China reports a fresh outbreak of bird flu in the north, and it sounds serious.

In Asia, crucible of the virus, China’s official Xinhua news agency said 2,600 birds in the northern grasslands had died of the disease. It did not give details on when the birds were found, and sought to reassure the public that the outbreak was contained.

Move along, nothing to see here. There is no SARS in Beijing.

UPDATE: The WHO reports that China has culled 91,100 birds in Inner Mongolia in a bid to prevent the H5N1 virus from spreading. Elsewhere in Asia, Taiwan reports its first bird-flu case, Thailand records its first human bird-flu death in over a year and Indonesia is being accused of both a cover-up and gross neglect of its bird-flu epidemic.

You might want to read this first.

The first Chinese car to be sold in Europe has scored zero — the worst-ever score — in safety tests….

The two-ton 4×4 scored zero stars in crash tests last week by the ADAC, the German automobile club, which carries out tests for Euro NCAP. “It had a catastrophic result,” said a spokesman for the ADAC. “In our 20-year history no car has performed as badly.”

This is a site I would normally never link to, but it’s certainly of interest to those tracking China’s business development. Link is via the Instapuppet who says of China’s auto industry:

“Not ready for prime time. Of course, that’s what they said about the Japanese in 1970.”

Were Japanese cars this bad back in 1970? Anyway, knowing Chinese industriousness, I’m sure they’ll rapidly improve and then have the last laugh.

Which should we call it? Either way, here’s a new thread.

[Photo via Fire Dog Lake.]

Indictments should be handed out any minute now, and according to this bombshell, one of the big fish has caved, and is giving testimony that could lead directly to Dick Cheney, and maybe even higher. The other name to watch in the days ahead is Ari Fleischer, the all but forgotten shyster who brought a new level of dishonesty to the White House press room.

Remember, this has next to nothing to do with the outing of an undercover operative. It is all about the concentrated and coordinated effort from the the very top to obscure the truth about iraq at any cost to keep Americans ignorant and sheepishly devoted to a bogus war. It’s about deception on a scale unimaginable in a free country with a free press. It’s about a ruthless campaign to suppress the truth by smearing and slandering, and embracing criminality in the process.

What we will see in the months ahead will, I believe, expose the soft underbelly of the Bush spin machine and render it broken. But don’t expect Rove and Bush and Cheney to go gentle into that good night. The great Bullmoose opines that their response is utterly predictable:

No, if he indicts, nothing else will matter to the GOP smear team than sullying the reputation of the special counsel. Hopefully, he has no unpaid parking tickets, has never jaywalked or removed a label from a mattress. If he has committed these misdeeds, we will see them advertised as a screaming headline on Drudge. They will do a “South Carolina” number on Fitzgerald.

Fitzgerald will become the anti-Ken Starr to the right. He will be characterized as a zealous out of control prosecutor. The ACLU will be enlisted by the Norquist crowd to defend their brave persecuted leader, Mr. Rove. The right will wail that they are the victims of modern Palmer Raids with innocent leaders such as DeLay and Rove being swept out of power by a Vast Left Wing Conspiracy. Wasn’t Fitzgerald seen at Blockbuster furtively renting a Michael Moore video and surfing Moveon.org?

All of the pack that relentlessly pursued Clinton will kvetch about the “criminalization of politics.” They will see no irony or hypocrisy in their complaint because this is a fight about preserving power not maintaining consistency. The conservative standard is clear – when a Democratic President is the target it is about the “rule of law” and when the “victim” is a Republican it is about the “criminalization of politics.” It is particularly rich that Tom DeLay, the relentless pursuer of Clinton, is making this claim. One wonders whether he agonized over this injustice with Casino Jack Abramoff and Righteous Ralph Reed as they jetted over the Atlantic on the way to their golfing outing in Scotland.

So be prepared; poor Fitzgerald is about to be drawn and quartered. But he’s a smart guy, and he surely knows this is coming. I suspect he’s paid all his parking tickets.

I really feel we are at a turning point. The Delay indictment was just for openers but this one is the real thing, because it goes right up to the very top. It may well lead directly to Bush, especially if, as the Daily News article reportedly implies, one of the fat ladies sings. Then it’s really over. Fingers tightly crossed as liberals brace for a near-delirious outbreak of schadenfreude.

A simple, naive question, I know, but when I read stuff like this I have to ask myself what he gets out of it that makes his pilgrimage worthwhile.

After months of speculation about the timing of this year’s visit, Koizumi acted Monday morning to fulfill his promise to pray annually at Yasukuni, a Shinto shrine that deifies Japan’s 2.5 million war dead, including Class A war criminals responsible for atrocities throughout Asia, where the shrine is generally regarded as a symbol of unrepentant Japanese militarism.

The shrine’s officials and its museum have long stood at the center of a movement to justify Japan’s prewar conduct, arguing that Japan tried to liberate Asia from Western powers and was pushed into World War II by the United States, and that war criminals enshrined there were innocent.

As Koizumi has led Japan to adopt a more assertive foreign policy, more and more politicians and public figures have been openly trying to justify Japan’s past. Their message has resonated in a country where anxieties over a shrinking population, uncertain economic prospects and China’s rise have led to an increase in nationalist sentiments.

Koizumi rejected criticism of his visit, saying that he was merely paying homage to Japan’s war dead. “From a long-term perspective, I believe China will understand,” Koizumi said. “No foreign government should criticize the way we mourn our war dead.”

