number of English teachers and teaching hours.

Its executive director, Stewart Forbes, said that the need to emphasize English must continue to be part of the government’s policy.

“Private sector companies in Malaysia continue to complain about graduates’ communication skills in general, and English skills in particular, and the government’s efforts to raise the level of English expertise are very worthwhile,” he said.

Some educators from Malaysia’s two largest minority groups, the Chinese and Indian communities, welcomed the decision to revert to using Chinese and Tamil for science and math in vernacular schools, local media reported.

However, many parents and the National Union of the Teaching Profession have expressed concern over the decision to scrap English.

Shazlin Aidani, a mother of three, said she wanted her children to learn math and science in English.

“When they graduate and go to work everything will be in English, not Bahasa,” she said.

Bearak, "World Cup in Africa Stumbles Over Strike"

From: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/09/world/africa/09safrica.html?em

Access: 7/8/09

World Cup in Africa Stumbles Over Strike

Jon Hrusa/European Pressphoto Agency

Striking construction workers marched in Johannesburg on Wednesday. The nationwide strike could threaten the 2010 World Cup.

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By BARRY BEARAK

Published: July 8, 2009

JOHANNESBURG — Thousands of South African construction workers walked off their jobs on Wednesday, beginning a nationwide strike that could threaten the biggest event in international soccer, the 2010 World Cup.

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Joao Silva for The New York Times

Construction workers demonstrated Wednesday outside the grounds of Soccer City in Johannesburg, where the finals of the World Cup are to be played next June.

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Joao Silva for The New York Times

Soccer City, above, is one of 10 stadiums being built or renovated for the 2010 World Cup, the first to be held in Africa.

However important the tournament may be to fans of the game, it represents nothing less than a defining moment for South Africa, the first country on the continent selected to host such a major sports competition.

Work on 10 stadiums — five new ones and five under renovation — is supposed to be complete by December, well in advance of the games to be played next June. This nation’s self-esteem is on the line, with $75 billion in building projects under way, including upgrades to airports and highways.

“We’re all proud to be working on a World Cup site, but pride does not fill your family’s stomach,” said Martin Baloyi, a 42-year-old laborer who laid aside his tools Wednesday afternoon at Soccer City, the behemoth of a stadium here in Johannesburg where the finals are scheduled to be played.

For several months, two unions representing 70,000 construction workers have been negotiating a revised deal with a consortium of employers known as the South African Federation of Civil Engineering Contractors. Most of the laborers earn about $1.75 an hour, and the unions are asking for an increase of 13 percent.

The companies have countered with a 10.4 percent offer, while publicly complaining that union demands include a costly set of enhanced benefits, like a meal allowance, payment for days lost because of bad weather and four months’ maternity leave.

“This package all adds up to a 50 percent increase in costs, and on top of that is the 13 percent in wages, so you are looking at 63 or 65 percent extra, and that’s way too much,” said Joe Campanella, a spokesman for the consortium.

A lengthy strike would not only embarrass South Africans as their country primps for an event expected to draw 450,000 visitors, but would also be a huge failure for the new government. Jacob Zuma ascended to the presidency with a mighty boost from the trade unions. The extent of his assistance to labor now will be seen as a measure of payback for that support.

President Zuma is in Italy attending the Group of 8 summit meeting, which includes leaders from some developing nations. But his labor minister has called for an urgent meeting on Thursday, bringing together chief executives of the biggest companies involved, civic overseers of the World Cup and leaders of the two unions, the National Union of Mineworkers and the Building Construction and Allied Workers Union.

“Bottom line, I think they’ll come up with some agreement sooner rather than later,” said Udesh Pillay, head of a research project tracking South Africa’s preparations for next year’s World Cup, a 32-team tournament.

Mr. Campanella, the spokesman for the construction companies, said: “If a strike goes on for a month, we’re in trouble. If it goes on a couple of days, maybe not.”

The workers, of course, have a powerful hammer in any job action that threatens the World Cup. Bhekani Ngcobo, a union negotiator, said the strike would go on until all demands were met, “even if that comes in 2011.” The labor stoppage also includes work on the Gautrain, a rail link between Johannesburg and Pretoria, scheduled for completion next year.

But there is no strike fund, and very few of the construction workers have enough savings to forfeit a payday. “Some of us can afford to stay out two days, some not even that,” said a concrete handler, Richard Bizela. “The landlord doesn’t care about strikes. He just wants his money.”

Though South Africa boasts the continent’s biggest economy, its unemployment rate recently shot up to 23.5 percent, and tens of thousands of union jobs have been lost to the global recession.

