Despite the “internet sensation” claim, Ananova is really the only news source on this one.

A photograph purporting to show a 55ft snake found in a forest in China has become an internet sensation.

It was originally posted in a thread on the website of the People’s Daily, the official Communist Party newspaper in China.

The thread claimed the snake was one of two enormous boas found by workers clearing forest for a new road outside Guping city, Jiangxi province.

They apparently woke up the sleeping snakes during attempts to bulldoze a huge mound of earth.

“On the third dig, the operator found there was blood amongst the soil, and with a further dig, a dying snake appeared,” said the post.

“At the same time, another gold coloured giant boa appeared with its mouth wide open. The driver was paralysed with fear, while the other workers ran for their lives.

“By the time the workers came back, the wounded boa had died, while the other snake had disappeared. The bulldozer operator was so sick that he couldn’t even stand up.”

The post claimed that the digger driver was so traumatised that he suffered a heart attack on his way to hospital and later died.

The dead snake was 55ft (16.7m) long, weighed 300kg and was estimated to be 140 years old, according to the post.

However, local government officials in Guiping say the story and photograph are almost certainly a hoax as giant boas are not native to the area.

Anannova seems to have gotten the story from QuirkyChina, which claims to be quoting the People’s Daily for November 11th, but no such story turn up in a search of the English language edition of the paper’s web-site.

The use of the term “boa” is obviously inaccurate. Boa constrictors are native to the New World. The visible markings on the snake’s back, I think, identify it clearly enough as a reticulated python. And Chinese English news reports do clearly routinely refer to pythons (native to Asia) as “boas.”

This 40 k. (88 lbs.), 4 m. (13’) long reticulated python found by Yunnan villagers in this October 22, 2006 story is referred to as a “giant boa.”

There is a problem with range. Guping is a bit north of the generally described range of Python reticulatus.

Wikipedia estimated range of Reticulated Python (Python reticulatus)

Jiangxi Province, China

And there is a problem with the size. The photograph is obviously calculated to mislead. The snake is hanging from the bucket in the extreme foreground in an effort to induce viewers to take the people and cab behind as an indication of scale. If someone could identify the model of the backhoe, and could determine the actual size of the digging bucket, it would be pretty easy to come up with a more accurate estimate of the actual size of the snake.

Estimates of how large reticulated pythons can grow vary. Wikipedia says “more than 28 feet (8.7 m),” quoting Murphy/Henderson (1997). Wall (1926) proposes 30’ (9.14 m.). Oliver (1958) goes all the way up to 33’ (10.06 m.).

Yet, there is a news agency account, dated January 8, 2004, describing the capture in Indonesia of a nearly 49 foot (14.9 m.), 990 pound (450 k.) monster reticulated python, complete with 0:33 video.

The most epic World of Warcraft duel is not going to be fought inside the game, reports the New York Times. Nor will broadswords, enchanted armor, and magic spells be producing the decision. DPS will be inflicted by interagency memoranda, and the Communist Party rather than the program algorithm will select the winner.

My guess is the Ministry of Culture is going to pwn those N00bs from the Administration of Press and Publication.

It could almost be a World of Warcraft game session — two competing titans, plotting against each other, swapping blows, embarked on a quest for a single prize that only the stronger of them will claim.

The virtual World of Warfare game is the subject of a regulatory dispute in China, where such games are big business.

But this is not virtual reality. The titans are two agencies of the Chinese government. And their quest, during which they have traded a few blows in the past week, is for a potentially rich prize: the power to regulate the real World of Warcraft, among the most popular online games in China.

The background: On Monday, the Chinese General Administration of Press and Publication ordered the Shanghai-based operator of World of Warcraft, NetEase, to shut down its servers for World of Warcraft. The agency said that it had rejected the company’s application to become the new host of the game’s four million Chinese players.

But by Wednesday, the Ministry of Culture had struck back.

“In regards to the World of Warcraft incident, the General Administration of Press and Publication has clearly overstepped its authority,” a ministry official, Li Xiong, was quoted as saying in the Economic Information Daily, a newspaper in Beijing. “They do not have the authority to penalize online gaming.”

The ministry said it had that authority. And it said NetEase was perfectly free to offer the game on computers in China. The matter now appears destined for settlement by the State Council, the Chinese government’s cabinet.

Such bureaucratic hair-pulling might seem petty, were so much not at stake. Why the authority to regulate video games should trigger such a fracas is not altogether clear. But on its face, the defining aspect of the dispute involves money.

The online gaming industry in China is already huge, and growing fast. About 50 million people crowd the Internet cafes of China on a regular basis to play. Revenues in 2008 rose about 50 percent to at least $2.9 billion, according to Alicia Yap, a Hong Kong analyst for Citi Investment Research and Analysis. That is 10 times the revenue of just five years ago. IDC, a research company, has predicted that annual revenue will reach $6 billion by 2013.

In that context, the question of who decides what games go online — and how they decide — looms large.

My liberal friends would scoff at the idea of there being any similarity at all, but their ideological affinity is recognized even in China, and a souvenir vendor in the Communist capital is exploiting the obvious resemblance quite profitably.

CRI:

A souvenir shop in the popular Houhai tourist area of Beijing has recently become quite famous because it is selling products with the image of U.S. President Barack Obama’s face imprinted over that of China’s late leader Mao Zedong, CCTV.com reports.

T-shirts and pouches with the “Oba Mao” design, a creative idea by shop owner Liu Mingjie, have attracted the attention of many foreign tourists.

“We usually sell souvenirs printed with historical figures,” Liu said. “Oba Mao is my new creation. The souvenirs with this logo are quite popular among visitors, foreign tourists in particular.”

Republicans are declining to support Obama-Care and Cap-and-Trade. Why, it’s enough to make New York Times editorialist Thomas Friedman envy China.

Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power. China’s leaders understand that in a world of exploding populations and rising emerging-market middle classes, demand for clean power and energy efficiency is going to soar. Beijing wants to make sure that it owns that industry and is ordering the policies to do that, including boosting gasoline prices, from the top down.

Our one-party democracy is worse.

Despotism comes quite natural to Islamic culture. When confronted with the European tradition, many Muslims freely prefer Adolf Hitler to Rembrandt, Michelangelo or Beethoven. Westerners don’t force them to study Mein Kampf more passionately than Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa or Goethe’s Faust; they choose to do so themselves. Millions of (non-Muslim) Asians now study Mozart’s piano pieces. Muslims, on the other hand, like Mr. Hitler more, although he represents one of the most evil ideologies that have ever existed in Europe. The fact that they usually like the Austrian Mr. Hitler more than the Austrian Mr. Mozart speaks volumes about their culture. Koreans, Japanese, Chinese and Middle Eastern Muslims have been confronted with the same body of ideas, yet choose to appropriate radically different elements from it, based upon what is compatible with their own culture.

You have to give him credit. Obama certainly has turned one sector of the economy around.

Ammoland.com

Wall Street Journal:

Computer spies have broken into the Pentagon’s $300 billion Joint Strike Fighter project—the Defense Department’s costliest weapons program ever—according to current and former government officials familiar with the attacks.

Similar incidents have also breached the Air Force’s air-traffic-control system in recent months, these people say. In the case of the fighter-jet program, the intruders were able to copy and siphon off several terabytes of data related to design and electronics systems, officials say, potentially making it easier to defend against the craft.

The latest intrusions provide new evidence that a battle is heating up between the U.S. and potential adversaries over the data networks that tie the world together. The revelations follow a recent Wall Street Journal report that computers used to control the U.S. electrical-distribution system, as well as other infrastructure, have also been infiltrated by spies abroad.

