In Max Brooks’ World War Z the plague that causes zombies to overrun the world begins in China. The Communists attempted to cover up the plague, hiding the truth until it was too late.

The reports of a virus killing children in the P.R.C. and the governments ruthless crackdown on doctors who can’t cure the children reminded me a bit of the book when I read these articles. The first is a Reuters report:

BEIJING (Reuters) - Fears of a virus that has killed at least 26 children in China gripped parents in Beijing on Tuesday amid a spreading outbreak of hand, foot and mouth disease.

The health scare prompted the Foreign Ministry to seek to assure the country it was doing its best to contain the outbreak.

“The Chinese government is paying great attention to the virus and related departments are taking effective measures to stop it from spreading,” ministry spokesman Qin Gang told a news conference.

Hand, foot and mouth is a common illness in children and infants caused by a family of viruses called enteroviruses and outbreaks regularly occur in China.

But the current outbreak has led to fatalities mostly when linked with enterovirus 71 (EV71), which can cause a severe form of the disease that can lead to high fever, paralysis and viral meningitis.

Some 11,905 cases of hand, foot and mouth have been reported in China this year, the official Xinhua news agency said. EV71 has caused 26 deaths, largely in Fuyang, a city in China’s eastern province of Anhui. At least two deaths were in the southern province of Guangdong.

All of the deaths in Fuyang were of children under six years old and most were under two.

[…]

China, which initially covered up the SARS epidemic in 2003, has denied a cover-up this time round and ordered authorities to aggressively tackle hand, foot and mouth.

An editorial in Monday’s China Daily blamed the crisis in Fuyang on a “delayed reaction” by the local government.

The Chinese government is blaming the doctors that treated many of the victims for their deaths in a move transparently designed to make those deaths look as if they were avoidable. From BrietBart.com:

Ten doctors and officials in China have been punished for mishandling a virus that has killed 26 children, state media reported as the number of infected youngsters rose to nearly 12,000.

The punishments have been meted out in the eastern Anhui province, where the bulk of the deaths have occurred and local officials have been accused of being too slow to report the disease, Xinhua news agency said late on Monday.

The virus is called enterovirus 71, or EV71, which leads to hand, foot and mouth disease.

EV71 is highly contagious and spreads through direct contact with the mucus, saliva or faeces of an infected person. Young children are most susceptible because of weaker immune systems.

As of Monday, it had infected 11,905 children nationwide, killing 26 of them, Xinhua reported, citing government figures.

The outbreak caused the Ministry of Health to declare a national alert over the weekend and establish a task force to liaise with local officials on control efforts.

In Anhui, one village doctor was fined 4,080 yuan (583 dollars) for illegally injecting 17 children with immune globulin, falsely claiming it would cure them, according to Xinhua.

The doctor, Wang Dongjun, charged 80 yuan for each injection, while five local county officials have been reprimanded for not distributing information about the virus.

Their failure to tell the people in Lichen village about the nature of the virus allowed Wang to “profiteer” from the disease, Xinhua reported, without saying what happened to the mistreated patients.

[…]

Sections of China’s state-run media have been highly critical of how authorities in Fuyang handled the outbreak, because children first started falling ill in March but the problem was not made public until last week.

That’s rich. China’s state run media is saying there was a cover up.

So if the government is willing to admit to nearly 12,000 people infected with this killer virus just before the Olympics, how many more do you think are really infected?

Tibetan protesters rallying for freedom in their home country were harassed and assaulted at a Communist Chinese organized rally in the supposedly free country of Canada. From Epoch Times:

TORONTO—A rally that was billed as promoting “anti-violence” turned hostile on Saturday as flag-waving Chinese denounced Tibetans who they blamed for the recent turmoil in Tibet in which 100 are said to have died.

Close to 1000 Chinese were in Toronto’s Dundas Square for the afternoon event, many of them students.

“Dalai Lama die there!” some Chinese shouted at a group of Tibetans who had gathered across the street from the square to protest. “Leave Canada!” others urged.

Tibetans say the Chinese rally, which began orderly, was designed to incite hate against them.

