Blood & Treasure

up on the roof

A man sets fire to himself on the roof of his home in order to prevent its forced demolition. Film taken at 9.am local time, October 30, Mishan, Heilongjiang Province. This triggers a fight between the man’s family and the cops, in which the family temporarily prevail, at least as far as I can see, after a confused but vigorous interlude of rock throwing and savage beating. “Nail house” protests are nothing new, of course. I’m not sure whether there are more of these cases around these days or whether the trend to protest by self immolation has given an ongoing issue new momentum and visibility. It may be that some cases like these are a by product of China’s economic stimulus package, which took a kind of foie gras approach to development, mandating local banks to lend to local authorities for projects which said local authorities had to think up to meet growth targets. Another factor may be the growth of a well connected “real estate lobby” of developers and officials.

Via Roland, who reports on a similar (but non-flammable) nailhouse case in Yunnan, this time with a happier ending after opinion in the Sinosphere mobilized in favour of the family affected.

unusual shrapnel

The Dubai package also contained a closed electrical circuit connected to a mobile phone SIM card hidden inside the printer. The printer was in a box with a textbook on management, a copy of The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot and various handicrafts, including a pink and purple lidded basket.

I presume this was meant as stuffing to stop everything rattling around. But it’s amazing what people happen to have lying about.

A couple of odd things. A large package sent across three continents from Yemen to a synagogue in Chicago is going to set off all kinds of bells and whistles. Also, why go to the trouble to find that address specifically if the thing is supposed to go off in mid air? And lastly, there’s the fact that the woman who is supposed to have sent the packages leaving her own mobile number and photo id. It’s as if someone wanted to leave a trail.

including belly dancers

Let’s face it, some part of us is going to miss Silvio the Unbelievable when he eventually goes. This has got almost everything you’d expect in a Berlusconi story: almost in the sense that it doesn’t include mafioisi, everything in the sense that it does include belly dancers.

A scandal over Silvio Berlusconi's relationship with a teenage Moroccan girl took on legal and political overtones today when a senior police officer confirmed that the Italian prime minister's office had intervened on her behalf when she was detained on suspicion of theft, claiming she was the granddaughter of the Egyptian president.

Via.

kickable targets

Well, this is all very cold war redux:

In the run-up to a visit by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Vietnam this week arrested two bloggers, refused to release another blogger after he completed a prison sentence, and convicted three labor activists and six Catholic villagers in human rights-related cases.

Several of those imprisoned are anti-Chinese nationalists and the article quotes analysts to the effect that this represents infighting in the VCP, ie an attempt by pro-Chinese factions to derail progress made by pro-American factions. In other words, there is a “good”, ie pro-American communist party and a “bad”, ie pro-Chinese communist party. Naturally, it’s the second one that’s arresting all the dissidents. Personally, I think that there’s just one Vietnamese Communist Party and that it’s doing what communist parties do, namely keeping control: especially of something so potentially explosive as an anti-Chinese turn in policy, assuming that this is what’s happening. This is actually quite typical of how the CPC behaves in China in the sense that it removes inconvenient people from the scene at times when it is attracting international attention. There also seems to be some buy in here from American sources:

Some U.S. experts worry that if the Obama administration presses Vietnam too much on human rights, it could derail the hard-won progress in the relationship.

For many people in non-government organizations and the human rights community, "Vietnam is a kickable China," said Brantly Womack, professor of politics at the University of Virginia. "It's an easy target."

"derailing hard won progress": that's how political science types used to talk about China. And for one reason and another, China has had a pretty good kicking over the past few months. But I suppose we must indulge the crimes of our new friends. On which subject, see also.

Most officials on Capitol Hill and human rights advocates received no warning or explanation prior to the Obama administration's quiet announcement Monday that it would waive sanctions against four countries that forcibly recruit child soldiers. However, an internal State Department document obtained by The Cable sheds light on the reasons behind the Obama administration's decision to pull back on a bill that Barack Obama himself co-sponsored as a senator.

The internal document shows that the administration prepared detailed justifications for its decision to waive sanctions against countries that forcibly recruit child soldiers, arguing that working closely with troubled militaries is the best way to reform them and that U.S. security depends on such relationships.

