The Senate is gearing up for another go-round on rogue websites legislation, and this time, they've jettisoned the "COICA" label in favor of calling it the "PROTECT IP Act." Like a summer blockbuster sequel, it tightens up some things, adds a few new villains, but in the end reprises the same general plot.

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The Hong Kong Education Bureau is planning to make patriotic education compulsory for primary and secondary school children.

Sometimes forgotten issues, people or stories come up from oblivion and awake something in the collective imagination. Sometimes also the protagonists in those stories become part of a legend, whose historical origins are difficult to track down.
This is more or less what happened to a group of people who are said to have lived in the remote mountains and plains of the Japanese archipelago until the 1970s. They are the Japanese gypsies or sanka [ja], written as 山家 (people of the mountains) or 山窩 (mountains nomads).

In an unexpected flareup up of football violence, fans of two local football clubs, Iraklis and PAOK, clashed in the center of Thessaloniki, Greece on April 26, 2011. They attacked storefronts, apartments buildings and parked vehicles, while riot police flooded the downtown area with tear gas.

Three films which give a rare glimpse inside the North Korea have been introduced during the North Korea Freedom Week, an annual event jointly held in Seoul and Washington hosting lectures and film screenings focusing human rights abuses in the North. Mike Paarlberg posted a detailed introduction to the films in the City Paper blog.