China press freedom campaign swells with new rally

GUANGZHOU, China: Protesters mounted a second day of rallies calling for press freedom in China Tuesday, as social media users and celebrities backed a campaign which poses a test for the nation's new leaders.

Scores of people, some carrying mourning flowers, gathered outside the Guangzhou offices of the Southern Weekly, a popular liberal paper which had an article urging greater protection of rights censored.

One man in a wheelchair held a banner reading: "Support the Southern Weekly, resist censorship, give back my freedom of speech."

Some demonstrators wore masks depicting the British revolutionary figure Guy Fawkes, adopted as an anarchist symbol internationally after being popularised in the film "V for Vendetta" which was recently broadcast on state television.

Police stood by allowing the rally to proceed, but as it dispersed for the day, a lone woman demonstrator stood outside the building, holding a white rose and raising one hand, making a victory sign with her fingers.

The second day of rare public protests pushing for greater rights in China came after bloggers and celebrities -- some with millions of followers -- voiced support online for freedom of the press.

Yao Chen, an actress who has 32 million followers, posted the paper's logo on China's Twitter-like Weibo service and quoted Russian dissident Alexandr Solzhenitsyn: "One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world".

Southern Weekly used the same quote in its 2006 New Year message.

Fellow actor Chen Kun, who has 27 million followers, replied: "I am not that deep, and don't play with words, I support the friends at Southern Weekly".

The popular blogger Han Han, named by Time magazine as one of the world's 100 most influential people in 2010, lamented the pressure that journalists faced.

"I hope we can give it some small strength and accompany it to keep it going," he wrote, referring to the Southern Weekly.

The row erupted after censors Thursday blocked the paper's 2013 New Year message calling for the realisation of a "dream of constitutionalism in China" and replaced it with an article in praise of the Communist Party, according to journalists.

Chinese media outlets are subject to directives from official propaganda departments, which often suppress news seen as negative by the ruling Communist party, but some publications take a more critical stance.

The dispute comes after the party's new leadership, headed by president-in-waiting Xi Jinping, took over at a congress in November, raising expectations of a more open style of governance.

The authorities seemed to be approaching the row cautiously to avoid a backlash that might trigger more protests, said Doug Young, a journalism professor at Fudan University in Shanghai.

"The government is treading really, really carefully in this incident because they have to make sure that it doesn't get out of control, say if they come across as acting too heavy-handed and start arresting people or trying to fire people," he said.

In a commentary the People's Daily, the Party's official mouthpiece, said propaganda chiefs needed to adapt to the "rhythm of the era" to ensure their effectiveness, and abandon "stiff preaching that is unchanging and patronising".

Analysts said the dispute was the latest instance of years of mounting tension between a heavily controlling government and a public increasingly assertive of its rights.

"It's part of the intensifying battle in the last decade," said Kerry Brown, director of the China Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. "You cannot just shut them up. This is not going to go away."

The US-based website China Digital Times posted what it called a message from propaganda authorities telling media outlets not to refer to the issue.

"Party control of the media is an unwavering basic principle" and "external hostile forces are involved in the development of the situation", it quoted the message as saying.

The international media freedom group Reporters Without Borders praised the protestors' "show of courage" and called for the original article to be published.

But a commentary in the English-language Global Times, which is close to the ruling party, on Tuesday said authorities would not allow radical changes in media policy.

"The country is unlikely to have the 'absolutely free media' that is dreamed of by those activists," it said, "The Southern Weekly issue will not be concluded with a surprise ending."

-AFP/fl

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Primitive and Peculiar Mammal May Be Hiding Out in Australia

It’d be hard to think of a mammal that’s weirder than the long-beaked, egg-laying echidna. Or harder to find.

Scientists long thought the animal, which has a spine-covered body, a four-headed penis, and a single hole for reproducing, laying eggs, and excreting waste, lived only in New Guinea. The population of about 10,000 is critically endangered. Now there is tantalizing evidence that the echidna, thought to have gone extinct in Australia some 10,000 years ago, lived and reproduced there as recently as the early 1900s and may still be alive on Aussie soil.