Attacks like these—or U.S. awareness of them—appear to have escalated in the past six months, said one former official briefed on the matter. “There’s never been anything like it,” this person said, adding that other military and civilian agencies as well as private companies are affected. “It’s everything that keeps this country going. ...

The intruders compromised the system responsible for diagnosing a plane’s maintenance problems during flight, according to officials familiar with the matter. However, the plane’s most vital systems—such as flight controls and sensors—are physically isolated from the publicly accessible Internet, they said.

The intruders entered through vulnerabilities in the networks of two or three contractors helping to build the high-tech fighter jet, according to people who have been briefed on the matter. Lockheed Martin is the lead contractor on the program, and Northrop Grumman Corp. and BAE Systems PLC also play major roles in its development. ...

Investigators traced the penetrations back with a “high level of certainty” to known Chinese Internet protocol, or IP, addresses and digital fingerprints that had been used for attacks in the past, said a person briefed on the matter.

Meanwhile, David Broder is shedding big, salty tears over the nation’s loss of the services of someone so “thoughtful and obviously smart as hell,” with a special gift for seeing “how situations look to the people on the other side,” particularly when those other people are lining his pockets.

Why, Freeman is so smart, Broder argues, that he would have been able to “explain” Chinese behavior in the recent incident in which Chinese vessels harassed a US intelligence ship in international waters.

I’m sure Freeman would have said that the Chinese were simply re-asserting their national pride after being so cruelly mistreated by the Western powers in the 19th century, and that their making innovative maximalist claims to territorial sovereignty over the South China Sea is a natural expression of their wounded dignity to which we should understandingly concede. Behaving otherwise on our part would be arrogant and provocative. See, Mr. Broder? The country doesn’t need Charles Freeman as head of NIC. I can tell you myself just what he would have said.

Washington Post:

Charles W. Freeman Jr. withdrew yesterday from his appointment as chairman of the National Intelligence Council after questions about his impartiality were raised among members of Congress and with White House officials.

Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair said he accepted Freeman’s decision “with great regret.” The withdrawal came hours after Blair had given a spirited defense on Capitol Hill of the outspoken former ambassador.

Freeman had come under fire for statements he had made about Israeli policies and for his past connections to Saudi and Chinese interests. ...

In an e-mail sent to friends yesterday evening, Freeman said he had concluded the attacks on him would not end once he was in office and that he did not believe the NIC “could function effectively while its chair was under constant attack.” He wrote that those who questioned his background employed “selective misquotation, the willful distortion of the record . . . and an utter disregard for the truth.”

Such attacks, he said, “will be seen by many to raise serious questions about whether the Obama administration will be able to make its own decisions about the Middle East and related issues.” And he said he regretted that his withdrawal may cause others to doubt the administration’s latitude in such matters.

—————————————————-

But, as Greg Sargent reports, Chuck Schumer is trying to take credit for pushing him.

—————————————————-

Andrew Sullivan finds the process interesting. The debate was in the blogs, not the MSM.

There are a couple of things worth noting about this minor, yet major, Washington spat. The first is that the MSM has barely covered it as a news story, and the entire debate occurred in the blogosphere. I don’t know why. But that would be a very useful line of inquiry for a media journalist.

The second is that Obama may bring change in many areas, but there is no possibility of change on the Israel-Palestine question. Having the kind of debate in America that they have in Israel, let alone Europe, on the way ahead in the Middle East is simply forbidden. Even if a president wants to have differing sources of advice on many questions, the Congress will prevent any actual, genuinely open debate on Israel. More to the point: the Obama peeps never defended Freeman. They were too scared. The fact that Obama blinked means no one else in Washington will ever dare to go through the hazing that Freeman endured. And so the chilling effect is as real as it is deliberate.

Our own original 2/26 posting was one of the earliest.

Barack Obama’s choice to lead the National Intelligence Council, the body which advises policy makers on global strategy and which produces the National Intelligence Estimate, is reported to be former Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Charles W. Freeman, Jr.

The radical left is rejoicing over what even the AntiWar.com Blog describes as an “amazing appointment.”

Freeman’s position on the political map can be identified by the fact that he succeeded George McGovern as head of the Middle East Policy Council.

He is renowned for anti-War-on-Terror and anti-Israel public pronouncements, as well as for statements sympathetic to the viewpoint of despotic regimes like those of Saudi Arabia and China.

Marty Peretz, at New Republic, expresses profound indignation at this appointment.

Here is the most stunning prospective appointment of the Obama administration as yet. Not stunning as in “spectacular” or “distinguished” but stunning as in bigoted and completely out of synch with the deepest convictions of the American people. What’s more, Charles “Chas” Freeman is a bought man, having been ambassador to Saudi Arabia and then having supped at its tables for almost two decades. ...

That Chas, as he is so artfully called, also made himself a client of China and China a client of himself, is evidence that he has no humane or humanitarian scruples that underlay well, his unscrupulous political views, viz, his remonstrance to Beijing that it should have smashed the democracy protests as soon as they emerged on the streets. ...

Chas Freeman is actually a new psychological type for a Democratic administration. He has never displayed a liberal instinct and wants the United States to kow-tow to authoritarians and tyrants, in some measure just because they may seem able to keep the streets quiet. And frankly, Chas brings a bitter rancor to how he looks at Israel. No Arab country and no Arab movement—basically including Hezbollah and Hamas—poses a challenge to the kind of world order we Americans want to see. He is now very big on Hamas as the key to bringing peace to Gaza, when in fact it is the key to uproar and bloodletting, not just against Israel but against the Palestinian Authority that is the only group of Palestinians that has even given lip-service (and, to be fair, a bit more) to a settlement with Israel.

That Freeman would be chosen as the president’s gatekeeper to national intelligence is an absurdity.

The appointment of head of the NIC does not require Senatorial confirmation, so, outrageous as it is, this one is probably a done deal.

Russia’s border patrol sank a fleeing Chinese freighter in the Sea of Japan last Saturday in unexplained circumstances.

Reuters:

Seven Chinese sailors were missing after the “New Star” sank on Saturday in stormy seas off Vladivostok and after a Russian warship shot at least 500 rounds into it, the official China Daily newspaper said, quoting a Chinese-language paper which in turned quoted a Russian newspaper.

The “New Star” was held at the Russian port of Nakhodka earlier this month, suspected of involvement in smuggling, before it left without permission last week, the China Daily said.

“China has already made representations to the Russian side,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu told a news conference.

“We hope they continue with the search and rescue operations for the missing sailors and clarify the reason (for the incident) as soon as possible.”

China says three Chinese crew members were rescued and seven were missing.

In video footage of the incident broadcast on Russian television, the rattle of gunfire could be heard, with authorities there claiming the ship was given adequate warning.

“The ‘New Star’ captain was called by radio, border guard boats sent light signals, a special flag demanding to stop was raised and a warning shot was fired,” a prosecutor in Nakhodka, Alexander Selentsov, told Russia’s Interfax news agency.

Interfax also quoted a border guard captain as saying “the foreign vessel disregarded authorities’ demands and was fleeing to the Chinese economic zone at a full speed.”

Smuggling or spying? I couldn’t find a hint on any of the usual Intel sites.

6:31 video

One wonders if the videographer came back the same way.

Though full of conventional eco platitudes and gush about “vital habitats” and “precious landscapes,” the World Wildlife Fund has an otherwise entertaining, and well-illustrated, report on new species discovered in recent years in the general vicinity of the Mekong River watershed.

