Sian O'Callaghan, Jia Ashton, Joana Yeates

Again, another shocking murder  happens in the UK after the case of Joanna Yeates and Jia Ashton. Hope all their killers are jailed as  soon as possible/ By the way, hope the families they left behind, can be strong to overcome this painful situation
Home | Mail Online

Police were hopeful of finding Miss O'Callaghan, 22, alive yesterday morning but hours later they found her body beside a country road – and said they were searching for a second corpse.

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How ten seconds a day of therapy cured my depression: A very unconventional counsellor has changed my life forever | Mail Online

Anger comes from emotional hurt and pain when we were younger,' she says

China denies obstructing Google's Gmail service

China denies obstructing Google's Gmail service | World news | guardian.co.uk

Chinese authorities have dismissed Google claims that they are to blame for technical problems with the country's Gmail service
* Tania Branigan in Beijing
* guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 22 March 2011 15.50 GMT

China has dismissed Google's allegation that Beijing is hampering access to its email service as "unacceptable". The internet provider said it believed government blocks were responsible for technical problems using Gmail from China.

The problems arose amid a tightening of internet controls that has made it increasingly difficult to use several popular virtual private networks. VPNs allow people to access material hosted overseas even if it is blocked by the Chinese government.

The new restrictions appear to be part of a security clampdown sparked by anonymous online calls for a "jasmine revolution" akin to the recent uprisings in the Middle East. Those messages were posted on an overseas website, but scores of Chinese activists and dissidents have been questioned, harassed and in some cases detained by the authorities for weeks.

A Google spokesman told the Guardian this week: "Relating to Google, there is no [technical] issue on our side. We have checked extensively. This is a government blockage carefully designed to look like the problem is with Gmail."

Users have reported frequent problems with basic tasks such as sending and searching emails or opening their address books.

But Jiang Yu, a spokeswoman for the foreign ministry, told a regular news conference: "This is an unacceptable accusation." She declined to comment further. The ministry of commerce and ministry of industry and information technology did not respond to faxed questions.

This month WiTopia, one of the most popular VPNs, asked users to report problems via email rather than its live support service because of an "extraordinary volume [of issues] from China shenanigans". The architect of the online censorship system had previously said it was "lagging behind" in a battle against VPNs and that further tightening was needed.

"It's grim. The reality is they can shut off all access if they want to," said Bill Bishop, a Beijing-based internet specialist.

He added: "You are heading into a two-internet world."

One Beijing-based industry source - who, like many, did not want to be identified in connection with the subject - said he hoped controls might ease in time. He pointed out that in the past sites such as Wikipedia had become available after having been blocked for years and suggested that blocks might be a temporary measure to encourage Chinese users to switch to local alternatives.

Many users are largely oblivious to the tightening of restrictions, preferring to use domestic email and social media services. But a growing number of activists and dissidents have embraced services such as Twitter, which is blocked and available only with the use of a VPN or other censorship-evasion technology.

Richard Buangan, spokesman for the US embassy in Beijing, said: "As part of our ongoing dialogue with China, we have emphasised to the Chinese government our view on the importance of an open internet. The ability to operate with confidence in cyberspace is critical in a modern society and economy.

"The United States believes that freedom of expression, including on the internet, is a universal right that should be available to all people, whether they are in the United States, China or any other nation."

Google angered the Chinese government when it announced last year that it was no longer willing to censor search results in the country and moved its Chinese search service to Hong Kong. It cited increased censorship and a cyberattack which it said appeared to have targeted human rights activists.

Separately, Google reported this month that it had seen "some highly targeted and apparently politically motivated attacks against our users", exploiting a vulnerability in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser. It did not identify the subjects, but journalists in China reported suspicious messages from users such as "moli hua" - Chinese for "jasmine" - at the same time.

Greg Walton, of cyber intelligence company MetaLab Asia, who analysed those messages, said users were invited to click on links that led to malware hosted on a Hong Kong server. It was apparently designed to download Gmail cookies and email them to several addresses, enabling access to the targets' Gmail accounts. One piece of malware appears to have been designed to connect the target computer to a command and control server in Heilongjiang, northern China.

Chinese officials have repeatedly said their laws ban hacking and that the country is itself a victim of cyber-attacks.

Monbiot is a fan of nuclear power

Why Fukushima made me stop worrying and love nuclear power | George Monbiot | Comment is free | The Guardian

You will not be surprised to hear that the events in Japan have changed my view of nuclear power. You will be surprised to hear how they have changed it. As a result of the disaster at Fukushima, I am no longer nuclear-neutral. I now support the technology.

A crappy old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami. The electricity supply failed, knocking out the cooling system. The reactors began to explode and melt down. The disaster exposed a familiar legacy of poor design and corner-cutting. Yet, as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation.

Some greens have wildly exaggerated the dangers of radioactive pollution. For a clearer view, look at the graphic published by xkcd.com. It shows that the average total dose from the Three Mile Island disaster for someone living within 10 miles of the plant was one 625th of the maximum yearly amount permitted for US radiation workers. This, in turn, is half of the lowest one-year dose clearly linked to an increased cancer risk, which, in its turn, is one 80th of an invariably fatal exposure. I'm not proposing complacency here. I am proposing perspective.

