Ben Muse notes that 80% of China’s oil has to travel from the Malacca Strait. Noting that the nation would be at risk from a conflict with India or an incident in the Straits would be a problem. This should be an area of mutual concern for the US and China. The former has long been arguing with Malaysia and Indonesia that Straits security is a global concern. Only Singapore has agreed to allow non-littoral states to engage in anti-piracy patrols.

Via BoingBoing, Piracy kills creativity.

In China, even cats know kung fu.

An editor at the China Youth Daily has written an open letter blasting new appraisal regulations that erode editorial freedom. ESWN translates. That an 26-year veteran editor of a Communist Youth League-owned paper should be openly criticising moves to create a more dogmatic paper is impressive. But Ian Lamont at Harvard Extended  notes that the desire for press freedom by Chinese journalists isn’t new.:

Kelly Haggart, on Chinese journalists during and after Tiananmen:
"There is pride among Beijing journalists about those few days of press freedom. For one thing, it showed the potential of Chinese journalists. For the first time they were allowed to act like real reporters and they did no worse at covering the story than their more experienced foreign counterparts. … For almost all city people, no matter what they thought of the students and their hunger strike, that week of relative press freedom brought home to them the importance of more open, more enterprising media. Freedom of the press was no longer a complete abstraction." [page 50]

 

The Eclectic Econoclast points to a site offering Suduko-generating software. Wikipedia notes that the Japanese number puzzle has this year gained global popularity.

If Shappell Corby, the Aussie tourist  sentenced to 20 years in a Balinese prison for drug smuggling, is released on appeal… she could be in the money.:

Men’s magazines will rush to sign-up Schapelle Corby for a raunchy photo shoot if she is freed. And the convicted drug smuggler could earn up to $500,000 for a sexy bikini shoot, according to reports.
FHM magazine has revealed Corby polled strongly in its 100 hottest women vote but editors decided against including the former beauty student, fearing a public backlash.
"At the time she was on trial and potentially could have been executed . . . so it may have been in slightly poor taste," FHM editor John Bastick was quoted as saying in The Courier Mail.

Brand New Malaysian points to the hazards of overplanning photo sessions.:

How corny does that look? At best, it shows the over-enthusiasm of this senior academic to portray, perhaps how attached and devoted he is to Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, as to put the book on a pedestal.
At worst, he comes off looking like a brown-nosing hypocrite that set up the placement of the book for the photography session.

Japan isn’t just importing cheap manufactured goods from China, Japundit notes that New Tokyo has imported a beach.

The Marmot doesn’t trust a new poll that finds South Koreans would overwhelmingly side with the North .

The survey by Gallup Korea of 833 individuals born between 1980 and 1989 also found a marked shift in attitude to North Korea and the South’s traditional ally, the U.S. Some 65.9 percent responded they would take North Korea’s side if it was at war with the U.S., while 21.8 percent said South Korea must stand with the U.S. and the rest were undecided.

Singaporean scientists have invented a device that could help solve China’s chronic power shortages. With 1.3 billion people here there is a lot of urine that could power this device.

Taiwan’s first iPod-related crime almost sparks a diplomatic incident.:

A 12-year-old girl tried to threaten her friend to get her iPod back, but accidentally dialed the Swaziland ambassador. The kind ambassador has decided to forgive the twerp who called her up in the middle of the night. Lucky for that girl it was the Swaziland ambassador she accidentally called, and not the ambassador from a certain Central American nation that bitched me out in front of everyone at a Far Eastern Hotel cocktail reception once.

A look at representations of aboriginals in Taiwanese baseball, and the origins of the image on the 500 Taiwan dollar note.

Arms Control Wonk notes that reports of the number of Chinese-government front companies operating in the US are consistently overestimated.

The existence of “3,000 Chinese front companies” is one the most persistent claims about China floating around. The number is often attributed to the FBI, but as far as I can tell that’s wrong too. Or it used to be.

Finally, scientists have determined what an average Korean looks like.

ThaRum has an excellent post on Cambodia’s emerging blogosphere.