According to a new report launched by World Wildlife Fund (WWF)... First Contact in the Greater Mekong... 1068 species were discovered or newly identified by science between 1997 and 2007 – which averages two new species a week. This includes the world’s largest huntsman spider, with a foot-long leg span and the Annamite Striped Rabbit, one of several new mammal species found here. New mammal discoveries are a rarity in modern science.

While most species were discovered in the largely unexplored jungles and wetlands, some were first found in the most surprising places. The Laotian rock rat, for example, thought to be extinct 11 million years ago, was first encountered by scientists in a local food market, while the Siamese Peninsula pit viper was found slithering through the rafters of a restaurant in Khao Yai National Park in Thailand.

“This report cements the Greater Mekong’s reputation as a biological treasure trove—one of the world’s most important storehouses of rare and exotic species,” said Dekila Chungyalpa, Director of the WWF-US Greater Mekong Program. “Scientists keep peeling back the layers and uncovering more and more wildlife wonders.”

The findings, highlighted in this report, include 519 plants, 279 fish, 88 frogs, 88 spiders, 46 lizards, 22 snakes, 15 mammals, 4 birds, 4 turtles, 2 salamanders and a toad. The region comprises the six countries through which the Mekong River flows including Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam and the southern Chinese province of Yunnan. It is estimated thousands of new invertebrate species were also discovered during this period, further highlighting the region’s immense biodiversity.

World’s largest spider, Heteropoda maxima, has a legspan of up to 12 inches (30 centimeters)

National Geographic slideshow

After Somali pirates hijacked the Iranian freighter MV Iran Deyanat (aka Deyant or Dianat) on August 21, 2008, as ransom negotiations proceeded, in late September, reports of strange illnesses striking down the pirates began appearing in the international press.

South Africa Times 9/28:

Somali pirates suffered skin burns, lost hair and fell gravely ill “within days” of boarding the MV Iran Deyanat. Some of them died.

Andrew Mwangura, the director of the East African Seafarers’ Assistance Programme, told the Sunday Times: “We don’t know exactly how many, but the information that I am getting is that some of them had died. There is something very wrong about that ship.”

ShiratDevorah offers the following explanation:

The MV Iran Deyanat is owned and operated by the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines (IRISL) – a state-owned company run by the Iranian military that was sanctioned by the U.S. Department of the Treasury on September 10, shortly after the ship’s hijacking.

According to the U.S. Government, the company regularly falsifies shipping documents in order to hide the identity of end users, uses generic terms to describe shipments to avoid the attention of shipping authorities, and employs the use of cover entities to circumvent United Nations sanctions to facilitate weapons proliferation for the Iranian Ministry of Defense. The MV Iran Deyanat departed Nanjing, China, July 28, and, according to its manifest, planned to sail to Rotterdam, where it would offload 42,500 tons of iron ore and “industrial products” purchased by an unidentified “ German client”. The ship has a crew of 29 men, including a Pakistani captain, an Iranian engineer, 13 other Iranians, 3 Indians, 2 Filipinos, and 10 Eastern Europeans, stated to be Albanians.

The MV Iran Deyanat was brought to Eyl, a sleepy fishing village in northeastern Somalia, and was secured by a larger gang of pirates – 50 onboard and 50 onshore. The Somali pirates attempted to inspect the ship’s seven cargo containers but the containers were locked. The crew claimed that they did not have the “access codes” and could not open them. Pirates have stated they were unable to open the hold without causing extensive damage to the ship, and threatened to blow it up. The Iranian ship’s captain and the engineer were contacted by cell phone and demanded to disclose the actual nature of the mysterious “powdered cargo” but the captain and his officers were very evasive. Initially they said that the cargo contained “crude oil” but then claimed it contained “minerals.” Following this initial rebuff, the pirates broke open one of the containers and discovered it to be filled with packets of what they said was “a powdery fine sandy soil” ....

Within a period of three days, those pirates who had boarded the ship and opened the cargo container with its gritty sand-like contents, all developed strange health complications, to include serious skin burns and loss of hair. And within two weeks, sixteen of the pirates subsequently died, either on the ship or on shore. ...

Although American intelligence and government sources are maintaining a strictly observed silence, the same does not apply to the Russians and so it is that we learn the real story of the MV Iran Deyanat. She was an enormous floating dirty bomb, intended to detonate after exiting the Suez Canal at the eastern end of the Mediterranean and in proximity to the coastal cities of Israel. The entire cargo of radioactive sand, obtained by Iran from China (the latter buys desperately needed oil from the former) and sealed in containers which, when the charges on the ship are set off after the crew took to the boats, will be blasted high into the air where prevailing winds will push the highly dangerous and radioactive cloud ashore.

Given the large number of deaths from the questing Somali pirates, it should be obvious that when the contents of the ship’s locked cargo containers finally descended onto the land, the death toll would be enormous. This ship was nothing more nor less than the long-anticipated Iranian attack on Israel. Not the expected rocket attacks (which could be intercepted by the Israelis) but an even more deadly and unexpected attack by sea. It is very interesting to note that the Israeli government has in the past few weeks, been loudly demanding that the United States establish a naval blockade of Iran.

On October 10, Iran evidently having paid the required ransom, the Deyanat was released, and allowed to depart. It sailed apparently in the direction of Muscat.

After Reagan, the candle glowed brightly, then it flickered, then it died. Why? The Old World has always been torn between the remnants of its ancient empires and the bold promise of human liberty. Its elites, its sophisticates, its nationalists have always whispered that America and its promises are lies. German culture, Japanese uniqueness, Chinese civilization, Islamic greatness, French grandeur and Russian tsars of myriad denominations—these were truth, and liberty was a lie.

For a few brief years, the East no longer believed the tale of its political and ideological bosses. Hong Kong, not Beijing, was the future of China. Bricks of the Berlin Wall were solid souvenirs of Marx’s folly. Russians dreamed of a joyful future. Reagan had been Washington again, and when Madison and Jefferson did their work, the world would be well, so it seemed.

Then nothing happened. When Reagan left office, it was like when Lincoln was shot. The keen mind and the wondrous soul which endured everything to emancipate men was gone. Small minds and smaller hearts scurried in. George H. Bush, famously, sacked the men of Reagan and replaced them with more sensible functionaries. ...

Anyone could see that the pressure which worked on the Soviets would work on the Chinese Communists as well. Students in Beijing begged the world for freedom in 1989, something unprecedented under the Soviets. The theme of liberty should have permeated every transaction between America and China. Not just government, but business should have resonated with the importance of human rights over commercial profits. If Clinton believed that, he might have been able to rally the nation, but Clinton emphatically rejected the value of liberty over comfort.

The Presidency in eight short years went from being occupied by a moral colossus to a moral dwarf. Clinton sold national security secrets for something as banal as campaign contributions. Although Yeltsin was President of Russia during all of Clinton’s administration, our clever Clinton was unable to prevent on August 19, 1998 – one decade ago – the collapse of Russian financial markets and the destruction of the hope of a Russian middle class. This was the midpoint between the presidential campaign to elect the successor to Reagan and our grim world today—ten years ago.

What was Clinton doing ten years ago? He was on national television, the very same day that the Russian economy collapsed and the rise of Putin was assured, explaining that he had an “inappropriate relationship” with Monica Lewinsky and, by the way, he was ordering cruise missiles to hit aspirin factories in Sudan to combat a terrorist threat.

Barbarian participation in competition is a firmly established part of the modern day Olympics. But the contemporary Olympic committee ought to make a policy of refusing to allow the Olympic Games ever to be hosted by totalitarian or non-European countries, period.