If other forms of energy production caused no damage, these impacts would weigh more heavily. But energy is like medicine: if there are no side-effects, the chances are that it doesn't work.

Like most greens, I favour a major expansion of renewables. I can also sympathise with the complaints of their opponents. It's not just the onshore windfarms that bother people, but also the new grid connections (pylons and power lines). As the proportion of renewable electricity on the grid rises, more pumped storage will be needed to keep the lights on. That means reservoirs on mountains: they aren't popular, either.

The impacts and costs of renewables rise with the proportion of power they supply, as the need for storage and redundancy increases. It may well be the case (I have yet to see a comparative study) that up to a certain grid penetration – 50% or 70%, perhaps? – renewables have smaller carbon impacts than nuclear, while beyond that point, nuclear has smaller impacts than renewables.

Like others, I have called for renewable power to be used both to replace the electricity produced by fossil fuel and to expand the total supply, displacing the oil used for transport and the gas used for heating fuel. Are we also to demand that it replaces current nuclear capacity? The more work we expect renewables to do, the greater the impact on the landscape will be, and the tougher the task of public persuasion.

But expanding the grid to connect people and industry to rich, distant sources of ambient energy is also rejected by most of the greens who complained about the blog post I wrote last week in which I argued that nuclear remains safer than coal. What they want, they tell me, is something quite different: we should power down and produce our energy locally. Some have even called for the abandonment of the grid. Their bucolic vision sounds lovely, until you read the small print.

At high latitudes like ours, most small-scale ambient power production is a dead loss. Generating solar power in the UK involves a spectacular waste of scarce resources. It's hopelessly inefficient and poorly matched to the pattern of demand. Wind power in populated areas is largely worthless. This is partly because we have built our settlements in sheltered places; partly because turbulence caused by the buildings interferes with the airflow and chews up the mechanism. Micro-hydropower might work for a farmhouse in Wales, but it's not much use in Birmingham.

And how do we drive our textile mills, brick kilns, blast furnaces and electric railways – not to mention advanced industrial processes? Rooftop solar panels? The moment you consider the demands of the whole economy is the moment at which you fall out of love with local energy production. A national (or, better still, international) grid is the essential prerequisite for a largely renewable energy supply.

Some greens go even further: why waste renewable resources by turning them into electricity? Why not use them to provide energy directly? To answer this question, look at what happened in Britain before the industrial revolution.

The damming and weiring of British rivers for watermills was small-scale, renewable, picturesque and devastating. By blocking the rivers and silting up the spawning beds, they helped bring to an end the gigantic runs of migratory fish that were once among our great natural spectacles and which fed much of Britain – wiping out sturgeon, lampreys and shad, as well as most sea trout and salmon.

Traction was intimately linked with starvation. The more land that was set aside for feeding draft animals for industry and transport, the less was available for feeding humans. It was the 17th-century equivalent of today's biofuels crisis. The same applied to heating fuel. As EA Wrigley points out in his book Energy and the English Industrial Revolution, the 11m tonnes of coal mined in England in 1800 produced as much energy as 11m acres of woodland (one third of the land surface) would have generated.

Before coal became widely available, wood was used not just for heating homes but also for industrial processes: if half the land surface of Britain had been covered with woodland, Wrigley shows, we could have made 1.25m tonnes of bar iron a year (a fraction of current consumption) and nothing else. Even with a much lower population than today's, manufactured goods in the land-based economy were the preserve of the elite. Deep green energy production – decentralised, based on the products of the land – is far more damaging to humanity than nuclear meltdown.

But the energy source to which most economies will revert if they shut down their nuclear plants is not wood, water, wind or sun, but fossil fuel. On every measure (climate change, mining impact, local pollution, industrial injury and death, even radioactive discharges) coal is 100 times worse than nuclear power. Thanks to the expansion of shale gas production, the impacts of natural gas are catching up fast.

Yes, I still loathe the liars who run the nuclear industry. Yes, I would prefer to see the entire sector shut down, if there were harmless alternatives. But there are no ideal solutions. Every energy technology carries a cost; so does the absence of energy technologies. Atomic energy has just been subjected to one of the harshest of possible tests, and the impact on people and the planet has been small. The crisis at Fukushima has converted me to the cause of nuclear power.

Arab League is a joke

Libya no-fly zone: Why Arab League isn't taken seriously | Mail Online

Having initially backed the idea of a no-fly zone over Libya, the Arab League’s apparent change of heart should surprise no one.

The organisation’s 22 member states (although Libya has been suspended since last month) have consistently dithered over internal politics since the group was established more than 60 years ago.

In fact, the league’s twice-yearly meetings now achieve so little that they have become a joke among ordinary Arabs.

MPPA

Oh, I see, that's why this company gives a dividend  today
Matahari Dept. Store Cetak Laba Rp624 Miliar - pasarmodal.inilah.com

Dalam laporan keuangan publikasi Perseroan yang dirilis Selasa (22/3) dijelaskan, laba bersih yang diraup pada 2010 tersebut berasal dari perolehan laba usaha sebesar Rp1,09 triliun. Pendapatan bersih juga naik dari Rp619,37 miliar di 2009 menjadi Rp4,09 triliun di 2010.

