Donald responded to Rui’s letters of protest, writing that Starbucks has shown “great sensitivity to, and respect for the heritage of the Forbidden City since it was invited to open a store there by museum officials six years ago.” Eden Woon, Starbuck’s Vice President for Greater China, tells the Beijing News, “As our contract with the museum has not expired, we have no plan to move out. Rui Chenggang’s proposal is only his personal opinion.”

Museum officials, though defensive, have taken note of the controversy. They tell the Beijing Morning Post that negotiations are underway between the museum and Starbucks, and expect the dispute to be resolved within the first half of this year. Amid the strong support of Rui’s stand on preserving national cultural integrity in the age of global integration, increasing questions are being raised about the management of China’s increasingly market-driven cultural institutions.

An article from China Daily reports that pressed by local dignitaries in 2003, a KFC outlet bid farewell to Beihai Park, an imperial garden in Beijing, after the expiration of a ten-year contract. Rui told the Beijing News that he hopes Starbucks will do the same. If Starbucks voluntarily moves out of the Forbidden City, he wrote in his blog, it will gain the heart-felt respect of the Chinese people who deeply love their traditional culture. He also notes that his personal protest is not a one-off occurrence. He believes that at present the West frequently misreads China, mostly due to the silence of the Chinese people. He says that he voices his opinion this time in order to help eliminate those misunderstandings, and will continue to do so in the future.

See related photo slideshow for this story.

People Daily is the mouthpiece of Chinese Communist Party and regarded as one of the most authorized media in China expressing the government's policy and point of view.

The piece is written by an economic researcher in the U.S. Research branch of Chinese Academy of Social Science. Wang, the writer, raised three reasons for Americans' victim-like psychology to explain the current tight Sino-US relationship and suggested a "new" thinking for China to deal with U.S. in trade issues as preparing for a long time friendly relationship.

Most people in China don't know much about the American polictics and debate in Senate and political lobbying, just as Americans are not familiar with Chinese ways of doing things. Chinese will feel surprised seeing leaders being challenged in U.S. political debate being broadcasted, just as Americans will be amazed by China's efficiency with those idle listeners in a meeting when leaders are speaking in boring official tones.

Wang said if one went to sit in a debate of U.S. congress, he/she will sure feel the consent of how U.S. has suffered, after hearinga the emotional speech by senators. "These senators and representatives who are demanding votes to continue their career, just cannot accept that U.S. has fell behind China in a trade game in which the rules were set by the America." So they require to use the rules to curb China.

"Americans think China are just lucky enough to grow in an age of globalisation." Wang concluded, cited this as the first reason for American's victim-like psychology.

Secondly, Americans felt that China and Chinese goods and Chinese workers will squeeze away the position U.S. and her citizens have taken and end their living. "Although many experts and academics have repeated saying China's producing advantage mostly rely on her cheap labour and China just functions as assembly for global brands led by U.S. and western countries, Americans still feared China's growth in technology." Wang said.

Globalization is also a key issue. Wall Street Journal recently published an article talking about the new merger and acquisition trend in business that related to cross-border buyout of companies, citing Dubai's port deal and China's CNOOC's attempt to buy Unicol as typical examples, supported by recent resistence to cross-border merger in European Union.

The debut of Ben Bernanke as chairman of Federal Reserve also has relate to the inverted curve phenomenon, as U.S. short-term notes' yield are higher than those of long-terms, to globalisation, as China and Japan are buying a huge amount of US treasuries, which is not as significant in earlier days. Bernakee thus ruled out an economic recession.

Globalisation is kicking Amricans' nurve when it's not Americanization. Wang said the third reason for American's victim-like psychology is American has put all their anxiety about globalisation on China. "U.S. used to be the promoter of globalisation." Wang said, "globalisation means adjusting to new culture and new ways of life. In the early days, American adjust happily as they are benefited from globalisation with their income increased and other things bettered. However, when the harms come near to them in their turn, Americans felt the pain felt by people in other places around the world in the early days and are eager to find someone to blame. China fell into the slot."

"US is the biggest trade parter of our country," Wang concluded at the end of the article, "We should do our best to keep the relationship, and keep it stable."

"Americans' viticm-like feeling is strong and we should be aware of that when dealing with them in the future." Wang said, "We should prepare for it as it will take the U.S. a long time for them to adjust and changing the victim-like feelings."

“The Italian government doesn’t know anything about the presence of Italian citizens at Abu Ghraib – they point out from Rome – In any case we absolutely exclude that these people are soldiers or public officers”.

