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Well, he's had his passport revoked, is being hunted around the world, and is being vilified in almost all public media.

Snowden isn't being hunted around the world because his passport is revoked. He is in Russia. Snowden isn't being vilified in "almost all public media." It is quite the reverse - he is being hailed as a hero by Chinese, Russians, many Europeans, and others across the world.

Well, at least he took refuge in Russia. What use do they have for four laptops full of NSA secrets?

Russia warns Ireland it will retaliate in spy row
Ireland Is Training Base for Russian Spies
As many Russian spies in UK today as in Cold War: Soviet defector
Canadian navy officer sentenced to 20 years for being Russian spy
10 in US held as spies for Russia
Russian spies in Australia at 'near Cold War level'
Germany jails Russian spy couple
Belgian diplomat suspected of being Russian spy
Finnish academic charged of aiding Russian spies
Spies in Sweden mostly from China, Russia, Iran
Estonia shaken by new Russian spy scandal
Georgia: Russian Spy Ring Smashed in Tbilisi -- Officials
Spain-Russia spy row leads to diplomats' expulsion

Russian warplanes breach NATO airspace - British and Norwegian jets intercepted Russian military aircraft ... close to the U.K. and Finland
Russian spy plane flies by Swedish military drill

This report comes after the newspaper wrote on 22 April, 2013 that Russian fighters had made dummy attacks close to Swedish territory during the Easter weekend.

RAF catches Russian bombers in UK airspace
UK jets shadow Russian bombers
Russian bombers’ secret UK missions ‘not a friendly act’
Russian subs stalk Trident in echo of Cold War - ... hunting down British Vanguard boats in a return to Cold War tactics
Russian around - A DESPERATE hunt was on last night for a Russian nuclear submarine lurking off the coast of Britain.

Face it, Blogging, Twitter, even SMS have changed the foundation of journalism as we know it.

When was that ever up for debate? Of course it has! Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse! When 'news' spreads like wildfire across Twitter and it turns out to be correct, it was a great thing. You might be downplaying the other results though.

It's now the people on the street who are witness to events

When was it anybody else? These are the first hand accounts you must go out and find your self, not through Wikileaks through stolen U.S. documents.

and can record them with their cellphones and instantly upload them to the net - anonymously or not.

Record what? Where is Pickens presenting any recorded information here? Hell, I can't even find a sound bite from a Peace Corp volunteer that was raped. You give me video, that's hard to spoof and I might buy that if it's anonymous. In the future, video manipulation will be better and we'll lose the ability to tell if compressed cell phone footage is legit.

The information moves so quickly around the world that many so called traditional journalists are left in the dust. So, you can stick with your old antiquated notions of what constitutes journalism (and many who do are part of an industry that is quickly going bankrupt), or you can get with the program and embrace the technology of the 21st century.

Yeah, so here's the core of your disagreement with me. You think that I'm fighting the speed at which information and news flows. That's not true, I'm one of the highest submitters here on Slashdot. I love it, I want it to move as fast as possible. But all that motion and speed isn't worth a goddamn thing when you're spreading unverified information or lies. And that's what I'm calling out here.

For all the praise of NYtimes, they are run at a loss and are at the behest of the billionaire Carlos Slim. A civilian with a cellphone is now more objective than a journalist worried about their next paycheck.

Seriously? Are you serious? Did you know that "Hugh Pickens" used to be a member of the Peace Corps? Did he disclose that potentially biased information in his article on his site that he linked to and calls "news"? Would that perhaps slant his views? I don't care if he has a cellphone. Other news sources are reporting allegations of espionage from the Peace Corp. Oh, sure, that could just as well be the KNB at work and nowhere is Pickens saying that any of the hundreds of members of Peace Corp could have done anything wrong. But nobody's bothering to try to find this out. I like how you play the 'objectivity' card when it comes to money for journalists but you have got to be out of your goddamn mind if you think that this "news" is more objective than what the NY Times would publish on this piece. They would send reporters to Kazakhstan if they were going to run this piece and they would verify all their sources and you're saying that the motivation of money is why they are biased? Again I ask you, are you serious?

I already mentioned this a few days ago (China's exploitation of colonized lands) in the thread about China's new plans to extract a century's worth of energy out of Tibet, but some people didn't think Tibetans (or Uighurs or Mongols) themselves and their status as disenfrancised and repressed people had anything to do with China's colonial resource grab policies...

Well, here again the fine article in Inhabitat goes for the single-minded technocrat approach, not unlike the glory-hungry regime in Beijing, but wouldn't it still be at least remotely relevant to also mention the other non-trade, non-technological aspects of Chinese Communist Party's rail expansion plans?

Namely that a scholar at a Chinese thinktank has stated that "we foresee that in the coming decades, hundreds of millions of people will migrate to the western regions, where land is empty and resources are untapped".

Why is it only a horrific never-forget issue when the 1930s German dictatorship planned for a little Lebensraum expansion?