Selain itu, Perseroan juga berhasil mengantongi keuntungan selisih kurs sebesar Rp275 juta di 2010 setelah di 2009 rugi Rp98 juta. Namun, kewajiban Perseroan naik menjadi Rp4,34 triliun di 2010 dari Rp1,28 triliun di 2009. Sedang ekuitas juga naik menjadi Rp1,07 triliun di 2010 dari Rp238,88 miliar di 2009.

Okay, I just found this info that TLKM wants to do buyback

Can someone explain to me about this policy. Will it disadvantage the investors?
Kontan Online - Harga saham turun tajam, TLKM berencana buyback

JAKARTA. PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia Tbk (TLKM) berencana melakukan pembelian kembali saham (buy back) tahun ini. Perseroan akan meminta persetujuan kepada para pemegang saham dalam rapat umum pemegang saham tahunan (RUPST) bulan depan.

Hal itu dikatakan Direktur Utama TLKM Rinaldi Firmansyah. "Ya kita akan buyback, tapi kita harus RUPS tahunan dulu. Nanti lah dibicarakan lagi," katanya.

Sayang, Rinaldi masih enggan menyebutkan berapa banyak saham yang akan dibeli kembali itu. Dia bilang, perseroan akan melakukan kajian buy back dua hingga empat minggu mendatang. Dia juga menolak untuk membocorkan berapa dana yang disiapkan untuk aksi korporasinya tersebut.

Rencana buy back saham terkait dengan penurunan harga saham TLKM. Asal tahu saja, harga saham BUMN halo-halo itu mengalami penurunan yang cukup signifikan. Harga sahamnya turun sekitar 17% year to date (ytd). Pada perdagangan Kamis (17/3), saham TLKM ditutup di level Rp 6.800 per saham atau turun 3,6%. Ini merupakan penurunan harga saham TLKM yang terdalam sejak 7 Januari 2011 lalu.

Saham PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia (TLKM) turun drastis!

Perusahaan aneh, dalam seminggu nilai sahamnya turun terus, entah sampai kapan. Anehnya, tidak ada satu media pun yang ngejelasin soal ini. Apa ada persekongkolan antara media dengan PT Telekomunikasi soal turunnya harga saham TLKM? Kebayang, ga sih, harganya tuurn dari 7450 ke 6600...edan turun banyak! Baik Kontan.co.id maupun detik finance, ga muat satu berita pun tentang turunnya harga saham TLKM itu!

Telekomunikasi Indonesia Tbk PT (TLKM:IJ) Stock Quote & Analysis - Bloomberg

Earnings Fundamentals
Earnings 576.130 Shares (Millions) 20,160.000
Price/Earnings (Trailing) 11.929 Market Cap (Millions) 134,064,000.000
Relative P/E 0.620 ROE 30.918
Last Dividend Reported 26.750 Interim
Dividend Yield (ttm) 4.333
Relative Dividend Yield 2.208
90-Day Volatility 26.515
Beta vs. JCI 0.784

Anyone can explain why the shares value of TLKM droop significantly?

Anyone can explain why the shares value of TLKM droop significantly? Just in a week the Telkom's share value decreases a lot, from 7450 (last week) to 6600 (today's value). This is weird. Is TLKM trying to rip off investor's money? This company sucks. There is no explanation regarding the big drop of its shares. To make it worse, there is no media has reported that anomaly? Can you imagine, just in a week its share value lost 850 points. Please, media inform us the truth. Don't hide it because it is your job to tell the it to the people. I still believe not all media can be dictated and bribed by giant companies. Please, anyone knows about the value's droop of TLKM share, share the info. You can contact me through my blog or twitter.

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Dallas Wiens is amazing

I wish him a successful surgery. You are really amazing. xxx

'My dream is to kiss my daughter again': Father becomes first man in U.S. to get full face transplant | Mail Online

This father is closing in on a dream of kissing his three-year-old daughter again.

Dallas Wiens has become the first man in the U.S. to have a full face transplant after a 30-man team of Boston doctors worked for 15 hours to complete an operation on him.

The 25-year-old, of Fort Worth, Texas, had his entire face replaced - including his nose, lips, skin, animation muscles and nerves to power them and give sensations.

Google, China, and Me

This story reported by Dailymail below is very true. I experienced this annoying thing when I was in China last week. It's difficult for me to access gmail, twitter, and blogspot. I was angry because I couldnt update my blog and twitter post. I already knew the difficulties to access my gmail/twiiter/blogspot account is not their fault  but it is related to the Chinese government trying to block those website from public. They are afraid the Middle east uprising would be copied in China.
Luckily, yahoo account is not blocked. So, during my one week China's trip, I sent the update through my yahoo account which previously been set up  to deliver my blogspot and twitter update.
Chinese government blamed after millions in country are unable to access Gmail accounts | Mail Online
Chinese government blamed after millions in country are unable to access Gmail accounts
 21st March 2011

Google have accused the Chinese government of interfering with its e-mail services in China, making it difficult for users to gain access to its Gmail program.

The claims come amid an intensified Internet crackdown following widespread unrest in the Middle East by the Chinese government.