Unions have been agitating for more state intervention in the economy, pushing for an ambitious industrial policy that might generate jobs. The Congress of South African Trade Unions, or Cosatu, is part of Mr. Zuma’s governing alliance. Nevertheless, its leader, Zwelinzima Vavi, has warned that delays in pay increases for government workers “could unleash explosive spates of uncontrollable labor unrest.”

On Wednesday, Cosatu issued a statement saying its members were “100 percent behind their comrades in the construction sector,” arguing that a strike for a 13 percent pay increase was justifiable in view of rising food prices and a 31.3 percent rise in electricity rates that went into effect last week.

GIRIDHARADAS, Farewell to an India I Hardly Knew

From: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/weekinreview/05giridharadas.html?ref=world

Access: 7/6/09

THE WORLD

Farewell to an India I Hardly Knew

Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

COMINGS AND GOINGS A Calcutta bus reflects confidence among Indians. Much has changed in a generation.

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By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

Published: July 4, 2009

MUMBAI, India — The first thing I ever learned about India was that my parents had chosen to leave it.

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The country was lost to us in America, where I was born. It had to be assembled in my mind, from the fragments of anecdotes and regular journeys east.

Now, six years after returning to the country my parents left, as I prepare to depart it myself, the mind goes back to the beginning, to my earliest pictures of it.

India, reflected from afar, was late-night phone calls with the news of death. It was calling back relatives who could not afford to call you. It was Hindu ceremonies with saffron and Kit Kat bars on a silver platter.

India, consumed on our visits back, was being fetched from the airport and cooked a meal even in the dead of night. It was sideways hugs that strove to avoid breast contact. It was the chauvinism of uncles who asked about my dreams and ignored my sister’s.

It was wrong, yet easy, to feel that we did India a favor by coming home. We packed our suitcases with things they couldn’t get for themselves: Jif peanut butter, Hellmann’s mayonnaise, Gap khakis. These imports sketched a subtle hierarchy in which they were the wanting relatives and we their benefactors.

My cousins in India would sometimes ask if I was Indian or American. I saw that their self-esteem depended on my answer. “American,” I would say, because it was the truth, and because I felt that to say otherwise would be to accept a lower berth in the world.

What it meant to be American was to be free to invent yourself, to belong to a family and a society in which destiny was believed to be human-made.

I looked around in India and saw everyone in their boxes, not coming fully into their own, replicating lives lived before. If only they came to America, I told myself, so-and-so would be a millionaire entrepreneur; so-and-so would be as confident in her opinions as her husband; so-and-sos’ marriage would be more like my parents’, with verve and swing-dancing lessons and bedtime crossword puzzles; so-and-so would study history and literature, not just bankable practicalities.

I moved to India six years ago in an effort to understand it on my own terms, to render mine what had until then only belonged to my parents.

India was changing when I arrived and has changed dramatically, viscerally, improbably in these 2,000 days: farms giving way to factories; ultra-cheap cars being built; companies buying out rivals abroad. But the greatest change I have witnessed is elsewhere. It is in the mind: Indians now know that they don’t have to leave, as my parents left, to have their personal revolutions.

It took me time to see. At first, my old lenses were still in place — India the frustrating, difficult country — and so I saw only the things I had ever seen.

But as I traveled the land, the data did not fit the framework. The children of the lower castes were hoisting themselves up one diploma and training program at a time. The women were becoming breadwinners through microcredit and decentralized manufacturing. The young people were finding in their cellphones a first zone of individual identity. The couples were ending marriages no matter what “society” thinks, then finding love again. The vegetarians were embracing meat and meat-eaters were turning vegetarian, defining themselves by taste and faith, not caste.

Indians from languorous villages to pulsating cities were making difficult new choices to die other than where they were born, to pursue vocations not their father’s, to live lives imagined within their own skulls. And it was addictive, this improbable rush of hope.

The shift is only just beginning. Most Indians still live impossibly grim lives. Trickle down, here more than most places, is slow. But it is a shift in psychologies, and you rarely meet an Indian untouched by it.

Grabbing hold of their destinies, these Indians became the unlikely cousins of my own immigrant parents in America: restless, ambitious, with dreams vivid only to themselves. But my parents had sought to beat the odds in a bad system, to be statistical flukes that got away.

What has changed since they left is a systemic lifting of the odds for those who stay. It is a milestone in any nation’s life when leaving becomes a choice, not a necessity.

My parents watch me from their perch outside Washington, D.C., and marvel at history’s sense of irony: a son who ended up inventing himself in the country they left, who has written of the self-inventing swagger of a rising generation of Indians, in a country where “self” was once a vulgar word.

At times, my mother wonders if they should have remained, should have waited for their own country’s revolution instead of crashing another’s. And as I leave India now I can only wonder how history would have turned out if the ocean of change had come a generation earlier.

