China Rising.
Freezing Ukraine.
“It’s the first thing I read every morning.” — David Barboza, founder of WireScreen and former Shanghai Bureau Chief for The New York Times.
1. The New York Times:
Until recently, Harvard was the most productive research university in the world, according to a global ranking that looks at academic publication.
That position may be teetering, the most recent evidence of a troubling trend for American academia.
Harvard recently dropped to No. 3 on the ranking. The schools racing up the list are not Harvard’s American peers, but Chinese universities that have been steadily climbing in rankings that emphasize the volume and quality of research they produce.
Look back to the early 2000s, and a global university ranking based on scientific output, such as published journal articles, would be very different. Seven American schools would be among the top 10, led by Harvard University at No. 1.
Only one Chinese school, Zhejiang University, would even make the top 25.
Today, Zhejiang is ranked first on that list, the Leiden Rankings, from the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Seven other Chinese schools are in the top 10.
Harvard produces significantly more research now than it did two decades ago, but it has nonetheless fallen to third. (Source: nytimes.com)
2. Late in the afternoon of Jan. 8, angry Iranians took to the streets in large numbers nationwide—from Tehran to Isfahan to the religious city of Mashhad and dozens of smaller cities and towns—chanting and spray-painting slogans that called for the fall of the Islamic Republic and “Death to the dictator.” This time, the regime forces were ready to play a more lethal role in quelling the protests. Paramilitary Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the voluntary Basij militia in plainclothes were deployed in large numbers across the country, often armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles. In one instance in west Tehran, security forces were seen with a heavy machine gun mounted on a pickup truck, according to footage verified by Storyful, which is owned by Journal parent News Corp. “We are pretty confident that a massacre happened starting late Thursday night throughout the country,” said Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of the New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran. “It was a complete war zone.” A video filmed that evening in Nazi Abad—a neighborhood close to Aminian’s school—shows protesters trapped in an alleyway as sounds of gunshots ring in the air. “They won’t let them leave,” says a voice in the video. “They are just shooting at them, killing them.” (Source: wsj.com)
