” [Google co-founder Sergey Brin] warned there were “very powerful forces that have lined up against the open internet on all sides and around the world”. “I am more worried than I have been in the past,” he said. “It’s scary.”

The threat to the freedom of the internet comes, he claims, from a combination of governments increasingly trying to control access and communication by their citizens, the entertainment industry’s attempts to crack down on piracy, and the rise of “restrictive” walled gardens such as Facebook and Apple, which tightly control what software can be released on their platforms.”

“Ghost marriage (minghun) is a 3,000 year-old custom practiced especially in northern China. Huang Jichun, a scholar at Shanghai University who studies Chinese folk traditions, says the majority of rural families in the north, whose relatives die unbetrothed , seek “ghost spouses” for the departed. According to custom, the bodies are buried together in a ceremony that is a cross between a wedding and a funeral. Their ghosts, it is believed, will then no longer be lonely, and the family’s fortunes will be restored.

…

Trade in female corpses is flourishing in these poor rural areas. Bodies are typically procured through brokers, with the typical quoted price of a fresh corpse rising at least 25% in the past five years to 50,000 yuan.”

Kazakhstan’s shooting team demanded an apology after a spoof national anthem from the comedy film Borat was played instead of the real one at a medal ceremony in Kuwait, the BBC reported on Friday.

“Digital hoarding is a huge problem. There is so much available storage, we don’t have to make decisions anymore,” says David D. Nowell, a neuropsychologist specializing in attention issues in Worcester, Mass. “The problem isn’t that it slows down your computer—it slows down your brain,” he warns, since each of those photos, links and folders demands some mental energy.

…

There isn’t a set number of emails in an inbox or photos saved that defines a hoarder. Accumulating crosses the line into hoarding, experts say, when it is disorganized and dysfunctional and gets in the way of other relationships and responsibilities.

…

When a Busy Inbox Signals a Problem

There are no official criteria for ‘digital hoarding’ but there are some tell-tale signs:

• You’ve exceeded your 7 gigabytes of free space in Gmail and have to buy more.

• Deleting anything makes you anxious—even things you can’t remember why you saved.

• You spend more time searching for a file than it would take to download it again.

• You have dozens of icons on your desktop and don’t know what they’re for.

• You can’t remember all your email or social-media accounts or how to access them.

• You have flash drives scattered in drawers, pockets and purses and no idea what’s on them.

• Of your thousands of digital photos, the vast majority are duds.

• You have entire seasons of bad TV shows you have no intention of watching.

Digging Out

Professional organizers who specialize in technology issues offer these tips for conquering digital hoarding:

•Practice ‘zero email.’ Discipline yourself to clean out your inbox completely every day, answering, filing or deleting each item.

• Declare ‘email bankruptcy.’ Delete every unread email in your inbox and alert your 10 best friends and colleagues that if they have sent something crucial, they should send it again.

• Unsubscribe to every newsletter and mailing list you don’t need or want immediately.

• Set your spam filter to block any regular emails you don’t want to receive.

• Don’t check your inbox continuously, and disable the ‘dinger’ alerts. Set specified times to read and answer email each day.

• Don’t copy and save documents; save Internet addresses where you can find them later, if necessary.

• Remember, people typically use only about 20% of what they save.

“Given that Baidu is streets ahead of Google – holding 83.6 percent of China’s search space — it is likely that the option to move would significantly lessen usage of Google amongst China iOS users.”