TOP 100 NEWS SITES
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| Violence Erupts in Iraq on Holiday Five people were killed in two attacks in Iraq following violence that left more than 40 dead in the four days leading up to the end of the major Shiite Islam holiday of Ashura. online.wsj.com |
Bodies of three skiers found in Switzerland Fresh snowfalls bring warnings of heightened avalanche risk as ski season opensThe bodies of three skiers missing after an avalanche in central Switzerland were found today, raising to seven the toll in the country's most lethal avalanches in more than a decade.The bodies of a Swiss woman, a Swiss man and a German man were found in the Diemtig valley, 25 miles south of the capital, Bern, said Theo Maurer, chief instructor of Alpine Rescue Switzerland. No other people have been reported missing.The victims were in a group of off-piste skiers who were hit by an avalanche shortly before midday on Sunday, burying two. A second avalanche about half an hour later hit the rescue party.An emergency operation involving eight helicopters of the Swiss air rescue service Rega and 100 rescuers was able to pull nine people from the snow. One man was already dead. Three others died in hospital of their injuries.The earlier victims were identified as a German and three Swiss, one of whom was a rescue doctor who had flown in to help.Rescuers had been unable to search for the remaining skiers yesterday because fog and snow prevented safe access to the area by air or on foot.Experts had held out little hope the missing three would be found alive. It was the biggest avalanche death toll in Switzerland since February 1999, when two snow slides swept away several chalets in the canton of Valais, killing 12 people.The start of the ski season and heavy snowfall in recent days have prompted officials to warn of a heightened avalanche risk in the Swiss Alps.Elsewhere on Sunday, a Swiss man was killed and his guide injured in an avalanche near the southern ski resort of Verbier. Last week an avalanche killed three people skiing off-piste in neighbouring France.SwitzerlandEuropeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Soccer Attack: Why South Africa Is not Angola The rush to taint South Africa's soccer World Cup with the terrorist attack on a team in Angola is wrong -- and reflective of Western journalists' ignorance feedproxy.google.com |
Bengals' Marvin Lewis is AP NFL Coach of the Year NEW YORK (AP) -- Marvin Lewis had much more than game plans to deal with this season.... hosted.ap.org |
Talking tough on censorship | Jonathan Fenby Hillary Clinton's speech on internet freedom was welcome. But don't pretend China and the US have shared valuesFor a western audience, Hillary Clinton's speech about internet freedom and the need to counter hacking was entirely welcome. For China, it amounted to "information imperialism".For the west, the fact that access to sensitive links from websites in China is blocked on official orders is unacceptable, leading Google to say this week that it will disregard such controls and thus risk having its Chinese language site closed down. For Beijing, there is no censorship in China, which has an "open" internet system.For the United States, hacking of the kind reported into Google's system with the copying of Gmail messages to unknown addresses is a major infringement on a private domain operation which puts users (including dissidents) at risk. For those authorities in the People's Republic, the ability to monitor dissidents electronically is more than welcome, while commentators linked Google to the White House, presumably as part of what Li Changchun, the Politburo Standing Committee member responsible for media, calls "hostile forces" seeking to infiltrate "decadent thought" into the People's Republic through the internet.The gulf between the two sides is enormous, built on different value systems and different political regimes. Whatever the faults of the American way, it has a basic belief in freedom of information. In China, on the other hand, control of information is an essential element in the power structure. For Li, as for remnant Maoists in the 1980s, what used to be called "spiritual pollution" is not only a threat to the facade of puritanical Communist Party rule harking back to the Spartan days in their wartime base (even if it is hugely belied by the extent of corruption by Party officials); it also threatens one of the levers of authority.There is, thus, no way in which China is going to accommodate Google. But, as I suggested in a Cif posting earlier this week, the row has ramifications that reach far beyond this particular case. Clinton's speech ups the ante considerably. On the day that Obama told the bankers "if these folks want a fight, it's a fight I'm ready to have", the secretary of state appears to be sending much the same message to Beijing.If this is the case, it is heartening that somebody as highly placed as Clinton is setting out lines of engagement on the issue of free speech, particularly amid a renewed crackdown on dissidents on the mainland. As I argued in a CiF contribution at the end of last year, the west has not got very far in its dealings with a more assertive, self-confident China, as was evident during Obama's visit to Shanghai and Beijing in November and at the Copenhagen climate change conference. The Treasury in Washington believed that a softly-softly approach on the currency issue would induce Beijing to raise the value of the yuan, but has achieved nothing at all.There are, of course, very evident difficulties in taking a tougher line. Most other US tech companies operating in China have distanced themselves from Google. The contribution of cheap mainland production to their bottom line in hard times is not something American companies that have set up plants in the People's Republic want to lose. Nobody has anything to gain from war or a trans-Pacific slanging match that gets out of hand. The G2 concept may be a mirage but China and America have to find ways of working together; one of the big disappointments of the Obama administration to date has been its lack of creativity in seeking to do so.With the US fleet in neighbouring seas, US spy planes patrolling its borders, an edgy relationship with Japan, a potential collapse in North Korea, unrest in Tibet and Xinjiang, the Taliban across the border and the Taiwan issue far from resolved, Beijing has many reasons to feel jittery. A leadership that came to believe Obama had switched to an offensive stance would be even less inclined to compromise with the US than it was in 2009. Mao-era fears of encirclement are never far away.That needs to be taken into account, as does the nature of decision-making in China and the long tradition of rule by law (rather than rule of law), which leads to the automatic conclusion that the likes of Google have to abide by the regulations, whatever they may be, or face the consequences. But the important thing, in this case as in others, is to set out a clear position. Sweet words about shared values have their place. When, as in this case, values are not shared, those who do cannot accept the Chinese leadership's vision of the nature and flow of information should say so quite clearly – just as Beijing does on its side.ChinaHillary ClintonInternetFreedom of informationFreedom of SpeechCensorshipUS foreign policyUnited StatesJonathan Fenbyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |