This week's newsletter from the market research firm Access Asia -- whose client list includes heavy hitters like Citigroup, Pfizer, and Nike -- contains an interesting description of the living conditions athletes can expect at the Beijing Olympic Village, likening the facility to a prisoner of war camp:

If you’re an athlete coming to compete in Beijing, don’t bother to bring a guidebook unless you’re tenacious. The chances of you actually getting out of the Olympic Village to see any of the city (apart from the venue you’re competing in) are minimal....

 

How serious will the Chinese authorities be in trying to keep athletes within the Village at all times? Well, consider that a major European sports brand and sponsor of the Games thought it a good idea to take over a major international school in Beijing for the duration of the Games. Using the school’s facilities, the brand’s management and marketing people, advertising firm and PR hypers had all planned to mingle with their star athletes’ endorsers and get the most out of the event. But now the authorities, worried about athletes leaving the Village unnecessarily, have overruled the deal, and won’t let it happen (which means the brand loses the alleged US$1.5 million they coughed up to rent the school for a month). We are told that security at the Village will be high – not just to get in, but also to get out.

 

So why turn the village into Stalag Beijing? Well, it seems there are a number of reasons. Worries that athletes may leave the Village to do impromptu reporting on human rights or other issues is one; keeping them all close to the people who are sponsoring the Village is another; but the major reason is that if they leave the Village they may be tempted to eat like the rest of us – i.e. not the specially prepared, reared and grown foods that are being made available in the Village (and in the Village only) – and that could mean plenty of athletes failing dope tests due to high levels of residual antibiotics and steroids commonly found in meat on sale in China. "

Ah, but many U.S. athletes already had this figured out and are planning to bring their own food. This is much to the chagrin of Beijing organizers, who are planning to ban outside food within the Olympic Village. As for speaking ill of China's human rights record, the gag orders -- which some athletes will be forced to sign as a precondition of competing -- should pretty much take care of that. Sounds like a lovely time indeed.

[Hat tip: Tim Johnson]

EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP/Getty Images

The folks at Rock the Vote just sent over the results of their latest poll, conducted by using jukebox-like machines to "survey" more than 72,000 bar and nightclub patrons. Here's the results, as provided by their PR flack:

I guess we can conclude:

1) A fair number of beer guzzling bar rats think all three of the candidates are pretty lame as drinking buddies.

2) Old beer guzzling bar rats in Florida would really like to sit down with McCain and commiserate about how the Maginot Line totally sucked.

3) Three in 10 bar rats have no clue what either the Republican or Democratic party is -- and probably don't care to.

4) Most bar rats could really use some extra cash to pay for beer.

Mike Brown/Getty Images

FP readers already know the story of "How Sushi Went Global." And it's generally no secret that you can get a spicy tuna roll everywhere from Bangalore to Belize. But barbecue? Yes, apparently slow-cooked pig's butt is starting to go global, too.

The word out of the 2008 World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest, the world's largest pork BBQ contest held last weekend in Memphis, is that the globalization of barbecue is in the "embryonic" stages.

The trend can apparently lead to some awkward interactions:

At one point this year, a member of the Deominox team [from Belgium] was trying to talk his way in past the gate. The 'good old boy' working the entrance [had to ask for] help.... The language barrier almost got the Deominox team disqualified when it turned in its blind box in the whole-hog contest. Two of the non-English-speakers handled the delivery, but they missed the deadline after walking past signs they didn't understand. A sympathetic official interceded and successfully made the case for giving the team a break and letting their samples be judged...."

Now, before getting carried away about diluting of an American icon, it's important to remember that around two-thirds of this year's contestants still hailed from Tennessee. Perusing the list of winners, I don't see any foreign teams. Nor did I see baby backs on the menu the last time I was in Beijing. Of course, that was two years ago....

BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images

Looks like Sen. Dick Durbin may be taking up the flag of the late Rep. Tom Lantos when it comes to bashing the operations of tech companies in China. Ars Technica's Nate Anderson reports on today's hearing before Durbin's Judiciary subcommittee:

Yahoo, Google, and Cisco all trekked over to the Senate today to sit for an hour under the grandfatherly, but strangely stern eye of Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL). The subject was 'Internet freedom,' but this turned out to be code for 'censorship in China....' Durbin [was not] convinced, though, that multinational corporations were truly doing as much as they legally could to avoid censoring information.... After Google's Nicole Wong claimed that engagement with China was better than isolation, Durbin said that the answer reminded him of corporate arguments regarding apartheid in South Africa.

Durbin told tech executives to expect some legislation in the Senate similar to the Global Online Freedom Act, which would hold U.S. companies liable for helping foreign governments censor the Net. A recently unearthed PowerPoint presentation in which Cisco Systems executives appeared to be keen to help Chinese officials in censoring the Web (one phrase referred to "combating Falun Gong evil cult and other hostile elements") could give the bill legs.

FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/Getty Images

Over at China Rises, Tim Johnson reports that most Chinese "seem content" with their government's rescue efforts after the Sichuan quake on Monday. But Johnson also notes that, politically speaking, it's a "fluid situation" for China's ruling Communists.

Among the developments to watch in coming days is growing public anger over the shoddy construction of schools in rural China. Among the dead are a massive number of children. Many parents are already asking: Why did the schools collapse when other government buildings remained standing?

Answering that question could pose a potentially destabilizing challenge for the Beijing regime. The NYT's Jim Yardley has more in a must-read today:

[E]nraged parents interviewed at the morgue on Wednesday afternoon and early Thursday morning say local officials lied to the prime minister to hide the true toll at Xinjian, which they estimate at more than 400 dead children. Several parents blamed local officials for a slow initial rescue response and questioned the structural safety of the school building. They were also furious that officials forbade them to search for their children for two days and then allowed access to the bodies only after the parents formed an ad hoc committee to complain.... Several parents wanted an investigation into the construction quality of school buildings in Dujiangyan. They say six schoolhouses collapsed in the city, even as other government buildings remain standing. One man said officials built two additional stories on the Xinjian school even though it had failed a safety inspection two years ago — allegations that could not be verified.

Much of the questionable engineering and construction can probably be tied to local level corruption, and it will be interesting to see if anti-official sentiments continue to grow in this regard. At the Far Eastern Economic Review, Michael Zhao reports that they already are: "we are hearing increasing reports of discontent, even outrage, with officialdom’s response.... There is a powerful linkage in Chinese political culture, including at the populist level, between natural disasters and state failure...." Seems "Grandpa Wen" and his cohorts are hardly out of the woods just yet.

In today's Washington Post, Mike Gerson quite rightly lambasts the "Coburn Seven" -- seven Senate Republicans who are all but blocking expanded funding for the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).

Unfortunately, what Gerson ignores is the GOP's long history of failure and ignorance on the HIV/AIDS front. This sad history dates to the very founding of the contemporary conservative movement. It was Ronald Reagan, the revered Godfather, who remained silent as tens of thousands of Americans died and a pandemic was spread to more than 100 countries around the globe. Even as Reagan did nothing to combat AIDS, his surrogates in the extreme right opined that the disease was a divinely-inspired retaliation on liberalism. It was Pat Buchanan, Reagan's White House communications director, who called AIDS "nature's revenge on gay men." Such sentiments proliferated as the power of the GOP's religious right-wing coalesced in the 1990s. Former Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee, for instance, famously called for those infected with HIV/AIDS to be "isolated from the general population" in 1992. He stood by the statement in his 2008 presidential campaign.

When historians sit down to assess the modern conservative movement a generation or two from now, among the most severe tarnishes on the GOP's legacy will be Guantanamo and record deficits. There also will be the string of painfully ignorant policies the party has held on HIV/AIDS. To his credit, George W. Bush has probably done more than any conservative politician of his generation to reverse this tragic legacy -- more, perhaps, than any liberal politician, too. PEPFAR has provided life-sustaining anti-AIDS drugs to 1.4 million patients in the countries hardest hit by the disease. It may be the most favorably remembered foreign policy initiative of Bush's entire tenure. And in his January State of the Union address, the President proposed a long-overdue doubling of the effort.

It looked as though the GOP had finally found its moorings on combating a disease that, in a number of African countries, now affects more than 1 in 5 adults. But a small GOP minority once again appears poised to force the United States to take a backseat in the fight. As Gerson says, it will come at a price paid in lives. Unfortunately, it won't be the first time.

AFP/AFP/Getty Images

It seems hard to imagine a scenario in which the massive earthquake that rocked China's western Sichuan Province at 2:28pm local time today has not killed tens of thousands -- possibly more. Beijing originally put the death toll at 61. Hours later, the figure was increased to "up to 8,500." With rescuers, including thousands of Chinese soldiers, still unable to reach the epicenter of the quake, one can only assume this figure is tragically optimistic.

Officials at the U.S. Geological Survey have said that the magnitude 7.9 quake was relatively shallow. Shallow earthquakes do more damage near their epicenters than ones which occur deeper in the Earth. Just over 30 years ago, in 1976, a similarly shallow quake, measuring magnitude 7.5, hit the northern Chinese city of Tangshan. It killed more than 250,000 people.

It's worth watching Beijing's response to the crisis, for a couple of reasons (in addition to any worst-case Olympic scenarios).The first will be to see how real recent transformations in Beijing's disaster response policies are, including a new network of emergency management offices and provisions which give local leaders more autonomy in times of crisis. So far, the speed with which Beijing has responded has been impressive. Can it be sustained and intensified?

The second will be to gauge Beijing's commitment to transparency with regard to the scale and scope of the quake's impact. So far, information seems to have flowed relatively freely to the Western media. As the scale of the disaster increases, and with it the death toll, in all likelihood revealing deficiencies in engineering and infrastructure, it will be interesting to see if these channels of communication remain as open.

ALEXANDER ZEMLIANICHENKO/AFP/Getty Images

Russian President Dmitri Medvedev said today that the Russian military is "gaining in strength and power like all of Russia."

To prove it, he marched troops, tanks, and Topol-M nuclear missiles around Red Square today. The event was reportedly planned as early as January, and Medvedev was so intent on making the Soviet-style show of prowess a success that he ordered Russia's air force to make sure no clouds rained on the festivities. So they carried out a cloud seeding operation in advance of the parade. Meant to mark the 63rd anniversary of the victory of Nazi Germany, it was the first parade of its kind in Red Square since 1990.

It is right to consider the images coming out of the parade as a bit disconcerting. But press reports from the scene seem a bit over the top, with stories of "glamorous" troops and "mixed messages." This ignores the realities of today's Russian military. Moscow-based defense analyst Pavel Falgenhauer provides a good reality check:

Russia still has large stocks of Soviet-made military hardware; most of it fully or partially out of order. Only a handful of ships, tanks, and jets are truly operational at any given time.... The task of reviving defense hardware parades on Red Square will face grave technical and logistical problems and in any event will most likely produce only a pathetic imitation of Soviet military grandeur.... One can only hope that ...  no ancient building will collapse as tanks and ICBMs roll into central Moscow to serve the vanity of Russia’s leaders."

Let's not get carried away with the Cold War nostalgia just yet.

Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

Newly minted London Mayor Boris Johnson's first brilliant policy decision? Banning the consumption of alcohol on London's Tube system. Trouble is, just about everyone besides Boris seems to understand that getting between an Englishman and his beloved pint is a pretty bad idea. A spokesman for the Tube employees' union said transport staff will have no way to enforce such a ban, nor much interest in risking their personal safety to do so:

Perhaps the mayor will come out with his underpants on over his trousers like Superman one Saturday to show us how it should be done, and maybe tell a crowd of Liverpool supporters that they can’t drink on the train.”

After Boris The Blonde made the announcement, British Transport Commissioner Peter Hendy rushed to assure passengers that the ban would only apply to London proper and those traveling longer distances wouldn't be subject to the measure. “We have no plans to introduce these measures on the national network," he said.

Johnson has himself been known to enjoy a pint -- occasionally more than one. He gave up booze in the final weeks of his mayoral campaign in what appeared to be a strategy to avoid embarrassing gaffes (others suggested it was a sign that he has a drinking problem). Of course, consuming large volumes of alcohol have never precluded British politicians from being good leaders. Winston Churchill was a notorious drinker, and 19th century prime minister William Pitt, the Younger was known to take down two or three bottles of port a day. If he enjoys his job, Boris might do better by heeding their example.

John Moore/Getty Images

The State Department has just released its annual report on global terrorism, as it does every April 30. Some highlights (read the AP synopsis here):

• On the strength of Al Qaeda: "It has reconstituted some of its pre-9/11 operational capabilities through the exploitation of Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas ... and [restored] some central control by its top leadership, in particular Ayman al-Zawahiri."
• On Al Qaeda's leadership: "Numerous senior al-Qaida operatives have been captured or killed, but al-Qaida leaders continued to plot attacks and to cultivate stronger operational connections that radiated outward from Pakistan to affiliates throughout the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe."
• Terrorist attacks in Pakistan doubled between 2006 and 2007 and the number of fatalities quadrupled
• In Afghanistan, the number of terrorist attacks rose 16 percent in 2007
• Terrorist attacks in Iraq declined slightly between 2006 and 2007, but still accounted for 60 percent of terrorism fatalities worldwide, including 17 of the 19 Americans killed in attacks last year
• More than 22,000 people were killed by terrorists worldwide in 2007, 8 percent more than in 2006
• Iran is the world's "most active" state sponsor of terrorism
• In Iraq: 13,600 noncombatants were killed in 2007; suicide bombings in country rose by 50 percent; suicide car bombings were up 40 percent and suicide bombings outside of vehicles climbed 90 percent over 2006

The conclusions on Pakistan are likely to garner the most attention, and quite rightly. Watch for more calls like this one for a three-front war.

Over at the Huffington Post, National Interest Senior Editor Jacob Heilbrunn worries that realists such as Kissinger and Scowcroft have failed to groom a generation of young Republicans to follow in their pragmatic foreign-policy footsteps:

[W]hile Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, and other realist elders are consulted by [John] McCain, his heart is with the younger neocons, the 'beavers,' in the words of one McCain supporter, who draft the speeches and get the grunt work done ... the result is disastrous recommendations such as threatening to expel Russia from the G-8.... The gap -- and it is fundamental -- in the GOP today is generational. The elderly realists haven't groomed anyone to replace them. The neocons have."

I think the simplest explanation for why the neocon voices within the McCain campaign are the loudest is that in recent years McCain has most closely identified with them ideologically. That's why, as I pointed out a couple months ago, he surrounded himself with foreign-policy minds like Mark Salter, Daniel McKivergan, Marshall Wittmann, and Randy Scheunemann (though McCain has never really fully signed on to the neocon cause).

As for the generational gap between GOP realists and neocons, Heilbrunn is probably right that it exists. But when I talk to young Republicans, I get the sense that, thanks to the Iraq war, the problem will be self-correcting. Just because a group of young realists hasn't found a home in the McCain camp doesn't mean they aren't out there. Still, it is unfortunate that they had to come to their thinking based on a botched war instead of being groomed by the old guard.

FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/Getty Images

It was to be the marquee event of the Olympic torch's tour around the world. In a triumphant show of Chinese prowess and technological know-how, the torch was to ascend to the highest point on Earth and powerfully symbolize China's dramatic entry on the world stage.

Instead, as Agence France Presse puts it, the torch's trip up Mt. Everest, which could begin as early as this weekend, has "descended into farce":

[L]ast-minute changes this week by Beijing Olympic officials called for a rapid and tightly controlled two-to-three day trip through riot-hit Tibet to Mount Everest base camp. The changes raised concerns among journalists about the health impact of ascending too quickly to the camp's elevation of 5,150 metres (16,900 feet). After foreign media requested further information on the safety concerns, Beijing Olympic Games organisers set a sudden Thursday morning payment deadline for air tickets to the Tibetan capital Lhasa. The situation descended into farce when the Olympic official tasked with collecting payments refused to accept the fees from organisations including AFP and other international news agencies as he headed to the airport to purchase the tickets. 'I'm sorry, it is too late. I am going to the airport now,' said Xu Xianhui, a Beijing Games media official. It was not immediately clear if the refusal to accept payment was part of an official government decision to keep reporters out of Tibet. Xu said the payment of some foreign media organisations had been accepted but declined specifics. Olympic organisers were asked to explain the refusal but did not immediately reply."