The 1936 Nuremburg Olympics, long ago, demonstrated the unseemly manner in which the spectacle of Olympic competition could be appropriated to glorify a criminal regime and to legitimize in the eyes of the world its despicable ideology.

The 1988 Seoul Olympics featured flagrant cheating by host country judges on behalf of native athletes, and ought to have made clear the undesirable problems associated with trying to conduct fair competitions under the authority of representatives of non-European cultures where the rule of objective law is unknown and in which “face” is valued far above integrity.

Predictably enough, the Red Chinese Olympics are proving to be another carefully orchestrated pageant of deceptive spectacle glorifying the Chinese State and its authoritarian regime, and cheating in competition and judging is well underway.

Phony fireworks in opening ceremony broadcast.

The actual 7-year-old singer replaced with a more attractive lip-syncher mouthing to a recording.

56 Chinese minority ethnic groups falsely represented by 56 ordinary Chinese (Han) children.

China cheats, winning Olympic gold medals with underage gymnasts.

Jonathan Kay rants indignantly, too.

To view them, you will first have to allow Microsoft to install its Silverlight plugin, then restart the browser.

Here is the Equestrian events video page.

Now that is convenient.

Yahoo Sports explains that, though fireworks were actually used at the Beijing Olympic Games opening ceremonies, the astonishing display broadcast around the world on television was faked, combining computer generated images with prerecorded shots of fireworks.

The rise of China to the status of a major economic power and relative prosperity creates opportunities its regime is only too likely to misuse. Meanwhile, Russia was delivering a lesson on how to misuse power.

For the best possible illustration of why Islamic terrorism may one day be considered the least of our problems, look no farther than the BBC’s split-screen coverage of yesterday’s Olympic opening ceremonies. On one side, fireworks sparkled, and thousands of exotically dressed Chinese dancers bent their bodies into the shape of doves, the cosmos and more. On the other side, gray Russian tanks were shown rolling into South Ossetia, a rebel province of Georgia. The effect was striking: Two of the world’s rising powers were strutting their stuff.

The difference, of course, is that one event has been rehearsed for years, while the other, if not a total surprise, was not actually scheduled to take place this week. That, too, is significant: The Chinese challenge to Western power has been a long time coming, and it is in a certain sense predictable. As a rule, the Chinese do not make sudden moves and do not try to provoke crises.

Russia, by contrast, is an unpredictable power, which makes responding to Moscow more difficult. In fact, Russian politics have become so utterly opaque that it is not easy to say why this particular “frozen” conflict has escalated right now. ...

Previous tensions, both in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the other piece of Georgia that has declared sovereignty, have somehow been resolved without a war. Someone, clearly, wanted this one to go further.

Both sides have deeper motives for fighting. The Russians want to prevent Georgia from joining NATO, as Georgia, a Western-oriented democracy—George Bush has called the country a ” beacon of liberty”—has long wanted to do. In this, they will almost certainly succeed: No Western power has any interest in a military ally that is involved in a major military conflict with Russia.

The Georgian leadership, by contrast, had come to believe that the constant pressure of Russian aggression, coupled with the West’s failure to accept Georgia into NATO, compelled them to demonstrate “self-reliance.” President Mikheil Saakashvili has indeed been buying weapons in preparation for this moment. Those who know him say he believed a military conflict was inevitable but could be won if conducted cleverly. As of last night, with Russian soldiers fighting in South Ossetia—only a few dozen miles from Tbilisi, the Georgian capital—it seemed as though he might have miscalculated, badly. Russia has not sent 150 tanks across that border in order to lose.

Svante Cornell believes Russian behavior is all about Georgia’s potential NATO membership.

Apparently, China’s promise that the 20,000 foreign journalists covering the Olympic Games would have unfettered Internet access is going the same way as its pledge to provide breathable air — up in smoke. ...

Early arrivals at the main press center found themselves unable to access scores of sites on the usual topics the Chinese government prefers to keep quiet — among them Tibet, Taiwan, Tiananmen Square and the sites of Amnesty International, Radio Free Asia and several Hong Kong newspapers. “It has been our policy to provide the media with convenient and sufficient access to the Internet,” said Sun Weide, the chief spokesman for the Beijing organizing committee. “I believe our policy will not affect reporters’ coverage of the Olympic Games.” ...

Meanwhile, Sen. Sam Brownback, R.-Kan., says he has documents indicating that China has forced all the major foreign-owned hotels to install spying equipment that will monitor the Net activities of journalists, athletes’ families and guests during the Games and beyond. The Public Security Bureau’s order says failure to comply could bring financial penalties, suspension of Net access, or the loss of a license to operate a hotel in China. “These hotels are justifiably outraged by this order, which puts them in the awkward position of having to craft pop-up messages explaining to their customers that their Web history, communications, searches and key strokes are being spied on by the Chinese government,” Brownback said.

I’m sure the host country will put on a lovely tribute to the Olympic ideals during the opening ceremonies, but it’s going to be awfully hard not to gag a little while watching.

Eleven days after the 7.9 magnitude earthquake struck western China, vice environment minister Wu Xiaoqing first revealed Friday, May 23, that 50 hazardous radioactive sources have been located – 35 recovered and controlled; “three more buried in rubble and 12 in dangerous buildings. At present, tests show no accidental release of radiation,” he reported as the death toll climbed past 55,000.

Two of the most badly damaged cities housed China’s secret nuclear weapons design facility – at Mianyang – and a plutonium processing facility – in Guangyuan – both close to the quake’s epicenter.

Soon after the quake struck, Chinese soldiers were sent to protect nuclear sites and preparations made for an environmental emergency.

DEBKAfile’s military sources note that the Beijing announcement did not specify the nature of the hazardous sources or disclose how they – or the secret nuclear weapons and plutonium facilities were secured – whether sealed with cement and lead like the Chernobyl reactor in Ukraine in the 80s or their contents removed to safe places.

According to the Beijing government’s official Web site, “nuclear facilities and “radioactive sources” included power plants, reactors, scientific research labs and medical treatment facilities, a big concentration of which are located in the worst hit areas.

French sources disclosed that 489 hospitals with laboratories containing radioactive materials, as well as hundreds of high-risk industries, were leveled.

Hans Kristensen, a nuclear arms expert at the Federation of American Scientists, said it was hard to believe that the military plants with nuclear materials had escaped the disaster. Other experts suspect that the damage to radioactive sites and radiation leaks may extend beyond the stricken Sichuan province.

France24 The Observers:

Yahoo! China pasted a “most wanted” poster across its homepage today in aid of the police’s witch-hunt for 24 Tibetans accused of taking part in the recent riots. MSN China made the same move, although it didn’t go as far as publishing the list on its homepage.

Yahoo indignantly wrote France24 saying: “Yahoo! isn’t doing this. It’s Yahoo! China*.”

*Yahoo had to accept a Chinese partner, and Chinese control, to gain access to China’s market.

Hat tip to Matt Brown Hamlin

we must ask, why is this happening? Why have the prices of commodities like oil and gold risen so dramatically in the last year? Why has the dollar fallen so much? Normal business cycle? Bad management from the world’s financial institutions? And why hasn’t the world’s largest and strongest economy, backed by the most powerful government, been able to change the course of the situation?

Perhaps the larger picture is that the United States is waging an economic war against China.

The United States could strengthen the value of the dollar. It has not. China is hurt because now Chinese products are very expensive in the United States, and this will reduce the US trade deficit with China. China must import huge amounts of oil and strategic metals which are very much more expensive now. China holds hundreds of millions of physical dollars, the value of which is now much less.

