"Sinocism is the Presidential Daily Brief for China hands"- Evan Osnos, New Yorker Correspondent and National Book Award Winner
- Chinese Forces Reportedly Open Fire on Protesting Tibetans – NYTimes.com – BEIJING — Chinese security forces on Saturday fired into a crowd of Tibetans in a restive area of Sichuan Province after they tried to take away the body of a Tibetan man who had died after setting himself on fire that morning to protest Chinese policies in the Tibetan areas, according to reports from two Tibet advocacy groups and Tibetan officials in the exile government in India.
- China, Israel And Attacking Iran | Sinocism – wrote last time the israel-iran war drums were beating so loudly
- Scientists: UN Soldiers Brought Deadly Superbug to Americas – Yahoo! News – Compelling new scientific evidence suggests United Nations peacekeepers have carried a virulent strain of cholera — a super bug — into the Western Hemisphere for the first time.
The vicious form of cholera has already killed 7,000 people in Haiti, where it surfaced in a remote village in October 2010. Leading researchers from Harvard Medical School and elsewhere told ABC News that, despite UN denials, there is now a mountain of evidence suggesting the strain originated in Nepal, and was carried to Haiti by Nepalese soldiers who came to Haiti to serve as UN peacekeepers after the earthquake that ravaged the country on Jan. 12, 2010 — two years ago today. Haiti had never seen a case of cholera until the arrival of the peacekeepers, who allegedly failed to maintain sanitary conditions at their base. - People’s Daily Online IPO Is Approved by Chinese Regulator – Businessweek –
- Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory | This American Life –
- iamxiaoli’s Channel – YouTube – interesting approach to learning chinese
- Mandarin Smackdown! Stewart vs. Huntsman vs. Xiao Li – James Fallows – Politics – The Atlantic– What do Messrs. Stewart and Huntsman have in common, apart from spelling their first name Jon? Apparently an interest in Asian language. Stewart puts the needle effectively in Huntsman for using Mandarin on the campaign trail, starting at time 5:00 of this clip. (Take-home message: If you’re running in a political primary, don’t speak in a language most of your audience can’t understand.) Then at the end of the segment Stewart does a surprisingly creditable job of a Mandarin riff himself. 。。When you live in a “hard-language” environment, it can get really tedious hearing the fine-distinctions preening among foreigners about who has better command of the local language than someone else. This is despite the fact that they all may be quite good in it — and that any ordinary person in that “hard” language country grows up with native linguistic command and no one gets excited by that achievement.I will avoid such disputes in the case of Huntsman by saying (a) he can speak Chinese way better than I ever will and (b) I can understand him, in Chinese, much more easily than I can understand a normal Chinese person, in keeping with the theme I explored at length last year.
- Tell Congress To Undo The NDAA, Ban Indefinite Military Detention Of Americans | Demand Progress –
- 电商融资“皇帝新衣”：谁在忽悠谁？ – 产经 – 21世纪网 – 一位VC人士表示，融资额夸大集中出现在电商、团购等过去两年非常热门的领域，就是因为多家企业获得融资，所以才争相高报融资额。
- China top military paper warns U.S. aims to contain rise – The United States’ new defense strategy focused on the Asia-Pacific region is directed at containing China’s rise, the People’s Liberation Army’s newspaper said on Tuesday in Beijing’s strongest warning yet against the new Pentagon stance.
- In Bustling Vietnam, a Rare and (still untrammeled) Escape – NYTimes.com – Sao Beach draws visitors seeking a place to reflect on the beauty of Phu Quoc. The beach, on the opposite coast from the rapidly developing Long Beach, is prized for its relative inaccessibility
- Niseko, Japan’s Own St. Moritz – NYTimes.com – skiing my way through deep blankets of powder on Mount Annupuri in Niseko. The network of ski areas around the small resort village of Hirafu on Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island, see almost constant snowfall from December to April, a type of “Champagne powder,” as aficionados call it, that is a result of low pressure systems over northeast Hokkaido meeting high pressure systems over northwest Siberia. The winds from Siberia pick up moisture from the Sea of Japan, and the resulting bands of clouds dump huge amounts of snow when they reach the mountains.