Google said its engineers have determined there are no technical problems with the e-mail service or its main website.

via ScribeFire

Meet Jake Adelstein, a Jewish reporter who thinks like a Japanese gangster

Jake Adelstein is the author of Tokyo Vice, a new book that chronicles the author's crazy adventures as a crime reporter for Japan's largest newspaper. During his 12 years at Yomiuri Shimbun, Adelstein made deadly enemies — and some lifelong friends — in the yakuza, the organized crime underworld that quietly controls a large part of Japan's political economy. The book (which I reviewed in January) chronicles his journey from naive young foreigner to one of the ballsiest reporters on the yakuza beat. Along the way, he discovered that one of the mob bosses, a guy named Goto Tadamasa, had made a deal with the FBI to go to the US and get a liver transplant at UCLA — an embarrassing scandal that Goto didn't want anyone to know about. When Goto found out that Adelstein was investigating, he figured he should just kill him. "It was really terrifying," he says. "I couldn't even walk outside without my lovable ex-yakuza bodyguard next to me."

Fortunately for Adelstein, he found himself still breathing when Goto lost power in October of 2008. Today, he walks the streets of Tokyo with a titanium core umbrella ("a baseball bat would probably make people uneasy") and that keeps him safe... at least for now.

Over the next two months, we'll be collaborating with Jake Adelstein to bring you a series of Boing Boing exclusive yakuza stories. We'll kick it off with a two-part Q&A that gives us an inside look at his life and brings us up-to-date on yakuza influence on present-day Japan. After that, we'll go behind-the-scenes with Adelstein and his yakuza buddies to watch how they do ordinary things like play video games, use the computer, and chop off body parts.

For part one of the Q&A series, I sat down with Adelstein over bacon waffles and coffee one morning in San Francisco to get some personal stories of Adelstein's connections with the yakuza. Read on to learn about how a Jewish-American from Missouri beat up a mobster with a golf club; the indelible link between gangsters and Buddhist priests; and how Adelstein came to incorporate the highest yakuza values into his daily life.

How did you know that Goto Tadamasa wanted to kill you?

On the day he got kicked out of the Yamaguchi-gumi*, one of the last things he said as he was getting into his car was: "That fucking American Jew reporter. I'd like to kill him." When I heard that, I thought, well it's nice to be recognized for your hard work.

Goto has been connected to 17 unsolved murders. His people are responsible for the attack on film director Itami Jyuzo in 1992. Itami made a movie parodying the yakuza. It showed them as what most of them are, as a bunch of obnoxious sneaky lying thugs, and they didn't really like that. They didn't kill him at first — they just grabbed him as he left his house and slashed open his face in the parking lot. A few years later, he allegedly committed suicide. But what I heard from people who would know is that they dragged him to a rooftop, stuck a gun in his face, and said you can jump or we'll blow your face off.

So nobody out there wants to put a gun to your head and make you jump?

Well, I'm sure Goto would like to do it. The question is, what's the cost benefit of doing it? Right now [with the publication of Tokyo Vice] I'm such a public nuisance that whacking me would only bring more heat and might bring political pressure on Japan to close down the yakuza buildings and put them out of business. When you consider the risk of doing that, the analysis is, well, easier to let him live and be a pest rather than make a martyr out of some annoying Jewish-American.

Are you scared of the yakuza?

Of course I'm scared of them. Even the guys I'm close to I'm scared of. They're like wild animals. These are guys who make a living through violence, and they're very very tough. They just have incredible endurance and tolerance for pain. They're like the Energizer bunny; you can beat them and hit them with a hammer and they'd still come at you like the Terminator. I'm saying this from personal experience.

You mean you've actually fought with one?

In April 2008, I was trying to figure out how Goto knew that I was writing a book about his liver transplant. There was a yakuza real estate broker; he was a good source, and I had paid him. I remembered having a conversation with him a few months back, and he was asking how my book was coming along — I suspected he might have been sounding me out for information. So I went to his office and said, "Listen, did you sell me out on Goto? Did you tell him I'm writing a book"? And he said, "Yeah of course. He pays much more than you do. Why wouldn't I? It's not like we're friends. It's nothing personal." He didn't even try to deny it. So I said to him, "Remember a couple years ago when Sugiura got hit? I'm gonna tell my friends in the Sumiyoshi-kai that you gave away his location. They may not believe me, but they might come ask you some questions, and when they do I don't think they'll be very nice to you. Nothing personal." And as I turned my back to leave, he jumped on me. He started hitting me really hard and kicking me. So I ran to the corner of his room and got a golf club, and kept hitting his knee until his knee broke. I was just running around in circles aiming at his knee. Even after his knee broke, he was still crawling at me. I was like, god! Why don't you just give up?

What does it say about you? Don't you have to be a bit crazy to throw snarky comments at yakuza and break their knees with golf clubs?

It would say that I have a bad temper. I was angry! I didn't make the first attack, though. That was totally in self-defense. What would you do if someone whom you thought was a friend was like, I planted heroin in your car and called the cops?

I would probably be like, I'm in the wrong business. On the wrong beat. I'd probably get out.

It was too late, you know? I was committed. Committed to the left lane. I was taking my driving test a few years ago and my instructor said, go to the right lane. And I told him, I can't. I'm committed to the left lane.