I like that: troubled militaries. They’re just crazy, mixed up, heavily armed kids.

electoral contingencies

There are other states - Colorado, Nevada, Alaska and Kentucky - where Democrats may survive because of whacko performances by their Tea Party opponents. Joe Miller in Alaska has confessed to so many lies that Alaskans may well try to revert to Lisa Murkowski. But as a write-in candidate she labors under the burden of many Alaskans being unable to spell her name, so the Democrat, McAdams, might squeeze through.

On the figures, Cockburn may be right.

rimjingang

This sounds interesting:

A magazine composed almost entirely of materials smuggled out of North Korea by reporters living inside the country has just launched its first English edition in an effort to reach a wider audience.

... All of the reporters left North Korea because of economic hardships but returned to the country after being recruited to work for the magazine, which provides them with journalistic training and recording equipment. In a country that tightly regulates information, taking images of street-level North Koreans for outside distribution would most likely be construed as treason.

For safety, the identities of the North Korean reporters are completely shrouded in secrecy — they do not know each other or what their colleagues are doing, Ishimaru said. The reporters periodically cross the China-North Korea border to deliver what they have recorded.

The materials include digital images of people who foreigners would rarely have access to — a woman making merchandise at home to sell at a market, homeless children looking for food in a dump, clothing regulation enforcers on the lookout for youngsters wearing unacceptable fashions such as tight-fitting pants, and young soldiers scavenging for food from a farm.

Not an assignment I’d fancy. Rimjingang is not available in English just yet, but I’ll keep an eye out and let you know. Meanwhile, Good Friends for your North Korean grimness needs. In particular, scroll down here for the story of Kim Kwangho.

don't be feudal

The new new economy: Google is providing servants to its satraps and feudatories on the lump labour principal. This is necessary to enable the company to concentrate on its tax avoidance strategies.

avoid the soup

Yes indeed. Very funny. And what’s more:

The Maldives is a world-class tourist destination famed for its warm welcome and excellent customer service. Episodes such as that captured on video have no place in our tourism industry or in our society more broadly, and are alien to our cultural and religious values," said the foreign minister, Ahmed Shaheed.

Disgruntled flunkeys are precisely what you’d expect at a world class tourist destination offering excellent customer service and you’d be a fool to think otherwise.

This could be quite interesting, since the local government is apparently promising to enact laws to prevent such a thing ever happening again. Given the Maldives dependence on tourism, what we may be moving towards here is the world’s first actual customer service dictatorship. I’d still avoid the soup though.

The wedding racket generally is getting bizarre. I know a couple who got married at Chester Zoo recently, in a ceremony that involved a large parade of ants bearing rose petals towards them. I can't wait for the piranhas to be repurposed.

his grin

Hmmm. Not good.

I expected Alim to state the obvious, namely the number of police and soldiers in Urumqi. Instead he said, “The changes? The biggest is that many Chinese respect us now. They are scared of us. They have seen our strength.”

His grin told me what he thought of this, but I asked anyway.

“Yes,” he said. “It is good thing,”

litany of casualness

Lynne Featherstone reviews the Baby P reports released by Michael Gove:

The extraordinary thing is that when there is a child protection plan in place as there was with Baby Peter – given that child has been assessed as ‘at risk’ we (the people) would expect those charged with the child’s safety to be rigorous in their attention to detail. Instead we find a litany of missed appointments, no follow-ups, files lost, handovers not done, meetings not attended. It is genuinely an appalling litany of casualness.

Via. Someone involved in children’s services told me the other day that the reports were, among other things, a very useful how to guide for people who wanted to abuse children and get away with it. She was thinking of systematic sexual abuse rather than casual violence but as I understand it the procedures for both are similar and involve many of the same agencies. This would seem to confirm that opinion.

Obviously, abusers might not be able to rely on precisely the same mistakes being made. But they are now able to identify weaknesses in the system and get a reasonable understanding of what they might be able to get away with. At he very least, they might have the confidence to proceed. That may turn out to be unwarranted, but they would only know that after the fact. On the other hand, I’m not sure what benefit there is in me being able to know about it.