Officials in Beijing also announced that foreign press would not be allowed to cover the climbing team's departure from Everest Base Camp, scheduled for tomorrow.

Moreover, medical experts say the trip from Beijing (at sea level) to Base Camp should not be made in less than one week in order to allow for acclimatization. Accordingly, several news agencies pulled their reporters from the assignment due to the potential for serious health complications. Authoritarianism through bureaucracy is an art form in China.

The move is hardly surprising, considering that the reporters hoping to cover the torch's climb up Everest were to be the first allowed to enter Tibet in a month or so. Scattered reports of continued protests are still leaking out of Lhasa, despite a near-complete ban on media coverage. And Beijing is clearly paranoid that the torch's trip there will spark more uprisings. Earlier this week, an American mountaineer was kicked off Everest by officials keeping watch over the mountain after a "Free Tibet" banner was discovered in his gear. Oh, and Tibet won't be reopened to tourists next month as planned, either.

Does anyone else see a pattern developing here? At this point, it seems appropriate to ask whether the Beijing Games can even be taken seriously. So, can they?

From Shanghaiist comes this disturbing story of a young American attacked by a mob of angry Chinese outside a Carrefour store in Zhuzhou, Hunan Province, on Sunday night:

Last night [Sunday, Apr. 20] around 7pm my friend was attacked by a mob of about 150 people outside the Carrefour in Zhuzhou, Hunan.... When leaving Carrefour some of the crowd started shouting at him and he tried to say he didn't have anything to do with the Olympics, but 3 men started to push him and then he was hit in the back of the head at least 3 times. He started to run, and the mob chased him. He jumped into a cab, but the mob surrounded the car and started shaking and rocking it. The cab driver was shouting at him to get out. Then they started hitting the car. The crowd was shouting "kill him! kill the Frenchman." He called the Field Director while in the back of the car. The cab driver abandon the car when he saw police coming. Two police made there way though the mob and managed to drive the cab away. The Field Director alerted.... The police got him another cab and he took it from Zhuzhou to the field director's home in Changsha. He spending the night here in Changsha and is likely leaving China as soon as possible.

The French supermarket chain has been under siege in China over the past week. And it's hardly alone. A similarly disturbing, though less violent, episode took place last week right here at home -- at Duke University -- when a 20-year-old freshman from China who had tried to encourage dialogue between Chinese student demonstrators and a smaller group of Tibetans found her personal information published on the Internet. Hundreds of thousands of angry and threatening posts appeared on Chinese Web sites. Back in China, the student's parents were threatened and had to go into hiding.

It's all part of an increasingly scary rise in nationalism on the mainland. According to the IHT, Beijing has encouraged such nationalistic fervor to run amok by easing up on restrictions on online forums in recent weeks. If true, that news is disturbing. Because in just a few months, 500,000 foreign tourists will begin arriving in China for the Olympics. What kind of welcome are they going to receive?

(Hat tip: Passport reader hdp)

China Photos/Getty Images

I remember when the first McDonald's opened in Moscow in 1990. There was something powerfully symbolic about seeing tens of thousands of Russians lined up to get a taste of America. It meant communism was on the way out. Capitalism had won. And Muscovites were waiting hours in the cold to get a "Big Mak" just to prove it. The store needed 27 cash registers and seating for 700 just to accommodate the crowds. Young Russians left jobs at coveted scientific institutions in order for the chance to earn 1.5 rubles an hour making fries for Ronald McDonald. Take that, Mr. Gorbachev.

Put bluntly, the whole thing felt like a victory. Eighteen years later, the conduct of U.S. companies with regard to the Beijing Olympics offers a different feeling indeed. Here's the slogan Coca-Cola (a company which is in bed with the Beijing Olympics to the tune of between $75 and $90 million) is using in its Chinese marketing: "Red Around the World." Yeah, you read that right. The slogan comes in the form of a jingle that makes up the centerpiece of Coke's Olympics-specific marketing efforts in country.