Because it came between their generation and mine, the premise of our family story has been pulled out from beneath us. We are American citizens now, my family, and proudly so. But we must face that we are Americans because of a choice prompted by truths that history has undone. They were true at the choice’s making; in India, I saw their truth boil slowly away.

They don’t crave our mayonnaise and khakis anymore. They no longer angrily berate America, because they are too busy building their own country. Indian accents are now cooler than British ones. No one asks if I feel Indian or American. How delicious to see that unconcern. How fortunate to live in a land you needn’t leave to become your fullest possible self.

And how wondrous, in this time of revolutions, to have had my own here.

I grew up in America defining myself by the soil under my feet, not by the blood in my veins. The soil I shared with everyone else; the blood made me unbearably different. Before I loved India, I loathed it. But that feeling seems now like a relic from a buried past.

I leave now on the journey’s next stretch, with sadness and with joy, humbled by India, grateful to have been at the revolution and to have known the revolutions within.

Sang-Hun, "Rural South Koreans’ Global Links Grow, Nourished by a Satellite Crop"

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/30/world/asia/30satellite.html?_r=1&ref=world&pagewanted=print

Access: 6/30/09

June 30, 2009

YEONGJU JOURNAL

Rural South Koreans’ Global Links Grow, Nourished by a Satellite Crop

By CHOE SANG-HUN

YEONGJU, South Korea — Lee Si-kap, a shy farmer living in this central South Korean town, holds a record: He owns more satellite dishes than any other South Korean — 85 of them, receiving 1,500 satellite television channels from more than 100 countries, some as far away as South Africa and Canada.

To passers-by, Mr. Lee’s home stands like an exclamation mark in the otherwise nondescript countryside dotted with apple orchards and ginseng fields. Satellite dishes cover his roof like giant steel mushrooms.

They spread into his front yard and blossom in a field behind his house, some as large as 16 feet in diameter.

Once dismissed as a local eccentric, Mr. Lee has more recently emerged as something of a hero of modest fame, featured on national television as “antenna man.” Since late last year, he and thousands of fellow satellite enthusiasts — including the husbands of foreign brides and a few dedicated souls searching for signals from extraterrestrial life forms — have started a campaign to install free satellite dishes for poor foreign brides living in rural South Korea, so they can receive broadcasts from their home countries.

“Thanks to Mr. Lee, I now miss my country, my mother and father less than I used to,” said Bui Thi Huang, a 22-year-old bride from Haiphong, Vietnam, who now lives here in Yeongju, about 100 miles southeast of Seoul.

In recent years, the South Korean countryside has had an influx of brides from poorer countries like Vietnam, China and the Philippines. Like Ms. Bui, they marry South Korean farmers who have difficulty finding a spouse because so many young Korean women have rejected rural life and migrated to cities.

In towns like Yeongju, these young foreign brides have become a bedrock of the local economy. They work alongside their husbands in the fields and have brought back a sound that was fast becoming a distant memory among the aging farm population here: crying babies.

In South Korea, which had once prided itself on being a homogeneous society, 4 out of 10 women who married in rural communities last year were foreign born. In Yeongju alone, the number of foreign wives increased by 28 percent in the past year and a half, to 250, half of them from Vietnam.

“These women have a hard time fitting in. The local governments, and the husbands, often focus only on making them ‘Korean,’ teaching them the Korean language and computer skills,” said Mr. Lee, 39, who has never married. “They don’t quite understand how isolated these women feel.”

When Mr. Lee, who lives with his 80-year-old mother and 97-year-old grandfather, is not toying with his satellite equipment, he tends his pepper and sesame fields or makes the rounds of nearby villages to see if the foreign brides are having any problems with their television reception.

Mr. Lee and his friends still encounter objections from husbands who are determined to shield their foreign brides from any reminders of their native lands, for fear these might only magnify their homesickness. But they are encouraged that many families have reported that watching satellite broadcasts from home actually helps the women to overcome their loneliness and better adjust to life here.

Mr. Lee says his sympathy for foreign brides stems in part from his own experience of feeling cut off from society.

He felt deeply hurt when his father abandoned him and his mother when he was a small boy, and, lacking self-confidence, had trouble making friends in his neighborhood and at school. He rarely ventured outside his village, and said he still feared making phone calls.

What saved him, he said, was “music — and satellite television.”

“Music was my only friend,” said Mr. Lee, whose dream is to meet his idol, the American heavy metal rock musician Ronnie James Dio. “And because I couldn’t get much rock music on Korean television, I turned to satellite television.”

Satellite television introduced him to the wider world — to Japanese baseball, life on Pacific islands, Russian folk music and religions in India and Nepal.

