by Staff Writers
Beijing (AFP) March 4, 2008
China said Tuesday its defence spending would jump 17.6 percent this year but insisted the rise was moderate, amid a flare-up in tensions with the United States over Beijing's growing military muscle.
Military spending in 2008 will reach 417.8 billion yuan (57.2 billion dollars at the end-2007 exchange rate), a spokesman for China's parliament told reporters ahead of the legislature's annual session beginning Wednesday.
As Jiang Enzhu announced the figures, he also renewed a warning to rival Taiwan that its plans for a March 22 referendum on United Nations membership was putting an already uneasy peace between the two sides at risk.
Nevertheless, Jiang said the budget rise, following a similar jump in 2007, was not excessive, with the spending coming off a low base and helping to boost soldiers' incomes as well as beef up the military's high-tech capabilities.
"In recent years the Chinese government has moderately increased its spending on national defence on the basis of sustained, steady and fast economic growth and rapid build-up of government revenues," Jiang said.
Jiang said China's military spending was just 1.4 percent of its gross domestic product last year, compared with 4.6 percent ...   more »

By Bob Brewin
The Defense Department said Monday that cyberattacks in 2007 against computer networks operated by governments and commercial institutions around the world "appear" to have originated within China -- marking the first time the Pentagon has so visibly pinned the blame against China for cyberattacks.
Defense made its cyber warfare charge against China in its annual report to Congress on China's military power.
"In the past year," the report concluded, "numerous computer networks around the world, including those owned by the U.S. government, were subject to intrusions that appear to have originated within the [People's Republic of China]. These intrusions require many of the skills and capabilities that would also be required for computer network attack. Although it is unclear if these intrusions were conducted by, or with the endorsement of, the [People's Liberation Army] or other elements of the PRC government, developing capabilities for cyber warfare is consistent with authoritative PLA writings on this subject."
The report said that in 2007, networks operated by Defense, other federal agencies, defense-related think tanks and contractors experienced "multiple computer network intrusions, many of which appeared to have originated in the PRC."
The report also highlighted public statements by top intelligence ...   more »

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, International Business Editor
The verdict is in. The Fed's emergency rate cuts in January have failed to halt the downward spiral towards a full-blown debt deflation. Much more drastic action will be needed.   
The Federal Reserve building in Washington
Evans-Pritchard: Defending scaremongers
'Ninja' loans explode on sub-prime frontline
The latest news and views on the credit crisis
Yields on two-year US Treasuries plummeted to 1.63pc on Friday in a flight to safety, foretelling financial winter.
The debt markets are freezing ever deeper, a full eight months into the crunch. Contagion is spreading into the safest pockets of the US credit universe.
It is hard to imagine a more plain-vanilla outfit than the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which manages bridges, bus terminals, and airports.
The authority is a public body, backed by the two states. Yet it had to pay 20pc rates in February after the near closure of the $330bn (£166m) "term-auction" market. It had originally expected to pay 4.3pc, but that was aeons ago in financial time.
"I never thought I would see anything like this in my life," said James Steele, an HSBC economist in New York.
No sane mortal ...   more »

State guidelines lay framework for deliberately letting some people die.
By Dorsey Griffith
Older, sicker patients could be allowed to die in order to save the lives of patients more likely to survive a massive disaster, bioterror attack or influenza pandemic in California.
It's not how nurses and doctors are accustomed to doing things, nor how Californians expect to be treated. But it is part of a sweeping statewide plan being praised for its breadth, even as it rankles providers who will have to carry it out.
The new "surge capacity guidelines" released by the state Department of Public Health, depict a post-disaster health care environment that looks and feels nothing like the system most Californians depend on.
It provides for scenarios in which patients could be herded into school gymnasiums for life-saving care or animal doctors could stitch up the human wounded and set their broken bones.
The 1,900-page document lays the practical – and ethical – groundwork for local and county health departments, hospitals, emergency responders and any able-bodied health care worker likely to be called upon in a catastrophe.
Striking in its specificity and its frank focus on the need to suspend or flex established laws and ...   more »

By Diana West  
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Transfixed by the two-candidate "horse race," maybe we didn't focus precisely on what happened in the homestretch of the last Democratic debate when Barack Obama tried to pick and nuance his way through a straight-ahead question from MSNBC's Tim Russert.
Q: Do you accept the support of Louis Farrakhan?
The question arose because the longtime racist and anti-Semitic leader of the racist and anti-Semitic Nation of Islam had delivered a two-hour speech devoted mainly to praising Obama's candidacy.
Here is Obama's answer: "You know, I have been very clear in my denunciation of Minister Farrakhan's anti-Semitic comments. I think they are unacceptable and reprehensible. I did not solicit this support. He expressed pride in an African-American who seems to be bringing the country together. I obviously can't censor him, but it is not support that I sought. And we're not doing anything, I assure you, formally or informally, with Minister Farrakhan."
"Minister" Farrakhan? The honorific seems unduly deferential applied to a demagogue who, just to recall a few pearls of his noxiousness, has labeled Judaism a "gutter religion," said "the white man" is "the anti-Christ," and suggested the post-Katrina failure of the New Orleans levees ...   more »