6 Smartassed Responses to “Murdering Parents to Sell Their Children” Biff- The comments are more interesting than the lead if you ask me...

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Interesting extended debate over at the forum at Pekingduck.org on the Chang/Halliday biography of Mao...

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Atlantis in the Himalayas: Norbu practices Bon, Tibet's ancient, non-Buddhist shamanist religion. The cult, which exists in the shadows in modern-day Tibet, subscribes to bloody, consciousness-altering rituals. French orientalist Alexandra David-Néel, a contemporary of Tucci, reports on how monks had themselves locked into chambers with corpses so that they could tear out their tongues -- which were then used as magic potions in battles with demons. ...The murder was followed by a decades-long, bloody religious war. "There is no doubt," says Baumann, "that Buddhism also came into Tibet carrying the sword, and that it erased the indigenous culture in much the same way that the communists later wiped out the Buddhists." Biff- the photospread is the best part of this report

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Next Step for Counterfeiters: Faking the Whole Company - Evidence seized in raids on 18 factories and warehouses in China and Taiwan over the past year showed that the counterfeiters had set up what amounted to a parallel NEC brand with links to a network of more than 50 electronics factories in mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Using the company name, the pirates copied NEC products, and went as far as developing their own range of consumer electronic products — everything from home entertainment centers to MP3 players. They also coordinated manufacturing and distribution, collecting all the proceeds. The actual NEC even received complaints about products — which were of generally good quality — that they did not make or provide with warranties.

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A CRITICAL ASSESSMENT OF JUNG CHANG AND JON HALLIDAY’S BIOGRAPHY -MAO: THE UNKNOWN STORY- Biff - a long and involved critique by a group of academics. Worth an extended gander.

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Child thieves skirt Turkish law: Pinar's story is like a modern-day version of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, a morality tale of a starving child caught in the grinding jaws of poverty and fought over by the forces of good and evil. She is one of 300 children known to be working in organized gangs. Two hundred are from Istanbul and about 100 from Diyarbakir in eastern Turkey. Their parents hand them over to criminals at age four or five in return for money. Some families work in concert with the gangs. Like the gypsy children in the 1978 film King of the Gypsies, the children are trained in pickpocketing and organized mugging.

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In Hong Kong, 'democracy will have to wait: HONG KONG - Democrats here, outmaneuvered by Chief Executive Donald Tsang and the central government in Beijing, have painted themselves into a small and increasingly irrelevant corner of Hong Kong's political life. Meanwhile, Taiwan's president, Chen Shui-bian, finds himself a stranger in his own land, as the mainland leadership has struck up a de facto diplomatic dialogue with the more amenable opposition party, the Kuomintang (KMT). The two different territories are in two different situations. The common element is a communist leadership in Beijing that seems to have finally discovered a greater finesse and self-confidence in dealing with troublesome opponents. From Beijing's point of view, the Motherland has not looked so embracingly maternal for a long time.

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The party, the people and the power of cyber-talk: Even the party itself pays attention to the deluge of public comment. Eager to acquire some legitimacy, but anxious to avoid democracy, it is trying its hand at populism. The prime minister, Wen Jiabao, said last month that the government should listen “extensively” to views expressed on the internet. With few other ways of assessing the public mood, the internet is indeed a barometer, even though surveys suggest that users are hardly representative of the general population, being mainly young, better educated and male.
In 2003 many internet-users expressed outrage on bulletin boards over the beating to death in jail of just such a young, well-educated man who had been arrested for failing to carry the right identity documents. This led to the scrapping of a decades-old law giving the police sweeping powers to detain anyone suspected of staying without a permit in a place other than his registered home town. Later that year the commuting of a death sentence of a gang boss prompted a similar online furore. The Supreme Court retried the case and ordered his execution. Biff- Pathetic, but most likely true. And yet another example of China copycatting KMT governance during Taiwan's old days of martial law, predating the outbreak of democracy. An evolution which will happen in China for the same reasons and, as such, is just as unstoppable. Not because I'm guilty of wishful thinking, but because, within reason, history repeats itself.