Now, call me McCarthyite if you want, but this rubs me the wrong way. We're talking about a country that, just a few years ago, was aggressively forcing down U.S. military aircraft and currently maintains one of the most robust -- if not the most robust -- spying platforms against the West. Now Coke, an American icon if ever there was one, is publicly envisioning the spread of "red around the world?"

Andres Kieger, Coke's director of marketing in China, says the color red isn't all that bad. "This isn't meant as a patriotic song," he says. "It is meant as an emotional song. Red is the color of a lot of good things." Presumably he was referring to Coke cans and not the nationalistic symbols of, say, Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany. Had someone at Coke bothered to check, say, Wikipedia, they would have found multiple entries explaining that, politically at least, red is the color of communism. The phenomenon dates to the Russian Revolution, when red symbolized the bloodshed of the working class in the fight against capitalism. For the more artistically inclined, the folks at the Guggenheim explain here.

I'm all for the forces of capitalism and target-specific marketing. But somehow, kowtowing to Beijing by trumpeting the spread of Communist red just doesn't feel like a victory to me.

A study released today by the Rand Corporation finds that nearly 20 percent of military personnel returning from Afghanistan and Iraq have symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or major depression. For those interested in the math, that's some 300,000 soldiers. Only slightly more than half have sought treatment, telling researchers that they feared doing so would harm their careers. Here are some highlights from the first large-scale, nongovernmental assessment of the psychological and cognitive needs of military service members who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past six years:

• 19 percent of returning service members report that they experienced a possible traumatic brain injury while deployed
• 7 percent report both a probable brain injury and current PTSD or major depression
• The study estimates that about 320,000 service members may have experienced a traumatic brain injury during deployment, from mild concussions to severe penetrating head wounds. Yet, just 43 percent reported ever being evaluated by a physician for that injury
• Half of service members say they had a friend who was seriously wounded or killed
• 45 percent report that they saw dead or seriously injured non-combatants
• Over 10 percent say they were injured themselves and required hospitalization

The Rand study is highly focused on the monetary societal costs of PTSD and depression among returning service members. The study asserts that, in the 2 years after deployment, these injuries will cost the United States between $6,000 to more than $25,000 per case, or as much as $6.2 billion in total. Of course, an equally high cost is being borne by the families and loved ones of these soldiers. Sadly, it's unlikely anyone will ever be able to quantify that.

China said yesterday it had restored order to the heavily Tibetan areas of Western China. Now, it turns out, that claim may have been a bit of an exaggeration. London's Times is reporting from Sichuan that as many as 1,000 paramilitary police opened fire late last night on a group of several hundred monks and other protesters, killing eight and wounding dozens:

Chinese paramilitary police have killed eight people after opening fire on several hundred Tibetan monks and villagers in bloody violence.... Witnesses said the clash – in which dozens were wounded – erupted late last night after a government inspection team entered a monastery in the Chinese province of Sichuan trying to confiscate pictures of the Dalai Lama.

Here's the background:

Officials searched the room of every monk in the Donggu monastery, a sprawling 15th century edifice in Ganzi, southwestern Sichuan, confiscating all mobile phones as well as the pictures. When the inspectors tore up the photographs and threw them on the floor, a 74-year-old monk, identified as Cicheng Danzeng, tried to stop an act seen as a desecration by Tibetans who revere the Dalai Lama as their god king. A young man working in the monastery, identified as Cicheng Pingcuo, 25, also made a stand and both were arrested. The team then demanded that all the monks denounce the Dalai Lama... At about 6.30 p.m., the entire monastic body marched down to a nearby river where paramilitary police were encamped and demanded the release of the two men. They were joined by several hundred local villagers, many of them enraged at the detention of the 74-year-old monk Cicheng Danzeng, who locals say is well respected in the area for his learning and piety. Shouting 'Long Live the Dalai Lama,' 'Let the Dalai Lama come back' and 'We want freedom,' the crowd demonstrated until about nine in the evening. Witnesses said that at around that time, as many as 1,000 paramilitary police used force to try to end the protest and opened fire on the crowd.