China has refused to revalue its currency to a realistic level to improve its trade position with the United States. China has used its huge dollar reserves as a sword against the United States by threatening to sell those dollars, and thereby causing the dollar to drop in value. In effect, the United States is using China’s strength against China.

In order for China to maintain the levels of its trade with the United States, it will be forced to lower the value of its currency. However, if it does that, it faces two major problems. Foreign direct investment (FDI) into China would become less expensive, and China is worried that more and cheaper FDI would spur China’s inflation. Further, a devalued currency would reduce the profit to China for its exported goods.

If China keeps it currency at its present levels, the United States will buy less. The United States wanted a stronger yuan to reduce trade, which China was unwilling to do. That objective is now achieved by a weaker dollar.

China’s dollar holdings are worth much less when buying goods like oil and metals that China depends on for its development and growth. Further, China has been talking and trying for some time to diversify its foreign-reserve holdings form dollars to other currencies and gold. Now, their dollars are worth much less when buying gold, yen and euros. ...

the “crisis” is being used to further the US economic position, long-term position, particularly with regard to China. From Sun Tzu: “All warfare is based on deception.”

My own impression has been that Esquire’s Barnett took advantage of the Admiral’s indiscretions to produce a hit piece on Bush Administration policy using Admiral Fallon as an involuntary cat’s paw. It is heartening, of course, to see the Bush Administration actually firing someone for undermining its foreign policy. Is it possible, do you suppose, that this novel approach to personnel management may yet extend into the Departments of State and Justice and the Intelligence Community before George W. Bush leaves office?

British athletes competing in this year’s Beijing Olympic Games must sign contracts banning them from talking about politics, it is reported.

Athletes must not mention politics -The clause – inserted in contracts for the first time – mean competitors must not comment on “politically sensitive” issues.

It then refers to the International Olympic Committee charter, which “provides for no kind of demonstration, or political, religious or racial propaganda in the Olympic sites, venues or other areas”.

The ban means athletes cannot discuss issues such as China’s human rights record or Tibet.

Those who refuse to sign-up face not be allowed to compete and anyone breaking the order could be sent home.

By calculating the amount of fuel oil required by the Chinese navy and air force in a large-scale attack across the Taiwan Strait under high-tech conditions, it becomes apparent that such an assault could not be sustained for an extended period. ...

..should high-intensity warfare break out across the Taiwan Strait, the daily fuel consumption of the PLA Air Force would be a minimum of 10,794 tons, taking into consideration only the third-generation fighters and H-6 bombers, JH-7A fighter-bombers and attackers. Actual consumption would be far greater if the large number of J-7E and J-8F serial fighters and Q-5 attackers currently in service are figured in.

The three major fleets of the PLA Navy would have a daily fuel consumption of 1,200 tons. As a result, the navy and air force would consume a total of 11,994 tons of fuel each day on average.

An initial large-scale landing operation against Taiwan would likely involve 20 divisions or brigades of amphibious, light and heavy mechanized troops. If each mechanized division or brigade needed fuel reserves for 500 kilometers, and one division or brigade consumed an average of 200 tons of fuel each day, the daily total of the 20 divisions and brigades would be 4,000 tons. Here, helicopters deployed by the ever-growing Army Aviation Forces have not been included.

The combined fuel needs of all combat forces engaged in an assault on Taiwan would amount to a minimum of 15,994 tons each day, not including the Second Artillery Forces and logistic support troops. These calculations alone indicate that the PLA forces would need a total of 240,000 tons of fuel to sustain 15 days of assault operations against Taiwan.

What is the total annual fuel consumption of the Chinese armed forces? A report published by the PLA General Logistics Department in 2007 says that the PLA forces saved 55,000 tons of oil in 2006, approximately 5.1 percent of their total consumption. Based on this figure, the total would be over 1 million tons, about 2,954 tons on average per day. It can be concluded that fuel consumption in a 15-day large-scale assault operation would surpass 20 percent of the annual total consumption of the Chinese military.

The hard fact is that China has only 7 million tons of oil reserves available for a period of conflict. The country has set its 30-day oil reserves at 10 million tons for civilian consumption, an average of 330,000 tons per day. During a 15-day assault, the country would require 4.96 million tons. The conclusion is that China’s current oil reserves could sustain a high-intensity assault operation against Taiwan for no more than 15 days.

The Daily Mail yesterday (10 Nov 2007) reported:

When the U.S. Navy deploys a battle fleet on exercises, it takes the security of its aircraft carriers very seriously indeed.

At least a dozen warships provide a physical guard while the technical wizardry of the world’s only military superpower offers an invisible shield to detect and deter any intruders.

That is the theory. Or, rather, was the theory.

American military chiefs have been left dumbstruck by an undetected Chinese submarine popping up at the heart of a recent Pacific exercise and close to the vast U.S.S. Kitty Hawk

– a 1,000ft supercarrier with 4,500 personnel on board.

By the time it surfaced the 160ft Song Class diesel-electric attack submarine is understood to have sailed within viable range for launching torpedoes or missiles at the carrier.

According to senior Nato officials the incident caused consternation in the U.S. Navy.

The Americans had no idea China’s fast-growing submarine fleet had reached such a level of sophistication, or that it posed such a threat.

One Nato figure said the effect was “as big a shock as the Russians launching Sputnik” – a reference to the Soviet Union’s first orbiting satellite in 1957 which marked the start of the space age.

The incident, which took place in the ocean between southern Japan and Taiwan, is a major embarrassment for the Pentagon.

The lone Chinese vessel slipped past at least a dozen other American warships which were supposed to protect the carrier from hostile aircraft or submarines.

And the rest of the costly defensive screen, which usually includes at least two U.S. submarines, was also apparently unable to detect it.

According to the Nato source, the encounter has forced a serious re-think of American and Nato naval strategy as commanders reconsider the level of threat from potentially hostile Chinese submarines.

It also led to tense diplomatic exchanges, with shaken American diplomats demanding to know why the submarine was “shadowing” the U.S. fleet while Beijing pleaded ignorance and dismissed the affair as coincidence.

Analysts believe Beijing was sending a message to America and the West demonstrating its rapidly-growing military capability to threaten foreign powers which try to interfere in its “backyard”.

The People’s Liberation Army Navy’s submarine fleet includes at least two nuclear-missile launching vessels.

Its 13 Song Class submarines are extremely quiet and difficult to detect when running on electric motors.

Commodore Stephen Saunders, editor of Jane’s Fighting Ships, and a former Royal Navy anti-submarine specialist, said the U.S. had paid relatively little attention to this form of warfare since the end of the Cold War.

He said: “It was certainly a wake-up call for the Americans.

“It would tie in with what we see the Chinese trying to do, which appears to be to deter the Americans from interfering or operating in their backyard, particularly in relation to Taiwan.”

What is particularly interesting is that a nearly identical incident occurred one year ago 26 October 2006 involving a Chinese Song-class submarine and the same U.S.S. Kitty Hawk.

Also discussed by Spook86.

Photo hopefully not taken from Chinese submarine

Norman Hsu, a bankrupt Hong Kong business, seems to have come to America and set up a shell corporation solely for the purpose of funneling large sums of money to democrat candidates, particularly Hillary.

New York Times story.

Gosh! Who do you suppose was supplying Mr. Hsu’s corporation with cash? Remember the Johnny Chung campaign contributions of the 1990s?

AP:

China plans to build a highway on the side of Mount Everest to ease the Olympic torch’s journey to the peak of the world’s tallest mountain before the 2008 Beijing Games, state media reported Tuesday.
Construction of the road, budgeted at $19.7 million would turn a 67- mile rough path from the foot of the mountain to a base camp at 17,060 feet “into a blacktop highway fenced by undulating guardrails,” the Xinhua News Agency said.