The new echidna information comes from zoologist Kristofer Helgen, a National Geographic emerging explorer and curator of mammals at the Smithsonian Institution. Helgen has published a key finding in ZooKeys confirming that a skin and skull collected in 1901 by naturalist John T. Tunney in Australia is in fact the western long-beaked echidna, Zaglossus bruijnii. The specimen, found in the West Kimberley region of Western Australia, was misidentified for many years.

(More about echidnas: Get to know this living link between mammals and reptiles.)

Helgen has long been fascinated by echidnas. He has seen only three in the wild. “Long-beaked echidnas are hard to get your hands on, period,” he said. “They are shy and secretive by nature. You’re lucky if you can find one. And if you do, it will be by chance.” Indeed, chance played a role in his identification of the Australian specimen. In 2009, he visited the Natural History Museum of London, where he wanted to see all of the echidnas he could. He took a good look in the bottom drawer of the echidna cabinet, where the specimens with less identifying information are often stored. From among about a dozen specimens squeezed into the drawer, he grabbed the one at the very bottom.

(Related from National Geographic magazine: “Discovery in the Foja Mountains.”)

“As I pulled it out, I saw a tag that I had seen before,” Helgen said. “I was immediately excited about this label. As a zoologist working in museums you get used to certain tags: It’s a collector’s calling card. I instantly recognized John Tunney’s tag and his handwriting.”

John Tunney was a well-known naturalist in the early 20th century who went on collecting expeditions for museums. During an Australian expedition in 1901 for Lord L. Walter Rothschild’s private museum collection, he found the long-beaked echidna specimen. Though he reported the locality on his tag as “Mt Anderson (W Kimberley)” and marked it as “Rare,” Tunney left the species identification field blank. When he returned home, the specimen was sent to the museum in Perth for identification. It came back to Rothschild’s museum identified as a short-beaked echidna.

With the specimen’s long snout, large size, and three-clawed feet, Helgen knew that it must be a long-beaked echidna. The short-beaked echidna, still alive and thriving in Australia today, has five claws, a smaller beak, and is half the size of the long-beaked echidna, which can weigh up to 36 pounds (16 kilograms).

As Helgen began tracing the history and journey of the specimen over the last century, he crossed the path of another fascinating mind who had also encountered the specimen. Oldfield Thomas was arguably the most brilliant mammalogical taxonomist ever. He named approximately one out of every six mammals known today.

Thomas was working at the Natural History Museum in London when the Tunney echidna specimen arrived, still misidentified as a short-beaked echidna. Thomas realized the specimen was actually a long-beaked echidna and removed the skull and some of the leg bones from the skin to prove that it was an Australian record of a long-beaked echidna, something just as unexpected then as it is now.

No one knows why Thomas did not publish that information. And the echidna went back into the drawer until Helgen came along 80 years later.

As Helgen became convinced that Tunney’s long-beaked echidna specimen indeed came from Australia, he confided in fellow scientist Mark Eldridge of the Australian Museum about the possibility. Eldridge replied, “You’re not the first person who’s told me that there might be long-beaked echidnas in the Kimberley.” (That’s the Kimberley region of northern Australia.) Scientist James Kohen, a co-author on Helgen’s ZooKeys paper, had been conducting fieldwork in the area in 2001 and spoke to an Aboriginal woman who told him how “her grandmothers used to hunt” large echidnas.

This is “the first evidence of the survival into modern times of any long-beaked echidna in Australia,” said Tim Flannery, professor at Macquarie University in Sydney. “This is a truly significant finding that should spark a re-evaluation of echidna identifications from across northern Australia.”

Helgen has “a small optimism” about finding a long-beaked echidna in the wild in Australia and hopes to undertake an expedition and to interview Aboriginal communities, with their intimate knowledge of the Australian bush.

Though the chances may be small, Helgen says, finding one in the wild “would be the beautiful end to the story.”

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Meet Obama's Defense Secretary Nominee

President Obama nominated former Senator Chuck Hagel as the next U.S. secretary of defense. To those who haven't followed the Senate closely in the past decade, he's probably not a household name.

Hagel is a former GOP senator from Nebraska and Purple-Heart-decorated Vietnam veteran, but he wouldn't necessarily be a popular pick with Republicans in Congress.