He installed his first satellite dish in 1992, when he was 23 and had already returned to farming after receiving a vocational college degree in electronics. Collecting secondhand satellite dishes has since become a hobby that verges on an obsession. When most farmers here look to the sky, they read clouds for weather. When Mr. Lee looks skyward, he says, he imagines satellites in earth orbit. To him, the air is filled with broadcast signals, “like seeds from thistles.”

Farmers here at first did not know what to make of their bachelor neighbor, who listened to heavy metal music, often belting out the lyrics in English, sometimes in Japanese. They would see him on the roof under the blazing sun of summer or under the starry winter sky, fiddling for hours with his satellite equipment.

Although he does not understand most languages on the broadcasts he receives, Mr. Lee said: “It gets addictive. The more dishes you have, the more channels you can get.

“Nothing compares with the joy of catching a new broadcast channel from a faraway country,” he said. “It’s like pulling in a big fish. It’s the excitement of discovering something from outside the boundaries of your usual world.”

Stelter and Stone, Stark Images, Uploaded to the World

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/18/world/middleeast/18press.html?_r=1&ref=world&pagewanted=print
Access: 6/18/09

June 18, 2009
Stark Images, Uploaded to the World
By BRIAN STELTER and BRAD STONE

A man bled to death on a street in Tehran on Monday. As one bystander tenderly held the man’s head, five others held out their cameras.

They captured photos and videos of the man, and of the blood that stained his white shirt. On Wednesday afternoon, an anonymous individual uploaded the disturbing video to YouTube, where it was viewed by thousands and shared by bloggers.

“This is absolutely despicable,” wrote one of those commenting on the YouTube video, urging the protesters to stay active. “The rest of the world is watching and cheering you on.”

Via the Internet, the world has received unprecedented looks at the continuing unrest in Iran. As foreign journalists are forced to leave Tehran and others are essentially confined to their hotel rooms, news organizations are looking more and more to the Iranians themselves to provide the news, or at least the pictures.

Dozens of videos of the sometimes violent protests by opponents of the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have appeared on YouTube and other sites in the days following last Friday’s presidential election, provided by Iranians eager to circumvent the shroud of censorship their government was trying to place over the unfolding events. On Wednesday, amateur videos of an opposition rally were one of the primary sources of television pictures from Tehran. Another video showed a protest inside a Tehran train station.

YouTube said it had relaxed its usual restrictions on violent videos to allow the images from Iran to reach the rest of the world.

“In general, we do not allow graphic or gratuitous violence on YouTube,” the company said in a statement. “However, we make exceptions for videos that have educational, documentary, or scientific value. The limitations being placed on mainstream media reporting from within Iran make it even more important that citizens in Iran be able to use YouTube to capture their experiences for the world to see.” But the Iranian government continued to try to restrict Web communications. On Wednesday, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard warned that protesters trying to stoke tensions using Internet sites like Twitter would be subject to retribution.

“We warn those who propagate riots and spread rumors that our legal action against them will cost them dearly,” a statement from the military force said.

At the same time, the opposition candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi was using his public profile page on Facebook to organize protests scheduled for Thursday.

Meanwhile, the Iranian visas of many visiting journalists have expired, meaning that the corps of international reporters in the country is shrinking. Newspapers and television news networks are increasingly supplementing their on-the-ground reporting with video images, with frequent caveats that their authenticity cannot be verified.

On Wednesday, CNN frequently showed amateur videos, with a graphic that labeled them “unverified material.” It showed a YouTube video of the aftermath of an apparent raid at Tehran University. The video showed rooms that appeared to have been burned extensively.

It is unclear how the gripping videos are being uploaded, given the restrictions on Internet access within Iran. Behind the scenes, a sophisticated cat and mouse game is playing out, with the Iranian government trying to thwart free Internet communications, and an informal coalition of Iranian protesters and their sympathizers trying to keep the floodgates open to data.
Throughout the week, supporters of the protesters around the world had been making their own computers available to Iranians who wanted to evade government censors.

These people have been publishing the IP addresses of their computers to public forums like Twitter — offering them as so-called proxy servers.

Greg Walton, founder of Psiphon, a provider of Web proxy services, said the continued Internet activity from Iran was a testament to the durability of the Internet and the commitment of Iranians to get their story out despite the government crackdown.

“Information is still coming out of Iran,” he said. “Twitter is still buzzing from people giving live updates from the street, and YouTube is full of live videos testifying to the brutality of the regime’s crackdown. The Internet is fragile but still operational.”

Christiane Amanpour, CNN’s chief international correspondent and a native of Iran, arrived back in London on Tuesday after her one-week Iranian visa expired. While CNN still has personnel in Tehran, Ms. Amanpour expects a heavier emphasis on amateur video.

