New discovery: A blog dedicated to covering the Avian Flu. From an entry today, China denies human deaths in Qinghai.

Dr. Klaus Stohr said the WHO conferred with representatives of the
Chinese Ministry of Health both in Geneva and in Beijing and was given
assurances the reports, published on some Chinese websites, were
unfounded. "We have spoken with the Ministry of Health representatives
here in Geneva today. We have also had contact with our colleagues in
China. They have come back and said that there is no indication of
human cases. They have not seen any human cases," Stohr said in an
interview from Geneva. The WHO will continue to monitor the situation,
Stohr added.

Horse’s Mouth is posting a series of remembrances of the June 4 massacre.:

An endless line of army trucks had now jammed Chang’an Avenue. For a moment there was complete silence. Then, little by little, the people collected again and inched their way toward the trucks until they could touch them. They begged, they cursed, they swore. "You’re the People’s Army, you can’t open fire on the people!" some protested. Others were sarcastic, saying, "You’re very good at killing unarmed civilians! You’ve turned yourselves into killing machines for those old bastards! But when they finally die, you’ll all be executed!" Then a hoarse voice began to lead the crowd in singing the "Internationale." We all wept. The soldiers were stone-faced; you could see from their eyes the stupidity, the apathy, the cruelty.

Global Voices online has started online profiles of bloggers nominated for the Freedom Blog Awards. The first profile is on Glutter.

For the next few weeks, we’ll be offering profiles of bloggers
nominated for the Reporters Sans Frontières weblog awards. This profile
is part of the series. Please visit the RSF voting page and vote for your favorite blogs. - Your friendly editors

Via Tomorrow, a fictional report on what an outbreak of avian flu could look like in the journal Nature:

25 January 2006 Escaping from hell
Apologies for the long delay in posting. The past few weeks have been chaos. I was out with WHO teams from dawn to dusk as they tried in vain to stamp out the outbreak with drugs. People fell sick all over Hanoi and 1 in 50 of them died. Many of the worst affected felt fine in the morning, but were dead by lunchtime — blue in the face, gasping for air. At the overcrowded hospital, I saw victims collapsing, suffocating in their own lung fluid, blood streaming from their noses and gums. Others had longer ordeals, tortured by encephalitis as the virus ate into their brains, or overwhelmed by multiple organ failure. Panicky authorities transported corpses out to the fields by truck and burnt them on open pyres.

A good reason to support the Adopt-a-blog project (via China Digital Times):

Chinese-run websites have until the end of May to register their sites or face being shut down as part of a new government campaign to police the Internet, a leading portal announced on Saturday.

The registration drive is an effort by the Ministry of Information Industry to clamp down on fraud and other "unhealthy" activity on the Internet, the portal Sohu.com said.

Note to Singapore bloggers: just in case the ‘.gov’ in the IP addresses didn’t tip you off - the Straits Times bluntly explains that big brother is watching (via Buttermilk):

‘According to the Ministry of Information, Communications
and the Arts, the Government keeps an eye on all feedback it gets
online, including blogs. "However, it is not practical, if not
impossible, to keep track of everything that goes on over the
Internet," stressed a spokesman.’

Implied: ‘. . . much as we would like to!’

‘Could
like-minded people—say, opposition sympathisers—get together after
reading one another’s blogs? There is little evidence of that for now,
but it cannot be ruled out.’

No doubt Gabriel
would tell me not to conflate the organs of the state with the state
itself, but sometimes the fingerprints of the state are too thick and
grimy to ignore. ‘Opposition sympathisers‘? ‘Cannot be ruled out‘? Very interesting
choice of words. (Compare: ‘Could Democrat sympathisers get together
after reading one another’s blogs? The possibility cannot be ruled
out.’)

Tak at the Old Revolution mentions a reason why Americans should also be upset by the frequent visits by Japan’s politicians to the Yasukuni shrine.:

14 class A war criminals, including Hideki Tojo, the generalissimo of Japan’s military who was sentenced to death by the Tokyo War Crime Tribunal (note: did not die in battle). He, for example, approved the infamous 731 Unit, which conducted experiments on humans to develop germ and chemical weaponry and in the process murdered at least 3,000 Chinese, Koreans, and Allied POWs. He also ordered the attack on Pearl Harbor (which means he’s not only Hitler but also Osama, to stretch the historical parallel way too thin). (emphasis added)