Tag: deeper

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Business

In Hong Kong, Brief-Lived Censorship Hints at a Deeper Standoff

In Hong Kong, Short-Lived Censorship Hints at a Deeper Standoff

The Mr. Law, 27, said he and other activists had set up the site from outside Hong Kong. A New York Times check on the digital route taken by traffic to the site showed that it was hosted by servers in the United States.

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Mr. Law said he had gone back and forth with a representative at Wix since Monday, when the site first disappeared. At the time, the company told him that there was a legal takedown request and that the site was in violation of the company’s terms of service. Later, the company sent Mr. Law the letter from the Hong Kong police, which said the site was a threat to national security.

The site contains a letter, addressed to Hong Kongers who have fled the city, that calls for them to unite in striving for democracy in the city. It also calls for the repeal of the national security law, urges the reform of policing in Hong Kong and criticizes the authoritarian rule of China by the Chinese Communist Party.

“We strive for Hong Kong’s democratic transformation, to realize the freedom, autonomy and democracy that were promised to Hong Kong,” reads a part of the letter. Visitors to the site can sign onto the document, called the “2021 Hong Kong Charter.”

Mr. Law said the website did not encourage violence. “It does not do anything that would be considered illegitimate in liberal countries, but the government can always quote the national security law” to rule that a site is illegal, he said.

“So yes indeed, we will face more similar events in the future,” he added.

In January, Hong Kong’s biggest mobile telecom companies severed access to a local Hong Kong website that listed the personal information of police officers. The move heightened long-held fears that censorship rules as strict as China’s could be ushered into Hong Kong in the coming years.

This week, authorities said they would soon require residents to use their real identity when purchasing cellular services. A similar system in China helped regulators end online anonymity and empowered a force of internet police officers who question and sometimes jail the most outspoken.

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Business

Atlas Obscura, a Journey Website Centered on the Bizarre and Obscure, Digs Deeper

Atlas Obscura, a Travel Site Focused on the Weird and Obscure, Digs Deeper

When the pandemic hit last spring, Atlas Obscura had just received a $20 million investment from a group of investors led by Airbnb. Atlas Obscura, at the time, was focused on building the “experience” side of its business — guided tours and classes — which it expected to snap into the giant home rental platform. (The New York Times is also an investor in Atlas Obscura.) But Airbnb gave up on the initiative as it scrambled to weather the crisis. And like the rest of travel media, Atlas Obscura has spent a year mostly catering to the fantasies of homebound travelers. That led, the company says, to record traffic and advertising revenue, as well as a new business in online classes.

Now, the travel media and the travel industry are bracing — and hoping — for a surge of tourism. Though few in the travel media have taken on re-editing of their product like Atlas Obscura, they’re also trying to adapt to a changed political situation, seeking to find nonwhite writers who live in the places they write about, or to have more diverse American writers tell the stories of destinations. Jacqueline Gifford, the editor in chief of Travel and Leisure, said the travel media was trying to ask itself, “Who gets to tell travel stories, why they’re telling them, and what’s the way we can be more representative of this country, of the world we’re living in today?”

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May 28, 2021, 12:54 p.m. ET

But there are also built-in limits to how much you can revolutionize travel writing, said Rafat Ali, the founder of the travel business site Skift.

“It’s always going to be outsiders looking in,” he said.

The challenge for editors and writers across media is how to make journalism inclusive as well as riveting and provocative, rather than just a corporate media exercise in box-checking. (One top newspaper editor described that genre to me last week as “D.E.I. dutiful,” referring to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.)

It shouldn’t be that hard. Complicated, surprising stories are often the best ones, as illustrated by the superb “Reckoning With a Reckoning” issue that Adrienne Green, the features editor at New York magazine, put together last week. It sought, as the magazine’s editor in chief, David Haskell, wrote in an email, “to clarify stakes and also complicate them, to tell morality tales but avoid easy morals.”

Atlas Obscura, which also publishes magaziney features like the disturbing story of how a Black woman’s remains wound up on display at a Philadelphia museum and the secret queer history of Colonial Williamsburg, is another good example of how a publisher can meet the moment by deepening its content with an inquiry into, in particular, the violence Americans often choose to forget.

Indeed, Mr. Patel told me he’s not sure “decolonizing” was the right word for the project. “Decolonization suggests removal, and that’s not what we’re doing,” he said Wednesday morning, as we began our tour of unusual New York sites on the edge of the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. “Adding this kind of perspective to travel and travel writing makes it less boring.”

Categories
Health

U.S. ought to dig deeper into concept that Covid originated in a Wuhan lab, ex-Clinton official says

U.S. should dig deeper into theory that Covid originated in a Wuhan lab, ex-Clinton official says

The U.S. should play a bigger role in getting to the bottom of the theory that Covid-19 first leaked from a virology lab in Wuhan, China, Atlantic Council senior fellow Jamie Metzl told CNBC on Monday.

“Right now the World Health Assembly is meeting and the United States should do everything possible with our allies to demand a full investigation into the origin of Covid with full access to all records, samples and staff in China and beyond,” said Metzl former national security officer in the Clinton administration, said in The News with Shepard Smith.

“If China wants to turn its nose to the rest of the world despite more than 3 million deaths, let them make that statement,” he said.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday that the determination of the origin of Covid-19 is subject to an international investigation by the World Health Organization and that the U.S. cannot conduct its own investigation.

Metzl organized a group of scientists and academics last year to call for a deeper investigation into the origins of Covid. He told host Shepard Smith that it was “critically important” to find answers to the causes of the pandemic, because if we do not, everyone would be “unnecessarily at risk”.

The White House did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

A previously unpublished US intelligence report found that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were seeking treatment in hospital after an illness, “with symptoms consistent with both Covid-19 and common seasonal illnesses,” the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday and quoted from the report.

The World Health Organization has repeatedly said that the virus most likely jumped from bats to humans through another animal. It has described the theory that the virus leaked from a laboratory as “extremely unlikely” but has not ruled it out. Metzl said he thought the theory was a “likely hypothesis”.

“Why should there be a bat coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan and not in southern China where the horseshoe bats are? And what we know they are in Wuhan is China’s only level 4 virology institute with the largest in the world Collection of bats coronaviruses that did aggressive research to make these pathogens more dangerous, “Metzl said.