Xinhua said construction, which would start next week, would take about four months. The new highway would become a major route for tourists and mountaineers, it said.

An official from the Secretariat of the Tibetan government, who declined to give his name, confirmed the project was planned, but refused to give any details. Tibet and Nepal are the most commonly used routes up the mountain.

In April, organizers for the Beijing Summer Olympics announced ambitious plans for the longest torch relay in Olympic history—an 85,000-mile, 130-day route that would cross five continents and reach the 29,035-foot summit of Everest.

Taking the Olympic torch to the top of the mountain, seen by some as a way for Beijing to underscore its claims to Tibet, is expected to be one of the relay’s highlights.

It was an hour before midnight, three hours into the night shift with nine more to go. At his workstation in a small, fluorescent-lighted office space in Nanjing, China, Li Qiwen sat shirtless and chain-smoking, gazing purposefully at the online computer game in front of him. The screen showed a lightly wooded mountain terrain, studded with castle ruins and grazing deer, in which warrior monks milled about. Li, or rather his staff-wielding wizard character, had been slaying the enemy monks since 8 p.m., mouse-clicking on one corpse after another, each time gathering a few dozen virtual coins — and maybe a magic weapon or two — into an increasingly laden backpack.

Twelve hours a night, seven nights a week, with only two or three nights off per month, this is what Li does — for a living. On this summer night in 2006, the game on his screen was, as always, World of Warcraft, an online fantasy title in which players, in the guise of self-created avatars — night-elf wizards, warrior orcs and other Tolkienesque characters — battle their way through the mythical realm of Azeroth, earning points for every monster slain and rising, over many months, from the game’s lowest level of death-dealing power (1) to the highest (70). More than eight million people around the world play World of Warcraft — approximately one in every thousand on the planet — and whenever Li is logged on, thousands of other players are, too. They share the game’s vast, virtual world with him, converging in its towns to trade their loot or turning up from time to time in Li’s own wooded corner of it, looking for enemies to kill and coins to gather. Every World of Warcraft player needs those coins, and mostly for one reason: to pay for the virtual gear to fight the monsters to earn the points to reach the next level. And there are only two ways players can get as much of this virtual money as the game requires: they can spend hours collecting it or they can pay someone real money to do it for them.

At the end of each shift, Li reports the night’s haul to his supervisor, and at the end of the week, he, like his nine co-workers, will be paid in full. For every 100 gold coins he gathers, Li makes 10 yuan, or about $1.25, earning an effective wage of 30 cents an hour, more or less. The boss, in turn, receives $3 or more when he sells those same coins to an online retailer, who will sell them to the final customer (an American or European player) for as much as $20. The small commercial space Li and his colleagues work in — two rooms, one for the workers and another for the supervisor — along with a rudimentary workers’ dorm, a half-hour’s bus ride away, are the entire physical plant of this modest $80,000-a-year business. It is estimated that there are thousands of businesses like it all over China, neither owned nor operated by the game companies from which they make their money. Collectively they employ an estimated 100,000 workers, who produce the bulk of all the goods in what has become a $1.8 billion worldwide trade in virtual items. The polite name for these operations is youxi gongzuoshi, or gaming workshops, but to gamers throughout the world, they are better known as gold farms. While the Internet has produced some strange new job descriptions over the years, it is hard to think of any more surreal than that of the Chinese gold farmer.

1:20 video

Shane Danielson argues that Zhang Yimou’s Chinese martial arts films should be viewed as successors to the Hollywood musicals, featuring the same massive budgets, and similar attractive men and women performing show-stopping ensemble numbers against aesthetically-gilded backgrounds.

He makes the case for his perspective in this essay occasioned by the release of Curse of the Golden Flower (Man cheng jin dai huang jin jia -2006).

trailers

My result is:

Your URL is Blocked!

China will boost military spending by 17.8 percent this year, a spokesman for the national legislature said Sunday, continuing more than a decade of double-digit annual increases that has stirred unease in Washington and some of China’s neighbors.

Read the whole thing.

And this increase comes after the Chinese market crash!

Going wide means recognizing that Iraq is just one front in a regional war against an Islamist Axis centered in Iran—and we cannot win that war without confronting the enemy directly, outside of Iraq.

Going wide means recognizing that the conflict in Iraq is fueled and magnified by the intervention of Iran and Syria. One of the reasons the Iraq Study Group report flopped was that its key recommendation—its one unique idea—was for America to negotiate with Iran and Syria in order to convince these countries to aid in the “stabilization” of Iraq. This proposal wasn’t so much argued to death as it was laughed to death, because it is clear that Iran and Syria have done everything they can to de-stabilize Iraq, supporting both sides of the sectarian conflict there.

It is obvious that both regimes have a profound interest in an American failure and retreat in Iraq. After all, if America can successfully use force to replace a hostile dictatorship with a free society, then the Iranian and Syrian regimes are doomed. So as a matter of elementary self-preservation, they have done everything they can to plunge Iraq into chaos, supporting guerrillas and militias on all sides of the sectarian conflict. Just today, a US official confirmed new evidence “that Iran is working closely with both the Shiite militias and Sunni Jihadist groups.” Most ominously, Iran has brazenly provided training and weapons to the Shiite militias—who carry rifles straight off the assembly lines of Iranian weapons factories—and these militias have emerged in the last year as the greatest threat to US troops and to the Iraqi government.

How can we quell the conflict in Iraq, further suppress the Sunni insurgents, and begin to dismantle the Shiite militias—if we don’t to anything to stop those who are funding, training, and supporting these enemies? Just as we can’t eliminate terrorism without confronting the states who sponsor terrorism, so we can’t suppress the Sunni and Shiite insurgencies in Iraq without confronting the outside powers who support these insurgents.

Every day, we see the disastrous results of fighting this war narrowly inside Iraq while ignoring the external forces that are helping to drive it. To fight one Shiite militia tied to Iran—Sadr’s Mahdi Army—we have recently signaled our support for an Iraqi political coalition that includes another Shiite militia tied to Iran, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim’s Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and its Badr Brigades. And so it should be no surprise that a US military raid on Hakim’s headquarters last week netted two Iranian diplomats and members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards—the outfit responsible for supporting global terrorism. That’s what happens when we fight the symptoms in Iraq rather than fighting the disease.

Going wide also means recognizing that more is at stake in this war than just the fate of Iraq. This is a war to determine who and what will dominate the Middle East. Will this vital region be dominated by a nuclear-armed Iran, working to spread Islamic fascism? Or will America be able to exert its military influence and political ideals in the region?

He’s clearly right, but he isn’t going wide enough.

Behind Syria and Iran, you find China fishing in troubled waters in order to thwart American “hegemony.” China is Iran’s arms supplier (often via North Korea) and soon to be leading trading partner. But we are China’s number 1 trading partner.

We have a far more powerful weapon to use against China to force her to withdraw support from her surrogates operating against the US than arms. We can threaten to deny China our trade.

China is planning to build a 400 room resort-hotel in a water-filled quarry in Songjiang. Atkins Architectural Group won the international design competition.

Hat tip to Andy G.

