Frank A. Bosco 1919 - 1975

The four short paragraphs below, written by William Saroyan, were the words my father, Frank A. Bosco, the greatest man I ever knew, chose as a humanistic creed by which to live his life. In time, he passed them along to me, as I later did to my son Joseph. While each of us at times fell short of its ideals, they none the less remained our private benchmark.

In The Time of Your Life

In the time of your life, live--so that in that good time there shall be no ugliness or death for yourself or for any life your life touches. Seek goodness everywhere, and when it is found, bring it out of its hiding place and let it be free and unashamed.

Place in matter and in flesh the least of the values, for these are the things that hold death and must pass away. Discover in all things that which shines and is beyond corruption. Encourage virtue in whatever heart it may have been driven into secrecy and sorrow by the shame and terror of the world. Ignore the obvious, for it is unworthy of the clear eye and the kindly heart.

Be the inferior of no man, or of any men be superior. Remember that every man is a variation of yourself. No man's guilt is not yours, nor is any man's innocence a thing apart. Despise evil and ungodliness, but not men of ungodliness or evil. These, understand. Have no shame in being kindly and gentle but if the time comes in the time of your life to kill, kill and have no regret.

In the time of your life, live--so that in that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world, but shall smile to the infinite delight and mystery of it.

William Saroyan

China Indicts Times Researcher, Saying He Disclosed State Secrets

By JIM YARDLEY
Published: December 24, 2005

BEIJING, Dec. 23 - A Chinese researcher for The New York Times was indicted Friday on charges of disclosing state secrets to the newspaper and on a lesser charge of fraud, a move that should send the case to trial within six weeks, his lawyer said.

The researcher, Zhao Yan, 43, who worked in the paper's Beijing bureau, has spent 15 months in prison without a hearing. The formal indictment is significant because such a move on charges relating to state secrets is usually tantamount to conviction in China.

Mr. Zhao, who has denied the charges, could face a minimum of 10 years in prison.

"For Zhao Yan's colleagues, family and friends, this is deeply disheartening," said Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times. Mr. Keller lobbied the Foreign Ministry on Mr. Zhao's behalf in October during a visit to Beijing.

"We've seen no evidence whatsoever that he is guilty of anything but honest journalism," Mr. Keller added.

Mr. Zhao's arrest is directly linked to an article in The Times on Sept. 7, 2004, that disclosed that the former president, Jiang Zemin, had unexpectedly offered to resign his last leadership post as chief of the military. The ruling Communist Party is acutely sensitive to any reporting on the secretive inner workings of the leadership.

Chinese Pressing to Keep Village Silent on Clash

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: December 17, 2005

SHANGHAI, Dec. 16 - Ten days ago, the sleepy fishing village of Dongzhou was the scene of a deadly face-off, with protesters hurling homemade bombs and the police gunning them down in the streets.

Now, a stilted calm prevails, a cover-up so carefully planned that the small town looks like a relic from the Cultural Revolution, as if the government had decided to re-educate the entire population. Banners hang everywhere, with slogans in big red characters proclaiming things like, "Stability is paramount" and "Don't trust instigators."

Many facts remain unclear about the police crackdown on a Dongzhou demonstration on Dec. 6, which residents say ended in the deaths of 20 or more people, but one thing is certain: The government is doing everything possible to prevent witnesses' accounts of what happened from emerging.

Residents of Dongzhou, a small town now cordoned off by heavy police roadblocks and patrols, said in scores of interviews on the telephone and with visitors that they had endured beatings, bribes and threats at the hands of security forces in the week and a half after their protest against the construction of a power plant was violently put down. Others said that the corpses of the dead had been withheld, apparently because they were so riddled with bullets that they would contradict the government's version of events. And residents have been warned that if they must explain the deaths of loved ones - many of whom were shot dead during a tense standoff with the police in which fireworks, blasting caps and crude gasoline bombs were thrown by the villagers - they should simply say their relatives were blown up by their own explosives.

"Local officials are talking to families that had relatives killed in the incident, telling them that if they tell higher officials and outsiders that they died by accident, by explosives, while confronting the police, they must make it sound convincing," said one resident of the besieged town in an interview. "If the family members speak this way they are being promised 50,000 yuan ($6,193), and if not, they will be beaten and get nothing out of it."

Sex, lies and surveys: Point is, is there a point?

Zhou Liming
2005-12-15 06:04

Media obsession with female students' chastity, or the lack of it, has moved up a notch with a student paper at a top Beijing university refuting a report on the high rate of sexual activity.

The survey was conducted in response to an online claim that only a small minority of female students at Beijing Foreign Studies University (Beiwai) were unfamiliar with sex.

"I feel this is unfair. Female students as a group have been the target of a demonization campaign," said He Min, a junior majoring in journalism, who spoke on the condition that her real name not be revealed.