- VIE disclosures are pathetic | China Accounting Blog | Paul Gillis – Investors need the information required by the FASB standards on VIEs to properly assess the risks of investing in companies that use the VIE structure. I call on companies to improve the quality of disclosures. I suggest that the Big Four get together and agree how to apply the FASB standard in China. I also call on the SEC to get tougher on requiring companies to make these disclosures.
- The Rise of the New Groupthink – NYTimes.com –
- 茅台会不会成为政府禁购“奢侈品”？–南方报业网 –
- Jon Huntsman’s Mandarin moments – Juana Summers – POLITICO.com– after a nationally-televised debate last week in which he displayed his bilingual skills to mixed reviews, and in a party where China has been a source of considerable economic and foreign policy anxiety, Huntsman’s habit is drawing attention — and not necessarily the good kind.“I didn’t think the Mandarin thing worked at all. I thought it was ridiculous,” said Donald Trump, a harsh critic of China, on Fox News. “And frankly, I think Huntsman’s stance toward China is — it’s almost like he’s an Obama plant.”Joe Scarborough, the former GOP congressman and host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, also had a negative reaction: “You don’t speak Mandarin during a Republican debate.”
- Taiwan President Ma Declares Victory in Election – Bloomberg –
- Yunyun (云云): Social Search Meets Q&A | TechRice –
- U.S. to Renew Myanmar Ties in Light of Reforms – NYTimes.com –
- iScalp, iQueue, iScuffle– Ning Weiping, an employee with Jones Lang LaSalle, the property management company overseeing the Village, said they had not made any emergency plans for possible disorder because the store did not inform them of the new launch.”They’ll have to pay extra money if they want us to enhance security and management,” he said, ”and normally the police wouldn’t have many precautions either.” The Apple store does not pay the police for the extra security service so the officers will not step in unless there are reports about crimes or disorderly behavior, Ning said.”I don’t know whether we’ll have enough officers tonight to watch out for incidents at the store,” an officer with the Sanlitun police station told the Global Times yesterday evening.
- Lunch with the FT: Zbigniew Brzezinski – FT.com –
- Beijing limits democracy tourists to Taiwan – The Globe and Mail –
- False Flag – By Mark Perry | Foreign Policy – A series of CIA memos describes how Israeli Mossad agents posed as American spies to recruit members of the terrorist organization Jundallah to fight their covert war against Iran.
- Rebecca’s War Dog of the Week: They got military dogs in China. Lots. | The Best Defense – a late-December headline reporting that China currently employs upwards of 10,000 military working dogs in its armed forces. China uses breeds like Labs and Shepherds as well as the Kunming dog for patrol and detection work. According to Wang Han, the quoted official from the Beijing dog breeding and training centre, China’s dogs “serve in more than 5,000 army divisions,” doing all the things you might expect: “missions like peacekeeping, post-disaster search and rescue and border patrolling.”
- Thai Police Probe Hezbollah Plot – WSJ.com– BANGKOK—The U.S. Embassy in Thailand warned of possible terrorist attacks in Bangkok and Israel issued a travel warning, amid growing tensions with Iran following the assassination of a nuclear scientist in Tehran.Police in Bangkok were questioning a Lebanese man with alleged links to Iranian-backed militant group Hezbollah on Friday after the U.S. warning was issued.Deputy Prime Minister Chalerm Yubamrung said Thai authorities had received a tipoff about a terrorist plot to stage an attack in the Thai capital, one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations.
“At first we were told the Palestinians were behind it, but it turned out to be Hezbollah,” Mr. Chalerm told the Associated Press.
