Short videos on China

Since I’ve been posting more videos lately, let me add links to two videos I prepared myself with the help of some tech people in Washington. One video is a brief introduction to Beijing, the Olympic host city. The other is about the sports training system in China, which has some 3,000 sports schools. I wrote a news story on this same issue but it has not yet been released. Once it has been, I'll add a link.

Comments

[A B]

First video (the only one viewable) is well done.

Just one thought --- Beijing is the epicenter of Northern Chinese culture. It would be interesting for you to go to somewhere that is the center of Southern Chinese culture and see the contrasts.

Whether the Beijing Olympics will be judged a success will be from the point of view of the sponsors --- whether they achieved their marketing and promotional goals with their advertising dollars.

Unlike the last few Olympics, whose "customers" are primarily in North America and Europe, this time, the No. 1 target audience is the Chinese consumer.

If the Beijing Olympic Committee though about this very hard, they would realize that most of the problems they have been dealing with that deal with the surface (like a few minor protesters) are not really important relative to the alignment of business, economic, and, grin, political interests in helping them make the games a success.

They would take a much more relaxed view if they understood the ramifications of this.

[on the other hand]

Tim you look different in the video than the picture on the blog.

[A B]

That is because he was wearing a disguise.

Can't you tell the big bushy beard, fake nose, and other decoys intended to throw off the people who comment on his blog so they wouldn't recognize him in real life?

You got to be Kato to pick him out.

[on the other hand]

A B,

I vaguely remember during the Tibet unrest there was a commenter here that had heated debates with you (or someone else?) and called to organize an international facts finding mission to Tibet. Is s/he still around? Just curious.

Tim:

I like the part about morning excercises in a park, but not so much the cuisine part. From the video I can hardly tell how rich the Beijing cuisine scene can be.

[jeff]

There was a terror today in Xinjiang.

[A B]

@on the other

You honestly do not expect me to keep track of those kind of things?

I can barely keep track of how many toes and fingers I have at a given moment in time.

@jeff

China got to start acting like the US in Muslim areas around the wold, send in Predators with Hellfire missiles to take out a bunch of wedding parties and gatherings of people.

[Marvin L Foushee]

The anti-terrorist American newspapers should be covering this story like white on rice; Why is McClatchy ignoring this Jew Klux Klan story in Beijing and in its American newspapers? Anal probes searching for Cipro tablets at Olympic time can be embarrassing for American reporters.

Anthrax case wasn't lock
Source says evidence largely circumstantial

By Scott Shane | New York Times News Service
12:12 AM CDT, August 4, 2008

The evidence amassed by FBI investigators against Bruce Ivins, the Army scientist who killed himself last week after learning that he was likely to be charged in the anthrax letter attacks of 2001, was largely circumstantial, and a grand jury in Washington was planning to hear several more weeks of testimony before issuing an indictment, a person who has been briefed on the investigation said Sunday.

While genetic analysis had linked the anthrax letters to a supply of the deadly bacterium in Ivins' laboratory at Fort Detrick, Md., at least 10 people had access to the flask containing that anthrax, said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the investigation publicly.

Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation also have no evidence proving that Ivins visited New Jersey on the dates in September and October 2001 when investigators believe the letters were sent from a Princeton mailbox, the source said.

The source acknowledged that there might be some elements of the evidence of which he was unaware. And while he characterized what he did know about as "damning," he said that instead of irrefutable proof, investigators had an array of indirect evidence that they argue strongly implicates Ivins in the attacks, which killed five people and sickened 17 others.

That evidence includes tracing the sale of the pre-stamped envelopes used in the attacks to a post office in Frederick, Md., frequented by Ivins, who had long rented a post office box there under an assumed name, the source said. The evidence also includes records of the scientist's extensive after-hours use of his lab at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases around the time the letters were mailed, the source said.

In an indication that investigators were still trying to strengthen their case, FBI agents took two public computers from the downtown public library in Frederick last week, The Frederick News-Post reported.

One law enforcement official said Sunday that evidence against Ivins might be made public as early as Wednesday, if the bureau could persuade a federal judge to unseal the evidence and if agents could brief survivors of the anthrax attacks and family members of those who died.

Paul Kemp, a lawyer for Ivins who maintains his client's innocence, declined to comment for the record on Sunday on the alleged evidence.

The stakes for the beleaguered FBI and its troubled investigation, now in its seventh year, could hardly be higher.