Koizumi is smart and shrewd. He must be getting a political payback that makes the international condemnation an acceptable price to pay for his visit. Is it ramped-up nationalism, or a harmless, from-the-heart desire to honor Japan’s war dead? (Again, I know how naive and dumb these questions sound, but I’ve never really read a satisfactory explanation.)

While I find China’s reaction to the shrine visit out of proportion to the “crime,” I can understand it. Those Shrine officials are scary as hell, and if I were Chinese I’d be upset about them, too. So why does Koizumi encourage the perception that he is somehow on their side (and that is definitely a perception the world gets when he makes his annual visit, whether it is valid or not). Koizumi knows full well he’s playing with dynamite. Why bother?

Now that I have your attention… I recently had conversations with no fewer than three separate female Western expats who are living in China or have lived there in the past, and I was struck by one theme that each of them brought up: the difficulty that Western women have dating Chinese men, in sharp contrast to the infamous ease with which Western men date Chinese women.

Again, the scenario each of these friends shared was remarkably similar. Each described her love life in Asia as highly wanting, and each had more or less the same explanation, namely that Asian men in general and Chinese men in particular seem to be afraid of Western women and unwilling to take the risk of asking them out for a date. Two of them said they felt it had to do with the “feminine side” of Chinese men, and the third, when I mentioned this to her, embraced it as truth.

So what does that mean? First, this isn’t in anyway a put-down, especially since I find that guys who acknowledge their “feminine side” are way more interesting than their Marlboro Man counterparts who swagger and go to great lengths to appear muy macho.

The argument boiled down to this: American men tend to act out their masculinity in a distinct way. They are forthright, uninhibited, hide their fears and nervousness, come across as strong and dominant – and for whatever reasons, these seem to be traits that Chinese women find alluring. Or at least enough of them to keep Western men in China very busy. The same in the gay scene: Most Chinese gay guys seem to be attracted to Western guys who exude the same machismo, and they automatically typecast themselves in the female role. No, not sexually (necessarily) but in terms of expecting to be the one to “take care of their man,” keeping the place clean and making dinner for him, etc.

But alas, it seems the female expats don’t have it as easy. “Chinese men have a strong feminine side compared to American men’s omnipresent masculine side,” one of them told me. “That makes them afraid of women they perceive to be strong-willed. They see that strength as a masculine trait, and they see it in Western women, which is why you so rarely see native Chinese guys here dating Western women.” Ironically, she said, it is exactly this trait that attracts Asian women (and gays) to Western men, while turning off Asian men to Western women.

I’m not saying any of this is absolutely true, but I did find it interesting food for thought. Watching the body language of the guys here – the way they walk, the way they carry themselves, thy way they hold their bag (most macho Americans wouldn’t be caught dead holding a bag, but nearly all men here carry something not unakin to a purse), the way they cross their legs – well, it’s just very different from the he-man American style that we oafish Westerners seem intent on displaying.

So are Chinese men really more effeminate? Or are Western men just more obsessed with camouflaging and denying their feminine side? Whatever the answer, it’s too bad the victims have to be nice Western females looking for companionship.

The US State Department just sent this to expats’ email boxes:

Recent news reports could lead to the recurrence of anti-Japanese demonstrations similar to those seen in April 2005. In the past, these events have resulted in property damage and some instances of violence that required a police response.

Americans are urged to monitor the local news, be vigilant of their
surroundings, and avoid crowds. Past demonstrations have taken place near the Japanese Embassy in Beijing and Japanese Cultural Centers and businesses in other Chinese cities.

Get out your riot gear, avoid sushi bars and don’t accept rides from anyone driving a Nissan.

I don’t think anyone who lived in China during the SARS period could be at all surprised to see the government is still not a shining example of openness, despite the threat of a global pandemic.

As governments in North America and Europe grow increasingly worried about the possibility of a global epidemic of bird flu, one crucial player is China. Yet for now, much of what the country is doing to manage a possible epidemic is a mystery.

China is not only the world’s most populous nation, but also the world’s biggest poultry producer. It has a quarter of the world’s chickens, two-thirds of the world’s domesticated ducks and almost nine-tenths of the world’s domesticated geese, statistics from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization show.

The first known case of the A(H5N1) strain of avian influenza was found in 1996 in a goose in China.

While the Beijing authorities insist that no poultry in the country has the disease now, Hong Kong University scientists who have studied the genetic evolution of the virus wrote in Nature in July that infected migratory birds in western China appeared to have contracted the disease in southern China; the virus has since spread from western China to East Asia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkey and Romania.

The Chinese health authorities in Beijing have called repeatedly for vigilance against the disease. But they have refused to share virus samples from infected wild birds this year with international organizations and have quarreled with researchers who have suggested that the disease remains a problem.

Shigeru Omi, the World Health Organization regional director for the Western Pacific, called Friday for countries to share samples more quickly.

“Without those samples, we cannot know if the virus is mutating and if it is any closer to tipping the world into the unknown,” he said in Manila.

Hey, go get your own samples. We’ll be as cooperative and as forthcoming about bird flu as we were about AIDS in Henan province and SARS in Beijing.

…Simon has a superb recap of the latest media and blog coverage, and he comes to all the right conclusions. Excellent reading and great links.

No time for a clever title, I’m flying to Bangkok in a few hours. (No, not for fun, but because I need to apply for my work visa from outside the country.) Talk about anything.