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For more than two centuries, Englishmen have burned an effigy of Guy Fawkes every year on Nov. 5 to commemorate the foiling of the Gunpowder plot to blow up Parliament in 1605. In the 21st century, Fawkes has been given a new lease on life by online activist groups who use photos of Guy Fawkes masks — modeled after that worn by the hero of the science fiction movie “V for Vendetta” — as their online avatars. These so-called hacktivists, who combine computer hacking with social, political and economic protest, have straddled the line between simple criminal behavior and legitimate […]
Bo Xilai, the dismissed Communist Party chief of the western municipality of Chongqing, began his long fall from grace in February, when his police chief, Wang Lijun, sought refuge in the United States Consulate in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in Southwest China. Wang’s short-lived “defection” lifted the lid off a corruption scandal that is likely to complicate the once-in-a-decade transfer of power to new party leaders in the fall, drawing international attention to internal politics that party officials prefer to keep far from public view. The charges currently being brought against Bo, which include disturbing details about his […]