“You can’t keep any of this news down anymore, and that’s a huge change from the past,” she said in an interview. “The process of getting the word out is totally democratized.”

Stone and Cohen, Social Networks Spread Defiance Online

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/16/world/middleeast/16media.html?em=&pagewanted=print
Access: 6/17/09

June 16, 2009

Social Networks Spread Defiance Online

By BRAD STONE and NOAM COHEN

As the embattled government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appears to be trying to limit Internet access and communications in Iran, new kinds of social media are challenging those traditional levers of state media control and allowing Iranians to find novel ways around the restrictions.

Iranians are blogging, posting to Facebook and, most visibly, coordinating their protests on Twitter, the messaging service. Their activity has increased, not decreased, since the presidential election on Friday and ensuing attempts by the government to restrict or censor their online communications.

On Twitter, reports and links to photos from a peaceful mass march through Tehran on Monday, along with accounts of street fighting and casualties around the country, have become the most popular topic on the service worldwide, according to Twitter’s published statistics.

A couple of Twitter feeds have become virtual media offices for the supporters of the leading opposition candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi. One feed, mousavi1388 (1388 is the year in the Persian calendar), is filled with news of protests and exhortations to keep up the fight, in Persian and in English. It has more than 7,000 followers.

Mr. Moussavi’s fan group on Facebook has swelled to over 50,000 members, a significant increase since election day.

Labeling such seemingly spontaneous antigovernment demonstrations a “Twitter Revolution” has already become something of a cliché. That title had been given to the protests in Moldova in April.

But Twitter is aware of the power of its service. Acknowledging its role on the global stage, the San Francisco-based company said Monday that it was delaying a planned shutdown for maintenance for a day, citing “the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran.”

Twitter users are posting messages, known as tweets, with the term #IranElection, which allows users to search for all tweets on the subject. On Monday evening, Twitter was registering about 30 new posts a minute with that tag.

One read, “We have no national press coverage in Iran, everyone should help spread Moussavi’s message. One Person = One Broadcaster. #IranElection.”

The Twitter feed StopAhmadi calls itself the “Dedicated Twitter account for Moussavi supporters” and has more than 6,000 followers. It links to a page on the photo-hosting site Flickr that includes dozens of pictures from the rally on Monday in Tehran.

The feed Persiankiwi, which has more than 15,000 followers, sends users to a page in Persian that is hosted by Google and, in its only English text, says, “Due to widespread filters in Iran, please view this site to receive the latest news, letters and communications from Mir Hussein Moussavi.”

Some Twitter users were also going on the offensive. On Monday morning, an antigovernment activist using the Twitter account “DDOSIran” asked supporters to visit a Web site to participate in an online attack to try to crash government Web sites by overwhelming them with traffic.

By Monday afternoon, many of those sites were not accessible, though it was not clear if the attack was responsible — and the Twitter account behind the attack had been removed. A Twitter spokeswoman said the company had no connection to the deletion of the account.

The crackdown on communications began on election day, when text-messaging services were shut down in what opposition supporters said was an attempt to block one of their most important organizing tools. Over the weekend, cellphone transmissions and access to Facebook and some other Web sites were also blocked.

Iranians continued to report on Monday that they could not send text messages.

But it appears they are finding ways around Big Brother.

Many Twitter users have been sharing ways to evade government snooping, such as programming their Web browsers to contact a proxy — or an Internet server that relays their connection through another country.

Austin Heap, a 25-year-old information technology consultant in San Francisco, is running his own private proxies to help Iranians, and is advertising them on Twitter. He said on Monday that his servers were providing the Internet connections for about 750 Iranians at any one moment.

“I think that cyber activism can be a way to empower people living under less than democratic governments around the world,” he said.

Global Internet Freedom Consortium, an Internet proxy service with ties to the banned Chinese spiritual movement Falun Gong, offers downloadable software to help evade censorship. It said its traffic from Iran had tripled in the last week.

Shiyu Zhou, founder of the organization, has no idea how links to the software spread within Iran. “In China we have sent mass e-mails, but nothing like in Iran,” he said. “The Iranian people actually found out by themselves and have passed this on by word of mouth.”

Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Harvard Law School who is an expert on the Internet, said that Twitter was particularly resilient to censorship because it had so many ways for its posts to originate — from a phone, a Web browser or specialized applications — and so many outlets for those posts to appear.

As each new home for this material becomes a new target for censorship, he said, a repressive system faces a game of whack-a-mole in blocking Internet address after Internet address carrying the subversive material.

“It is easy for Twitter feeds to be echoed everywhere else in the world,” Mr. Zittrain said. “The qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked are what make it so powerful.”

