China has installed a silent alarm system inside every house in a border town as part of its strengthened crackdown on fugitives from North Korea, a report said on Friday.
The system is designed to let residents secretly send a signal to police if North Korean escapees come to their houses and ask for help, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency said.
It can transmit dialogue between the owner of a house and visitors, and Chinese authorities plan to expand it into other areas bordering the North, the agency said.
“If you push the red button on the wall, a signal goes directly to a police station,” Yonhap quoted one man as saying.
The man said he saw the device during a recent trip to his relative in the Yanbian border area in northeastern Jilin province.
Yonhap said China had stepped up a crackdown in border areas since South Korea criticised its repatriation of dozens of North Korean refugees in February and this month.
The man who developed a whole new way of playing the banjo, and turned it from not much better than a comic prop into the defining sound of bluegrass music, died on Wednesday aged 88. Obituaries at the NYT, the Guardian, the Guardian music blog, and an excellent short video here from the BBC, which makes the point that, unlike so much of the Country music establishment, which turned its back on the counter-culture in the late Sixties and headed down the road to Muskogee, Scruggs moved with the times, playing with the likes of Bob Dylan and performing at anti-war demonstrations.
Steve Martin (himself no slouch on the banjo) wrote a fine appreciation of the man in the New Yorker back in January:
In 1945, when he first stood on the stage at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville and played banjo the way no one had ever heard before, the audience responded with shouts, whoops, and ovations. He performed tunes he wrote as well as songs they knew, with clarity and speed like no one could imagine, except him. When the singer came to the end of a phrase, he filled the theatre with sparkling runs of notes that became a signature for all bluegrass music since. He wore a suit and Stetson hat, and when he played he smiled at the audience like what he was doing was effortless. There aren’t many earthquakes in Tennessee, but that night there was.
As boys in the little community of Flint Hill, near Shelby, North Carolina, Earl and his brother Horace would take their banjo and guitar and start playing on the porch, then split up and meet behind the house. Their goal was to still be on the beat when they rejoined at the back. Momentously, when he was ten years old, after a fight with his brother, he was playing his banjo to calm his mind. He was practicing the standard “Reuben” when found he could incorporate his third finger into the picking of his right hand, instead of his usual two, in an unbroken, rolling, staccato. He ran back to his brother, shouting, “I’ve got it, I’ve got it!” He was on the way to creating an entirely new way of playing the banjo: Scruggs Style.
He was only twenty-one when he was in on the founding of bluegrass music, adding the Scruggs’ banjo sound to Bill Monroe’s great blend of guitar, bass, fiddle, mandolin, and Monroe’s iconic high, lonesome voice, singing, “It’s mighty dark for me to travel.” He had already been playing Scruggs style for eleven years. On the Grand Ole Opry’s Ryman Auditorium stage, the banjo had been played well, but mostly in the old style, and mostly by comedians, prompting Uncle Dave Macon, a beloved regular, to say about Earl from the wings, “That boy can play the banjo, but he ain’t one damned bit funny.” [...]
A grand part of American music owes a debt to Earl Scruggs. Few players have changed the way we hear an instrument the way Earl has, putting him in a category with Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, Chet Atkins, and Jimi Hendrix.
Over ten years after the overthrow of the Taliban, a new report from Human Rights Watch documents the continued punishment inflicted on Afghan women for "moral crimes", which can include not only running away from abusive marriages, but even being the victim of rape:
The Afghan government should release the approximately 400 women and girls imprisoned in Afghanistan for “moral crimes,” Human Rights Watch said in a new report released today. The United States and other donor countries should press the Afghan government under President Hamid Karzai to end the wrongful imprisonment of women and girls who are crime victims rather than criminals.
The 120-page report, "I Had to Run Away’: Women and Girls Imprisoned for ‘Moral Crimes’ in Afghanistan,” is based on 58 interviews conducted in three prisons and three juvenile detention facilities with women and girls accused of “moral crimes.” Almost all girls in juvenile detention in Afghanistan had been arrested for “moral crimes,” while about half of women in Afghan prisons were arrested on these charges. These “crimes” usually involve flight from unlawful forced marriage or domestic violence. Some women and girls have been convicted of zina, sex outside of marriage, after being raped or forced into prostitution.
The fall of the Taliban government in 2001 promised a new era of women’s rights. Significant improvements have occurred in education, maternal mortality, employment, and the role of women in public life and governance. Yet the imprisonment of women and girls for “moral crimes” is just one sign of the difficult present and worrying future faced by Afghan women and girls as the international community moves to decrease substantially its commitments in Afghanistan.
Human Rights Watch interviewed many girls who had been arrested after they fled a forced marriage and women who had fled abusive husbands and relatives. Some women interviewed by Human Rights Watch had gone to the police in dire need of help, only to be arrested instead.
“Running away,” or fleeing home without permission, is not a crime under the Afghan criminal code, but the Afghan Supreme Court has instructed its judges to treat women and girls who flee as criminals.Zina is a crime under Afghan law, punishable by up to 15 years in prison.
Women and girls interviewed by Human Rights Watch described abuses including forced and underage marriage, beatings, stabbings, burnings, rapes, forced prostitution, kidnapping, and murder threats. Virtually none of the cases had led even to an investigation of the abuse, let alone prosecution or punishment....
