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China's New Online Encyclopedia Aims To Surpass Wikipedia, And To 'Guide And Lead' The Public

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China has a long history of producing encyclopedias that goes back thousands of years. One of the most famous works is the fifteenth-century Yongle encyclopedia, which had over 15,000 volumes, and is still the largest paper-based general encyclopedia ever created. More recently, the main publication in this field was the Encyclopedia of China, whose first edition had 74 volumes. Later, CD-ROM and online versions were added. The third edition has just been announced, and although it is not quite on the scale of the Yongle encyclopedia, it is ambitious in its scope:

The third edition of the Chinese Encyclopaedia is currently China's largest publication project, with more than 20,000 authors from universities and research institutes contributing to articles in more than 100 disciplines.Designed to be the nation's first digital book of "everything", it will feature more than 300,000 entries, each about 1,000 words long, making it twice as large as the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and about the same size as the Chinese-language version of Wikipedia.
As the article in the South China Morning Post notes, access to Wikipedia is patchy in China. Most of the uncontroversial articles can be read, but searches for sensitive keywords such as "Dalai Lama" and even "Xi Jinping," have a habit of timing out. The new project is clearly designed to steer people towards safer opinions:
"The Chinese Encyclopaedia is not a book, but a Great Wall of culture," Yang Muzhi, the editor-in-chief of the project and the chairman of the Book and Periodicals Distribution Association of China, told senior scientists at a meeting at the headquarters of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Beijing on April 12, according to a report on the academy's website the next day....Yang told the meeting China was under international pressure and felt an urgent need to produce its own encyclopaedia to "guide and lead the public and society".
Speaking of Wikipedia, Yang went on:
"The readers regarded it to be authoritative, accurate, and it branded itself as a 'free encyclopaedia that anyone can edit', which is quite bewitching," he wrote. "But we have the biggest, most high-quality author team in the world ... our goal is not to catch up, but overtake."
China certainly has the resources to complete this huge project by 2018, its planned launch date. And once those 300,000 entries are available to "guide and lead the public," it's hard not to think that accessing the rival Wikipedia will be made so hard that most people will give up trying, and stick with the new Chinese Encyclopedia. At that point, the Chinese authorities will indeed have created a "Great Wall of culture" to complement that Great Firewall of China, both designed to keep out all those inconvenient ideas.Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

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House Subcommittee Passes Police-Protecting 'Thin Blue Line' Bill

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There's no shortage of existing laws protecting law enforcement officers. So, of course, there's no shortage of new legislation being introduced to further protect a well-protected subset of government employees. Using a nonexistent "War on Cops" as impetus, legislators all over the nation are submitting bills designed to make harming a cop more of a crime than harming anyone else.This isn't just happening at the state level. Last year, Colorado representative Ken Buck introduced a federal "Blue Lives Matter" law, which would have turned attacks on cops into "hate crimes." The bill is a ridiculous extension of protection to officers who aren't in any more danger than they were a decade ago, histrionic statements by various federal officials notwithstanding.Buck's bill has gone nowhere in the last year. It's been sitting in a House subcommittee since April of last year. But one bill's failure doesn't predict the future performance of similar legislation. As Reason's C.J. Ciaramella reports, a similar bill -- Florida rep Vern Buchanan's "Thin Blue Line Act" -- has cleared the House Judiciary Committee.

The House Judiciary Committee advanced a bill Thursday, the Thin Blue Line Act, by a 19-12 vote that would make the killing of a state or local law enforcement officer during the commission of a federal crime an aggravating factor for juries to consider when weighing a death penalty sentence.
All well and good, I suppose, although the bill is pretty much a carbon copy of Florida rep David Jolly's 2015 proposal, right down to the bill's name. Like Rep. Buck's bill, Jolly's made it as far as a committee referral before stalling out. Buchanan's bill, however, now has a greatly increased chance of being pushed towards the President's desk.But to what end, asks Ciaramella? The law apparently does nothing more than signal supporters' cop-supporting virtue.
The legislation would be largely symbolic. Federal death penalty cases are exceedingly rare, and executions at the federal level are even rarer. The last federal execution took place in 2001, when Timothy McVeigh was executed for the Oklahoma City bombing. Most homicide cases are prosecuted by states.
Congressman Bob Goodlatte seems to feel the bill will be most useful when deployed in terrorism cases, but otherwise admits practical applications will be few and far between. The bill has support from police unions but, more importantly, it certainly has the support of the DOJ and the President. This bill caters to Trump's "law and order" push and does a fair amount of sucking up to Attorney General Sessions himself.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions introduced similar legislation in 2015, when he was a U.S. senator, saying "the alarming spike in violence directed against the men and women entrusted with ensuring the safety and order of our society must be stopped..."
The "alarming spike in violence" Sessions was apparently referring to was the increase of police killed in the line of duty by one over 2014's total of 122… which itself was below the average for the preceding ten years (~150 per year).The bill's being tossed into a pretty receptive Congress. It won't really need the support of powerful police unions, though -- not when the head of the DOJ has previously expressed his legislative desire to give cops even more protection.

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