Chinese media, especially the tabloids, seem to be fixated on the private lives of female college students.

There are numerous reports of college girls moonlighting in houses of ill repute, with some putting their number very high.

A posting titled "The night life of a Beiwai girl," which has been making the rounds on the Internet, claims to be a first-person account of a "san pei" (escort) girl in the city's Sanlitun bar district.

Also, an online survey, purportedly conducted by the Beijing Film Academy's "Single Men Society," concluded that, by the time they graduate, only 15.86 per cent of female students at Beiwai are virgins.

The poll was conducted by a dozen people through "social networking and online data gathering" and "does not guarantee its accuracy," said the report.

He Min, the Beiwai student who was riled by it, defended their "good name" with their own poll, which was done on campus.

The result, published in "107 Investigation," a student newspaper, said that only 11.5 per cent of female students engaged in sex during their college years.

"This is a resounding rebuttal of the online figure," said He.

Discussions on Internet forums show that most Chinese are troubled by a sense of sliding morals, which they attribute to a growing materialistic craving. The loss of virginity at a young age is often seen as a manifestation.

Some experts have different views.

"The Beiwai students were trying to protect their values," said Ai Xiaoming, a feminist scholar. "But it played right into the traditional virginity obsession."

As Professor Ai argued, the whole fracas is pointless except that it has highlighted how ironclad thousands-of-years-old concepts of a male-dominated society are and how they still grip public imagination.

"What does it matter whether a student is a virgin or not? As long as it's a voluntary act, I don't see any problem with it," she told China Daily.

"The fixation on a woman's chastity is more important to men than to women."

Virgin Ratio at BSFU: The Making of a Story

By Li Mu (Lianne Li)

"This is the first investigation on the sexual condition of female students in BFSU. It mainly focuses on the general conditions of campus sex, the level of sex knowledge, and sexual attitudes. We would like to gather data in order to know the genuine sexual condition within the campus." That was the lead of an article titled An investigation on the sexual condition of BFSU female students, published in the third issue of the monthly BFSU campus paper, 107 INVESTIGATION.

The investigation was an effort to better understand female students at Beijing Foreign Studies University, a female-dominated school that has a reputation for pretty girls and being a "dyejigger" corrupting female virtues. A college virgin ratio chart that was spread all over the Internet claimed that the percentage of virgins among BFSU graduates was only 15.86%, despite no scientific or empirical research on female sexual activity in China's colleges.

In November, 6 girls from the Journalism Department at BFSU designed 13 questions for the sex investigation questionnaire under the supervision of a teacher. The questionnaire asked about the recipients' knowledge and source of the ongoing gossip, their attitudes and knowledge of sex and the ways in which they wished to obtain sexual education. Only one of the questions asked whether they had sex during college. Over 600 recipients from different grades returned the questionnaires, and the investigative report was written according to the data, featuring interviews of some of the respondents and medical staff at the campus hospital.

"We wished to receive considerable responses from what we had done, but we never expected such a huge influence," says one of the girls among the investigation group. On December 9th, a reporter from Chinatimes came to interview Luo and Liang, who participated in the investigation. "He kept asking us whether we were trying to rebut what the gossip had imposed on us, but we denied it because that was not on our mind when we were doing this," said Luo. However, the headline on the report published on December 12th came out as BFSU Girls Carried Out a Sex Investigation to Rebut On-line Gossips.

The report emphasized the finding that only 11.5% of the responding students had sex, quoting Luo anonymously, saying that she believed only a small number of students were sexually active and that the bad impression that had been stamped on BFSU girls was unfair. Although Luo never mentioned in the interview that the girls were "6 virgins," the reporter manufactured it by extracting it from a sentence in Luo's personal blog, which actually pleaded for tolerance from readers on campus, saying that the six of them had no experience with sex and the other issues investigated.

Although a later article in the Legal Evening Post (Fazhiwanbao) published most of the investigation's results with no special emphasis on any one part, almost all of the major on-line news media put up the Chinatimes article and played games with it. One secondary report was even headlined as 6 Virgins Carried Out a Sex Investigation in BFSU.

The virgin ratio determined by the investigation became one of the most hotly debated topics of on-line bulletin boards. By December 14th, there had been 1448 comments on the bulletin board of Netease alone, with a whole page specially devoted to the topic. Many expressed disbelief and disapproval of the investigation. According to a vote-in survey on sohu.com, only 18.27% of the 4000 participants considered the result convincing, and over 70% of them disagreed with the argument that only 10% of female students were sexually active.

What's more, half of the visitors considered the investigation to be a joke. Some said the investigation was "trying to mask things by making them obviously contradictory." Some feminists even openly condemned the purpose of the investigation. "The gossipers are mean indeed, but to rebut it, the investigators themselves must have been supporters of masculine pressure that stressed women's virginity and the idea that sexual relationships are filthy," said a commenter on Netease.