At age 21, Hagel and his brother Tom became the next in the family to serve in the United States Army. They joined the masses of Americans fighting an unfamiliar enemy in Vietnam.

In his book, he describes finding himself "pinned down by Viet Cong rifle fire, badly burned, with my wounded brother in my arms."

"Mr. President, I'm grateful for this opportunity to serve our country again," Hagel said after Obama announced his nomination Monday.

In 1971, Hagel took his first job in politics as chief of staff to Congressman John Y. McCollister, a position he held for six years. After that, he moved to Washington for the first time, where he went on to work for a tire company's government affairs office, the 1982 World's Fair and in 1981, as Ronald Reagan's Deputy Administrator of the Veterans Administration.

Obama Taps Sen. Chuck Hagel for Defense Secretary Watch Video

Sen. Chuck Hagel's Defense Nomination Draws Criticism Watch Video

Obama's Defense Nominee Chuck Hagel Stirs Washington Lawmakers Watch Video

He worked in the private sector for most of the 80s and 90s before his first election to the Senate in 1997.
Since the turn of the century, Hagel has followed a curvy path of political alliances that puts his endorsements all over the map. Hagel's record of picking politically unpopular positions could be a large part of why Obama is naming him for the job, as Slate's Fred Kaplan surmises the next Defense secretary will be faced with tough choices.

In 2000, he was one of few Republican senators to back Sen. John McCain over then-presidential-candidate George W. Bush.

After that election, Hagel fiercely criticized Bush for adding 30,000 surge troops to Iraq, in place of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group's proposal of a draw-down and regional diplomacy, which Hagel preferred. When Bush instead announced that more troops would go to Iraq, Hagel co-sponsored a nonbinding resolution to oppose it, along with then-Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del.

"The president says, 'I don't care.' He's not accountable anymore," Hagel told Esquire in June 2007. "He's not accountable anymore, which isn't totally true. You can impeach him, and before this is over, you might see calls for his impeachment. I don't know. It depends how this goes."

Hagel's fierce opposition to America's involvement in Iraq – he called it one of the five monumental blunders of history, on par with the Trojan War – will be of substantial importance as the Obama administration charts our course out of Afghanistan, deciding how to withdraw the last of the troops in 2014 and how much of a presence to leave behind.

Hagel's support for McCain, which was substantial in his competition against Bush, disappeared in the 2008 election. Hagel toured Iraq and Afghanistan with Obama during his first campaign for the presidency.

In October 2008, Hagel's wife, Lillibet, announced her support for the Obama team, after the Washington Post reported on her donations to his campaign. She donated again in 2012.

Before the 2008 election, Hagel wrote: "The next president of the United States will face one of the most difficult national security decisions of modern times: what to do about an Iran that may be at the threshold of acquiring nuclear weapons."

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West vs Asia education rankings are misleading

Western schoolchildren are routinely outperformed by their Asian peers, but worrying about it is pointless

MATHEMATICS and science are as essential to modern economies as coal was to the industrial revolution. So when the results of international tests show Western schoolchildren lagging behind their peers in countries like Singapore and Japan, alarm bells start ringing.

The latest results to cause consternation are from a comparison of mathematical and scientific knowledge called TIMSS, or Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study. This is given every four years to 9-10-year-olds and 13-14-year-olds from more than 50 countries.

The results, released last month, show that students from the UK, US and Australia continue to perform disappointingly. In maths, for example, English, American and Australian 13-year-olds were outperformed by their peers in South Korea, Singapore, Chinese Taipei, Hong Kong, Japan and Russia. It was a similar story in science.

Cue much wailing and gnashing of teeth. US secretary of education Arne Duncan lamented that "a number of nations are out-educating us today... If we as a nation don't turn that around, those nations will soon be outcompeting us in a knowledge-based, global economy."

Australia's Education Standards Institute director Kevin Donnelly said the results proved that the country's education system had gone "pear-shaped".

However, there are reasons to think that such worries are misplaced.

First of all, although the results are not world-beating, they are far from terrible. All were above average, and better than many other developed nations. For the US at least, they continue a trend of long-term improvement. In the first international mathematics survey, conducted in 1964, the US finished second from bottom.

