BEIJING – China’s Twitter-like websites are facing new threats of censorship.

One of the country’s top microblogs is down for maintenance, and the other three have begun displaying a “beta” tag to indicate they are in testing, though they have been operating for months.

Users worry that the changes are cover-ups for further restraints on speech in China, where Twitter itself is blocked. They have deluged Chinese cyberspace and the microblog operators with questions and theories about the changes.

Long Weilian, a China-based tech blogger who uses the name William Long, was skeptical about China’s top four microblogs suddenly posting “beta” tags or going “under maintenance.”

“Such a long time to figure that one out,” he tweeted Wednesday.

Chinese officials often fear that public opinion might spiral out of control as social networking — and social protests — boom among the world’s largest Internet population. The government unplugged Twitter and Facebook last year but has allowed domestic versions to fill the void while keeping them under scrutiny.

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LAGOS (AFP) – Nigeria’s government backtracked Wednesday on claims that its state petroleum firm was insolvent, raising new questions over the oil-rich nation’s squandered resources and the role corruption has played.

The reversal came a day after the junior finance minister labeled the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) insolvent, prompting an angry response from the firm, which blamed the government for its woes.

According to the company, the government has not paid it more than six billion dollars in subsidies, which are supposed to be provided in exchange for holding down petrol prices in Africa’s most populous nation.

The controversy has played out against the backdrop of an approaching election season, with a presidential vote set for early next year in the OPEC member, the world’s eighth-largest oil exporter.

“To say it’s insolvent, as you know, is incorrect,” Finance Minister Segun Aganga told journalists on Wednesday.

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MONTVILLE, Conn. – Almost 125 years ago, 15-month-old Emma Wheeler was laid to rest within sight of her family’s church near a stone wall in a New England cemetery.

The church is now long gone, and the cemetery is abandoned. Over time, the toddler’s grave and the rest of the Montville burial grounds became obscured by shoulder-high branches, brambles and fern fronds.

It’s a scene mirrored at an untold number of abandoned cemeteries nationwide, leaving state and local governments under pressure from residents to clean up the burial grounds out of respect for the dead — without imposing more costs on the living.

Last year, Connecticut joined a number of states that have enacted laws that let towns acquire abandoned cemeteries if they cannot find the legal owners or heirs and if no burials have taken place for generations.

But the new law only allows for the acquisitions and cleanups. It doesn’t require towns to do so or allocate any money to pay for the work.

Likewise, officials in many other states say it’s proven nearly impossible to pinpoint exactly how many abandoned burial grounds exist, much less find the legal owners or shoulder the cost of cleaning them up. Part of the reason: Cemeteries weren’t on tax rolls, so there was little impetus for governments to track their ownership.

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New York –
On a teeming street in Mumbai’s Dharavi slum, amid a colorful swirl of sweet lime carts and red-clay pottery, Pastor Bala Singh brings an assortment of buckets to retrieve his daily ration of water. The indoor spigot he uses provides water only three hours a day. It is the only source for the six small homes on his street, and each family has 30 minutes to fill its containers.

Pastor Singh is not complaining, though. Things are greatly improved from when he first immigrated to Dharavi – the most crowded part of one the world’s most crowded cities. “The roads were muddy,” he says from his second-floor office, above the popping sizzle of a man welding, sans protective gear, downstairs. “Now they put down bricks.” Singh ministers to a small congregation that meets above the church-sponsored kindergarten where his wife has taught for 17 years. Though relatives have begged him to come home to Tamil Nadu, 700 miles east, he has no plans to leave.

“Three times I tried to go back to my native place,” the pastor says, explaining that there were no jobs there. “I don’t want to live here … but God’s plan is different.”

Singh’s migration to the city, a combination of divine impulsion and the simple need to work, is part of what could be called an epic trend affecting billions of people worldwide. Sometime in 2007, for the first time in human history, more people began to live within the cacophonous swirl of cities than in rural hamlets or on countryside farms.

It’s a fundamental shift that may be altering the very fabric of human life, from the intimate, intricate structures of individual families to the massive, far-flung infrastructures of human civilizations. In 1950, fewer than 30 percent of the world’s 2.5 billion inhabitants lived in urban regions. By 2050, almost 70 percent of the world’s estimated 10 billion inhabitants – or more than the number of people living today – will be part of massive urban networks, according to the Population Division of the United Nations’ Department of Economic and Social Affairs.

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