To each his own.

The mayor of China’s top manufacturing city is hosting a “swimathon” this summer in the local Pearl River. Cleanup efforts to reverse years of industrial pollution have been so successful, claims mayor Guang Zhangming, that the Pearl is once again safe to swim. To prove it, he plans to don a suit and join the 10,000 other swimmers whom he hopes will take the plunge.

But after looking into the filmy water and smelling its foul wafts, other officials are said to be begging off. Three vice-mayors told a local newspaper that they couldn’t swim.

As with many other environmental catastrophes in China, this one has been “getting better” in recent years but, as the article makes clear, it still has a very, very long way to go.

It looked like things were going so well just a week ago, and now it sems like the Vatican and the Party are once more at one another’s throats.

The Vatican lashed out Thursday at Beijing, announcing the excommunication of two bishops who were ordained by China’s state-controlled church without Pope Benedict XVI’s consent. Benedict’s first major political clash since his election as pontiff a year ago dimmed hopes for any re-establishment soon of official ties between the Holy See and Beijing that ended after communists took control of China in 1949.

Also automatically excommunicated for defying the pope were the bishops who performed the ordinations in separate ceremonies since Sunday, according to a provision of church law cited by Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls. Benedict learned about the defiant ordinations “with great sadness,” said Navarro-Valls. “It is a great wound to the unity of the church.”

I still can’t figure it out. Hu had been winning invaluable PR for improving ties to the Vatican, and now he appears to be back to square one.

Could it get any more ironic?

As Energy Prices Rise, It’s All Downhill for Democracy
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: May 5, 2006

In case you haven’t noticed, all the oil-rich bad guys seem to be having a fine and dandy time these days.

Iran, awash in oil money, thumbs its nose at U.N. demands for it to desist in its nuclear adventures and daily threatens to wipe Israel off the map. President Vladimir Putin of Russia, awash in oil money, jails his opponents at home and cozies up to America’s opponents, like Iran and Hamas, abroad. Sudan, awash in oil money, ignores the world’s pleas to halt its genocide in Darfur. Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez, awash in oil money, regularly tells America and his domestic opponents to take a hike.

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Our Sick Society
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: May 5, 2006

Is being an American bad for your health? That’s the apparent implication of a study just published in The Journal of the American Medical Association.

It’s not news that something is very wrong with the state of America’s health. International comparisons show that the United States has achieved a sort of inverse miracle: we spend much more per person on health care than any other nation, yet we have lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality than Canada, Japan and most of Europe.

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I was reading more of his sister’s torturous daily updates recounting the Kafkaesque wall of bureaucracy she and her family face every day as they try to find out something, anything, about the arrest of her beloved brother. I’m looking outside my office window, watching the pedestrians and cars on Xin Yi Lu, and thinking how we all take it for granted that we can go outside and do what we want and carry out our affairs without fear of being watched or persecuted. And I think of Hao Wu, alone in a cell somewhere, and wonder how I could deal with it and keep my sanity. (I honestly don’t think I could.) I’ll be in China in less than two weeks, and my greatest hope is that he’ll be free by then and that a bunch of us bloggers can take him to dinner. It’s not likely; he’s into his third month of imprisonment, and if there’s light at the end of this tunnel I (and Hao Wu’s sister) haven’t seen it yet. And if he were freed, would he want to stay on living in the country that did this to him? I know I’d have second thoughts about it, fearing a repeat performance.

After more than two months, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep up your momentum, and Hao Wu inevitably fades from being a person, becoming rather like a concept and a symbol, losing the human dimensions. So pardon me if I periodically bring him up to remind readers (mainly myself) that this is a flesh and blood human being, an exceptional and wonderful person, who’s languishing behind bars at this very instant. He’s not an abstraction or a concept, and as I prepare to step outside for lunch he has no such freedom, no such luxury. And the thought of that is so agonizing I instinctively want to stop thinking about it. And that’s what I need to fight – the desire to just feel good and forget about it. And so I force myself to remember, and to put up posts like this, so we don’t let his cause burn out and die.

Hong Kong’s version of national Public Radio is under threat. Even though there are supposed to be one country with two systems, the boys in Beijing still want that other system to conform to its no-dissent policies. I can’t imagine Hong Kong letting this happen without putting up a very good fight.