Second, the common-sense connection between test scores and future economic success doesn't necessarily hold up. For developed nations, there is scant evidence that TIMSS rankings correlate with measures of prosperity or future success. The same holds for a similar test, the Program for International Student Achievement (PISA).

In 2008, Christopher Tienken, then at Rutgers University in New Jersey, compared 1995 TIMSS scores with the 2006 Growth Competitiveness Index. This index was devised by the World Economic Forum to measure a nation's future economic health. Tienken found that for developed countries there was no statistically significant relationship (International Journal of Education Policy & Leadership, vol 3, no 4).

Tienken, now at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey, has since done a similar analysis of the 2003 PISA mathematics rankings and two measures of economic success: per-capita GDP in 2010, and the 2010-2011 Growth Competitiveness Index. The study, to be published in April, again found no statistically significant relationship.

These findings make TIMSS and PISA rankings seem irrelevant. But it could be worse than that. In many cases, high test scores correlate with economic failure.

Japanese students, for example, have always been near the top of the TIMSS. You might expect those high-flying students to be driving a high-flying economy. Yet the Japanese economy stagnated throughout the 1990s and 2000s.

There may be no causal connection, but the same negative correlation is seen elsewhere.

In 2007, Keith Baker of the US Department of Education made a rough comparison of long-term correlations between the 1964 mathematics scores and several measures of national success decades later.

Baker found negative relationships between mathematics rankings and numerous measures of prosperity and well-being: 2002 per-capita wealth, economic growth from 1992 to 2002 and the UN's Quality of Life Index. Countries scoring well on the tests were also less democratic. Baker concluded that league tables of international success are "worthless" (Phi Delta Kappan, vol 89, p 101).

A more recent analysis of 23 countries found a significant negative relationship between 2009 PISA scores and ranking on the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor's measure of perceived entrepreneurial capabilities. This counts the percentage of people in a country who feel confident that they could start a business.

With so many indicators showing a negative relationship, perhaps we need to reconsider how we interpret success - or failure - on international education scores. "If we believe that these tests actually tell us how well a kid or a country is doing, and then we hold people accountable for that, those people are going to focus on what's most likely to be tested, and they're going to cut out everything else," says Tienken.

This is especially relevant to the UK, where the education secretary Michael Gove has justified some of his controversial reforms by referring to the country's performance on the international educational stage.

We might instead consider that in a global economy, where the answers to almost any standard question are a few smartphone taps away, skills like creativity and initiative will be the true drivers of prosperity. None of these traits can be measured easily by tests. When testing consumes precious educational time, focus and money, they get squeezed out.

"Standardised tests reward the ability to find answers to pre-existing questions, but finding the question is more important," says Yong Zhao, an education researcher at the University of Oregon in Eugene who found the negative relationship between PISA scores and entrepreneurship.

We must, of course, continue to promote the importance of mathematics and science, but fixating on international tests as a way to achieve this could prove counterproductive.

MacGregor Campbell is a New Scientist consultant based in Portland, Oregon, and a former teacher

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China fund mulls buying stake in Daimler: report

SHANGHAI: China's sovereign wealth fund is considering buying a four to 10 per cent stake in German automaker Daimler, the website of the official People's Daily newspaper said at the weekend.

The potential purchase comes as China Investment Corp. (CIC), which had more than US$480 billion from the wealth fund under management at the end of 2011, seeks bargains in Europe's weak economy, said the website, quoting unnamed sources.

But a source with knowledge of the matter dismissed the report, saying it was "not true". Chinese media reported nearly a year ago that Daimler had been in contact with CIC regarding a possible deal.

The Financial Times newspaper valued a purchase of four to 10 per cent of Daimler at 1.8 billion to 4.5 billion euros.

A spokeswoman for CIC, declining to be named, said: "Our consistent policy is that we do not comment on any particular project."

Daimler, which produces luxury Mercedes-Benz cars as well as trucks, plans to sell 300,000 cars in China in 2015, about two-thirds of which will be from local production, the company said last month.

In October last year, CIC bought a 10 per cent stake in the company that controls London's Heathrow airport, according to Spanish construction group Ferrovial, one of the vendors.

Last January CIC bought a stake in British utility company Thames Water.