Human Rights Watch said that women and girls accused of “moral crimes” face a justice system stacked against them at every stage. Police arrest them solely on a complaint of a husband or relative. Prosecutors ignore evidence that supports women’s assertions of innocence. Judges often convict solely on the basis of “confessions” given in the absence of lawyers and “signed” without having been read to women who cannot read or write. After conviction, women routinely face long prison sentences, in some cases more than 10 years.
Nearly two-thirds of North Korean children under 10, or some 2.2 million, suffer from growth disorders related to malnutrition and 18,000 of them are so undernourished that their life is at risk, according to a study.
Hwang Na-mi, a researcher at the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs in Seoul, published her findings in the March issue of the journal Health and Welfare Forum on Sunday. She analyzed a nutrition assessment conducted in the North by the UNICEF in cooperation with the North's Central Statistics Bureau in 2004 and 2009.
According to the study, 2.2 million or 61.7 percent of the North's 3.55 million children under 10 were underweight, chronically malnourished with stunted growth, or acutely undernourished with a frail physique. Some numbers overlap.
The average life expectancy for North Koreans is 11 years less than that for South Koreans, due to poorer healthcare and nutrition among other reasons, the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs (KIHSA) said Sunday.
In a study titled “Health Disparity between the South and North,” it said the average life expectancy for North Koreans stood at 69.3 years (65.6 years for men and 72.7 years for women) in 2008. In comparison, an average South Korean was estimated to live for 80.1 years (76.5 years for men and 83.3 years for women).
North Korea is about to spend an estimated US$2 billion, or one third of its annual budget, to mark the centenary of nation founder Kim Il-sung on April 15, plus an additional $850 million to build a three-stage rocket and launch pad for the event. The total would be enough to buy 4.75 million tons of rice based on current grain prices at $600 per ton as the regime holds out its hands for international food aid.
St Anne’s Church has a long-standing connection to the Royal Navy, and its current Rector is honorary Chaplain to the Royal Navy. Its clock is the highest church clock in London. It was designed as a special maritime clock for shipping on the Thames: it chimed every 15 minutes to guide the 6000 ships that moored in the docks every day. These days, it chimes every hour. Above the clock, there is a golden ball, which until recently was a Trinity House sea mark for navigating the Thames.
And not forgetting the pyramid:
A distinctive pyramid, originally planned to be put on one of the corners at the east end of the building, now stands in the churchyard and is Grade II listed.
It hadn't occurred to me before, but this article by Paul Rosenberg on the killing of Trayvon Martin (via the Dylan site Expecting Rain) is a reminder that it's just the kind of case that Bob Dylan would have written a song about back in the campaigning civil rights days of the early Sixties, some fifty years ago. Rosenberg cites "Who Killed Davey Moore", about the boxer, but the slaying of a black youth by a white vigilante, and the lack of interest from the police, surely has more resonance with songs like "Only a Pawn in Their Game" or even "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll". The fact that the killer goes by the name of Zimmerman adds a bizarre twist to the tale.
The times they are not a-changin' as fast as we sometimes like to think.
It may not be much, and it may just reflect the need for Chinese leader Hu Jintao to make the right polite kind of noises while being hosted at the nuclear summit in Seoul, but there's some indication that the pressure on China on the subject of North Korean defectors, aggravated by the recent fiasco over the short-lived nuclear moratorium deal, may be pushing Beijing away from its usual automatic support for Pyongyang.
North Korean defectors hiding out the South Korean Consulate in Beijing will soon be able to come here [to South Korea], a diplomatic source in Seoul said Monday. The source said after a meeting between Chinese President Hu Jintao and President Lee Myung-bak the chances are good that China will let the North Korean defectors who have been hiding out at the consulate for almost three years go.
The source added they should be able to discreetly board a flight to South Korea at the end of this month or early next month.
Hu during the summit with Lee at Cheong Wa Dae on Monday said China "is taking a lot of interest and giving consideration to the issue of North Korean defectors and respects [South Korea's] the position. It will strive to ensure that the issue is resolved smoothly." That appears to confirm hopes that Beijing will allow the defectors hiding out in South Korean missions in China to come to South Korea.
Chinese President Hu Jintao urged North Korea Monday not to proceed with its planned launch of a long-range rocket next month, saying North Korea is "wrong to launch a satellite and advised to give up." He also said Pyongyang should focus on improving its people’s livelihood.
In comments made in his summit talks with President Lee Myung-bak at the latter`s office in Seoul, Hu also said, “(The Chinese government) has been closely communicating with North Korea on this issue several times,” adding, “We`re making efforts to persuade the North to give up (the launch).”
Since Beijing had not openly expressed its opposition to Pyongyang`s previous launches of long-range rockets, Hu`s demand that the North change its priorities and focus on improving its people’s livelihood is considered unusual.
China, which had sided with North Korea on its 2010 attack on the South Korean naval corvette Cheonan and Yeonpyeong Island, has thus made a unanimous voice with South Korea for the first time in years.
By the usual standards of Chinese diplomacy over matters relating to North Korea, that's remarkably blunt. Could this mark the beginnings of a shift in Chinese attitudes towards their troublesome neighbour?