The bureau, having recently paid off one wrongly singled out researcher, Steven Hatfill, now stands accused by Ivins' lawyer and some of his colleagues of hounding an innocent man to suicide. Only by making public a powerful case that Ivins was behind the letters can the FBI begin to redeem itself, members of Congress say and some bureau officials admit privately.

Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the former Democratic leader of the Senate and one target of the deadly letters, said Sunday that he had long had grave doubts about the investigation.

"From the very beginning, I've had real concerns about the quality of the investigation," Daschle said on Fox News Sunday.

"Given the fact that they already paid somebody else $5 million for the mistakes they must have made gives you some indication of the overall caliber and quality of the investigation," Daschle added. He was referring to the government's settlement in June with Hatfill, which pays him $2.825 million plus $150,000 a year for life to compensate him for what the FBI now acknowledges was a devastating focus for years on the wrong man.

Daschle said he did not know whether the new focus on Ivins was "just another false track." He added, "We don't know, and they aren't telling us."

John Miller, an FBI assistant director, declined Sunday to address criticism of the investigation, one of the largest and most costly in bureau history.

"As soon as the legal constraints barring disclosure are removed, we will make public as much information as possible," Miller said in a statement. "We will do that at one time, in one place. We will do that after those who were injured and the families of those who died are briefed, which is only appropriate."

He added, "I don't believe it will be helpful to respond piecemeal to any judgments made by anyone before they know a fuller set of facts."

The unsealed evidence would likely include affidavits for search warrants laying out the bureau's reasons for focusing on Ivins, including summaries of scientific evidence that investigators consider central to their case. Ivins' house near the gates to Fort Detrick was the subject of an extensive search by FBI agents last Nov. 1, and bureau surveillance vehicles openly followed the scientist for about a year, according to people who knew him.

Ivins, 62, had acted strangely in the weeks before his death, and he was hospitalized from about July 10 to July 23 after associates concluded that he might be a danger to himself or others. Jean Duley, a social worker who had treated him in group therapy, sought a restraining order against him. He had said he expected to be charged with "five capital murders," she said, and had threatened to kill colleagues and himself.

Duley did not say that Ivins had confessed to the anthrax attacks, and the scientist left no suicide note, according to an official briefed on the investigation.

Critics say the Hatfill settlement was the culmination of a pattern of blunders in the investigation. The FBI and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service have thrown a huge amount of resources into the hunt for the anthrax mailer, whose letters dislodged members of Congress and Supreme Court justices from contaminated buildings, which cost hundreds of millions of dollars to clean up.

Yet from the beginning, public glimpses of the investigators' work prompted serious questions. "What has bothered me is the unscientific, bumbling approach of our investigators," said Rep. Rush Holt, a Democrat and physicist whose New Jersey district includes the contaminated Princeton mailbox.

Holt said in a recent interview that his first doubts came after anthrax was found in his congressional office in October 2001 but investigators never returned to conduct systematic testing to trace the path of the anthrax spores.

After that, he said, when contamination at a New Jersey postal processing center indicated that the letters had been mailed on one of a limited number of routes, it took investigators seven months to test several hundred mailboxes and identify the source.

"Within two days they could have dispatched 50 people to wipe all those mailboxes," Holt said. He wrote to Robert Mueller, the FBI director, on Friday to ask that he testify to Congress about the investigation as soon as it is closed.

When investigators questioned people around the Princeton mailbox about whether they had seen a suspect there, they showed passers-by photos of only Hatfill, according to local residents who were questioned. Criminologists said that only by showing photos of a number of people could investigators have confidence in an eyewitness identification of Hatfill or any other suspect.

Some experts also questioned the FBI's use of bloodhounds from local police departments to try to trace a scent from the recovered letters to suspects' homes, including that of Hatfill.

Law enforcement sources at the time said the bloodhounds' reactions at Hatfill's apartment were one reason for the FBI's intense focus on him. But independent bloodhound handlers said it was highly unlikely that a useful scent could be obtained from letters that might have been handled by the perpetrator with gloves, had rubbed against thousands of other scents in the mail, and then were irradiated to kill the dangerous spores.

[Marvin L Foushee]

Tim Johnson, that person in the video doesn't look like you. Have you been working out in the Tysir Nasser Gym in Jordan in preparation for the Olympics?

[LarryJ]

Tim, really nice whiskers there.
Thought the fashion show video was a bit too long and the sports one a bit too short.
Larry J