Wines: Civic-Minded Chinese Find a Voice Online

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/17/world/asia/17china.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print
Access: 6/17/09

June 17, 2009

Civic-Minded Chinese Find a Voice Online

By MICHAEL WINES

BEIJING — There was a time when the story of the 21-year-old waitress who fatally stabbed a Communist Party official as he tried to force himself on her would have never left the rural byways of Hubei Province where it took place.

Instead, her arrest last month on suspicion of voluntary manslaughter erupted into an online furor that turned her into a national hero and reverberated all the way to China’s capital, where censors ordered incendiary comments banned. Local Hubei officials even restricted television coverage and tried to block travel to the small town where the assault occurred.

On Tuesday, a Hubei court granted the woman, Deng Yujiao, an unexpectedly swift victory, ruling that she had acted in self-defense and freeing her without criminal penalties.

The case of Ms. Deng is only the most recent and prominent of several cases in which the Internet has cracked open a channel for citizens to voice mass displeasure with official conduct, demonstrating its potential as a catalyst for social change.

The government’s reactions have raised questions about how much power officials have to control what they call “online mass incidents.” China’s estimated 300 million Internet users, experts say, are awakening to the idea that, even in authoritarian China, they sometimes can fight City Hall.

“It’s about raising the public awareness of democratic ideas — accountability, transparency, citizens’ rights to participate, that the government should serve the people,” said Xiao Qiang, a journalism professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who tracks China’s Internet activity. “Netizens who are now sharing those more democratic values are using these cases, each time making inch-by-inch progress.”

China still exerts sweeping and sophisticated control over the Internet, employing thousands of people to monitor Internet traffic for forbidden material and using software to spot key words that hint at subversion. But the system is not infallible, and Internet users frequently find ways to skirt the censors.

Since late last year, online tempests have blown up over a video of an official in Guangdong Province who assaulted a young girl and bragged that he was above punishment, and a Nanjing city official who was spotted wearing a $14,500 Vacheron Constantin watch and smoking $22-a-pack cigarettes, evidence of a lifestyle well beyond his means.

Early this year, an online outcry exposed prison officials’ cover-up of the beating death of an inmate. At the moment, outrage is focused on officials in Yunnan Province who battled a rabies outbreak by dispatching “killing teams” that, according to news reports, beat 50,000 dogs to death.

Not all the crusades are entirely civic-minded. In more than a few cases, virtual mobs have harassed offending officials, posting personal information and other details. The nickname for such mobs, “human-flesh search engines,” hints at their pitiless nature.

But the Internet campaigns have repeatedly produced results. Six officials were punished or fired in the prison beating. The Nanjing official with the flashy watch was sacked. The Yunnan dog killings have provoked harsh criticism, even in state-run newspapers.

Most such cases, says Mr. Xiao, the Berkeley professor, spawn tens or hundreds of thousands of mentions on Internet blogs and other forums.

But Ms. Deng’s case eclipsed them all, racking up four million posts and counting, he said. Her story resonates with millions of Chinese who not only are fed up with low-level corruption but also prize chastity in young women, causes that transcend politics.

“Deng Yujiao is a metaphor for someone who fights back against officials, and of course the officials are those who spend the taxpayers’ money, who are so abusive to ordinary citizens and so corrupt,” he said. “It’s almost a stereotype of the online image of officials. That’s why this case becomes so big.”

As she described it to a lawyer, Ms. Deng was a waitress in a karaoke parlor in rural Badong County, a Hubei Province backwater along the Yangtze River. Like more than a few such venues, this one offered “special services,” or prostitution, in a backroom spa, the only room with hot water.

On the night of May 10, Ms. Deng said, she was in the room washing clothes, when a local official, Huang Weide, came in and demanded that she take a bath with him. She refused, and after a struggle fled to a bathroom.

But Mr. Huang and two companions — including a second official, Deng Guida, who was not related to Ms. Deng — tracked her to the bathroom, then pushed her onto a couch. As they attacked, Ms. Deng said, she took a fruit knife from her purse and stabbed wildly. Mr. Deng fell, mortally wounded.

Ms. Deng was arrested, investigated for involuntary manslaughter and, after the police reportedly found pills in her purse, variously described as sleeping pills and antidepressants, sent her to a mental ward.

But when a blogger, Wu Gan, publicized her case, a cascade of posts crowned her a national hero for resisting official abuse of power and demanded a fair trial.

Under public pressure, Hubei officials freed her on bail. Mr. Wu helped recruit a prominent Beijing law firm to represent Ms. Deng.

On May 22, Beijing censors ordered Web sites to stop reporting on the case. Four days later, television and the Internet were cut off in Yesanguan, the town where the attack occurred. The official explanation for the shutdown was as a “precaution” against lightning strikes.

