This week: • Xinhua • Armageddon • Dolphins •
• Laptops • UFOs • Stuff •

 

Timed to coincide with the 56th anniversary celebrations of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, Reporters Without Borders has released an in depth look at the state news agency Xinhua which acts as a vital propaganda tool for the Chinese Communist Party.

“Xinhua’s goal is to maintain the CCP’s news monopoly,” states the report, co-written with a French journalist who worked for Xinhua for two years. Xinhua currently diffuses more than 1,000 reports a day — 700 international stories and 300 domestic ones. Though you might think it is getting more critical of the party, this is false, the only slightly critical reports are done in English and are unavailable to the Chinese public.

Nevertheless the inclusion of the rare critical piece has lent the news organ far more credibility than it deserves. Nearly one third of all news reports on China selected by Google News, for instance, originate from Xinhua. Xinhua boasts a workforce of 8,400 of which 1,900 are editors and journalists. By contrast, Agence France Presse has a total work force of 2,000.

“If you want to get the latest news, go to AFP, if you are interested in how it is presented, you can look at Xinhua,” comments one Asian journalist wryly. New journalists at Xinhua are put through an intensive three week indoctrination course. 80% of the journalists are members of the CCP. They can be seen applauding officials at press conferences — hardly the actions of an objective bunch of journalists. The news organ falls under the control of the country’s Propaganda Department, recently rebranded as the Publicity Department. The entire organization is stuffed full of so many party cadres throughout the editorial chain of command to rot out and censor any questionable stories. Sensitive stories such as worker unrest, Taiwan and the Falun Gong are not disseminated to the public but sent to the top CCP leaders labeled as ‘internal reference’. The state news agency still very much lives by a Cold War style of reporting. “Support whoever fights the enemy, fight whoever the enemy supports. That is still the stance of the Department of Propaganda when it comes to putting out news,” says the now exiled Jiao Guobiao, a journalism lecturer, in his Manifesto For a Free Press hence why there is unstinting support of such lovely fellas as Milosevic, Saddam, Mugabe and Castro.

Perhaps our favourite example of warped Xinhua reporting came during 2003’s SARS episode — a classic case of denying the presence of an elephant in the room. In the first few months of SARS, Xinhua employees were told the disease didn’t exist yet temperature controls were installed at the agency’s entrance and masks were handed out — comically showing the true colours of communist China, managers were handed better masks than everyone else! SARS was blacked out for nearly six months. Imagine when they do the same with bird ‘flu, which we have been warned could kill as many as 150 million people.

For the full 10 page report by Reporters Without Borders click here and to see the world through red-tinted glasses head on over to Xinhuanet whose objectives are amusingly emblazoned as truth, objectivity, impartiality and promptness.

 

 

“Even in an unclassified world this is not the kind of thing you want flying around the Internet.” — Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita talking about a document, yanked from a Pentagon website on September 19th, which outlines US nuclear warfighting plans, including the pre-emptive use of nuclear weapons and the use of nukes in conventional war.

So the US Department of Defence doesn’t want us talking about the merits of nuclear Armageddon. As it formulates its own pre-emptive nuclear strategy, environmental group Greenpeace has taken issue with this viewpoint and is going out of its way to ensure the nuclear news does indeed fly around the internet — an initiative we wholeheatedly support.

“Comments to the document by the various military branches,” writes Greenpeace, “reveal squabbling about who gets to run a nuclear war, a disagreement about the legality of pre-emptive warfighting strategies, and a discussion of the etiquette of alerting allied troops that a nuclear attack is coming their way.” Are we back in the imagination of Stanley Kubrick and his movie Dr Strangelove again? The leaked document can be viewed here and those kind folk at Greenpeace have made it easy for you and I to forward this explosive document to others, simply by clicking here.

