Li Qingyou vividly recalls the hot summer day 40 years ago in Tiananmen Square. He was among the one million members of the new cadre of radical students called Red Guards who stood at rapt attention and waved their Little Red Books as Mao Zedong exhorted them to destroy China's "Four Olds" - old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits.

The historic mass rally was the first under the Cultural Revolution, Mao's effort to rid the country of its feudal past and create an agrarian utopia. Over 10 years, it led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands and scarred China's national psyche.

It is an anniversary that the government would prefer that Li, a 55-year-old retired factory manager, and other Chinese forgot.

The government, which still reveres Mao, has taken few steps to redress the wrongs committed during the Cultural Revolution, leaving many Chinese of that generation, including former members of the Red Guards, struggling to make sense of the madness that enveloped their nation and the trauma it inflicted.

Despite China's official reluctance to address the fallout of the Cultural Revolution, Li and other former Red Guards in his old unit are attempting to come to grips with the period in a personal way: They recently "adopted" the village where they were once sent to spread the Cultural Revolution. Now they are helping it modernize using a mix of international assistance and homegrown entrepreneurship.

Looking back on the Cultural Revolution, Li said that he and the other schoolchildren had been brainwashed by an irrational mixture of Marxist idealism and Maoist extremism.

"We were a generation that was born and grew up under the red flag," Li said in a recent interview. "Our mentality was that when Chairman Mao waved his hand, we would move, and whatever he said, we would do. We never realized where it would all lead."

The Tiananmen Square rally on Aug. 18, 1966, was a call to action for the Red Guards. The frenzied students took to the streets.

"We did what you see on TV or in films," Li said. "We put up big-character posters and went around to the houses of the rich and landowners to get their stuff. We took their money, gold, silver and things and gave it to the government.

"And of course, we also destroyed the stuff that belonged to the Four Olds category."

As Mao goaded on the Red Guards over the next few months, they began attacking anyone deemed counterrevolutionary.

Modern learning and development were shelved in favor of "learning from the farmers," and cities were emptied of students and professionals who were sent to work in remote villages.

In December 1966, Li found himself with 18 classmates on a rickety truck bound for Jiasang, in central Shanxi Province.

Liang Yuting, 60, a farmer who was Jiasang's Communist Party secretary at the time, said he had had o... [ Read More (0.5k in body) ]

Former Red Guards revisit their past - International Herald Tribune

How to have fun with a simple Squid proxy and ruin your neighbor's day. Well, when they still your intarweb connection.

The Upside-Down Ternet

At the end of World War II on August 6, 1945 an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima by the Americans. The plants and trees in the area around the epicentre were examined in September 1945. Among the survivors were the four Ginkgo biloba trees shown on this page. They were situated near the blast center and appeared to bud after the blast without major deformations and are still alive today.

Therefore the Ginkgo is regarded as the 'bearer of hope'.

The Trees that Survived Hiroshima

The government is to seek parliamentary approval for the pardoning of more than 300 World War One soldiers executed for military offences.

Many of those who were executed are now thought to have been suffering from 'shell shock' when they refused to fight.

good

ePolitix.com - WW1 soldiers to receive pardons

I'm always pleased when I see healthy page views for our business stories - but there are exceptions.

Take this story: "MSN 'to charge user fee'" says the headline, and for a few weeks it has steadily moved up the ranks of our daily statistics. On Sunday it was the most-read business story, and on Monday and Tuesday it featured in the top five.

The hitch: It was written five years ago - on 25 February 2001.

this was the third was emailed story according to the bbc news front page today 16 August 2006
except this story is itself date stamped 8 March 2006, 12:26 GMT

BBC NEWS | Business | Thousands fall for Hotmail prank

While American politicians and generals in Washington debate the possibility of civil war in Iraq, many U.S. officers and enlisted men who patrol Baghdad say it has already begun.

Army troops in and around the capital interviewed in the last week cite a long list of evidence that the center of the nation is coming undone: Villages have been abandoned by Sunni and Shiite Muslims; Sunni insurgents have killed thousands of Shiites in car bombings and assassinations; Shiite militia death squads have tortured and killed hundreds, if not thousands, of Sunnis; and when night falls, neighborhoods become open battlegrounds.

"There's one street that's the dividing line. They shoot mortars across the line and abduct people back and forth," said 1st Lt. Brian Johnson, a 4th Infantry Division platoon leader from Houston. Johnson, 24, was describing the nightly violence that pits Sunni gunmen from Baghdad's Ghazaliyah neighborhood against Shiite gunmen from the nearby Shula district.

As he spoke, the sights and sounds of battle grew: first, the rat-a-tat-tat of fire from AK-47 assault rifles, then the heavier bursts of PKC machine guns, and finally the booms of mortar rounds crisscrossing the night sky and crashing down onto houses and roads.

The bodies of captured Sunni and Shiite fighters will turn up in the morning, dropped in canals and left on the side of the road.

"We've seen some that have been executed on site, with bullet holes in the ground; the rest were tortured and executed somewhere else and dumped," Johnson said.

[nicked from digg]

Iraqi civil war has already begun, U.S. troops say

pics from Washington Post
Punks in China
global culture
they would feel at home in my local pub and certainly not look out of place

China's Punk's Look to Rock - Washington Post

Alexander Raggio says he was 16 when he learned one of his relatives was gay, and watching that person's struggle gave him a grim introduction to discrimination against gays.

He carried those feelings into West Point, and in his senior thesis argued that the military's policy banning gays is not only wrong, but harmful to the Army.

The Pentagon may not agree, but the U.S. Military Academy gave him an award for the paper.

[nicked from digg]

Northwest Florida Daily News: West Point thesis challenges military's gay policy, wins award

Wikipedia, you've been put on notice.

In his ongoing attempt to lob satire at inanity, comedian Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central's Colbert Report has pranked Wikipedia and its consensus-driven reality. In a word, he coined the phenomena "wikiality" — Wikipedia mixed with reality.
...
There was just one problem with the prank: Colbert was ultimately proven wrong.

[nicked from digg]

TheStar.com - Wikipedia handles Colbert

It's a race you can bet Floyd Landis never wanted to win: The descent from the winner's podium in Paris to accused drug user. And yet he has accomplished it with breathtaking speed. With yesterday's news that Landis's backup "B"-sample drug test confirmed there were elevated levels of testosterone after the July 20 stage of the Tour de France, the man who two weeks ago was credited with a historical feat is now being labeled a cheat.

Something in the Blood