Tuesday Global Blog Roundup is online. Read and bookmark/RSS… very grober blogage summary. And thanks for the link.

Milton J Madison has a good roundup of commentary on the arrest of Straits Times journalist Ching Cheong for ’spying.’ He also offers his view:

I think that there are several things going on here. There
is a typical scam involving local officials against foreign Chinese
where they get "caught"/set-up doing something that is somewhat illegal
or accused of doing something illegal. They are then held for ransom
and their loved ones are told not to tell anyone and if they do, then
they will put them on trial for some trumped up charge.
Also,
the mad-mandarins are very concerned with covering up everything that
they can regarding June 4th massacre of innocent students. There must
be something with the transcripts of the late Zhao Ziyang that has
gotten the mandarin’s sphincter muscles a-twitchin’. This sends a very
strong message to domestic and foreign journalists that there is high
price to pay for screwing around with the residents of the fever-swamps
of Beijing.

Jodi has found a metrosexual boyfriend in Pusan. Myrick is not a metrosexual. He cooks, occasionally carries a ‘man-purse,’ and irregularly uses moisturizer. But ironing, shopping and organizing are right out. (Myrick’s sock drawer is an example of market failure that disturbs him).

Jodi’s new beau sounds like a keeper.

He comes over to my desk and rummages through the cosmetic storage boxes which he had bought and organized for me earlier that day while I was at work, picks up a small bottle of scented facial lotion (he knew exactly which drawer to look in), holds it in his left hand and examines it before taking the liberty of then applying it to his own face before neatly screwing the cap back on and returning it to its own little compartment.
I stopped what I was doing and stared at him in disbelief, my mouth hanging open…
This is all an epilogue to what I caught him doing when I came home from work the day before: ironing my clothes after cleaning my apartment. (I train them well, don’t I?) Which followed a weekend willingly spent shopping with me at his suggestion. (I have never met a guy who suggests we spend time together shopping although I am always game for it.)…
So now I’m just gonna’ say it. This dude ain’t Korean.

Myrick is disturbed by how he had been referring to himself in the third person on this page.

The Horse’s Mouth continues his series of reprints on the massacre:

The argument has been made that the slaughter of June 3 and 4 was necessary to clear Tiananmen Square. Then why did the indiscriminate killing of innocent people continue for several days after the martial law troops had already occupied the square?  On or about June 5, Zhang Xianghong, a second-year student in the International Politics Department at People’s University, went to the end of the alleyway near her home with her sister-in-law, as they were anxious about Zhang’s brother who was going out. They were chasing behind him, calling for him to return home when Zhang was hit by a round of ammunition fired by the martial law troops. Zhang died instantly in the arms of her sister-in-law.

Joseph Bosco applauds Nicholas Kristof’s praise of Bush, and bashing of the Democrats, over China policy. I concur, but the dynamic of this is still really weird.

Nicholas Kristof scores again, but the victim of his dagger prose in today’s The New York Times (reg req) is the American political scene, not the Chinese. He takes a number of liberal Democrats in Congress to the whipping post over bad foreign policy towards Beijing. And he gives credit–mostly correctly–to Bush for five years of good foreign policy towards Beijing…

So it’s time for Americans to take a deep breath. Poisonous trade disputes with China will only aggravate the risks ahead, strengthen the hard- liners in Beijing and leave ordinary Chinese feeling that Americans are turning into China-bashers. Sadly, they’ll have a point.

I welcome comments, and will keep them open for as long as possible. But I reserve the right to delete items for any reason at any time.

For starters, libelous comments are unwelcome and will be deleted.

Anonymous racist or extreme intolerant comments will be deleted (if you are willing to stand by your comments with your own name and own URL fine! You deserve and should expect backlash.)

Advertising won’t be tolerated unless I get a substantial cut.

Excessive length will not be tolerated. It’s bad form. If you have an essay to write, get your own blog and post a link to an entry in the comments section.

But since I didn’t say any of that earlier,  Siroos only gets a yellow card.

I’ll let the essay sit for a day or two. before removing it. In the interim, I would encourage Siroos to get a blog.

China and Japan are not accumulating US treasuries, says Bud Conrad in a report. The question is then, who is?

I see a shift in the composition of foreign purchases that looks to be built on a less stable base. Who these Caribbean investors really are is a mystery. To give some explanation, one could imagine US hedge funds using these instruments as offshore conduits. They could ply their trade of leverage to attain positions of safety in the face of plight for concern about risks of already too low rates being offered for junk and emerging debt. But Hedge fund rumors of calamity don’t leave me with comfort that this is a reliable source of deficit funding.