But isn't there a point in a reporter's life where they realize, if I go any further than this, I'm going to be putting myself and the people close to me at great risk, and you either decide to go ahead or you don't? How did you make that decision?

By the time I got to that point, I didn't have a choice. When the FBI and the National Police Agency were putting me under police protection in March 2008, one guy at the NPA whom I had known from my days of covering the police beat said to me, "Let me explain to you how this works. You're probably thinking, alright, I'll just go home. I wouldn't advise that. You've pissed off a guy who has very good connections in the United States. If you go home to your family he'll send someone to where you live and kill you; and if your family's around they will all be killed as collateral damage. If you ask, he'll just say, hey, it was just some crazy foreigner. Never meant for the family to be wiped too. So if you love your family, you're not going home until you resolved this."

His advice to me was, "You're a writer. Time to write. He's angry with you now because you have information, but once it's out he'll have problems bigger than you to worry about."

Do you worry about your family?

I have a guarantee from someone up high in the Yamaguchi-gumi that they won't touch my family. Their word is pretty solid. It's a gentleman's agreement that they'll only kill me, which makes me feel better.

Really?

Sure, because there's less to worry about.

What do you do to keep yourself centered?

I meditate. I'm going to get my Buddhist priest certification this year — that's what I originally went to Japan for. I've been offered a meeting with Goto when I get that certification. He's also a Buddhist priest now. Another boss promised that once they can be sure we're not going to punch each other's lights out, we should meet. "He's a changed man," he said. I'm like, yeah, tell me another one.

Is it a trend for ex-yakuza to become Buddhist priests?

It's not uncommon. There are two reason for doing this. Once you set yourself up as a religious organization, you don't get taxed on your income. It's a great way to launder money. The other reason is that people love the bad guy becomes a good guy story. As soon as he left the Yamaguchi-gumi, there was an order out to hit him; but as soon as he becomes a Buddhist priest you can't kill him. Here's this guy trying to lead a good life and you killed him. You guys are evil. He's good. Goto leaked the Buddhist priest story all over the place. The priest robe is his bullet-proof vest.

Is it your bullet-proof vest too?

No, it's just something to do. I've got a lot of yakuza friends and cop friends and reporter friends. They all die early. It would be nice to be able to do their funerals for them.

Is there anything about the yakuza that you admire?

Unlike in America, where someone's word is as light as a feather, some of the yakuza guys have demonstrated incredible loyalty. If they promise something — if they give their word — they honor it, even if that promise is no longer convenient or even detrimental to keep. Bushi ni nigon wa nai. ("A warrior does not have a forked tongue.") Once you've said it, then you'll do it. A promise is a promise. It's so rare to meet anybody in this world who has any sense of honor, who puts actual importance in keeping their word. That's one of the nicer things about them.

I was a very typical American when I started on this beat. I'd say I'd be somewhere and I wouldn't, I was late for appointments... To me those are typical American traits — sloppy, forgetful, doesn't honor their word, and doesn't remember the favors that have been done to them. Over time, I've learned that if you say to one of these people, yeah I'll call you, then you better call them. Every time you say you'll do something, you do it, and you build credibility with these people. I'm willing to accept their codes of behavior and live by them.

There's a lot of wisdom in the things that they've taught me. What's bad about that is that I'm probably a very hard person to be with. I'm a very hard person to date and to have as a friend because my expectations are high. As a result, I don't have that many close friends. I don't know if I'll ever date anyone again. Most of my closest friends are either cops or criminals.

You've also said in the past that it's not safe for someone to be too close to you.

I wonder if I should hand people a list that says: "Hi, here are the risks of being close with me" — like a warning on a cigarette pack — "I have a dangerous job and I anger people and it might put you at risk if you're perceived as someone very close to me."

I'm horribly overly paternal. I'm not a misogynist or a chauvinist, but I keep seeing women victimized. So with my friends who are female, I am overgenerous and overprotective to the point of being annoying. And there's guilt involved there. I probably care too much because I'm compensating for a time when I didn't care enough.

I believe investigative journalists serve a function in society by correcting wrongs that the government or police won't address. It keeps society healthy. I believe in my cause, and am willing to risk personal injury to do that. I'd be setting a bad example for my children if I said, "When the bad guys yell in your face and threaten you, you run away." I like my job. I think I do some good in the world.

Has this affected your health at all?

You can toss around terms like PTSD, but that's not what it is. There's still a legitimate risk, however small, so I have to be careful. Sometimes I see someone who's walking behind me for too long or someone who just has that look and my fight or flight turns on. I think the psychological term is hypervigilance. When I walk into a restaurant I scope out the place. I almost always sit facing the door. I sleep in two to three hour shifts.

I'm in lousy shape after smoking and drinking too much and being under constant stress. The other day, I had a migraine or a mini-stroke. It was ten in the morning, and I was Tweeting on my computer something funny that a yakuza boss had said recently when I noticed I couldn't see out of my left eye. I had a splitting headache and felt really nauseous. I tried dialing emergency but no words would come out of my mouth. So I walked to the clinic down the street, and they ran some tests. I had to cancel my flight to the US and book a new ticket.

One of the things I love most about Japan is the public health care system. When I feel bad, I can go to the doctor without going bankrupt or worrying that my insurance company's going to drop me.