“The document is a rare unpolished look at how the Cold War doctrine of nuclear first strike — previously spun as ‘deterrence’ — has taken on a new dimension,” Greenpeace explains. “It reveals that the threshold for actually using nuclear weapons has been lowered dramatically.” In a chilling finale, “Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations” concludes that “no customary or conventional international law prohibits nations from employing nuclear weapons in armed conflict.” Greenpeace disarmament campaigner William Peden said, “This document should send a shiver down the spine of everyone. It shows that the highest levels of the Pentagon have undergone a major shift in thinking and now view nuclear weapons no longer as a weapon of last resort but a weapon that can and should be used.”

“This means a US military machine prepared to use nuclear weapons first, against non-nuclear countries and non-military-related, civilian targets.”

View the document, and forward it to every one you know, then protest on the streets, and finally dig yourself a very, very, very deep hole. Dubya’s got his finger on the button and he’s not afraid to press it.

 

 

“You know, I have one simple request. And that is to have sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads! Now evidently my cycloptic colleague informs me that that cannot be done. Ah, would you remind me what I pay you people for, honestly? Throw me a bone here! What do we have?” — Dr Evil.

We at the little red email have been known to come up with a scam or two in time, but sadly this isn’t one of them. As far as we can assertain it’s real. Out in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, cetacean terrorists may well have been set loose by the forces of hurricane Katrina. Worse still the trained killer mammals may be armed with poisoned dart guns.

Deep breaths now. This is not a drill: this is the real deal. The US Navy may well be missing 36 Atlantic bottlenose dolphins, each a trained killer, whose mission is to shoot people underwater. Their coastal compound was breached during the storm, and sources close to the US government’s marine fisheries service confirm the dolphins have escaped, according to Leo Sheridan, who is quoted in this article in the Observer.

This menacing marine mess only came to light when a group of dolphins from a nearby aquarium were also set free by Katrina’s wash. Eight were found with the help of the US Navy, but the dolphins were only returned after Navy scientists had examined them thoroughly, no doubt to ensure that the dolphins were not the Navy’s killer cetaceans.

Whilst the dart guns are supposedly non lethal, inducing sleep rather than death, should a diver be shot by one of the Navy dolphins and not be recovered immediately, then death is fairly certain.

The US Navy have been working with dolphins and sealions for a long time: the current (unclassified) interceptor Marine Mammal Systems (MMS), the Mark 6 Dolphins and Mark 6 Sealions were first used operationally during the Vietnam War in 1971. There are also Mark 4 MMS, Mark 7 MMS and Mark 8 MMS (Mine clearance, dolphins only), Mark 5 MMS (object recovery, sealions only).

According to the Navy’s Marine Mammal Program website, the dolphins’ missions are all passive, with them fitted with harnesses and small electrodes planted under their skin, and taught to patrol and protect Trident submarines in harbour and stationary warships at sea, remove mines and locate swimmers, all of which are later dealt with by trained sailors. But of course they would say that, and the climate induced by animal rights activists since their going public has no doubt necessitated a big dose of plausible denial and secrecy on top of the usual classified program stuff.

Naturally the US Navy also maintains a plausible deniability about the Katrina dolphins.

 

 

A massive knowledge gap between the rich west and less developed nations could be on the verge of being bridged. Information technology has thus far been the domain of richer nations, those that don’t have to forage around looking for water and food on a daily basis. Sure, Bill Gates might have donated more than a billion bucks to help poorer nations but the fact is computers are just way too expensive for the vast majority of the world’s population.

The average GDP of a citizen on earth is around $8,200 and the average laptop costs, while declining as much as 10% a year, still clock in at $1,442 — so your average world citizen is hardly going to spend 17.5% of his annual income on a laptop. This is set to change with the introduction of $100 laptops designed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The designs were unveiled last week and incorporate an AC adapter which would double as a carrying strap, and a hand crank that would power them when there’s no electricity. For outdoor reading, their display would be able to shift from full colour to glare-resistant black and white. Surrounding it all, the laptops would have a rubber casing that closes tightly, because “they have to be absolutely indestructible,” said Nicholas Negroponte, the MIT Media Lab leader. These rugged laptops will be WiFi- and cell phone-enabled, and have USB ports galore. Its current specifications are: 500MHz, 1GB, 1 Mega pixel.