- A Partners’ Fight Erupts at Wynn – WSJ.com– A battle that erupted this week between Steve Wynn and a longtime business partner reveals turmoil within the casino mogul’s global empire that could add to its challenges in the explosive Asian casino market.On Wednesday, the business partner, Kazuo Okada, a director and the biggest shareholder of Wynn Resorts Ltd., alleged in a lawsuit filed in Clark County District Court that he was blocked by Mr. Wynn from seeing the company’s financial records after he contested the company’s donation of $135 million to a university in Macau.The suit said Mr. Okada also wanted to see the records to determine how Wynn Resorts used $30 million of his money in the run-up to its Macau developments. Mr. Okada is chairman of Japanese casino company and arcade-game manufacturer Universal Entertainment Corp.
- Obama’s private equity alums – POLITICO.com– For all the fire directed at the private equity world this week – from Mitt Romney’s opponents in both parties – few major politicians can claim to have their hands clean when it comes to the financial services industry, and President Barack Obama is no exception.Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry found that out the hard way: Gingrich took criticism for attacking Bain Capital while having one served on the board of Forstmann Little, while Perry came in for a grilling from Laura Ingraham over the thousands of dollars in campaign donations he’s taken from private equity executives.And Obama may have some private equity questions of his own to answer, having both taken donations from the industry and appointed a number of private equity veterans to his administration.
The most prominent among them is Jack Lew, the new White House chief of staff, who was previously a managing director at Citi Alternative Investments. Nancy-Ann DeParle, a deputy chief of staff who helped lead the president’s health care reform effort, was a managing director at CCMP Capital.
- Cocaine: The New Front Lines – WSJ.com – china a big growth market, and more expensive here than in US
- Apple Details Working Conditions at Factories – WSJ.com– surprised no mention of the censorship/other compromises//Local police ordered Apple to close the store, saying the situation wasn’t safe. Apple later said it would temporarily halt sales of all iPhones in its five retail stores in mainland China.Chinese authorities have looked unkindly on such disturbances, and Apple executives scrambled to control fallout from the incident, which was shown in videos around the world.
- 10 reasons the U.S. is no longer the land of the free – The Washington Post – Even as we pass judgment on countries we consider unfree, Americans remain confident that any definition of a free nation must include their own — the land of free. Yet, the laws and practices of the land should shake that confidence. In the decade since Sept. 11, 2001, this country has comprehensively reduced civil liberties in the name of an expanded security state. The most recent example of this was the National Defense Authorization Act, signed Dec. 31, which allows for the indefinite detention of citizens. At what point does the reduction of individual rights in our country change how we define ourselves?
- All iPhone Sales Suspended at Apple Stores in China – NYTimes.com – Wary of unrest, police ordered the store not to open, according to one source familiar with the situation. Furious, some would-be customers threw eggs. Police dispersed the crowd and temporarily cordoned off the store.
- Wen Jiabao in Middle East as China Evaluates Oil Policy – NYTimes.com – BEIJING — Premier Wen Jiabao heads on Saturday to the oil-producing nations of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, a six-day tour of Iran’s Persian Gulf neighbors that is the first Saudi trip by a Chinese premier in two decades, and the first ever to the other two states.
- 驻京办报警寻找微博炫富女 要求新浪正式道歉-搜狐IT –
- 危险的毒瘤：石药集团内蒙古涉污调查 – 产经 – 21世纪网 –
- Important Article Posted on PRC Ministry of National Defense Website: “PLA should foster offensive defense thinking in developing long-range strike weapons” | Andrew S. Erickson – This article appears designed to send a strong, clear message, and merits very careful reading, analysis, and reflection. It is accompanied by a photograph of DF-21C conventional ballistic missiles, which is one type of an potent variety of long-range strike weapons that China is developing.
- College in China Loses Face Over Statues Depicting Donors as Goddesses – Global – The Chronicle of Higher Education –
- 中央党校教授刘建飞谈民主中国与世界-视频-环球500-环球网视频-环球网 – evan osnos talks democracy in china w party school prof liu jianfei in global times video interview