With over 2,000 years of inï¬u201auence from Sun Tzu’s teaching, along with the inï¬u201auence of other signiï¬cant philosophical and military writings, the Chinese are particularly comfortable with viewing war and diplomacy in comprehensive and dialectic ways and acting accordingly. Indeed, many of these observations have become proverbial components of the Chinese way of war and diplomacy. The most notable ones are bing yi zha li (war is based on deception), shang-bing fa-mou (supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy’s strategy), qi-zheng xiang-sheng (mutual reproduction of regular and extraordinary forces and tactics), chu-qi zhi-sheng (win through unexpected moves), yin-di zhi-sheng (gain victory by varying one’s strategy and tactics according to the enemy’s situation), yi-rou ke-gang (use the soft and gentle to overcome the hard and strong), bishi ji-xu (stay clear of the enemy’s main force and strike at his weak point), yi-yu wei-zhi (to make the devious route the most direct), hou-fa zhi-ren (ï¬ght back and gain the upper hand only after the enemy has initiated ï¬ghting), sheng-dong ji-xi (make a feint to the east but attack in the west), and so on. All of these special Chinese four-character proverbs are strategic and dialectic in nature. All bear some character of ï¬u201aowing water. This Chinese way of war and diplomacy is in striking difference to the Western way of war from ancient Greece to the United States today. In the Western tradition, there is a heavy emphasis on the use of force; the art of war is largely limited to the battleï¬elds; and the way to ï¬ght is force on force.

A senior executive for Microsoft has said the firm could pull out of non-democratic countries such as China.

Fred Tipson, senior policy counsel for the computer giant, said concerns over the repressive regime might force it to reconsider its business in China.

“Things are getting bad… and perhaps we have to look again at our presence there,” he told a conference in Athens.

“We have to decide if the persecuting of bloggers reaches a point that it’s unacceptable to do business there.”

“We try to define those levels and the trends are not good there at the moment. It’s a moving target.”

BBC

The final 15 hour, 710 mile (1143 km) stretch from Golmud in China’s western Qinghai province to Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, was only opened last July 1st. The carriages are pumped full of oxygen, and a supplementary supply is available by tube, since the route reaches a height of 16,640ft (5072 meters). As Bennett writes, breathlessly:

There are no crampons or ice picks in our gear. Instead we – a band of 77 rail enthusiasts, retirees and foreign journalists – have crammed altitude-sickness pills, painkillers and oxygen supplies into our bags in the hope of combating the effects of our journey across the roof of the world. We are the first group of Western holidaymakers to take Tibet’s new Sky Train and, although carriages will be pumped with supplementary oxygen, no one – not even the doctor who is accompanying us -knows whether it will be enough. At best we have been told to expect breathlessness, tiredness and headaches; at worst, pulmonary oedema or death.

If the railway causes a headache for its passengers, it has proved a chronic migraine for the engineers. A constantly freezing and melting permafrost along the route has meant that a network of pipes has had to be driven into the ground to pump liquid nitrogen and cold air beneath the track to keep it frozen all year round. Just four weeks after the line opened, the Chinese government admitted that global warming had raised temperatures faster than expected and that the foundations had begun sinking into the permafrost. The day before our group boarded the train, one of the dining cars derailed 250 miles from Lhasa. No one was hurt, but it sparked fears about what would have happened if the oxygen supply to the 600 passengers had been cut off.

Mobile execution buses being used by the Chinese government…

Dominic Waghorn found that between 3,500 and 10,000 people are put to death each year.

The volume of executions has meant that China has invented new ways of killing, mobilizing and mechanizing its execution system.

Brochure shows execution buses A brochure acquired by Sky News reveals details of China’s new execution buses now operating across the country.

Fitted with lethal injection equipment they can deliver on the spot executions.

Sky News spoke to a number of people affected by the executions including the family of Nie Shubin who was only 20-years-old when he was wrongly accused of rape and murder.

His mother and sister told how he was held in jail for three years, without being allowed to see his family once.

Sky’s Dominic Waghorn Nie Shuie said: “They never let me see him after his arrest. That continued till the end. I never saw him again before he was executed.

“And nobody told us that he had been executed.”

Nie was accused of attacking a woman in a field near his home, but only after his execution did another man confess to the attack.

In an exclusive report earlier this year, Sky News gathered evidence linking China’s execution system and its booming organ transplant industry.

Amnesty International says the demand for transplant organs may be driving the high number of executions in China.

Even by official figures more people are executed every year in China than the rest of the world put together.

Early morning of September 30th, I walked out of our dining tent to gaze over towards the Nangpa La pass. I saw a line of Tibetans heading towards the start of the pass – a common sight, as the trade routes are open this time of year.”

“Then, without warning, shots rang out. Over, and over and over. Then the line of people started to run uphill — they were at 19,000ft. Apparently the Chinese army was tipped off about their attempted escape, and had showed up with guns.”

“2 people were down, and they weren’t getting up”

“Watching the line snake off through the snow, as the shots rang out, we saw two shapes fall. The binoculars confirmed it: 2 people were down, and they weren’t getting up. Then more Chinese army swarmed through Advanced Base Camp.”

According to the climber, Tibetans on the mountain later said that up to seven people might have been shot dead, their bodies then shoved into a crevasse not far from Cho Oyu Base Camp.

The Turkish Press reports:

A new armor-busting rocket-propelled grenade believed to be of Iranian origin has shown up in Iraq in what may be “a hint about things to come,” the commander of US forces in the Middle East said Tuesday.

General John Abizaid said the weapon, an RPG-29, has a dual warhead and has proved effective against most types of armored vehicles.

“The first time we saw it was not in Iraq. We saw it in Lebanon. So to me it indicates, number one, an Iranian connection,” he told defense reporters here.

“It`s hard to say in our part of the world that we operate in as to whether or not people have given us a hint about things to come,” he said.

He said only a single RPG-29 has turned up in Iraq so far, and it was unclear how it was smuggled into the country.

But he said it was the latest in a number of new and more sophisticated weapons that appear to be moving onto the region`s battlefields from Iran.

He said longer-range Chinese rockets that looked new also have been found in Iraq.

Abizaid said he believed the Chinese rockets ca
me from Iran although they may have been taken from the arms inventories of the former Iraqi regime and cleaned up.

“It looked brand new to us,” he said.

The new weapons are in addition to more sophisticated roadside bombs with explosively shaped charges that the US military has long charged are being manufactured in Iran and brought into the country by Iran`s Revolutionary Guards-Quds Force.

Andre Pachter does not believe these are old inventory weapons:

Military experts tell China Confidential that Iran supplied the rockets and that they are in fact brand new, Chinese-made weapons.
Energy-starved China and oil-rich, Islamist Iran have deepening economic, political, and military ties. Beijing, as we have reported for months, is firmly committed to blocking meaningful sanctions against America’s arch-enemy. And Chinese arms have been instrumental in Iran’s military modernization.

Abizaid also said that a new, armor-piercing rocket-propelled grenade has turned up in Iraq. The weapon, which was first used in Lebanon by Iran’s Shiite proxy, Hezbollah, in its month-long war with Israel, has a dual warhead and has proved effective against most types of armored vehicles.

Citing links between Hezbollah and Shiite militias in Iraq, the US commander said the RPG could be “a hint of things to come.”

Chinabounder, an anonymous British expat and self-confessed wastrel in his early 30s, likes to boast on his weblog of his sexual conquests of Chinese women, including some of his students.

This has so outraged Shanghai’s web citizens that they have resolved to track him down and “kick the foreign trash out of China”.

In racy language suggesting a Terry-Thomas-like rogue cutting a dash in the seedy bars of Shanghai, Chinabounder describes seducing a different girl every night of the week.

The postings are also critical of Chinese male sexual prowess and contain occasional snipes at womanising and the frustrations of Chinese housewives.

The collection of juvenile if provocative musings on sexual mores in contemporary China may even be a hoax cooked up by artists to gauge the reaction in China to such unsavoury comments from a foreigner.