CIC was established in 2007 to invest some of China's massive foreign exchange reserves, the world's largest at US$3.3 trillion at the end of September last year.

China's sovereign wealth fund suffered a 4.3 per cent loss on its overseas investments in 2011 due to the weak global economy. It was the first loss since 2008, when CIC was hit by the global financial crisis.

- AFP/xq

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HTC Q4 profit, sales plunge amid holiday crush

The Droid DNA didn't help HTC's results in the fourth quarter.

(Credit:
Sarah Tew/CNET)

LAS VEGAS--Apparently, the worst isn't over for HTC.

The Taiwanese company reported that its fourth-quarter profit fell more than 90 percent to 1 billion Taiwanese dollars ($34 million) from more than 10 billion Taiwanese dollars a year ago. Sales fell roughly 40 percent to 60 billion Taiwanese dollars.

The poor results mark the lowest profit in eight years for HTC, according to Bloomberg, and further illustrates the difficult position that it continues to be in. The results come despite having a flagship smartphone at Verizon Wireless in the Droid DNA, as well as the marquee smartphone for Windows Phone 8 in the Windows Phone 8X.

HTC has a virtual non-presence at this year's Consumer Electronics Show, which is expected to be light on mobile news.

They also come as HTC CEO Peter Chou vowed that HTC will have a better year in 2013, blaming some of the weakness on the lack of marketing support.

The company, however, finds itself outgunned by larger companies such as Apple and Samsung Electronics, which have much larger war chests to draw upon for their marketing campaign. While HTC was an early darling of the
Android community, much of the buzz has since shifted over to Samsung.

HTC began to show cracks about a year ago, when its 2011 fourth-quarter results disappointed for the first time. Since then HTC has shown consistent year-over-year declines as consumers move away from its smartphone products.

Industry observers, meanwhile, struggle to see how HTC can get back to its lofty position given its relatively limited resources. The company has attempted to compensate by partnering more closely with allies such as the carriers and with Microsoft, but that hasn't yet paid off.

HTC isn't in as bad a position as some of its peers, including former heavy hitters such as LG and Nokia. Both those companies, and several other handset makers, continue to post losses.

It remains to be seen whether HTC and Chou will make good on his vow to turn things around. The last year has shown that even good phones get ignored without the proper support.

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Best Pictures: 2012 Nat Geo Photo Contest Winners

• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  











• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Winner: Places

  Photograph by Nenad Saljic

  A full moon illuminates the Matterhorn peak near Zermatt, Switzerland, in the winning image in the contest's Places category.

  Full moons occur every 29.5 days or so as the moon moves to the side of Earth directly opposite the sun, reflecting the sun's rays off its full face and appearing as a brilliant, perfectly circular disk.

  (Read more about full moons.)

  Published January 4, 2013

  
  











• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Winner: People

  Photograph by Micah Albert

  A picture of women scavenging refuse from a landfill in Dandora, Kenya, is the winning image in the People category of the National Geographic Photo Contest.

  The Dandora landfill, located in eastern Nairobi, is one of the largest in Africa.

  Published January 4, 2013

  
  











• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Photograph by Jason Ching

  Published January 4, 2013

  
  

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Pastor Accused of Killing Wives Faces Trial

Jury selection is scheduled to begin Monday for Pastor Arthur Schirmer, who is accused of killing his second wife and then staging a car accident to hide it.

Schirmer, 64, also faces a second trial at a later date for the death of his first wife. He has said he is innocent of all charges.

In 2008, the pastor and his wife, Betty, were involved in what appeared at the time to be a car crash. Schirmer told police at the time that he had been driving 55 mph and swerved to miss a deer, causing him to drive off the road, according to a police affidavit obtained by ABC News.

Schirmer also said at the time that his wife's head had come forward and struck the windshield, according to the affidavit. Betty died a day later and her body was cremated at the request of Schirmer.

It wasn't until a grisly suicide in 2010 inside Schirmer's office that authorities decided to revisit the case of Betty Schirmer's death and arrest the pastor.

The man who broke in and shot himself at the desk in Schirmer's office at the Reeders United Methodist Church, Joseph Mustante, was the husband of the pastor's secretary, Cynthia Mustante, Poconos Township Police Detective James Wagner said.

