Amnesty International today urged the Chinese authorities to release a woman sentenced to a year in a labour camp for retweeting a supposedly anti-Japanese message.
Chinese online activist Cheng Jianping was sentenced to one year of ‘Re-education Through Labour’ on Monday for “disturbing social order”, having retweeted a satirical suggestion on October 17 that the Japanese Pavilion at the Shanghai Expo be attacked.
Cheng disappeared ten days later, on what was to be her wedding day, her whereabouts unknown until it emerged this week ...
BEIJING — In a case that has galvanized the Chinese arts community, a prominent artist who helped lead a short-lived demonstration along the nation’s most politically hallowed thoroughfare went on trial Wednesday on assault charges that supporters say are aimed at punishing him for his political activism.
The defendant, Wu Yuren, 39, is accused of assaulting a group of police officers at a Beijing police station last May. He had gone to the stationhouse with a friend who was seeking to file a complaint against his landlord, but Mr. Wu ended up in a verbal confrontation with several officers after they grabbed his cellphone, the friend, Yang Licai, said.
The police officers say Mr. Wu attacked them. Mr. Wu claims ...
Oh, lady, you just earned our 15 bucks. Rihanna will sell millions of copies of Loud, her fifth album, and she'll deserve every penny of it -- not because it's a dependably excellent club-shaker, though it is, but because no woman should have to endure the kind of pick-up line Drake shoots her way on "What's My Name," the record's second single. "I heard you good with those soft lips / Yeah you know word of mouth," purrs the Canadian rapper (and Ri-Ri's rumored fling). "The square root of 69 is 8 something, right / 'Cuz I been trying to work it out."
Woof. But while Casanova rolls over in his grave, Rihanna smirks and takes it in stride. Drake may open the track, but she reigns in their shared world -- with a coquettish flip, she glides into a chorus that leaves no doubt: "Hey boy, really wanna see / If you can go downtown with a girl like me." In the video, she struts happily around New York's Lower East Side in a zebra-striped jacket, a nod to the actual animal she sat atop in the video for last year's "Rude Boy" -- with her bodysuit covered in Keith Haring-esque graffiti to match the floor and walls, like Haring himself was bodypainted to melt into his own squiggly backdrop in Annie Liebovitz's 1986 portrait. "Rude Boy," from last year's defiantly terse but uneven Rated X, was released when the young pop star was still struggling to overcome her well-documented romantic difficulties with boyfriend Chris Brown, and seemed about to melt into the tabloid stories.
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A LOT has happened since the screenwriter Steve Kloves began working on his adaptation of the very first Harry Potter book, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” in the late 1990s.
The three central characters — Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Hermione (Emma Watson) and Ron (Rupert Grint) — have grown up on screen, enduring the twin horrors of Voldemort and adolescence before our very eyes. The stories have become progressively darker and more complicated. And Mr. Kloves has immersed himself so deeply in the world of Harry Potter that by the time J. K. Rowling’s seventh and final volume, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” came out in 2007, he said, he knew the characters almost as thoroughly as she did herself.
Adapting the stories for film has been a delicate process all along, as faithfulness to books adored by millions has always had to be balanced with the conventions (and length) of Hollywood blockbusters. (Mr. Kloves is the screenwriter for all but one of the movies, “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.”) But “Deathly Hallows” was perhaps the most difficult of all. More than 700 pages long and crammed with quick-moving plot developments leading to an apocalyptic finale, the book ultimately proved too dense to make into a single film. So it has been split into two.
Part 1, to be released on Friday, covers the first half of the novel, a kind of prolonged road trip in which Harry, Ron and Hermione become nomads in hiding, sorting out their feelings for one another while eluding capture and searching for magical objects that must be destroyed before Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) can die. Part 2, which builds to a final battle between good and evil inside the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, ...
PALO ALTO, Calif. — For more than two decades, e-mail has been the killer application of the Internet. But Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, believes that e-mail is antiquated.
On Monday, Mr. Zuckerberg unveiled a new unified messaging system on Facebook that allows people to communicate with each other regardless of whether they are using e-mail, text messages or online chat services.
“We don’t think a modern messaging system is going to be e-mail,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. He said that e-mail is too formal, too slow and too cumbersome, especially for young people who have grown up communicating using online chat and text messaging systems. The new Facebook service, which will allow users to have @facebook.com e-mail addresses, intends to integrate the three forms of communication into one inbox that is accessible from PCs or mobile phones.
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