"The whole idea of the virgin ratio chart didn't flash into our mind until we were setting about doing a backdrop for reporting on the investigation," complained Luo. "The media has distorted our aim of the investigation, and the public misunderstood it. What we are doing is disclosing the basic sexual behavior of the girls so that people can extend a better understanding towards them all."

What the report really meant to deliver was the ignored corner of the debate: the university had long neglected sex education. The statistics showed that even among female graduate students, there were some who admitted knowing very little necessary sexual knowledge. The major source of the girls' sex knowledge was found to be books, pornographic films and the Internet; over 80% responded that they had no idea of any lectures on sex held on campus or on the distribution of condoms.

Although the focus of public concern still lies on a meaningless ratio, some scholars are starting to support the investigation. When interviewed by Chinatimes, Fang Gang, PhD, a scholar on the Sociology of Sex at Renmin University, believes that it is important for people to know why female college students were considered to have casual sex lives. He said: "These girls are young and attractive, which is why people like to think of them that way and why they become targets of sexual desire. It's a mark of the masculine sexual possessiveness in our male-dominant society. It is not right for society or the media to distort their image."

Editorial

Death of an American City

We are about to lose New Orleans. Whether it is a conscious plan to let the city rot until no one is willing to move back or honest paralysis over difficult questions, the moment is upon us when a major American city will die, leaving nothing but a few shells for tourists to visit like a museum.

We said this wouldn't happen. President Bush said it wouldn't happen. He stood in Jackson Square and said, "There is no way to imagine America without New Orleans." But it has been over three months since Hurricane Katrina struck and the city is in complete shambles.

There are many unanswered questions that will take years to work out, but one is make-or-break and needs to be dealt with immediately. It all boils down to the levee system. People will clear garbage, live in tents, work their fingers to the bone to reclaim homes and lives, but not if they don't believe they will be protected by more than patches to the same old system that failed during the deadly storm. Homeowners, businesses and insurance companies all need a commitment before they will stake their futures on the city.

At this moment the reconstruction is a rudderless ship. There is no effective leadership that we can identify. How many people could even name the president's liaison for the reconstruction effort, Donald Powell? Lawmakers need to understand that for New Orleans the words "pending in Congress" are a death warrant requiring no signature.

The rumbling from Washington that the proposed cost of better levees is too much has grown louder. Pretending we are going to do the necessary work eventually, while stalling until the next hurricane season is upon us, is dishonest and cowardly. Unless some clear, quick commitments are made, the displaced will have no choice but to sink roots in the alien communities where they landed.

The price tag for protection against a Category 5 hurricane, which would involve not just stronger and higher levees but also new drainage canals and environmental restoration, would very likely run to well over $32 billion. That is a lot of money. But that starting point represents just 1.2 percent of this year's estimated $2.6 trillion in federal spending, which actually overstates the case, since the cost would be spread over many years. And it is barely one-third the cost of the $95 billion in tax cuts passed just last week by the House of Representatives.

Total allocations for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the war on terror have topped $300 billion. All that money has been appropriated as the cost of protecting the nation from terrorist attacks. But what was the worst possible case we fought to prevent?

Losing a major American city.

"We'll not just rebuild, we'll build higher and better," President Bush said that night in September. Our feeling, strongly, is that he was right and should keep to his word. We in New York remember well what it was like for the country to rally around our city in a desperate hour. New York survived and has flourished. New Orleans can too.

Of course, New Orleans's local and state officials must do their part as well, and demonstrate the political and practical will to rebuild the city efficiently and responsibly. They must, as quickly as possible, produce a comprehensive plan for putting New Orleans back together. Which schools will be rebuilt and which will be absorbed? Which neighborhoods will be shored up? Where will the roads go? What about electricity and water lines? So far, local and state officials have been derelict at producing anything that comes close to a coherent plan. That is unacceptable.

The city must rise to the occasion. But it will not have that opportunity without the levees, and only the office of the president is strong enough to goad Congress to take swift action. Only his voice is loud enough to call people home and convince them that commitments will be met.

Maybe America does not want to rebuild New Orleans. Maybe we have decided that the deficits are too large and the money too scarce, and that it is better just to look the other way until the city withers and disappears. If that is truly the case, then it is incumbent on President Bush and Congress to admit it, and organize a real plan to help the dislocated residents resettle into new homes. The communities that opened their hearts to the Katrina refugees need to know that their short-term act of charity has turned into a permanent commitment.

If the rest of the nation has decided it is too expensive to give the people of New Orleans a chance at renewal, we have to tell them so. We must tell them we spent our rainy-day fund on a costly stalemate in Iraq, that we gave it away in tax cuts for wealthy families and shareholders. We must tell them America is too broke and too weak to rebuild one of its great cities.

Our nation would then look like a feeble giant indeed. But whether we admit it or not, this is our choice to make. We decide whether New Orleans lives or dies.