Watch for more trouble when the Olympic torch comes to London this weekend.

Here's Ted Turner, the media mogul turned restaurateur whom serious people routinely label an "environmentalist," commenting on the impact of global warming by 2048:

Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals. Civilization will have broken down. The few people left will be living in a failed state — like Somalia or Sudan — and living conditions will be intolerable."

Come on, Ted. These kinds of comments are the reason many people don't take climate change seriously. (You can read more sober comments from Turner in an interview with FP here.)

(Hat tip: Mike Nizza)

Facebook has become Shaitan incarnate for many preachers in Saudi Arabia, not least of all because six in 10 users of the social networking site in the country are women. This apparently makes Saudi men nervous. Influential cleric Sheikh Ali al-Maliki, for instance, has derided Facebook as a "a door to lust" and warned against "the accession of women to it."

Now, it appears, some Saudi men are taking matters into their own hands. London's Daily Telegraph reports:

A young Saudi Arabian woman was murdered by her father for chatting on the social network site Facebook, it has emerged. The unnamed woman from Riyadh was beaten and shot after she was discovered in the middle of an online conversation with a man...."

Shocking, but then again we're talking about a country that arrests American women for sitting with their male colleagues at the local Starbucks.

Richard Falk (Photo: CEM TURKEL/AFP/Getty Images)

I feel about human-rights violations the way U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart felt about porn. Forget all the moral parsing and conflict resolution jargon -- you just know them when you see them.

That's why it's always puzzled me that the United Nations Human Rights Council has such trouble when it comes to calling a spade a spade. For decades, the old U.N. Human Rights Commission was the laughing stock of the international community for packing its membership with notorious human-rights abusers. When the U.N. reorganized the body as the Human Rights Council in 2006, things were supposed to change. Secretary-General Kofi Annan declared, "The Council's work must mark a clean break from the past."

But that's hardly been the case. First, the Council granted seats to such human-rights abusers as Azerbaijan, China, Cuba, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. Then it passed eight resolutions condemning Israel and spoke out against the "defamation of religion" (read: cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed unfavorably), while dropping inquiries into the worsening human-rights conditions in places such as Iran and Uzbekistan.

Now comes news that the Human Rights Council has appointed Princeton University Professor Richard Falk to a six-year term as the special investigator into Israel's actions in the Palestinian Territories. I've got nothing against appointing an investigator to keep tabs on this issue per se. But Falk? This is a guy who defended disgraced University of Colorado Professor Ward Churchill as "having made major contributions" to academia after Churchill called the innocent victims of the Twin Towers "little Eichemanns," arguing that they had deserved to die on 9/11. And how, by any reasonable standard, can Falk be considered an impartial observer on Israel-Palestine? This was Falk writing in an article entitled "Slouching Toward a Palestinian Holocaust" last June:

Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not."

Surely there were better candidates out there.

ARIS MESSINIS/AFP/Getty Images

You had to see this one coming. Following Monday's embarrassing debacle in Ancient Olympia, the much touted 85,000-mile round the world relay of the Olympic torch -- dubbed the "Journey of Harmony" -- is reportedly being scaled back, most notably in San Francisco and Paris. San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsome confirmed yesterday that the planned events in the City by the Bay, the torch's only stop in North America, are already being altered.

Elsewhere, Chinese authorities are requesting that the "harmony" of the journey be imposed by force. They have requested, for instance, that the Australian military accompany the torch through Canberra next month. An Aussie government official characterized Beijing's level of anxiety over the possibility of protests at torch events this way: "They're absolutely wetting their pants...."

Australia denied China's request, according to reports, and doesn't plan to scale back events. San Francisco, Paris, and other major cities along the relay route should do the same. The concept of the Olympic torch relay was first conceived for the 1936 games held in Nazi Germany. It would be a sad irony if Beijing and the International Olympic Committee are allowed to continue their pathetic charade of denial. Where is Tom Lantos when we need him?