Negroponte, no relation to the Bush acolyte we should add, hatched the $100 laptop idea after seeing children in a Cambodian village benefit from having notebook computers at school that they could also take home to use on their own. He decided that, for kids everywhere to benefit, someone would have to make laptops inexpensive enough for officials in developing countries to purchase in large numbers.

Within a year, Negroponte expects his non-profit One Laptop Per Child to get 5 million to 15 million of the machines in production, when children in Brazil, China, Egypt, Thailand, South Africa are due to begin getting them. In the second year — when Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney hopes to start buying them for all his state’s 500,000 middle and high-school students — Negroponte envisions 100 million to 150 million being made.

The laptops would run the freely available Linux operating system instead of Windows — a key part in price reduction. By being beholden to Bill’s software we are all ripped off massively.

Unlike the classic computing model in which successive generations of devices get more gadgetry at same or higher prices, Negroponte said the MIT team expects constantly to lower the cost for similar specifications.

Amusingly, MIT provided the details of their low cost project in the same week that Dell, a brand that has always marketed itself on its low prices, unveiled a new high end range of computers and laptops specifically for more affluent customers, which got us thinking — if MIT can bring out computing machines for less than a Benjamin Franklin, then we are all being taking for mugs by the established PC brands. This thought hit home especially hard as our laptop made a dull thud as it hit the ground at the Wild Fire restaurant at Hong Kong airport last Tuesday and has refused to switch on ever since.

 

 

So despite the reams of evidence, including our very own gallery here, you still have your doubts about the existence of UFOs. We’d suggest to the Doubting Thomases of our readership that they book a flight to Puerto Rico and head on down to the village of Lajas, where the folk there are set to build a landing strip for extraterrestrials so common are their sightings in this region, reports the Associated Press. Indeed, as you wend your way to Lajas a bright green sign along a lonely country road in south-western Puerto Rico proudly displays a silhouette of a flying saucer and two words in Spanish: “Extraterrestrial Route.”

The strip is the idea of Reynaldo Rios, a school teacher aged 39, who claims he’s been in touch with aliens since he was 13, when white lights burst into his bedroom, entered his body and cured him of a back injury he had received during a basketball game.

“I can’t say exactly when they will come, but I know it will happen,” Rios said. “I want to keep believing in my dreams.”

The local mayor has given his blessing for the project to go ahead, believing the community will benefit from more geek tourist dollars as it looks to brand itself as the next Roswell. Like the site in New Mexico, Lajas citizens claim a UFO crashed in 1997.

Rios, who leads a group called UFO International that holds night time vigils to search for signs of alien life, says the landing strip will be 80-feet (24-meters) long and have pyramids as control towers because aliens are attracted to the shape. Puerto Rico is already known for its Arecibo Observatory and its 1,000-foot (304-meter) parabolic receiver that astronomers really do use to search for extraterrestrial life.

The huge dish, in northern Puerto Rico, made a cameo appearance in the 1997 film “Contact,” starring Jodi Foster as a SETI astronomer who picks up a signal from extraterrestrials. But it’s a little-known aerostat off the Extraterrestrial Route that inspires UFO lore in Lajas. The US military uses the aerostat, a tethered blimp with a radar system, to detect low-flying drug smuggling planes. But many Lajans don’t believe that. Even the mayor has suggested that the aerostat’s true purpose is to detect UFOs.

Much more information pertaining to extraterrestrial life hovering around Puerto Rico can be accessed here. Of course this is not the first time the little red email has opted for Latin flavoured UFO tales.

Who can forget last year’s exclusive images from Mexico?