If you had the choice, would you get out of this lifestyle?

Yes, I would love to get out but I can't. I am trapped. How do I earn my living? I write. What's my next book about? It's about yakuza. Until I finish that book, I'm locked in.

*The Yamaguchi-gumi is the largest yakuza group in Japan. The other two major ones are the Sumiyoshi-kai and Inagawa-kai.

15 of The Worst Mistakes Women Make Trying To Look Attractive *INFOGRAPHIC*

15 of The Worst Mistakes Women Make Trying To Look Attractive *INFOGRAPHIC*

Japan shows us the heroic in the everyday

 | Sarah Ditum | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

One of the workers inside the Fukushima nuclear power station has reportedly sent a message to his family. It says: "Live well. I cannot be home for a while." The "Fukushima 50" are, by any definition, heroic – risking their lives to protect others. And in the middle of a greater work than most of us will (hopefully) be called on to do, this man is thinking about home.

That feels poignant. Bathetic, even. After all, we usually think of heroism as being distinct from normality, as extraordinary. We do the same when we decide what is valuable in our culture, often picking out the rare and remarkable as the most precious, to looking to symphonies, great paintings or magnificent buildings as evidence of the excellence of our species.

But when absolute disaster comes, it is made abruptly clear how much more the banal and the homely can matter than any of these totems to cultural greatness. The images of ruined domesticity are the most painfully affecting: family photos covered in filth and separated from the people they belong to, the mystifying appearance of a man with a bike in the middle of collapsed streets, the awful incongruity of a stained Miffy toy sitting among rubble and trash.

The cynical response to these pictures would be to say that they show us how puny human lives are. Even if the owners are still alive, can they care about such detritus in a time of mass tragedy? We are a fragile species, obsessed with ephemera, these stills seem to whisper. It's comforting to tell ourselves that what's been lost was trivial anyway – but terribly wrong. This explosion of peoples' daily lives into the open shows us what our existence is actually made up of – not the dramatic and unusual, but the boring, the things that are as unremarkable and essential as air and water. (Speaking of which, images of people queueing to fill plastic bottles from pumps ought to tell us that a functioning water system is a more impressive feat of construction that any of the ancient follies people travel thousands of miles to gawk at.)

Japanese discipline rules despite disaster

Japanese discipline rules despite disaster - POSTSCRIPT By Federico D. Pascual Jr. | The Philippine Star >> News >> Opinion

POSTSCRIPT By Federico D. Pascual Jr. (The Philippine Star)

WHAT, NO LOOTING?: Three days after a magnitude-9 killer quake devastated Japan, triggering Pacific-wide tsunamis and a likely nuclear plant meltdown and then consigning millions of Japanese to darkness, thirst and hunger in the wintry cold, I still have to read reports of widespread looting.

This Filipino watching 3,200 kilometers from Ground Zero finds this disciplined behavior of a huge population in distress awe-inspiring. Let us pray that they stay that way — and that we learn from them.

In adversity, the Japanese are now reaping the fruits of having been taught, and drilled in, discipline and resilience since childhood.

* * *

SPARTAN MEALS: In Japanese grade schools, where lunch is free, pupils (and their teachers) are sometimes served nothing but vegetables. Nobody openly complains, because it has been explained to them that they have to get used to occasional Spartan meals.

The pupils are told that there could come a time when, for some reason, they might have to subsist only on something less.

This calamity dealt them by Nature is one of those unexpected times. Now the instilling of that value or attitude seems to be paying off, thanks also to the way their government is responding to their needs despite the destruction of infrastructure.

There could be scattered deviations from this disciplined behavior, especially with the intensity and duration of their post-quake suffering, but these could be written off as aberrations.

* * *

WALK WITH BUDDIES: There are other things we can learn from the Japanese public school system.

Every child must be enrolled in the nearest school — “nearest” meaning within walking distance. This way, big numbers of students going to and from class need not take public or private transportation, thus alleviating the traffic problem.

The children do not walk to school by themselves. They are grouped according to their home addresses. They assemble at a designated place and move out together when everybody is accounted for.

After class, the teacher sees to it that members of the same flock walk home together. They are made aware that they are responsible for one another. The group has to make sure nobody is missing.

how much low-level radiation poses a serious health threat

Japan Subculture Research Center | All the intriguing and seedy aspects that keep Japan running.

Everyone knows that high levels of radiation are deadly. It seems that no one is certain of how much low-level radiation poses a serious health threat. It’s one of the things that makes the nuclear disaster in Japan such a cause for fear and anguish. One of the problems of assessing the risk is that it’s very hard to study low levels of radiation exposure because there are many things that contribute to people getting cancer

yakuza

Amazon.com: Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan (9780307378798): Jake Adelstein: Books

A Q&A with Jake Adelstein

Question: What drew you to Japan in the first place, and how did you wind up going to university there?

Jake Adelstein: In high school I had many problems with anger and self-control. I had been studying Zen Buddhism and karate, and I thought Japan would be the perfect place to reinvent myself. It could be that my pointy right ear draws me toward neo-Vulcan pursuits--I don’t know.

When I got to Japan, I managed to find lodgings in a Soto Zen Buddhist temple where I lived for three years, attending zazen meditation at least once a week. I didn’t become enlightened, but I did get a better hold on myself.