Several national newspapers such as La Repubblica, Il Corriere della Sera and La Stampa gave the news about the video one day in advance on their web sites. The left leaning paper L’Unità wrote on that day that “Italian mercenaries, too, tortured prisoners in Iraq”, then adding that “these people get paid a huge amount of dollars to kill and wage war under the flag of the United States of America”. The article also described the government’s attitude as “an attempt to avoid responsibilities, not a real denial“.

Watch the video on Rainews24.

Not long after that, on Feb. 23, China Vice Premier Wu Yi "vowed to intensify her fight against illegally copied goods -- not to fend off complaints from Washington but to spur her own country's ambitions to become a technological power," according to a report by Reuters.

Reuters also said a report issued this month by the United States Trade Representative Rob Portman that promised concerted action."IPR protection is one of China's greatest shortcomings," said the report. "The volume of counterfeit goods from China seized at the U.S. border continues to rise."

This IPR issue, among many others related to China's crippled legal system, has become a critical issue for American companies doing business in China, esp. at a time when India boasts its more completed and westernized legal framework to attract FDI (Foreign Direct Investment).

According to a Financial Times report on Feb. 22, India could achieve sustained economic growth rates of up to 10 per cent – at which it would keep step with China – if the government quickened the pace of reform, as predicted by the International Monetary Fund in Feb.21 released a report.

Italy is involved in the first place as an investigation is underway in Milan into the disappearance of an Egyptian cleric allegedly abducted by CIA agents. Other 11 cases are reported to have taken place and the Italian secret service is suspected of having known it. In the article on the left-leaning il manifesto the journalist argues that “the European intelligence agencies must have been aware of what was happening in their territories with the ‘extraordinary renditions’. Now we’ll see how they’ll cover it up and tamper with the evidence”. Chiesa goes on by adding that this is the way Europe is acting now: “slavish governments willing to support the international war on terror and, consequently, the violations of fundamental human rights”. George Bush is depicted as "an emperor ready to breach any international regulations and, together with Dick Cheney, to trample on the American laws and Constitution". But, the journalist concludes, “Europe is guilty of letting the American gangsters damage democracy and Western values as a whole”.

In the meantime, the European Parliament has launched its own investigation. Il manifesto in the same page of Chiesa’s article, runs an interview with Claudio Fava, the Italian member of the temporary commission which will delve into the matter. “We must start from what Marty found. The existence of CIA prisons is not under discussion, our task now is to discover where they were and whether the European governments were involved or not in the violations”.

The Globe and Mail leads with a cover story on a 20-minute phone call between George W. Bush and the Prime Minister-designate. No details of the conversation are availible, but the paper runs a photograph of a smirking Bush talking into the phone, obviously pleased with what he's hearing. This picture dominates the front page and, given the unpopularity of Bush in Canada, can't but be interpreted as a provocative gesture. In some ways, this is an oblique reference to the Liberal campaign's strategy of trying to link Bush and Harper, with the suggestion that a Conservative victory will serve to bolster the un-Canadian Bush, and may lower resistance to such unpopular, US-backed initiatives as national missile defense, the war in Iraq and domestic surveillance.

How does the right respond? What is the National Post's take on the phone conversation between the two leaders? We don't know - the Post runs an inoccuous wire version of the story, without picture, stuffed in the back pages of its print edition.

“By opening up economies to ‘market forces’, Latin American countries were promised significant poverty reduction. In fact, what happened was a significant increase in the hold exercised over Latin American economies by multinationals, especially US corporations. Between 1990, and 2002, multinational corporations acquired 4,000 banking, telecommunications, transport, petrol and mining interests in Latin America.”

Sulehria closes with this warning:

“For the last two decades, Washington has forced neoliberalism (read poverty) down third world throats in order to make the world better for US business. To many the US economic empire, spreading at gunpoint, seemed unassailable. But now, unable to defeat rag-tag Iraqi militias and rapidly losing allies in Latin America, the empire stands exposed to others on the globe. Others, including Pakistan, are watching and learning.”

DAVID MONTERO reports from Islamabad, Pakistan for the Christian Science Monitor.

[T]he percentage of black students attending schools where most students are non-white increased across the US from 66% in 1991 to 73% in the 2003-2004 school year, according to the report by Harvard's Civil Rights Project and released at the weekend. In the south, where the desegregation effort was concentrated, the number of black students in schools where most students are non-white rose from 61% to 71% over a 12-year period. More than three-quarters of intensely segregated schools serve children from poor families, the report said.

School desegregation is one of the signal achievements of the 1960's Civil Rights movement, both within the US and throughout the world. That there could be increasing segregation, even a return to late-60's levels, strikes at one of the great symbols of America's commitment to racial equality and domestic reform.

