No, China will not have dissent.
Human Rights Watch senior Asia researcher Nicholas Bequelin said the crackdown is even more serious than the one in December when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to a jailed Chinese dissident, Liu Xiaobo. He said it is also more extensive than when police questioned and detained activists involved in signing Charter 08, a manifesto for peaceful democratic reform that Liu co-authored, in 2008.
“There is a sense that the authorities want to put an end to the kind of open defiance of the government by rights activists, people who have been fairly active on Twitter and other social networks who were allowed for a couple of years to do that,” Bequelin said.
Of course they abstained from voting on the Libyan event. They don’t want anyone telling them that they can’t squash any rebellion (plus, they own us).
URGENT: Radiation 1,600 times normal level 20 km from Fukushima plant: IAEA.
Radiation 1,600 times higher than normal levels has been detected in an area about 20 kilometers from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, International Atomic Energy Agency officials said Monday.
Data collected by an IAEA team show that radiation levels of 161 microsievert per hour have been detected in the town of Namie, Fukushima Prefecture, the officials said.
The government has set an exclusion zone covering areas within a 20-km radius of the plant and has urged people within 20 to 30 km to stay indoors.
I don’t think that anyone is out partying at this point.
Arab League chief: We respect UN resolution on Libya military action.
“We respect the UN resolution and there is no conflict with it, especially as it indicated there would be no invasion but that it would protect civilians from what they are subject to in Benghazi,” he said.
I guess Barack didn’t get punked?
German newspaper publishes suppressed photos of U.S. soldiers posing with partially naked Afghan corpse. Yup, this is the stuff that makes papers sell, and makes for a lot of anger. What were they thinking?
Get the Kleenex out. Not.
Libyean leader Muammar Gaddafi sent a message to the US President defending his decision to attack the rebels fighting to overthrow him.
Gaddafi(68) also wrote a letter to the French and British leaders, and the UN Secretary General, saying the Security Council resolution was “void” and violated the UN charter, warning them that they would “regret” any intervention.
“Libya is not for you, Libya is for the Libyans,” he said.
Wrong Gaddafi, what POTUS wants…POTUS gets. Somehow, I think this all came as a shock to Muammar?
Details of Gaddafi’s letters were released by the Libyan government spokesman at a news conference in Tripoli.
Defending his decision to attack rebel cities, Gaddafi told Obama, “Al Qaeda is an armed organisation, passing through Algeria, Mauritania and Mali. What would you do if you found them controlling American cities with the power of weapons? What would you do, so I can follow your example.”
Trying to strike a personal note, Gaddafi prefaced his letter saying, “To our son, his excellency, Mr Baracka Hussein Obama. I have said to you before, that even if Libya and the United States of America enter into a war, god forbid, you will always remain a son. Your picture will not be changed.”
via ‘To my Dear Obama, our son’, says Gaddafi, defending attack on rebels. Good grief, did Muammar really believe in the wayward son? Note to Muammar: Barack is busy doing another samba in another country right now. Will get back to you later when he feels like it.
Possible oil sheen under investigation in Gulf of Mexico could be large.
The U.S. Coast Guard is investigating reports of a potentially massive oil sheen about 20 miles north of the site of last April’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion.
A helicopter crew and pollution investigators have been dispatched to Main Pass Block 41 in response to two calls to the National Response Center, the federal point of contact for reporting oil and chemical spills, said Paul Barnard, an operations controller for Coast Guard Sector New Orleans.
The first caller, around 11 a.m., described a sheen of about a half-mile long and a half-mile wide, he said.
About two hours later, another caller reported a much larger sheen — about 100 miles long — originating in the same area and spreading west to Cocodrie on Terrebonne Bay, Barnard said.
“We haven’t been able to verify that, and it would be very unlikely for an individual to be able to observe a 100-mile long sheen,” he said, adding inspection teams were en route around 3 p.m. to the site.
Timing is everything. It might not be oil.
The Coast Guard had gotten reports of an oil sheen, but officials have not confirmed the substance is oil.