Question: How did you become a journalist for the most popular Japanese-language newspaper?

Jake Adelstein: The Yomiuri Shinbun runs a standardized test, open to all college students. Many Japanese firms hire young grads this way. My friends thought that the idea of a white guy trying to pass a Japanese journalist’s exam was so impossibly quixotic that I wanted to prove them wrong. I spent an entire year eating instant ramen and studying. I managed to find the time to do it by quitting my job as an English teacher and working as a Swedish-massage therapist for three overworked Japanese women two days a week. It turned out to be a slightly sleazy gig, but it paid the bills.

There was a point when I was ready to give up studying and the application process. Then, when I was in Kabukicho on June 22, 1992, I asked a tarot fortune-telling machine for advice on my career path, and it said that with my overpowering morbid curiosity I was destined to become a journalist, a job at which I would flourish, and that fate would be on my side. I took that as a good sign. I still have the printout.

I did well enough on the initial exam to get to the interviews, and managed to stumble my way through that process and get hired. I think I was an experimental case that turned out reasonably well.

Question: How did you succeed in uncovering the underworld in a country that is famously "closed" or restricted to foreigners? Do you think people talked more openly to you because you were American?

Jake Adelstein: I think Japan is actually more open than people give it credit for. However, to get the door open, you really need to become fluent in the spoken and written language. The written language was a nightmare for me.

You’re right, though; it was mostly an advantage to be a foreigner--it made me memorable. The yakuza are outsiders in Japanese society, and perhaps being a fellow outsider gave us a weird kind of bond. The cops investigating the yakuza also tend to be oddballs. I was mentored into an early understanding and appreciation of the code of both the yakuza and the cops. Reciprocity and honor are essential components for both.

I also think the fact that I’m too stupid to be afraid when I should be, and annoyingly persistent as well--these things didn’t help me in long-term romance, but they helped me as a crime reporter.

Question: Do you feel that investigative journalism is being threatened or aided by the expansion of the Internet and news blogs, and the closing down of many printed newspapers?

Jake Adelstein: In one sense it is being threatened because investigative journalism is rarely a solo project. It requires huge amounts of resources, capital, and time to really do one story correctly. Legal costs and FOIA documents are expensive things. The bigger the target, the greater the risk and the more money is required. The second-biggest threat to investigative journalism is crooked lawyers and corporate shills who sue as a harassment tactic. In general, it’s rather hard and time-consuming to be an army of one. It took me almost three years to break the story about yakuza receiving liver transplants at UCLA on my own. The costs in financial terms were immense, and so were the losses along the way. A team of reporters could have done the work much faster, probably.

However, these things said, blogging is also a great source of news that might go unreported, or be overlooked, by the mainstream media. Twitter, too, has had an interesting impact, actually helping a journalist get out of jail in the case of James Karl Buck. We’re beginning to see kind of a public option in investigative journalism, too--such as things like ProPublica. They do an awesome job at investigative journalism, partly through donations, and they have a great web site. So the Internet is not all bad for investigative journalism, as long as we proceed with caution and forethought. At the same time, real intelligence-gathering work actually requires you to put down your cell phone and your computer and get off your ass and meet people in the real world. As odious as it may be, we have to sift through garbage, pound the pavement, and visit the scene of the crime. Not all answers can be found in front of a keyboard, or on Google, and the “it’s all in the database” mentality is the bane of reporting and often generates shoddy reporting.

The individual journalist can do great investigative work--it’s just a lot harder, and usually financially difficult to do unless you’re independently wealthy, like Bruce Wayne. Most of us don’t have the time or the resources or the luxury of holding down a day job and doing investigative journalism on the side, as a hobby.

Question: What do you hope your American audience can learn from your book?

Jake Adelstein: I think everyone will take away something different from the book. I suppose you can learn a lot about how journalism works in Japan, how the police work, and how the yakuza work. I would also hope that people take away from the book an understanding of some of the things I really like about Japan and the Japanese, things like reciprocity, honor, loyalty, and stoic suffering. I think in Japan, I learned how important it is to keep your word, to never forget your debts--and not just the financial ones--and to make repayment in due course. Perhaps that’s what honor is all about.

There’s a word in Japanese, hanmen kyoshi, which means, more or less, “the teacher who teaches by his bad example.” At times, I’m an excellent hanmen kyoshi in the book.

Everything I’ve learned that’s important to me is in the book somewhere. I hope there’s something universal in the contents beyond just making people aware of cultural differences between the United States and Japan, or reiterating the importance and value of investigative journalism. Like a book I would choose to read to my children, I hope there’s some kind of moral to it all. Maybe the real lesson is to be kind and helpful to the people you care about whenever you can, because it’s good for them, and good for you, and your time with them may be much shorter than you imagined.

(Photo © Michael Lionstar)

Looting in Japan: Why so little looting in Japan?

The explanation is legal as much as cultural. - By Christopher Beam - Slate Magazine

If your home was hit by a 9.0-magnitude earthquake, a tsunami, and radiation from a nuclear power plant, you'd be forgiven for not remaining calm. Yet that's what many Japanese quake victims appear to be doing. People are forming lines outside supermarkets. Life is "particularly orderly," according to PBS. "Japanese discipline rules despite disaster," says a columnist for The Philippine Star.