The event was promoted in Chinese-language press as a rally to tell the “truth” about Tibet and “safeguard the reunification of the motherland.”

Several major Chinese-language media outlets in Canada have parroted the Chinese communist regime’s line on Tibet, blaming the turmoil on the Dalai Lama and his followers and fanning a nationalist animosity toward Tibetans.

The rally began with a parade of speeches repeating the Chinese regime’s line on Tibet: that it has long been part of China, that the Chinese government spent millions trying to help the Tibetan people, and that Tibetan monks and youths led violent protests in Lhasa recently that caused death and suffering of Han Chinese, the majority ethnic group in China.

The speeches were interspersed with patriotic Chinese songs. No mention was made of police violence used to quash the protests, nor of the Tibetan grievances that experts say sparked the initially peaceful protests in Lhasa.

“China and Chinese people have helped Tibetan people to improve human rights,” said one organizer who spoke in English. “How can somebody who cannot even read or write understand anything about human rights? If they cannot read or write, how can they understand what they have lost in the past in Tibet? People were just blind faith to believe in their religion. They were controlled.”

Another speaker added, “Tibetan culture not only has not been damaged, but has been greatly protected, spread and developed.”

The Pro-Chinese protest was clearly supporting the dreaded Imperialism that lefty college professors hate so much. Oh, how I just know those students get an ear full of self righteous moralizing on the horrors of the Chinese empire every semester.

What should worry the Canadians more however is the fact that the Chinese language press in Canada is shill for the Chinese Communist government (or an arm of it, really) and that they can turn out 1000 college students anytime they want to “protest” this or that. 1000 students who sang “patriotic Chinese songs” (Communist party songs they mean) and were ready to commit violence against their fellow Asian immigrants.

What else could the Red China get these 1000 people to do? Riot? Spy? Kill the Prime Minister?

Canada, the same country that hauled Ezra Lavant in front of thought crime court for criticizing Militant Islam, allows the Chinese government to broadcast Communist propaganda into millions of homes there (as do we, via Direct TV), including what Canada itself would define as hate speech.

The southern border gets a lot of attention from Americans but our northern neighbors are becoming just as dangerous as they allow themselves to be infiltrated by governments and movements that seek our destruction.

I’m ready for a fence.

Civil unrest in the birth place of World War I. Who would have thought Kosovo Independence was a bad idea? Now an American embassy was attacked during riots by Serbian Nationalists in Belgrade:

Rioters stormed the U.S. embassy in Belgrade, Serbia, on Thursday and started a fire in protest of Kosovo’s declaration of independence earlier this week.

Serbian media said a charred body was found inside the embassy.

U.S. officials told FOX News that the embassy building was secured and the fire was extinguished, but angry demonstrators were still rioting well into the night. The mayhem came after a large organized protest against the situation in Kosovo.

Sources have provided conflicting reports on how extensive the breach of the U.S. Embassy was. Some told FOX News that no protesters made it into the building, which has been closed this week.

Other reports from The Associated Press noted masked attackers had gained entry and tried to throw furniture from an office. The reports also said a blaze had broken out inside one of the offices.

The neighboring Croatian Embassy also was attacked by the same group.

It took police about 45 minutes to appear at the scene, and firefighters arrived about the same time and put out the blaze. Police secured the U.S. Embassy and surrounding area, blocking off all access.

Russia, China and some reports claim Venezuela back the Nationalists. We and a crumbling Western Europe full of Islamists and peaceniks support Kosovo. So when the Nationalist backers start flooding the area with weapons and “advisers” what country is it going to fall to protect Kosovo?

So, does Obama or Clinton have an exit strategy from Serbia?

Gateway Pundit has more on the riots.

This makes me glad to be an American. A woman called “darklilth” asked me recently what was wrong with a little communism (I’m paraphrasing), the answer is nothing if you don’t mind being told what to do or think:

BEIJING (Reuters) - China has added ghosts, monsters and other things that go bump in the night to its list of banned video and audio content in an intensified crackdown ahead of the Beijing Olympics.