I am sure that China's formerly communist (now nationalist/Han chauvinist) dictatorship won't be reminding anyone or allowing any debate inside the "People's Empire of China" that invading a peaceful and totally non-Chinese neighbouring nation of Tibet in 1950, resulting in over a million Tibetan deaths; brutally repressing the Tibetan people, their unique language (with Sanskrit-based script), their history, their Buddhist religion and their national identity while brainwashing Tibetans to believe that their pacifistic culture is inferior; wiping out practically all of the 6000 monasteries that served as Tibet religious and administrative centres and housed invaluable written records (burned) and precious ancient artifacts (melted for Mao's foreign reserves); exploiting Tibet's extensive and varied natural resources (precious minerals, metals, timber, various sources of energy) without native Tibetans having any say; keeping the Tibetans under constant surveillance and imposing upon them China's alien imperial language etc. amounts to genocidal colonialism.

But no, the current ultra-nationalist successor regimes of the world's most murderous dictator, the marxist Mao Zedong, have made the Final Solution in China's western neighbours (Tibet, East Turkestan aka Xinjiang and Southern Mongolia) a propaganda imperative in the name of expansionist "Han China's" unity and for them colonialism is merely the often-evoked accusation against the evil foreign powers.

So now Tibet, called the "Western Treasure house" in modern Chinese, is really facing an extensive surface stripping so that the colonizing Chinese (lead by Communist Party "princelings" and their cronies) can extract the mind-boggling amount of energy stored across the Tibetan Plateau?

If that wasn't enough, just recently a professor and member of Chinese Academy of Engineering (a Chinese Communist Party thinktank) revealed that "we foresee that in the coming decades, hundreds of millions of people will migrate to the western regions, where land is empty and resources are untapped"!

One must suppose that if Hitler had provided the West cheap capitalist services under his nazional-socialist policies, he too would've gained quiet acceptance for Nazi-Germany's Lebensraum expansion and resource grab, like China does today...

Oh please, you don't actually think aiding dissidents in a foreign country is legal do ya? The only thing stopping Iran from demanding the extradition of these people is that they are anonymous..

Extradition? What have you been smoking? Iran has a long history of assassinating dissidents in foreign countries.

Like in Germany.

One thing not mentioned in the article (but is mentioned in the 2005 article) is the problems between the Kazakh and Russian governments.They are still debating over problems (especially money) due to failed rocket launches, most recently in September. The Kazakh government keeps suspending and then unsuspending Russian operations at the base.

See this article from EurasiaNet: http://eurasianet.org/resource/kazakhstan/hypermail/news/0011.shtml

http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/culture/imag es/sj2.jpg [eurasianet.org]

That's the second image, a smoking hunk of what must be a fallen rocket casing I guess.

There's 12 images in all, I've only seen the first two, but they seem to follow simple numeric order, so the others would end

.../sj3.jpg

and so on.

If anyone wants to send me a zip of the pictures if they can access them by email, I'll rehost and post the link. But as I say, right now I've only got two images.

Uh, no you're wrong. The Afghanis had their Loya Jirga and they voted for Hamid Karzai. EurasiaNews


Terrorist are not normal people. Normal people don't go around killing everyone they see. There are lots of people around the world who have lost everything or never had anything. They don't go around killing indiscriminately. Although I will say that the outside influence of the radical Islamic clergy does play no small role in the matter. I will state it again they hate us for being us. Nothing we do will help. Not appeasement, not bargaining, nothing. We can try containment or extermination. That's it. The only thing being done in my name is killing the bad awful people. The world needs to be rid of them and the sooner the better.
It would seem that the middle east and near Asia is ashamed of its backward ways and blames the west for it's woes. Stop blaming us for your shortcomings and better yourselves.

As for Shock and Awe in Iraq, if the US really did practice carpet bombing like you state then there would be no Baghdad. Have you seen WWII footage of Hamburg or Berlin? That's what carpet bombing looks like. You should lecture the cowardly Iraqi army for hiding in and among civilians: the deadliest force to Iraqis seems to be other Iraqis.

As far as your point about mass media i would rather believe what it has to say than your tightly controlled and non-objective middle east media.

Sounds just like what you're saying now, IMO. "If we don't stop the [communists/terrorists] this time, they'll go on to [conquer the world/blow up more stuff], so we have to [send in the military/send in the military]".

In any case, I don't give a rat's ass about the moral arguments. If they mattered (other than as propaganda), we would have dragged Saddam out of Baghdad (and not supported him in the first place).

I'm talking about practical chances of success, and that's where the Vietnam analogy fits like a glove. We have no idea where the al Qaeda leaders are hiding. If we start getting close, they can hide in several other countries. And even if we catch them, there's plenty of other guys ready to take their place.

But most importantly, take a look at Vietnam today. They're turning capitalist. They love cell phones and american stuff. We lost with guns; we won with butter.

More propaganda. Islamic militants don't "hate freedom", and all that "Allah commands you" stuff is just there to recruit more Red Shirts.

The leaders do it because American foreign policy often results in a whole bunch of refugee muslims who are willing to be led. If the CIA had kept out of Afghanistan in the 1980s, today it would be another poor but stable former Soviet state (like all of the other *stan's to the north of it).

The War on Terrorism (tm) is going to be just like the War on Drugs.

I know 99.999% of people here are uninformed about the various bombings in China by muslim extremists. Since this is about China, I'm not surprised that 99.999% of you people either wouldn't care or simply refuse to believe that the PRC is capable of being truthful. Beyond that, yes, China does have problems with muslim extremists, some possibly supported by the Taliban. A strong indication of this is the creation of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) with Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan as members (read here and here). So, are you people still insistent that China's "full of it?"