UN nuclear inspectors have started a three-day mission to examine Iran's
atomic activities. Tehran says it's certain the talks - the first in
more than three years - will prove its program's purpose is purely
peaceful. The IAEA visit comes at a time when tensions between Iran and
the West are approaching crisis level. On Monday, EU nations adopted an
unprecedented set of sanctions against the Islamic Republic, which
include a complete embargo on oil supplies from Iran. That comes into
force in July, but Iran is considering an immediate halt of oil sales to
Europe in retaliation. RT discusses the latest development around the
Iranian crisis with Seyed Mohammad Marandi, who's a professor at the
University of Tehran.
When legislators in the US abandoned their support
of SOPA and PIPA in the wake of mass popular protest earlier this
month, many of those who had been mobilized by the legislation–which
would have granted the US government almost total power to block access
to foreign websites accused of so much as linking to copyrighted
material–did not have long to enjoy their “victory.” The very next day
the New Zealand police swooped in
to the million-dollar estate of MegaUpload.com founder Kim Dotcom,
arresting him and three others at the US government’s request for
alleged racketeering, copyright infringement and money laundering. The
Department of Justice is now seeking the MegaUpload CEO’s extradition to the US.
As a warrior for Internet freedom, you helped defeat the Stop Online
Piracy Act, or SOPA by supporting Web black outs by sites like Wikipedia
and by contacting your lawmaker to voice your displeasure. So loud was
your voice that even the president of the United States sided with you in opposing it.
But
don't take a deep sigh of relief because, after all, we're talking
about a merger of Washington, D.C., and Hollywood here, as well as
global interests. After the motion picture industry, its subsidiaries
and all "interested parties" have spent nearly $150 million lobbying for
some sort of Internet-centric "anti-piracy" bill, you should have known
the powers that be would return.
"Although
the proposed treaty's title might suggest that the agreement deals only
with counterfeit physical goods (such as medicines) what little
information has been made available publicly by negotiating governments
about the content of the treaty makes it clear that it will have a far
broader scope and in particular will deal with new tools targeting
'Internet distribution and information technology'", says an assessment
of ACTA by the watchdogs at the Electronic Freedom Foundation.
"ACTA
has several features that raise significant potential concerns for
consumers' privacy and civil liberties for innovation and the free flow
of information on the Internet [regarding] legitimate commerce and for
developing countries' ability to choose policy options that best suit
their domestic priorities and level of economic development," says EFF's
assessment.
As is usually the case with dubious,
rights-stripping legislation, ACTA - which Forbes.com reports was signed
by the U.S. in 2011 and has already been sanctioned as well by Japan,
Switzerland and many European Union nations - has largely been
negotiated in the shadows and, thus, has largely been devoid of
scrutiny... until now.
While the Obama administration was shying
away from SOPA, it has been aggressively pursuing ACTA (full disclosure:
the process was started under the Bush administration). Critics say it
is much more far-reaching than SOPA, bypassing "the sovereign laws of
participating nations" and "forcing ISP's across the globe to act as
internet police," Forbes said.
Police in Oakland, California, have used tear-gas and flash-grenades
as a 2,000-strong Occupy Oakland march turned violent, with some
protesters claiming that rubber bullets were also fired into the crowd.
At least 300 people were arrested.
The demonstrators had attempted to take over vacant buildings to use
as their headquarters, they also broke into City Hall and tried to
occupy a YMCA. Police spokesman Jeff Thomason told media most of the
arrests came around 8 pm local time. Police took many protesters into
custody as they marched through the city's downtown area, with some
entering a YMCA building.
Officials say, at one point protesters
began tearing down perimeter fences around the Henry J. Kaiser
Convention Center, as some attacked police officers, throwing rocks,
bottles and other objects. Police declared an unlawful assembly and used
force, according to the Oakland Tribune newspaper.
While police
were taking people into custody near the YMCA, about 100 officers
surrounded City Hall, while others swept the inside of the building for
protesters who had broken in. Inside the building, protesters burned
flags, broke into an electrical box and damaged several art structures,
according to Oakland Mayor Jean Quan.
“The City of Oakland
welcomes peaceful forms of assembly and freedom of speech, but acts of
violence, property destruction and overnight lodging will not be
tolerated,” the press release by city officials stated. “The
Oakland Police Department is also committed to facilitating peaceful
forms of expression while protecting personal safety and property
through ethical and constitutional policing.”
At the moment, the Occupy crowd in the city’s central square is being monitored by dozens of police officers.
Oakland
has seen one of America’s largest and most vocal Occupy protests, with
thousands of people attending since the demos started in October. Some
300 people have been arrested since then. The Occupy Wall Street
movement started in September in New York and claims to represent the 99
per cent of Americans, who suffer from corporate greed and economic
injustice.
If
you are an American or European citizen, chances are you've never heard
about shengren, minzhu and wenming. If one day you promote them, you
might even be accused of culture treason.
That's because these
are Chinese concepts. They are often conveniently translated as
"philosophers," "democracy" and "civilization." In fact, they are none
of those. They are something else. Something the West lacks in turn. But
that is irritating for most Westerners, so in the past, foreign
concepts were quickly removed from the books and records and, if
possible, from the history of the world, which is a world dominated by
the West. As the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel once
remarked, the East plays no part in the formation of the history of
thought.
But let us step back a bit. Remember what school told us
about the humanities? They are not the sciences! If the humanities were
science, the vocabularies of the world's languages would add up, not
overlap. Does that surprise you?
I estimate that there are over
35,000 Chinese words or phrases that cannot properly be translated into
the English language. Words like yin and yang, kung fu and fengshui. Add
to this another 35,000 Sanskrit terminology, mainly from India and
Buddhism. Words like Buddha, bodhisattva and guru.
In a recent
lecture at Peking University, the renowned linguist Gu Zhengkun
explained that wenming describes a high level of ethics and gentleness
of a people, while the English word "civilization" derives from a city
people's mastery over materials and technology.
The correct
Chinese translation of civilization should be chengshijishu-zhuyi.
Wenming is better, but untranslatable. It has been around for some
thousand years, too, while Europe's notion of "civilization" is a late
18th-century "invention."
Tourists and imperialists do not come
to be taught. They call things the way they call things at home. Then
they realize that the names are not correct.