After a busy week (and a nasty Friday flu) I had a chance to catch up on news and blogs. Some interesting stories from today and the past couple of days. Most are China related, a couple are not. All are interesting.

Niger Delta in flames 
An awful place gets worse, just as both the US and China are seeing it as one of the keys to future stability of oil supplies.
A car bomb just over two weeks ago, at an oil-truck stop in Warri, was activated by a cell phone and came just days after China's Hu met with Nigeria's leaders. The bomb was "the final warning" before fresh attacks on oil workers, storage facilities, bridges, offices and other "soft, oil-industry targets," a mend official wrote in an e-mail to news organizations. But it was also, the e-mail said, a message to "the Chinese government and its oil companies to steer well clear of the Niger Delta. The Chinese government by investing in stolen crude places its citizens in our line of fire."
Chinese lawyers for protestors and activists warned from talking to foreign media
Wouldn't want too much news of those protests leaking out through the back channels. The regression continues apace. The permalink to this story, originally from the unlinkable South China Morning Post, doesn't work. This is from Howard French's "A Glimpse of the World" blog. The story is dated May 20, and may move down the page as Howard posts more stuff.
The rules demand that lawyers who take on “mass” cases brought by protesters and other groups of 10 or more should report the cases to the association and “accept the monitoring and guidance of the judicial administration agencies”.

The association said the rules were needed to ensure that sensitive disputes did not threaten social stability.

“Mass cases often involve complex social, economic and political causes and have a varied impact on the state and society that cannot be ignored.”
Corruption in the Chinese media
Not all Chinese journalists are tireless saints. Want to be a city bureau chief for a Chinese newspaper? Guarantee ad revenue and pay and up-front "franchise fee". From ESWN (also noted by Fons in China Herald), this gets into the notorious Chinese media extortion tactic of threatening people with bad coverage unless journalists are bought off.
Among the reported offenses, the China Food Quality News established an office in Sichuan Province without approval from the press authority in June 2004, the SAPP said. Last July, the newspaper hired Wang Qiming, an ex-convict, as vice director of the illegal outpost, authorities said.  Wang allegedly threatened to run a bogus news story charging the Jingyan Food Co with improper production practices unless the firm paid him 300,000 yuan (US$37,474).

In another case, Meng Huaihu, head of the Zhejiang Province office of the China Business Times, reportedly signed a contract with the newspaper to generate 400,000 yuan worth of advertising revenue.  Meng allegedly extorted 350,000 yuan from the Zhejiang Petroleum Co, offering to withhold negative publicity after a car owner complained about problems with the company's fuel. 
Shaolin Inc.
From Pallavi Aiyar and Asia Times Online, those Shaolin Monks sure sound like a serene and spiritual lot:
"In the past, monks relied on farming to make a living. Today we have to rely on tourism," he says. "Advertising and publicity has always been integral to Buddhism. How else can we diffuse Buddhist philosophy into society at large?"
Well, you could always hire a fine PR agency...

Why is privacy important?
Nothing to do with China, except insofar as privacy is a semi-universal concept (with allowance for cultural differences). I have been following the NSA telephone surveillance news in the US, along with the various other domestic surveillance programs that have emerged in the wake of 9/11. In this piece one of my favorite non-China bloggers, security expert Bruce Schneier, eloquently explains why privacy is important, and rebuts one of the glib arguments used in favor of domestic surveillance.
Two proverbs say it best: Quis custodiet custodes ipsos? ("Who watches the watchers?") and "Absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Cardinal Richelieu understood the value of surveillance when he famously said, "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." Watch someone long enough, and you'll find something to arrest -- or just blackmail -- with. Privacy is important because without it, surveillance information will be abused: to peep, to sell to marketers and to spy on political enemies -- whoever they happen to be at the time.

Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we're doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.
A great wall is completed
In this case, the one across the Yangtze, the Three Gorges Dam. An achievement to rival Great Wall in scope and ambition. But one wonders if it won't be destined to be a strategic failure, in the same way that the Great Wall was.
Scientists warn that the upstream water quality has deteriorated because the flow is too slow to allow the river to clean itself. More than half of the sewage from Chongqing is pumped into the river untreated. New water treatment plants have been built, but this has failed to stop a slow stagnation. To minimise the loss of fertile land, farmers have been encouraged to dig up soil under the flood line and re-lay it on the tops of hills, but much biodiversity has already been lost under the reservoir.
Also in the Washington Post:
"This is the grandest project the Chinese people have undertaken in thousands of years," said Li Yong'an, general manager of the government's Three Gorges corporation, which runs the project under the direct leadership of Premier Wen Jiabao.
We're not calling it a "civil war"
Bleak reporting from Baghdad on the glorious, new society taking shape in the post-Saddam era. Don't miss the startling timeline of five days in bodies at the end of the article.

The logic of Adel The Patriot's new sectarian struggle against the Shia is driving him and his fellow Sunnis into radical new directions. Asked what will save the Sunnis, he replies almost instinctively.

"Our only hope is if the Americans hit the Iranians, and by God's will this day will come very soon, then the Americans will give a medal to anyone who kills a Shia militiaman. When we feel that an American attack on Iran is imminent, I myself will shoot anyone who attacks the Americans and all the mujahideen will join the US army against the Iranians.

"Most of my fellow mujahideen are not fighting the Americans at the moment, they are too busy killing the Shia, and this is only going to create hatred. If someone kills one of my family I will do nothing else but kill to avenge their deaths."

Nice to have career plans.