Producers have around three weeks to look through their tapes for “horror” and report it to authorities, the General Administration of Press and Publications said in a statement posted on the government Web site.

Offending content included “wronged spirits and violent ghosts, monsters, demons, and other inhuman portrayals, strange and supernatural storytelling for the sole purpose of seeking terror and horror,” the administration said.

The new guidelines aim to “control and cleanse the negative effect these items have on society, and to prevent horror, violent, cruel publications from entering the market through official channels and to protect adolescents’ psychological health.”

This won’t change the mind of the “darkliliths” of the world, but it makes me appreciate living in America all the more:

I love this country!

From the N.Y. Sun:

With the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, planning to maintain low interest rates in an effort to keep the economy out of recession, there is no end in sight for the dollar’s record slide, at least for the remainder of the year.

In congressional testimony before the Joint Economic Committee yesterday, he suggested that growth will be “sluggish” in the first quarter of 2008 and, notwithstanding the risk to inflation, he gave no hint that interest rates will be raised in the short term.

The advantage a cheap dollar provides for American exporters, however, has brought stern warnings from the Chinese, who say they will start to move their reserves out of dollars into harder currencies.

Even President Bush’s new ally, President Sarkozy, bluntly told Congress that the continued weakness of the dollar could prompt a trade war between America and Europe, with the Europeans deliberately reducing the euro’s value to allow European exports to compete with American goods.

Both the European Central Bank, which sets the interest rate for the euro, and the Bank of England governor, who does the same for sterling, yesterday left rates as they were to deter inflation and thereby gave no relief to Mr. Bernanke, who implied that there was little prospect of raising American interest rates in the near future.

As with all things finance related, the “benefits” of a falling dollar can seem a bit arcane to the layman. Basically what it means is that there may be more people in countries with stronger currencies looking to stretch their money by buying our goods on the cheap and we should also see a boom in tourism as Canadians, Europeans and the English will have much more purchasing power than they used to. It is American exporters who will do the best however:

The weak dollar (it has fallen more than 20% on a trade-weighted basis since its peak in 2001) is helping exporters close America’s trade imbalance. America’s current-account deficit fell to 5.5% of GDP in the second quarter, from a peak of 7% at the end of 2005.

If the dollar’s still falling it’s a good time to invest in foreign currency by the way. Europe and much of the world isn’t happy with the decline in the dollar, and what it will possibly presage:

A more sinister warning about the implications of the dollar’s weakness was delivered in person to Congress by Mr. Sarkozy on Wednesday.

“Those who admire the nation that has built the world’s greatest economy and has never ceased trying to persuade the world of the advantages of free trade expect her to be the first to promote fair exchange rates,” he said.

The artificially undervalued Chinese yuan “is already everyone’s problem,” he said. “The dollar cannot remain solely the problem of others. If we’re not careful, monetary disarray could morph into economic war. We would all be its victims.”

Implications of the weakness of the dollar price is likely to be raised by Chancellor Merkel when she visits Mr. Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, this weekend.

Mrs. Merkel is “preoccupied” by turbulence in the financial markets, the German foreign ministry’s coordinator for American relations, Karsten Voigt, told Bloomberg News yesterday. Cooperation between America and Europe on interest rates and currency values “is absolutely necessary,” he said.

The Canadian government also expressed concern about the effect of a weak dollar on world markets, and said the issue would top the agenda of next week’s G20 meetings of finance ministers and central bankers in Cape Town, South Africa.

The devaluation of the dollar is causing Middle East oil exporters, who are paid in dollars, to demand higher prices to compensate for the dollar’s loss of value. The rising price of oil and an expected hike in commodity prices may spark inflation.

It sounds like the Europeans and Canada are worried about what a devalued dollar, (devalued largely by China’s economic warfare and the comintern like propaganda issued by our left leaning MSM) means to world stability as oil becomes to expensive to drive the industrial worlds economies. Should we “cooperate” with other countries to keep the peace even if the cooperation means not doing what’s best for our economy?

And if we don’t are things are things on the world market bad enough for a trade war to escalate?