Tens of thousands of residents of the towns of Serthar and Luhuo – and more in the surrounding Tibetan-populated western corner of Sichuan province – have been effectively cut off from the outside world after the violence. Telephone and Internet services to the region have apparently been severed, and checkpoints have been set up along the roads to control who gets in and out.

“Inside Job had essentially all its facts wrong,” replies Summers, unbelievably, resorting to an argument based on timing: because he didn’t work in financial services before he was Treasury secretary, and because he waited a few years before taking that job at DE Shaw, Summers says it’s “absurd” to blame the revolving door for any of his actions.

It’s weird that Summers, who loves debate, generally refuses to sit down in some public forum and answer serious, informed questions about the legacy of his tenure at Treasury; it might well be that this single interview is the closest we’ll ever get. And on the basis of this interview, it’s clear that, far from apologizing for his actions, Summers is going Full Bluster, denying any culpability, and choosing instead to violently reject and belittle any suggestion that he holds any responsibility for the crisis at all.

In 2012, Tencent will continue to push forward aggressively in social and present a formidable challenge to Sina. In my first blog post of 2012, let’s have a look at how the two top microblog players in China will fare against each other.

"The Flowers of War" belly flop — and the problems it has faced on the way to the U.S. market — underscores the challenges Chinese movies can face in America.

The latest nonsense came from Mai Tian, another popular blogger, who asserted that Han Han could not possibly be the author of his blog posts, given that he was racing cars on some of the same days they were published.

“State capitalism is not something new. When Bismarck invented this idea in 1870 it gave Germany impressive performance over the main superpower of the time, Great Britain,” he said. “But 20 years later, it was the First World War.”

“Unlikely” says the answer from Beijing- based investor and Internet watcher Bill Bishop.

As Mr. Bishop notes, a large part of the speculation that Twitter might be getting ready to kow-tow to China’s censors stems from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s visit to Shanghai earlier this month, during which he complained about not being able to read his tweets. That trip came almost exactly a year after the founder of another social-media site banned in China, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, visited Beijing amid talk of trying to tap the Chinese market.

But for all the salivating over China’s potential in board rooms across Silicon Valley, Mr. Bishop says Twitter would have to be “incredibly naive” to think they could wedge their way into the country.

“It would be stupidity,” he says. “One, I don’t think the government would go for it. And two, the market is already saturated.”

The company surprised the public last week when it disclosed that hackers had obtained source code for its pcAnywhere software and other products, and that the code had likely been stolen in a six-year-old breach that Symantec had never disclosed.

So wrote Sima Nan, one of China's most vocal opponents of Western liberal values, before he boarded a plane to Washington, DC on January 20. At some point after arriving at Dulles International Airport, Sima leaned over the handrail of an escalator and wound up getting his head pinched between the handrail and an approaching section of wall.

Because many of these enhanced audit procedures were not in place early last audit season, I expect there will be a number of additional Chinese accounting frauds discovered in the next few months. I expect the auditors will have the help of the many short-selling research operations that have targeted Chinese companies. Deloitte Watch, a website I have commented on before, is back with suggested audit procedures for Qihoo 360. Andrew Left of Citron has previously used Deloitte Watch to encourage Deloitte to focus on Longtop and CCME, leading to the demise of these companies. We will soon see whether he has figured out Qihoo 360 ahead of Deloitte. 

This is false. Or, at least, it is false under present circumstances.

Proponents of marijuana have argued for years that the drug is safer than alcohol, both to individuals and society. But a ballot proposal to legalize possession of marijuana in small amounts in Colorado, likely to be on the November ballot, is putting the two intoxicants back into the same sentence, urging voters to “regulate marijuana like alcohol,” as the ballot proposition’s title puts it.

Low-end handsets have set off a smartphone boom in China

The change in expectations that didn’t occur during the last correction appears to now be underway. According to a People’s Bank of China (PBoC) survey (Chinese language), the number of people expecting housing prices to increase has declined from 45.8 percent during the last quarter of 2009 to 19 percent at the end of 2011. Moreover, the share of people who think housing prices will fall or stay the same is now 67 percent. Similarly, the number of people anticipating purchasing a new home in the next three months has declined by 14 percent.

More than anything else, Twitter’s announcement highlights both how integral a part of the global information ecosystem it has become, and how vulnerable that ecosystem can be when a single entity controls such a crucial portion of it. How Twitter handles that challenge will ultimately determine whether it deserves the continued trust of its users.

Until now, the only way we could take account of those countries’ limits was to remove content globally. Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country — while keeping it available in the rest of the world. We have also built in a way to communicate transparently to users when content is withheld, and why.

There are two ways of looking at this new “ability,” one optimistic and one pessimistic. One is that Twitter is now more able to effectively tailor itself to the needs of certain countries. The other is that Twitter is now more able to effectively tailor itself to the needs of certain countries.