A quiet battle over whether the only free and independent broadcaster on the land mass of China will remain so is intensifying. Over a 77-year span, Hong Kong public radio has dished out a blend of credible news and cultural programming in three languages, served as a link between expatriates and the Hong Kong street, and has gained increasing editorial autonomy and respect in China’s most sophisticated city.

Yet that is exactly what bothers influential pro-Beijing forces who wish media to more fully trumpet government policies. Many of them see Radio Television Hong Kong, or “RTHK” as it is popularly known, as an irritant at best and a damaging critic at worst – allowing a broad range of opinion, including mild satire and programs that may challenge official proposals, all at taxpayer expense.

The basic issue: Will RTHK be cut, restricted, or turned into a cheerleader for government policies? Or will it evolve into a subsidized but separate identity, similar to the BBC or Channel 4 in London?

One distinct difference between the climate of Hong Kong and that of mainland China, is freedom of expression, experts say.

“If our independence is harmed, it affects the overall climate of freedom here,” says Francis Moriarty, who heads the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents Club press freedom committee, and is an RTHK staffer. “If RTHK is doing hard-hitting stories, others have to work hard, too. In a Hong Kong context, we are the canary in the mineshaft. If our independence is under attack, everybody’s is under attack.”

Watch this carefully. My guess is that, as with Article 23, the free speech asphyxiators in Beijing will have to relent; they can only go so far so fast in their attempt to bring the feisty, freedom-loving HKers to heel. But don’t expect them to stop trying.

Via CDT.

One of the most intriguing and disturbing flame wars in the blogosphere’s history. At first I read Hitch’s article and, while not embracing it, came away thinking he made some fine points. Then I read Cole’s utterly mind-blowing response, and I can never have full respect for Hitchens again. Does Cole sound angry? Yes, very, very angry. Knowing what it’s like to wake up in the morning to face a long article written about you filled with half-truths and blatant lies, I sympathize deeply. Read Cole’s hypnotic and methodical decimation of Hitch’s bullshit, and don’t miiss the pictures at the end. And those comments. A tour de force if ever there was one.

People in China with what seems to be to much time on their hands are going to great lengths to protest Google’s new Chinese name of choice [in Chinese], “guge,” which some have translated as “valley song” or “corn song.” Not very hip or cool, is it? One news source says the most appropriate name would be

Gougou (dog dog), which is how Google is already widely known in China. The company says those folks are barking up the wrong tree: “Names such as gougou (dog dog) could not reflect the responsibilities of a corporate, brand or product name, nor do they reflect fully our goals and mission.” Other suggestions include Goule (enough), Gugu (auntie), Gugou (ancient dog), Gege (elder brother) and one that may strike a little too close to the bone, considering Google’s concessions to the government — Good Gou (good dog).

Poor, poor Google. What a dilemma.

Let’s (Third) Party
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: May 3, 2006

What would OPEC do if it wanted to keep America addicted to oil? That’s easy. OPEC would urge the U.S. Congress to deal with the current spike in gasoline prices either by adopting the Republican proposal to give American drivers $100 each, so they could continue driving gas-guzzling cars and buy gasoline at the current $3.50 a gallon, or by adopting the Democrats’ proposal for a 60-day lifting of the federal gasoline tax of 18.4 cents a gallon. Either one would be fine with OPEC.

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So what else is new?

The Captors Become the Captives
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: May 3, 2006

The invasion of Iraq has turned into “The Ransom of Red Chief.”

The famous short story by O. Henry, published in 1910, begins, “It looked like a good thing: but wait till I tell you.”

The tale is about a couple of guys who have a bold, illicit scheme they assume will be easy, but it ends up backfiring. The idea, one confesses afterward, must have struck them “during a moment of temporary mental apparition.”

Bill and Sam are fugitives lurking in a small town in Alabama who kidnap a prominent citizen’s child and ask for a ransom of $1,500. But once he is held in a nearby cave, the freckle-faced, red-haired boy turns out to be such a terror as he happily plays a violent Indian named Red Chief — attacking Bill and Sam with bricks, kicks, rocks, bites, a knife, a slingshot and a hot boiled potato — that he breaks the kidnappers’ spirit.

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