Tag: United States

  • Obama Says He Would Hear From Dalai Lama Before Going to Olympic Ceremony

    Without saying definitively he would not attend the Olympic opening ceremony in Beijing one month from today, U.S. Senator Barack Obama said as president he would skip the ceremony without hearing from the Dalai Lama that there had been progress on the Tibet issue. “In the absence of some sense of progress, in the absence…

  • When the U.S. Wants to Criticize 'Chinese Art'

    In The New Republic, Jed Perl exercises no economy of words in lambasting art from China and its growing global following. Based on a reading of “Chinese art” that does not apparently leave the island of Manhattan, Perl makes several questionable statements, often abetted by lack of knowledge, and Alan Baumler at Frog in a…

  • Is Venezuela selling oil to China instead of to the U.S.?

    The United States is importing less oil from Venezuela, and China is buying more. Is Venezuela putting its resources where Hugo Chávez’s mouth is and using the country’s major export as a geopolitical lever? Or are U.S. imports just catching up with a 10-year decline in Venezuelan production? The U.S. Energy Information Administration released April…

  • Mapping the Future of the Transpacific Internet

    Anyone living in China and communicating with the Western Hemisphere or Europe knows that even when government controls aren’t slowing down the internet, any disruption of undersea fiber optics in the Pacific can bring traffic to a crawl. From MIT’s Technology Review, via Japan Probe and Foreign Policy, comes a map of global fiber projects…

  • ABC's Efforts to 'Laugh With' an Imaginary Version of Japan

    The things I miss living outside the United States. New last week from ABC, I Survived a Japanese Game Show, has gone to work reinforcing the “odd Japanese” trope with laughter directed at the unsuspecting nation. David Marx writes at Néojaponisme: ABC producers went all the way to Japan to make their own TV program,…