Money Troubles Take Personal Toll in Greece

ATHENS — His face contorted with anguish, Anargyros D. recounted how he had lost everything in the aftermath of the Greek economic collapse — the food-processing factory founded by his father 30 years ago, his house, his car, his Rolex, his pride and now, he said, his will to live.

Multimedia

View the Original article

Despite Restrictions, Microblogs Catch on in China

Nelson Ching/Bloomberg NewsCharles Chao’s company, Sina, has come to dominate microblogging in China with Sina Weibo.

Add to PortfolioSINA CorpGo to your Portfolio »

“On Weibo, I’m mostly interested in current events, what my friends are saying, and some information related to health and psychology,” Mr. Wang said. “Every day I log in over five times, using either my computer or mobile phone. And I stay on for two or three hours.”

Mr. Wang and Weibo’s 140 million other registered users are one big reason American Internet companies like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube want to get into China. It has the world’s biggest Internet population, about 457 million users, and they are mostly young people who spend long periods engaged in social networking, online games and electronic commerce.

But for now, they cannot enter China. Although there are no regulations that prevent American companies from operating here, the three popular American Web sites have been blocked in China for several years. Analysts say this is probably because the Chinese government wants to prevent the services from distributing uncensored information.

Meanwhile, the Chinese social networking companies are booming. Two weeks ago, shares of the Chinese social networking site Renren soared after a dazzling initial public offering on Wall Street that, for a time, gave the start-up a market value of close to $7 billion.

But Renren, despite being called China’s Facebook, is not even the leader of this country’s hottest Internet craze. That company is Sina.com, the 13-year-old online portal that has reinvented itself with Sina Weibo. Shares of Sina listed on the Nasdaq exchange have jumped about 250 percent during the last year, and some analysts estimate that the company’s microblog unit could alone be worth $5 billion.

It’s all about traffic. In the two years since microblog services became widely available in China, they have attracted more than 220 million registered users.

Now, as microblogs have a powerful effect on public discourse and advertisers start to create campaigns aimed at microblog users, other Chinese Internet companies are scrambling to develop and promote their own microblog services.

“This is a big, big category,” said Zhao Chunming, an Internet analyst at the Susquehanna International Group. “The news media and celebrities are tweeting; so are C.E.O.’s. This is changing the way people receive their news and information.”

What is striking is that microblog services are booming here despite a recent Chinese government crackdown on social networking sites in the wake of democracy demonstrations in North Africa and the Middle East. The restrictions, which typically involve deleting or censoring politically charged content, seem to be aimed at preventing microblogs and other sites from being used to foster dissent or organize antigovernment protests.

Still, young Internet users in China seem unfazed by the restrictions, in part because microblog services are a compelling alternative to this country’s more heavily censored state-run media and, perhaps more important, because microblogs are a powerful tool for self-expression.

“There are just so many talkative people on Weibo,” said Guobin Yang, an associate professor at Barnard College in New York and the author of “The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online.” He said, “They talk about anything, from Marx and McLuhan to personal relationships and love affairs. So the real success of Weibo is that it offers a place for this kind of chitchat.”

American companies have not given up. Groupon, the online coupon giant, recently formed an alliance with Tencent, China’s biggest Internet company. And last December, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, visited Beijing and toured the offices of Sina and Baidu, China’s huge online search engine.

Facebook has dismissed rumors that it plans to enter China by teaming up with Baidu. Company executives have said only that they are exploring a way to enter China.

Analysts warn that the growth of Chinese microblogs could be curtailed if the government decided they have become too powerful a force in public opinion. But for the time being, microblog services are complying with censors and winning over new users, while social networking sites, like Renren, are struggling to keep pace, according to iResearch, an analytics firm based in Shanghai.

1 2 Next Page »A version of this article appeared in print on May 16, 2011, on page B3 of the New York edition with the headline: Despite Restrictions, Twitterish Microblogs Are Booming in China.Sign In to E-MailPrint Single Page Reprints

Connect with The New York Times on Facebook.