Spurred by the Internet frenzy, Chinese journalists had converged on Badong County. But after censorship was imposed, local officials began screening outsiders, and some journalists seeking to report there were beaten. Mr. Wu’s blog was shut down by censors.

Even Yangtze River boat service to Badong was suspended, ostensibly because the docks needed repair, after protesters vowed to hold a demonstration there.

The two surviving local officials who were involved in the assault have been fired, but no charges were brought against them.

The ruling on Tuesday, widely reported in state media, was a vindication for Ms. Deng and her Internet supporters. But the story may not end there.

Last month, a group of young people abruptly appeared in the middle of downtown Beijing, carrying on their shoulders a woman wearing a mask and wrapped in white cloth. They laid her on the ground and arranged signs around her, then took pictures.

The signs read, “Anyone could be Deng Yujiao.”

The photos immediately appeared on the Internet.

Zeleny and Cooper, Obama Calls for Alliances With Muslims

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/05/world/middleeast/05prexy.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print
Access: June 4, 2009

June 4, 2009

Obama Calls for Alliances With Muslims

By JEFF ZELENY and HELENE COOPER

CAIRO — President Obama pledged on Thursday to “seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world,” imploring America and the Islamic world to drop their suspicions of one another and forge new alliances to confront violent extremism and heal religious divides.

“We have a responsibility to join together on behalf of the world we seek,” he said. “A world where extremists no longer threaten our people, and American troops have come home; a world where Israelis and Palestinians are each secure in a state of their own, and nuclear energy is used for peaceful purposes; a world where governments serve their citizens, and the rights of all God’s children are respected.”

He dwelled on Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan but reserved some of his sharpest words for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He offered no major initiatives on the Middle East peace process although he put Israelis and Palestinians on notice that he intends to deal directly with what he sees as intransigence on key issues.

The speech in Cairo, which he called “the timeless city,” redeemed a promise he made nearly two years ago while running for president. It was, perhaps, the riskiest speech of his young presidency, and Mr. Obama readily conceded that not every goal would be easily or quickly achieved.

“I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect; and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition,” he said. “Instead, they overlap, and share common principles — principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.”

His message was sweeping and forceful — at times scolding — promoting democracy in Egypt, warning Israelis against building new settlements, and acknowledging that the United States had fallen short of its ideals, particularly in the Iraq war. It also evoked a new and nuanced tone, and some of Mr. Obama’s language drew appreciative applause from his audience of 3,000 invited guests in the Major Reception Hall at Cairo University.

Several times, for instance, he spoke of “Palestine,” rather than the more ambiguous term often used by American leaders, “future Palestinian state.” And, in reference to the Palestinians, he pointedly mentioned “the daily humiliations — large and small — that come with occupation.”

He described the bond between the United States and Israel as “unbreakable,” and urged Hamas, the Islamic militant group in control of the Gaza Strip, to stop violence. But in his next breath, Mr. Obama said Israel must curtail its expansion of West bank settlements and recognize Palestinian aspirations for statehood. He also acknowledged that Hamas, which the United States labels a terrorist organization, “does have some support among some Palestinians.”

“But they also have responsibilities,” Mr. Obama said, listing them as “to end violence, recognize past agreements, recognize Israel’s right to exist.”

“Israelis must acknowledge that just as Israel’s right to exist cannot be denied, neither can Palestine’s,” Mr. Obama said. “The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop.”

And, while Israel’s hawkish government has not accepted a so-called two-state solution, Mr. Obama said: “The only resolution is for the aspirations of both sides to be met through two states, where Israelis and Palestinians each live in peace and security.”

“This is in Israel’s interest, Palestine’s interest, America’s interest and the world’s interest,” he said. In the Middle East, “too many tears have been shed; too much blood has been shed.”

The address drew initial support from Palestinians. Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, called it “a good start and an important step towards a new American policy.”

Mr. Obama strode onto the stage to loud applause and a standing ovation in the conference hall. He conceded that his speech came at “a time of great tension between the United States and Muslims around the world.”

But he sought to explain that he represented the new face of American leadership. He did not mention the name of George W. Bush, who preceded him in office, and whose policies contributed to the mistrust.

“America is not and never will be at war with Islam. We will, however, relentlessly confront violent extremists who pose a grave threat to our security,” Mr. Obama said. “Because we reject the same thing that people of all faiths reject: the killing of innocent men, women, and children.” Mr Obama said: “I consider it part of my responsibility as president of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear. But that same principle must apply to Muslim perceptions of America. Just as Muslims do not fit a crude stereotype, America is not the crude stereotype of a self-interested empire.”

