A year on after Obama and the Nobel Peace Prize continues to hit the headlines with the recipient this year being the Chinese human rights activist and political prisoner Liu Xiaobo. In what appears to be a recurring theme, Liu Xiaobo is indeed an extremely deserving winner, embodying the attributes that represent the Committee’s designated goals, but is also someone who guaranteed international headlines and controversy. However, what the award has done is to perhaps commence the dialogue of what are truly universal human rights as rightly identified by the historian Timothy Garton Ash in an excellent article in the Guardian this past week. The problem is (as Garton Ash points out) that to many outside of the ‘western’ world universal are often equated as ‘western’ values. So what are universal human rights?

Well by in large most of us would agree with the fundamental human rights laid down by the UN’s universal declaration, many issues would need to be resolved before we see truly universal human rights. This is especially true where cultural and religious rights and freedoms conflict with political or individual ones; something which happens on a daily basis across the world. How many people are aware of the human rights abuses in the Seychelles for example where human rights are protected in law but not adhered to in practice? These are certainly not well publicised.

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Transportation (of people and goods) seems a benign topic on the surface of it. However, when one start to think of its role in our daily lives (i.e. its facilitation of human progress and interaction); we begin to realise how it should not be taken for granted. Transport networks are the metaphoric “blood circulation” of our global society’s  on both a micro and macro scale. Transport facilitates trade and travel which bring people together.

Now imagine a world where you’d be able to eat dinner in New York and have dessert in Paris less than an hour later having traveled there by train.  Unfathomable?

According to the video above; by 2099 it may be possible.  However; China is one nation taking bold strides to develop our global transport networks today.

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Mr Roberto Sharpe is a martial arts guru, someone who has spent twenty five years of life honing his craft in New York. Over the years he has practiced Tai Chi, bagua, Xingyi, capoeira, judo, karate, boxing, jiu-jitsu, xuejiao and others.  What’s most notable about what he has to say concerning his art is that he has adapted many styles to form his own way of fighting (martial street art) which is more reminiscent of “western boxing” whilst still paying homage to the Chinese culture from which his main martial art (Tai Chi) is derived.

In the interview above he talks about his development as a martial artist and how this flourished into him becoming a full-time teacher and his martial arts philosophy. He says that its based on liberation - “liberation from crass materialism, stylisms and egoistic traps that we fall into as people when we become good at something” to quote him loosely. Like Bruce Lee, he has become so accomplished in the various arts that he has studied that he is now looking to free himself from their limitations.

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