The Frontier Post has recently run an editorial about US involvement in the region, titled "How the US views India and Pakistan?" The question mark seems to be a pure formality, since the author, Mohammad Jamil, prefers the declarative mode, and hammers in his points with authority. He sees the US manipulating India against Pakistan, in effect betraying Pakistan, loyal ally in the Cold War struggle in Afghanistan and in the War on Terror. Indeed, far from commited enmity, the piece strikes a tone of hurt betrayal.

Anyhow, the way the US has treated a friend that stood by its allies for about half-a-century, got dismembered as a result of its involvement in military pacts, and even risked its very existence by becoming the frontline state against another super power during the Afghan crisis is deplorable. By entering into strategic partnership with India, the US leadership has not only disappointed Pakistan but also spawned despondency in Kashmir, as the Kashmiris always considered the US a country that stood for the right of self-determination of the suppressed nations.
It is surprising to note the double speak of the US administration. On the one hand it acknowledges Pakistan’s prodigious role in the war on terror but on the other it shows lack of trust when US-led forces enter Pakistan in hot pursuit of Al Qaeda operatives or Taliban remnants. Recently, when Washington was lauding President Pervez Musharraf’s determination against terrorism, and Pakistan forces’ action against terrorists in a briefing, eighteen people were killed and many injured in powerful explosions destroying one house and damaging other hutments in Bajaur Tribal Agency near Peshawar reportedly by the US-led allied forces.

It appears that even in Al Qaeda's backyard, it is specific policy positions and behavior - like Friday's missile strike - that motivate hostility, moreso than ideological or religious hatred.

Pakistan has reacted with shock and anger. In the border provinces, protests sprung up the day after the attack, spreading to major Pakistani cities - Karachi, Islamabad, Lahore and Peshawar - by Monday. In the Western press, the Guardian has published a fairly comprehensive overview of the attacks and the reaction. The largest crowds assembled in Karachi, where 10,000 people marched shouting slogans against the US and Pakistani leader Pervez Musharraf. DAWN, a Pakistani newspaper, gives approximate turnout at protests across the country.

Bolivia was supposed to be a laboratory for the ‘consensus’ economic reform model of tight social spending and export-oriented growth. But it was those who perceived themselves as 'disenfranchised' from those policies--millions of small farmers, urban poor and the country’s large indigenous population--who put Morales into the presidential palace in La Paz, and toppled whatever remaining legitimacy for the ‘consensus’ remained within the continent. Shortly after Morales’ election, Argentine president Nestor Kirchner announced that he would pay off the country’s outstanding $9.8 billion debt to the International Monetary Fund, thus unhinging the country from IMF/World Bank constraints; a left candidate for the Peruvian presidency, Ollanta Humalla, surged into second place in the polls; and the Zapatistas, in Mexico over new years, launched “the other campaign” in parallel to that country’s presidential race to highlight issues of indigenous rights--an effort widely perceived as having received a considerable boost from the election results in Bolivia. By January 14, the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo featured a debate between John Williamson, the U.S. economist, affiliated with the Institute for International Economics in Washington, DC, considered to be one of the primary architects of what’s become known as the Washington Consensus; and José Luis Machinea, Secretary General of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean at the United Nations, over what, if anything, remains of the “Consensus’.

The changes in Latin America—long in the works, but also intensified by Morales’ election—are not merely ones of rhetoric. Even John Williamson admitted that the World Bank made mistakes in not paying enough attention to the ‘social factors” involved in economic reform. The “Washington consensus,” a complex set of policies so tied to the United States that they bear the name of our nation’s capital, is unraveling just as quickly as a new term is being introduced to suggest a somewhat more welcome economic power in Latin Power: “Chindia,” the combined economic might of India and China. The turn of many Latin countries east—toward Asia as well as toward the European Union—has gone largely un-reported in the United States. But, El Tiempo suggests, such new trading partners offer not only growing and increasingly affluent markets, but none of the political baggage associated with the long history of U.S. intervention in the region:
“Since the end of the communist system in the USSR, the United States has been dreaming of a world dominated by one superpower: the U.S. That is not coming to pass.
The rapid transformation of China into an economic power, with India following in its footprints, signifies that the U.S. better prepare for a different future, one in which it will have to understand how to share power among others like never before. It’s a change that will not be easy.”

Karsic was working for an Islamic humanitarian organization when the Italian army force “Carabinieri”, arrested him allegedly for his links with terrorist groups. They questioned him without getting any information, so they handed him over to the Americans. He spent one week in a place he later realized was the base “Eagle” in Tuzla. He was kept in a cell, continuously questioned, forbidden to sleep and beaten. On the seventh day of his detention they freed him asserting “they had made a mistake”, gave him 500 dollars and made him sign a document where he promised not to say a word about what had happened.

