Jump off the express

Keeping up with the pace in Shanghai is a challenge but there's an oasis or two where you can take a breather, writes Winsor Dobbin.
THE sun has only just risen above the Shanghai skyline but already thousands of locals have descended on Fuxing Park - the leafy backyard for many apartment dwellers in this sprawling city.
There is an eccentric collection of Shanghainese going through their workout regimes, which range from swordplay to tai chi; ballroom dancing to calligraphy; kite-flying to head-butting a tree; playing musical instruments to playing cards.

Nightlife in Xintiandi. Photo: Getty Images
All age groups are involved; some of the dancers appear to be in their 80s. Some move energetically, others more languidly. Some are dancing to traditional Chinese music blaring from portable loudspeakers, others to 1940s big-band tunes.

A box-seat at a river crossing

Crossing the Zanskar. Photo: Christina Thompson

I STARE in amazement at the wooden box that will carry us across the river. As boxes go, it appears quite well made, if old and worn. Nevertheless, it is a wooden box, not what I would recognise as the promised "cable car".
But as I watch two local farmers sit calmly in the contraption as it is pulled across the Zanskar River by means of a frayed blue nylon rope,
I have the usual thoughts of a stranger facing a challenging situation in a foreign country: "Put your trust in the locals. They know what they're doing."

In fact, the ride looks quite exciting. The box, suspended from a cable that stretches to the stark, rock-strewn shore on the other side, will allow us to traverse a torrent of grey, silt-laden water from the peaks of the Ladakh range in the far north of India.

George Jonas: A decade after 9/11, the Islamists still have the upper hand

Many have suggested that 9/11 was like Pearl Harbor for America, at least psychologically. If so, it might be instructive to compare anniversaries. Where was the West 10 years after Pearl Harbor, compared to where it is 10 years after 9/11? Was being attacked by the Far Eastern militarism of the Empire of the Rising Sun as harmful to America as the suicide assault of Near Eastern fanatics? Did one do more damage than the other?
I’m posing the question, because I consider both acts of belligerency expressions of larger conflicts than just Japan’s or al-Qaeda’s with America. I take Pearl Harbor to have been Oriental despotism’s fascist-tinged declaration of war on Occidental democracy, and regard 9/11 as theocratic Islam’s challenge to secular post-Christendom.

Wiki war: 3500 unpublished leaks destroyed forever as Assange hits out

Former WikiLeaks staffer and one of the founders of OpenLeaks, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, holds his book Inside WikiLeaks. Photo: AP

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's former right-hand man has irrevocably destroyed 3500 unpublished files leaked to the whistleblower site including the complete US no-fly list, five gigabytes of Bank of America documents and detailed information about 20 neo-Nazi groups.
Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who left WikiLeaks last year after a falling out with Assange, revealed the document destruction in an interview with Der Spiegel.
WikiLeaks has hit back, accusing Domscheit-Berg of being in bed with US intelligence agencies and of jeopardising the leaking of “many issues of public importance, human rights abuses, mass telecommunications interception, banking and the planning of dozens of neo-nazi groups”.

Facebook sex scandal with girl, 16, topples German conservative politician

Christian von Boetticher, Schleswig-Holstein's Christian Democratic Union leader and top candidate for regional state elections in 2012, wipes tears as he gives a statement to the media after a board meeting in Kiel, Germany. Photo: Reuters

BERLIN — German voters may be willing to tolerate a politician's having an affair with a teenager, but not when that politician — a leading conservative, no less — met her on Facebook, where he also flaunted immodest details of his life.
Christian von Boetticher, 40, the successful state legislator at the top of the Christian Democratic Union's ticket in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein, resigned as head of the party there during a tearful news conference on Sunday. He admitted to the affair, which was legal under German law, and to making a misjudgement, but insisted that he had nothing to be ashamed of because it was "a very unusual love".
It is also an unusual scandal — not only because of the girl's age, which was at the border of permissible and punishable, but also because of the role played by the social-networking site.

In some ways, the fact of her youth was less strange to conservative voters and colleagues "than that a grown man with more important things to do would spend so much time playing around on this network with nothing better to do than trade messages with a young girl," said Rudolf Koetter, director of the Centre for Advanced Ethics and Science Communications at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany.

Space vacation: orbiting hotel ready for guests by 2016

Commercial space station.

This post was originally published on Mashable.com
The age of space tourism might be closer than you think. In fact, if you have an extra $US1 million ($964,041) lying around, five years from now you could be one of the first off-world adventurers to stay for five days in this orbiting hotel built by Russian company Orbital Technologies.
You’ll get there via a Russian Soyuz rocket, taking you about a day to reach the Commercial Space Station 217 miles above the earth. Once you catch up to the orbiting abode, you’ll settle in with your comrades — up to six other space tourists (or researchers) — for an unparalleled adventure, residing in four cabins aboard the space station.

Survey’s surprising finding: tea party less popular than atheists and Muslims

In an op-ed article in the New York Times, Robert D. Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard, and David E. Campbell, a political scientist at Notre Dame, say they have collected data indicating that the tea party is "less popular than much maligned groups like 'atheists' and 'Muslims.'"
But Campbell says the tea party was really an afterthought in their research.
"We didn't go into this study to look at the tea party," Campbell said in an interview with The Ticket.
The professors were following up on research they conducted in 2006 and 2007 for their book "American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us" and decided to add the tea party and atheists to their list of survey queries. By going back to many of the same respondents, the professors gleaned several interesting facts about the tea party.