Pocono Record, David Kidwell/AP Photo

Mustante's suicide was prompted by the discovery that his wife and the pastor had apparently been having an affair, Wagner said. He was alone at the time of his death.

Investigators looking into the suicide say that several church parishioners had concerns about the deaths of Schirmer's two wives.

"That suicide eventually exposed the affair publicly and subsequent to that, questions arose about the loss of [Schirmer's] wives and his character became questionable," Wagner said.

Relaunching the investigation into the two deaths, Wagner said he quickly suspected that "foul play existed, and the car crash was staged," allegedly, by Schirmer. Wagner said investigators also believed there was something "suspicious" about the first wife's death, a marriage that investigators had not known about prior to the suicide.

Investigators Look Into Deaths of Rev. Arthur Schirmer's Wives

Schirmer's first wife, Jewel, died in April 1999 from a traumatic brain injury after she purportedly fell down a flight of stairs in Lebanon, Pa., Wagner said.

Lebanon is about 100 miles southwest of Reeders, where Schrimer later moved with his second wife.

At the time of Jewel's death, Wagner said, a relative told police that he suspected Schirmer may have had a hand in his wife's death but that the investigation was "never completed."

On Dec. 11, 2012 -- more than 13 years after Jewel died, a Lebanon County judge ruled Schirmer would be tried for her murder.

When investigators looked at the death of Betty Schirmer, they saw inconsistencies, Wagner said.

"There was no airbag deployment and it simply looked like a car that had driven off the road at a very low speed," Wagner said. "It didn't match the injuries to [Betty's head].

"I know there are people out there who probably know him and feel like there is absolutely no way he would be capable of doing this," Wagner of Schirmer. "But they clearly don't know him."

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Silent Skype calls can hide secret messages

Got a secret message to send? Say it with silence. A new technique can embed secret data during a phone call on Skype. "There are concerns that Skype calls can be intercepted and analysed," says Wojciech Mazurczyk at the Institute of Telecommunications in Warsaw, Poland. So his team's SkypeHide system lets users hide extra, non-chat messages during a call.

Mazurczyk and his colleagues Maciej Karaś and Krysztof Szczypiorski analysed Skype data traffic during calls and discovered an opportunity in the way Skype "transmits" silence. Rather than send no data between spoken words, Skype sends 70-bit-long data packets instead of the 130-bit ones that carry speech.

The team hijacks these silence packets, injecting encrypted message data into some of them. The Skype receiver simply ignores the secret-message data, but it can nevertheless be decoded at the other end, the team has found. "The secret data is indistinguishable from silence-period traffic, so detection of SkypeHide is very difficult," says Mazurczyk. They found they could transmit secret text, audio or video during Skype calls at a rate of almost 1 kilobit per second alongside phone calls.

The team aims to present SkypeHide at a steganography conference in Montpellier, France, in June.

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13 killed in Philippine shootout: police

MANILA: Police in the Philippines killed 13 members of a criminal gang in a shootout on Sunday, the third violent incident within days amid widespread calls for stricter gun controls.

The battle erupted after the gunmen in two vehicles tried to smash through a police checkpoint near the town of Atimonan, according to the national police headquarters' operations centre.

A police statement said one senior police officer was wounded and taken to hospital. It said 10 firearms were recovered from the gang members, including an M16 assault rifle.

No other details of the incident in the town 173 km (108 miles) southeast of Manila were available.

The incident occurred two days after a drug-crazed former village official went on a shooting rampage, killing seven people and wounding 12 others, some of whom have life-treatening injuries.

Rolando Bae was himself killed in a subsequent shootout with police.

Also last week two children aged seven and four were killed by stray bullets fired during celebratory gunfire to welcome the New Year.

The incidents triggered public condemnation and calls for stricter controls on gun ownership, with official statistics estimating nearly 600,000 unlicensed guns across the Philippines.

Some 1.2 million licensed firearms were on the registry as of 2012.

Various civic groups as well as the influential Catholic church have called for a total ban on guns on the streets. President Benigno Aquino -- himself a gun aficionado -- has yet to respond to the demand.

Other groups called for the return of capital punishment, which the government banned in 2006.

- AFP/xq

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