- August 17, 2012 - first time women in North Korea are allowed to ride bicycles again after the ban in 1996 saying that bicycle riding is not feminine
- United World College in Hong Kong
- "congressman who took nude dip in Sea of Galilee apologizes"
- Sapir-Whorf hypothesis - "The idea that the language people speak controls how they think--linguistic determinism--is a recurring theme in intellectual life. It was popular among 20th-century behaviorists, who wanted to replace airy-fairy notions like 'beliefs' with concrete responses like words, whether spoken in public or muttered silently. In the form of the Whorfian or Sapir-Whorf hypothesis . . ., it was a staple of courses on language through the early 1970s, by which time it had penetrated the popular consciousness as well. . . . The cognitive revolution in psychology, which made the study of pure thought possible, and a number of studies showing meager effects of language on concepts, appeared to kill the concept in the 1990s . . .. But recently it has been resurrected, and 'neo-Whorfianism' is now an active research topic in psycholinguistics." (Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought. Viking, 2007) http://grammar.about.com/od/rs/g/SapirWhorf.htm
- some people really can remember every day of their lives (NPR)
- In China, serious human rights violations continue to be committed. This includes torture, execution (in which China is world leader), excessive use of force in public order policing, repression of dissent and forced repatriation of asylum seekers without recourse to a refugee determination procedure. Foreign governments continue to fail in challenging China's disastrous human rights record, however, the recent award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the Chinese human rights defender, Liu Xiaobo (right), may lead to some positive change in that regard.
- East Asia sees continuing serious human rights abuses across the region. Freedom of expression is still significantly limited in South Korea. In North Korea the government still fails to uphold its population's basic right to food and health care. Most East Asian governments, including Japan, continue to apply the death penalty.
aug 20 2012 ∞
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