Word: humanism
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President Obama has brought yet another Harvard name to Washington. Harvard Medical School professor David Blumenthal ’70 will oversee a $19.5 billion project to digitize medical records, the Department of Health and Human Services announced earlier this month...
...wasn't supposed to be like this. Many members of China's fledgling dissident community had hoped that after the successful hosting of the Olympics last summer, the control that authorities had exercised over the country's dissenting voices would ease up. Some human rights advocates, academics and other analysts in and out of China even expressed optimism that long-awaited reforms to the judiciary, the media, in labor relations and in the treatment of non-governmental organizations would finally materialize...
...that those reforms are still a long ways off. "It used to be the case that whatever the negative developments and systematic smothering of dissent, there were always some signs of hope and potential advances on other fronts," says Nicholas Bequelin, a China researcher with the New York-based Human Rights Watch. "But recently the good news has been very few and far between. There has been a total lack of progress on legal reform, the media, rural reform, labor. These issues were very much carrying forward hope for opening up of Chinese society, but now there's just nothing...
...government's tightening grip has manifested itself in every area of Chinese life. One prominent activist was detained and many others interrogated by police after some 300 people signed the "Charter 08," a document published last year calling for more democracy and respect for human rights. China's best know activist lawyer, Gao Zhisheng, who has been in and out of detention for several years and whose latest five-year sentence for "subversion" had been suspended, disappeared once again in early February after what was apparently a first-hand account of his jailing and torture by security forces appeared...
...quoted catchphrase. Whereas previous leaders like Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin have taken risky steps such as opening the country to economic reform and joining the World Trade Organization, the administration of President Hu and Premier Wen Jiabao seems "paralyzed by fear of the downside," as Bequelin of Human Rights Watch puts it. He says the state's level of control has always oscillated, but with a long period of heavy repression having already past and no prospect of relief in sight, the risk of serious destabilization is growing fast...