“The story – observes the journalist - raises some questions: Is the Italian army involved in the global fight against terrorism? On which legal basis Bosnian citizens are taken and handed over to Us forces?”. The Italian foreign minister Gianfranco Fini has just visited ex Jugoslavia and appreciated the army’s doings. The journalist says that Italy shouldn’t cooperate with the “kidnappers” in the Balkans, especially now that there have been protests against the kidnappings in the country, thus referring to the arrest warrants issued here in Italy for 22 suspected CIA agents accused of helping to kidnap a Muslim cleric in Milan in 2003 (see an article from Corriere della sera).

Big events like this stand out in the collective memory, but will these be the things for which 2005 will be remembered? Often history is driven less by discrete events, no matter how momentous, and more by processes, often of obscure origins, that tip the world between one period and another. This year one such process has matured, and may have crossed the point of no return. I'm speaking of the breakdown of the Western alliance and, on an even more fundamental level, the idea of the West itself.

During the Cold War, the Western institutions - NATO, certainly, but also the EU - represented not just a security alliance, but also a community of nations sharing a common set of values. These values were based on an Enlightenment consensus around rationalism, individualism and democracy. Although sometimes human rights and democracy could be compromised for tactical reasons, there was no question that the ultimate goal was the universal realization of these values. To this end the United States led in the formation of the UN, the Europeans enshrined rights and freedoms in EU accords, and Jimmy Carter pioneered human rights as an international relations issue. These shared, trans-Atlantic values were real, and gave the Western model its appeal against a utopian Marxism. But the battering of the transatlanticism and the recent behavior of the US administration is calling into question the strength, even the existence, of these shared values.

The US has transformed, and in doing so it has transformed the international system of the world. On this blog, Chiara Brusa Gallina has called into question the European willingness to follow the American war on terror. Gone are the days when the Western alliance was a given - instead, on purely strategic grounds, the US is pulling closer to India, to Japan, and even to Pakistan. And other countries are picking up the cues - in India, Sam Schramski reported that cooperation with the US, at least by some, is treated instrumentally. As Nagomi Onda points out, the Japanese begin to take a more aggressive security stand, reminding China of the Cold War. Russia returns to the Great Game. 2005 has seen a lot of disasters, but the most long lasting may be the burial of the Liberal International ideals of Woodrow Wilson, architect of peace and self-determination, and a global return to the Realpolitik of Bismark, whose friends called him "Blood and Iron."

Stateside, the debate about the Bush Administration's war on terrorism seems to have hit an upsurge with reports from the New York Times that the President allowed the National Security Agency to spy on its citizens. This is, of course, coupled with the news that certain sunset provisions ofthe Patriot Act will probably not be renewed. And though his recent series of speeches on the Iraq War have attempted to redraw connections between a concerted military action and disperse terrorist ones, this effort does not appear to be as trenchant as it once was.

Of course, the international coverage of these stories has yet to coalesce, perhaps because their implications are domestic. It appears that said news media has been captivated far more by the question of the CIA black sites. This is fitting considering how many countries were potentially involved, as noted in Francis Pisani's post.

When Sec. of State Condoleeza Rice made her trip to Europe over a week ago, one can assume responses to black site revelations were not at the top of her agenda. Nevertheless, she was met by an avalanche of criticism after every stop she made; from Berlin to Bucharest to Kiev, and everywhere in between. Much of it focused on the method of extraordinary rendition, which was a catchphrase difficult to explain in legalese, let alone in any extant language. In the end, as Nagomi Onda observes in her post on an Asahi article, both the U.S. and European countries had much face-saving to accomplish given their professed regard for "humanitarianism."

There are of course a plenitude of posts that were never made on other facets of the black site story, from the strange and tragic apprehension of Khalid al-Masri, to how some around the world view the United States' apparent implementation of Krauhammer's "ticking time bomb". We have but a small cast at our disposal.

Regardles, the Bush Administration's sudden garnering of attention in the thicket of domestic security concerns doesn't seem to bode well for its immediate future. The way in which both foreign governments, and for the purposes of this blog, foreign media have grasped on to this issue is also not easily dismissible, though. Take the Swiss NZZ, which announces every action of special prosecutor Dick Marty in the minutest of detail.

American conduct in its war on terror is under more intense scrutiny as the days roll on, mostly because its ephemerality leads so easily to skepticism. One can argue, perhaps, that the Administration's governance of this conflict has never been given a fair shake by the international media, that few in the foreign ranks seem to understand that the stakes include some of the most serious security consequences of our time. But then maybe all of the coverage is duly warranted.

Some more, still, have it that the best thing to do is to question those nattering nabobs head-on: As Colin Powell relayed in yesterday's BBC World TV program, none of this rendition business is "new or unknown."

If this is the case, this blogger would hate to think that WorldAndUs's occupancy of the information superhighway was merely idle.