Get Free E-mail Alerts on These TopicsChinaSocial Networking (Internet)TwitterFacebook.com Advertise on NYTimes.com

View the Original article

Britain Set to Announce Ambitious Environmental Steps

BRUSSELS — Britain is poised to announce some of the world’s most ambitious goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions — a striking example of a government committing to big environmental initiatives while also pursuing austerity measures.

Chris Huhne, the secretary of state for energy and climate change, is expected to release a statement on Tuesday that the British government will set in law a goal to cut its greenhouse gas emissions about 50 percent by 2025.

That reduction, based on 1990 levels, would be far deeper than theEuropean Union’s goal of cutting emissions 20 percent by 2020, and it would mean that Britain would make faster emissions cuts than other similar size countries, including Germany. The goal could require households to spend on new energy-saving devices for the home. It could also revive stalled government support for large projects, like those that capture power from tides and that bury carbon dioxide emissions.

A spokesman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change declined to comment before a formal announcement.

Governments in Britain and North America have broadly retreated from far-reaching pledges since the financial crisis began two years ago.

Since then, many leaders have seen sharply reduced public spending as incompatible with wholesale changes to their countries’ energy production and consumption.

That makes the pending decision in Britain, where the government is making the deepest spending cuts in decades to trim its debt load, all the more remarkable.

The expected decision has already lifted optimism among scientists and policy makers that fighting climate change remains viable even as economies continue to show, at best, feeble growth.

“This is an outstanding example of the kind of action by developed-world countries that’s needed to bring climate change under control,” said Bert Metz, an adviser to the European Climate Foundation, a group in Brussels that advocates lower emissions, and a former member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “It’s also really going to push the British economy in the direction of growth.”

Some British ministers had been wary of putting too much strain on households and companies that were already facing painful austerity measures. Manufacturers warned over the weekend that the measures would damage competitiveness and growth.

Environmental groups broadly welcomed the decision but had some reservations.

Jason Anderson, the head of European climate and energy policy at WWF, the conservation group, said that the British government appeared to have resisted making greater near-term emissions reductions, at least until other European Union countries also made such cuts. Mr. Anderson said that pursuing deeper near-term cuts would have sent a more powerful signal to the European Union about acting early, while helping ensure Britain could successfully reach the goal for 2025.

A primary reason the government is moving ahead with ambitious goals even in troubled economic times is the Climate Change Act, which took effect in 2008. The act requires Britain to cut its greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 2050 and requires a series of interim goals.

Britain is also moving ahead because an independent advisory body, the Committee on Climate Change, already made recommendations on how the country can best achieve its targets under the act. The recommendations were hard to ignore for Prime Minister David Cameron, who has pledged that his government would be the “greenest ever.”

Even so, the government had chosen a goal that the Committee on Climate Change described as the minimum necessary to stay on track to cut emissions 80 percent by 2050, Mr. Anderson said.

The proposed move also shows a commitment by Britain to diversify its economy and reduce its reliance on financial services after the economic crisis, and to develop a new focus on manufacturing in sectors — like wind and power grids — that show increasing promise.

“The current mood among many people in the U.K. government is, don’t get left behind in the race to develop new industries,” said Tom Burke, a founding director of E3G, an environmental consulting firm, and a visiting professor at Imperial College London.

Several big questions about the pledge remain, including how much of the cuts will come from refreshing Britain’s fleet of nuclear reactors, and how much will come from burning more natural gas and capturing some of those emissions before they reach the atmosphere.

Mr. Burke said he expected the government to continue its push for nuclear power as part of a low-carbon energy mix despite the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan, which knocked out reactors and led to radioactive leaks.

But Mr. Burke said that over time, natural gas would probably be a better optiwon than investing in reactors with their long history of delays, cost overruns and waste disposal problems.

View the Original article

E.U. Presses Ahead With Bailout Talks Despite I.M.F. Chief's Absence

BRUSSELS — Despite the absence of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, European finance ministers on Monday approved a bailout package for Portugal and debated new aid for debt-strapped Greece.

Multimedia

View the Original article