Kofi Annan: black skin, white masks Although Kofi Annan’s track record at the UN is an indisputable success in terms of management and efficiency, he has been sharply criticized for his political shortcomings. As Secretary…
Tag: trade
Beijing arrests 1,000 in Internet crime crackdown (Xinhua) BEIJING -Beijing police on Saturday said they have arrested 1,065 suspects and deleted more than 208,000 “harmful” online messages as part of an intensive nationwide crackdown on Internet-related crimes conducted since mid-February. The operators of more than 3,117 websites have received related warnings, a spokesman from the city police’s cyber security department said Saturday, adding that 70 Internet companies that defied the warnings have received administrative punishments, including forced closures. The spokesman said the campaign, dubbed “Spring Breeze,” mainly targets the dissemination of information related to smuggling firearms, drugs and toxic chemicals, as well as the sale of human organs, the counterfeiting certificates and invoices and trade in personal information. The crackdown is meant to address prominent public complaints about Internet-related crimes, the spokesman said, adding that reports about Internet related crimes have gone down 50percent since the campaign was launched on February 14. The spokesman urged Internet users to actively oppose the spread of harmful information. China has stepped up its efforts to “cleanse” cyberspace over the past few weeks. Beijing police on Friday announced the detention of six people for allegedly fabricating and spreading rumors on the Internet, as well as punishment for websites and social media that carried the rumors. Sixteen websites were subsequently forced to close, and the country’s two largest micro blog operators — Sina Weibo and Tencent — have suspended commenting functions on their sites from March 31 to April 3. A Tencent statement said the move was made to prevent illicit information from spreading through microblog posts.
Coincidently, the US military is now attempting to increase its presence in what is widely considered the world’s most resource rich nation, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The DRC has suffered immensely during its history of foreign plunder and colonial occupation; it maintains the second lowest GDP per capita despite having an estimated $24 trillion in untapped raw minerals deposits. During the Congo Wars of the 1996 to 2003, the United States provided training and arms to Rwandan and Ugandan militias who later invaded the eastern provinces of the DRC in proxy. In addition to benefiting various multinational corporations, the regimes of Paul Kagame in Rwanda and Yoweri Museveni in Uganda both profited immensely from the plunder of Congolese conflict minerals such as cassiterite, wolframite, coltan (from which niobium and tantalum are derived) and gold. The DRC holds more than 30% of the world’s diamond reserves and 80% of the world’s coltan, the majority of which is exported to China for processing into electronic-grade tantalum powder and wiring.
The BRICS summit, to be held in New Delhi at the end of March, provides the opportunity to begin a discussion on the global governance deficit. Looking ahead to 2050, the major challenges for growth…
BEIJING, Jan. 31 (Xinhua) — U.S. politicians have aimed a barrage of critiques at China’s trade policies recently but the shots from the crisis-plagued economy of the United States are likely to miss their target,…
US top foreign-policy strategist and a die-hard Russophobe Zbigniew Brzeziński had a point when he wrote in The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives that “Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire. Russia…
Timothy F. Geithner, the Treasury secretary, came to Beijing on Tuesday hoping to persuade Chinese leaders to toughen their stance toward Iran and to soften their opposition to a stronger renminbi, a move that could…