Access to his “Sex and Shanghai” blog – which attracted millions of readers – is currently denied as the author hides from a wave of contempt. Cyber-vigilantes, furious at his claimed seductions of married women and teenagers, have threatened him with a beating if they track him down and some comments are couched in dangerously xenophobic language.

Today, someone is claiming the whole thing was only a hoax, intended to test on-line vigilante behavior.

The not-currently working url is: http://www.chinabounder.blogspot.com

The Chinese Communist Party’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) personnel and 1,000 tanks were involved in a major military exercise recently to test their ability to engage in high-technology combat.

More than 20,000 personnel participated in the exercise code-named “North Sword—0607(S)”, organised by the PLA Beijing Area Command at a north China training base.

It was the first joint exercise involving troops from a PLA area command, the Air Force, the Second Artillery, and the Chinese People’s Armed Police, Xinhua news agency quoted military sources as saying.

A thousand tanks, armoured vehicles and troop carriers were involved in “fierce battles” on the site covering 1,000 square kilometres, it said.

The “Red Army” division was armed with information equipment and conducted a series of drills to test long-distance manoeuvrability under complicated conditions, while under assault from “Blue Army” troops, using “electromagnetic” equipment.

Thirty-five experts from the PLA’s National University of Defence were on hand to monitor and assess procedures.

Top Chinese leaders have repeatedly asked the PLA to be prepared to wage hi-tech future wars. The 2.5 million-strong PLA is concerned over Taiwan’s acquisition of high-tech weaponry, including F-16s and warships from the United States.

China Confidential has learned that Beijing remains confident that Hezbollah will prevail—politically, if not militarily—in the current conflict, strengthening Iran’s regional influence and prestige. People’s Liberation Army analysts contend that Hezbollah cannot be truly defeated and disarmed without World War II-style flattening of the 20 or more Lebanese villages in which Hezbollah hides and houses its Iranian-supplied missiles. An aerial bombardment of this magnitude would almost certainly result in massive civilian casualties—which increasingly isolated Israel can’t afford.

Therefore, PLA strategists are said to argue, Israel is restrained by sensitivity to world opinion from militarily crushing its enemy.

The analysis conforms with PLA theories of “unrestricted warfare,” including terrorism, information war, and “lawfare,” which in principle make it possible for smaller, technologically disadvantaged forces to fight—and defeat—great powers.

There is obviously a great deal of validity to the Chinese analysis.

Liu Yazhou

Confidential Reporter quotes a most intriguing recent (described as unpublished) essay by one of China’s leading military theorists, Liu Yazhou, a Lieutenant General and Deputy Political Commissar in the People’s Liberation Army Air Force, and son-in-law of the late Chinese president Li Xiannian.

Liu Yazhou is a very interesting thinker, who has previously been a novelist, and a visiting professor at Stanford. He is renowned for producing frequently provocative essays violating numerous conventional restrictions on discussion of politics and policy. He is clearly a rising star in the Communist Party leadership, and a very influential strategist. He is reported to be affiliated with Jiang Zemin’s Shanghai clique.

Confidential Reporter quotes Liu as contending

that the West is engaged in a losing civilizational clash with rising, radical Islam, with which China must forge a strategic alliance via deepening ties to Iran. Like other PLA theoreticians, he extols the potential of “unrestricted warfare”—use of a variety of methods to isolate, weaken and ultimately defeat the enemy—and “winning without fighting” whenever possible, i.e. making maximum use of deception and diplomacy in the face of a technologically superior enemy, such as the “US hegemon.”..

His clinical analysis of the US position with respect to radical Islam, however, is quite clear, according to our sources. Ironically, Liu’s essay is supposedly in tune with the views of some US conservative critics of the Bush administration. His main point, reportedly, is that the US faltered following the 9/11 attacks when it failed to identify radical Islam, or Islamism, as its enemy and instead launched a “war on terror,” sending a confused—and confusing—message to the American people. Sources say Liu argues that the reluctance to name Islamism as an enemy reflects (a) US unwillingness to completely break with decades of secretly supporting rightwing Islamic fundamentalism as a counterweight against secular radicals in the Middle East, and (b) US “weakness,” by which he seems to mean an essentially idealistic and, in his opinion, ultimately self-defeating faith in its own democratic and humanitarian ideals, which prevent the US from taking truly drastic military action when necessary.

Playing with Google Earth is pretty popular in tech circles. One can snoop into all sorts of earthly matters from heaven’s perspective. Lester Haines at the Register reports on one of Google Earth-ers’ most al-time intriguing finds: a Chinese military installation at Huangyangtan features an astonshingly detailed 900×700m scale model of a very mountainous landscape.

The army of Googlers applied ther obsessive analytic skills and identified the model’s subject location: a disputed region of the China-India border.

The extraordinarily elaborate model was obviously painstakingly produced for some sort of military training. The Google General Staff College theorizes that the purpose may be to familiarize Chinese pilots with the landscape in preparation for some future conflict. Considering just how much trouble and expense the Chinese have gone to with this one, India had better be prepared for a renewal of Chinese pressure for concessions, backed up by military force.

——————————————————Hat tip to PJM.

Look, there’s a wrong way to sell out—rappers pitching for Chrysler, anything Vegas—and a right way. Puff Daddy’s soundtrack for “Godzilla” could have been a disaster to his fans, but he chose to do a hip-hop remix of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir,” providing someone else to blame for the sellout. Or the Jimmy Hendrix strategy. Story has it that, despite using Gibson guitars on his albums, he signed a deal with Fender Guitars for cash and as many Stratocasters as he needed, as long as he appeared exclusively in concert and photos with Fenders. He took the deal, and with his unlimited supply of Fenders, began smashing them at the end of every concert, for fans who never knew he sold out.

Google could have kept their cool and trusted image if they’d just worked with someone else in China, someone they could smash. Eggroll.com powered by Google. Someone else to blame for those unsearchable keywords. Users in the West may not desert them, but a billion soon-to-be-online Chinese will forever associate Google with lame and censored results—search tools of the state. That’s just dumb. And totally uncool.

Also available at the author’s webpage.

tiananmen – Google Image Search.

AND

tiananmen – Google Image Search in China.

When I visited Little Green Footballs earlier today, and attempted to compare Google image search results, clicking on the China-version link resulted in my browser being automatically redirected to the US version. I found it impossible to access the censored China version.

US url: http://images.google.com/images?q=tiananmen

China url: http://images.google.cn/images?q=tiananmen
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RETRACTION

I leapt to the conclusion that Google had deliberately arranged to preclude US viewers from accessing the China-censored-version of the Tiananmen Image Search, but my wife informed me that the China url worked on her PC.

I found, looking into the matter further, that the url worked in Firefox on my own PC. Subsequent reports from other people tell me that the url works inconsistently in MS Explorer on other machines. It is not possible for me to identify the causes, but it seems most likely that these varying results are occasioned simply by the interactions of different software, and are not the result of any deliberate action by Google.

The BBC reports a story (subscription-only) in the Economist of a map purchased from a Shanghai dealer in 2001, which purports to be 1763 copy of a map originally dated 1418. The original, if established to be authentic, would cause a great deal of revising by Western historians of the chronology of the Age of Discovery, since the Chinese map claims discovery of the New World by China.

The precise number and actual extent of the voyages of Chinese Admiral Zheng He are not reliably known, but the possibility that he may have journeyed as far as the Americas exists and has given rise to considerable argument and speculation.
————————————————————————————————————————More Zheng He information here, here, and here.