China

Researchers report that up to 100,000 U.S. jobs are being lost to China every year.

Member states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) do not rule out an opportunity to create a regional free trade area, Kazinform reported quoting Kazakh Vice Foreign Minister Nurlan Yermekbayev.

This is how this Golden Shield will work: Chinese citizens will be watched around the clock through networked CCTV cameras and remote monitoring of computers. They will be listened to on their phone calls, monitored by digital voice-recognition technologies. Their Internet access will be aggressively limited through the country's notorious system of online controls known as the "Great Firewall." Their movements will be tracked through national ID cards with scannable computer chips and photos that are instantly uploaded to police databases and linked to their holder's personal data. This is the most important element of all: linking all these tools together in a massive, searchable database of names, photos, residency information, work history and biometric data. When Golden Shield is finished, there will be a photo in those databases for every person in China: 1.3 billion faces.

China is investigating whether hundreds of children, most aged between nine and 16, were sold to factories in Guangdong Province over the past five years to work as slave laborers, state media said. Chinese authorities inspected more than 3,600 businesses in Dongguan, the center of the child labor scandal, state press reported yesterday, after children were found working in factories.

Serfs and slaves accounted for 95 percent of the Tibetan population (peasants 60%, herdsmen 20%, and lower-class monks 15%). They were owned by serf-owners, just like the means of production. They had no political rights or personal freedom.

The Untied States said it would use all means to prevent Iran's influence in the region including its membership in Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO)–comprised of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan–began in 2001 as a confidence-building mechanism to resolve border disputes. In recent years, it has risen in stature and scope, making headlines in 2005 when it issued a timeline for U.S. forces to pull out of Uzbekistan.

In an interview with Radio Farda, Turaj Atabaki, a professor of Middle Eastern and Central Asian history at Leiden University in the Netherlands, said that Russia and China would not complicate SCO affairs and the group's status by accepting Iran as a member.

To prevent rain over the roofless 91,000-seat Olympic stadium that Beijing natives have nicknamed the Bird's Nest, the city's branch of the national Weather Modification Office--itself a department of the larger China Meteorological Administration--has prepared a three-stage program for the 2008 Olympics this August.

China welcomes Iran's wish to become a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which groups China, Russia and Central Asian nations, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said Tuesday.