China

What is life like in a Chinese megacity? | FP Passport

The more time one spends in China, and the more one travels within the country, the harder it is to describe "China" as a single entity. The country is far more geographically, culturally, linguistically and economically diverse -- and confusing -- than is evident from the photos we now often see of gleaming new shopping malls in its wealthier eastern cities. There is not one China story, but countless.

From the windblown deserts of Gansu province to the fertile rice paddies of Hunan, from impoverished Tibetan shepherds to shopaholic Shanghaiese, from the glitzy coordination of mass events, like the 2008 Olympic Opening Ceremony, to the chaotic hodgepodge of daily life (orderly queues are entirely unknown), there is no single narrative or argument that encapsulates the nation. (The Atlantic's James Fallows and others return often to this point.)

What all these aspects of China do have in common, however, is that they're changing. Rapidly. Over the next 20 years, some 400 million people -- more than the entire population of the United States -- will move from the countryside to China's fast growing cities. Imagine the many stages of American history over the last century and a half condensed into a single generation. Then you have a glimpse of the transformation underway in China.

In Britain, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, there are only two cities with a population of more than 1 million; in the United States, there are just 10 such cities. But already in China, there are 43 cities of more than 1 million, and by 2030 there will be 221, the McKinsey Global Institute predicts.

What is life like in China's booming megacities? To begin to answer that question, this spring I visited the sprawling metropolis of Chongqing -- once a relative backwater in mountainous western China, and today place where land is converted from countryside to apartment blocks and parking lots faster than anywhere else on the planet. A dynamic inland port city, and gateway to what Beijing considers China's still Wild West, think of it as "Chicago on the Yangtze" (check out the article here -- and Matthew Niederhauser's superb photo essay here.)

During World War II, the city was known to westerners as Chungking, when it was briefly the Nationalist capital of China. Many turns of history later, it is today a place where it is possible to drive through the northern New District for more than a half hour, past block upon block of new apartment highrises, where five years ago there were only fields. Its celebrity Party boss, Bo Xiali, is already making international headlines for his storied crackdown on Chinese mobsters and wrenching political ambitions.

For all the international attention paid to decisions made in Beijing, I have come to believe that the role that China, now the world's second largest economy, will come to play in the 21st century will depend not firstly on the wiles of its diplomats, the size of its navy, or even the next appointments to the Politburo, but on how well China manages the largest mass urbanization in history. The municipality of Chongqing, absorbing roughly 1 million new urban dwellers each year, is at the spear tip of this experiment.

UPDATE: Chicago fires back! Writing for the Chicago Reader, Lauri Apple takes issue with the comparison, and explains why Chicago is not the Chongqing of the United States:

Chongqing's skyline has jillions of tall buildings; we've got our fair share of skyscrapers, but nothing approaching Chongqing’s concrete horizon. Chongqing continues to build communist-style housing developments; Chicago is tearing them down.

Chongqing is mountainous, and its main body of water, the Yangtze, looks like a river of Yoo Hoo. Chicago has no mountains, and its water is blue (and green, on Saint Patrick's Day). In Chongqing, people play badminton in the public areas; Chicagoans play public cornhole.

Fair enough, there's no analogy that truly explains a Chinese megacity. But hopefully the article and photos will help a bit to demystify the abstraction.

Michael Anti

Joshua Keating's blog | FP Passport

Chinese blogger: How come Zuckerberg's dog can have a Facebook page and I can't?
Posted By Joshua Keating Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - 2:49 PM

Michael Anti, the Chinese journalist and political blogger, had his Facebook account suspended in January because, as representatives of the company told him, "Facebook has a strict policy against pseudonyms and that he must use the name issued on his government ID." So Anti was more than a little miffed to learn that Beast -- the Hungarian sheepdog puppy just purchased by Mark Zuckerberg and his girlfriend -- now has his own profile:

Anti, a former journalist who has won fellowships at both Cambridge University and Harvard University, said he set up his Facebook account in 2007. By locking him out of his account, Facebook has cut him off from a network of more than 1,000 academic and professional contacts who know him as Anti, he said.

"I'm really, really angry. I can't function using my Chinese name. Today, I found out that Zuckerberg's dog has a Facebook account. My journalistic work and academic work is more real than a dog," he said.

Zuckerberg recently set up a Facebook page for "Beast," complete with photos and a profile. Unlike Anti's, however, the page for the puppy doesn't violate Facebook's policies because it's not meant to be a personal profile page. Rather, it's a type of page reserved for businesses and public figures that fans can "like" and receive updates from on their own Facebook pages.

Facebook said it does not comment on individual accounts, but added that it believes a "real name culture" leads to more accountability and a safer and more trusted environment for people who use Facebook.

Cute puppies aside, Facebook's explanation seems bogus. In just my list of Facebook friends I can find at least a dozen people using pseudonyms, nicknames, or variations on their names. Moreover, Anti is a relatively well known public figure under that name. He's been writing articles under that name for years and his Twitter account has nearly 36,000 followers.

The timing of Anti's suspension, coming just a month after Zuckerberg's "vacation" tour of Chinese Internet companies, is equally unfortunate.

Hat tip: China Digital Times