links for 2007-03-05

“A top U.S. envoy on Sunday urged China to be more open about its military spending, hours after the government announced a 17.8 percent increase in its defense budget — the biggest in more than a decade.”

Tang Jiaxuan via Xinhua admonishes the United States not to “send any mistaken signals to ‘Taiwan independence’ separatists forces…”

The argument: “a peacefully rising country that is threatened by no nation on earth need not spend lavishly on defense if it is truly committed to a peaceful rise.”

“Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Monday he will make no apology for Japan’s forcing women of other Asian countries to provide sex for the Japanese military during World War II even if the U.S. Congress passes a resolution urging him to do so.”

Yeeyan (译言) combines Google machine translation and hands-on translating by peers.

“They cried out, but it didn’t matter to us whether the women lived or died … We were the Emperor’s soldiers. Whether in military brothels or in the villages, we raped without reluctance.”