Mr. Obama offered few details for how to solve myriad problems and conflicts around the globe, but he offered up his own biography as a credible connection to his audience. While the message touched upon a litany of challenges, it boiled down to simply this: Barack Hussein Obama was standing at the podium as the American president.

“I am also proud to carry with me the goodwill of the American people, and a greeting of peace from Muslim communities in my country: assalaamu alaykum,” Mr. Obama said, delivering a common greeting signifying peaceful intent.

Mr. Obama said the terrorist attacks in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001 caused “enormous trauma to our country.” He offered no direct criticism of the previous administration, but reminded his audience that he has “unequivocally prohibited the use of torture” and has ordered the prison to be closed at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

“The fear and anger that it provoked was understandable, but in some cases it led us to act contrary to our traditions and our ideals,” Mr. Obama said. “We are taking concrete actions to change course.”

The president divided his speech into seven sections, often sounding like the university professor he was before he sought political office. He touched on “sources of tension” from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, democracy, religious freedom, women’s rights and economic development and opportunity.

He said the Iraq war had been a “war of choice that provoked strong differences in my country and around the world.”

“Although I believe that the Iraqi people are ultimately better off without the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, I also believe that events in Iraq have reminded America of the need to use diplomacy and build international consensus to resolve our problems whenever possible.”

By contrast, he described America’s military presence in Afghanistan as a necessity after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

“Make no mistake: we do not want to keep our troops in Afghanistan,” he said. “We would gladly bring every single one of our troops home if we could be confident that there were not violent extremists in Afghanistan, and now Pakistan, determined to kill as many Americans as possible. But that is not yet the case.”

Turning to Iran’s contentious nuclear program, he said any nation “should have the right to access to peaceful nuclear power if it complies with its responsibilities” under international regulations to counter the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Iran maintains its nuclear enrichment program is for peaceful civilian purposes but many in the West suspect it is designed to build a nuclear bomb. “This is not simply about America’s interests,” Mr. Obama said, “It is also about preventing a nuclear arms race in the Middle East that could lead this region and the world down a hugely dangerous path.”

As his visit to the region began Wednesday in Saudi Arabia, Mr. Obama was greeted with reminders of the vast gulfs his address must bridge, as voices as disparate as Al Qaeda’s and the Israeli government’s competed to shape how Mr. Obama’s message would be heard.

In a new audiotape, Osama bin Laden condemned Mr. Obama for planting what he called new seeds of “hatred and vengeance” among Muslims, while in Jerusalem, senior Israeli officials complained that Mr. Obama was rewriting old understandings by taking a harder line against new Israeli settlements.

Reuters, "Buy American" provision in U.S. stimulus bill

From: http://uk.reuters.com/article/economyNews/idUKTRE51C4RG20090213?pageNumber=1&virtualBrandChannel=0
Access on June 3, 2009

FACTBOX: "Buy American" provision in U.S. stimulus bill
Fri Feb 13, 2009 6:58pm GMT

(Reuters) - The U.S. Congress is expected to approve an $787 billion economic stimulus, including a Buy American provision that has aroused concerns among trade partners and some U.S. business groups.

Here are details of the provision:
* The Buy American provision imposes a general requirement that any public building or public works project funded by the new stimulus package use only iron, steel and other manufactured goods produced in the United States.
* The stimulus package includes about $48 billion in transportation projects, roughly $30 billion in infrastructure improvements and additional other spending that could be covered by the Buy American provision.

TRADE PACT COMMITMENT CLAUSE
* The bill stipulates that the Buy American provision be "applied in a manner consistent with United States obligations under international agreements."
* That is further explained in separate report language on the bill to clarify that it requires the United States to comply with obligations under the World Trade Organization's government procurement agreement and under the North American Free Trade Agreement and other U.S. free trade accords.
* The report language says products from least-developed countries would be treated in the same manner as countries with which the United States has formal trade commitments.
* The trade compliance language gives members of the WTO's government pact such as the European Union, Japan, Canada, South Korea and Taiwan comfort they could provide material for a public works project funded by the stimulus bill.
* But countries such as China, Brazil, Russia and India which are not members of the government procurement accord or do not have free trade pacts with the United States are not protected by that clause.

WAIVER AUTHORITY
* The act allows the Buy American mandate to be waived if the federal agency overseeing a particular project deems it would be "inconsistent with the public interest."
* It can also be waived if iron, steel and the relevant manufactured goods "are not produced in the United States in sufficient and reasonably available quantities and of a satisfactory quality" or if it would increase the overall cost of a project by more than 25 percent.
* The waivers can apply to a "category of cases" so if a particular product is not made in the United States, contractors would not have to apply over and over again for permission to use it.
(Reporting by Doug Palmer; editing by David Storey)