Category Archives: Asia

May 13, 2012

Co-host of Obama Hollywood fundraiser under SEC investigation

Posted on May 13, 2012 by ifnm| Leave a comment

The SEC investigation seeks to determine whether DreamWorks made illegal payments to Chinese officials in order to obtain the right to produce and distribute their films in the country.

President Obama’s record $15 million fundraiser tonight at the home of actor George Clooney is being co-hosted by DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg. In addition to being the largest single donor to the pro-Obama Super PAC Priorities USA at $2 million, Katzenberg’s company is currently under investigation by the SEC for allegedly bribing Chinese officials.

The SEC investigation comes just weeks after Katzenberg announced this February that DreamWorks had struck a $2 billion deal to open a studio in Shanghai under the Oriental Dreamworks brand. The China deal was inked in a ceremony that featured Katzenberg alongside Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping, who stopped off in Los Angeles in February on his way back to China after a series of high-level meetings at the White House, including meetings with Obama.

Katzenberg joined Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Chinese vice president for a meeting that led to the DreamWorks deal. In an interview with the Financial Times, Katzenberg said the deal required Xi’s personal approval in order to move forward.

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Posted in Asia, Entertainment, Government, Law & Courts, Obama

May 12, 2012

A Facebook Founder Renounces His U.S. Citizenship

Posted on May 12, 2012 by ifnm| 1 Comment

He declined to say exactly what simplifications the impending billionaire would enjoy, other than the financial ones. The revelation of the renunciation, published by the State Department at the end of April and reported by Bloomberg News earlier on Friday, comes just days before Facebook is expected to go public.


Eduardo Saverin, co-founder of Facebook, at an event in New York last year.

Eduardo Saverin, one of the founders of Facebook, officially defriended the United States in September, giving up his American citizenship for the more tax-friendly residency status of Singapore.

Mr. Saverin, who was born in Brazil and has lived in Singapore since 2010, plans to remain in the Asian island nation indefinitely. Singapore has a maximum personal income tax rate of 20 percent and no taxes on capital gains. He gained American citizenship in 1998.

A spokesman for Mr. Saverin insisted his client did not renounce his citizenship for financial reasons. “I have worked with him for over a year, and that never came up,” said Tom Goodman, the spokesman. “Obviously, it was a big decision, but he’s making all these investments in Europe, Asia and the U.S. It just seemed a lot simpler.”

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Posted in Asia, Technology

April 22, 2012

Meenakshi Thapar Dead: Bollywood Actress Killed After Being Kidnapped By Co-Stars

Posted on April 22, 2012 by ifnm| Leave a comment

Jaiswal and Surin had demanded a 1,500,000-rupee (approximately $28,000) ransom from Thapar’s family. The International Business Times reports that Thapar’s mother gave the kidnappers 60,000 rupees (just over $1,000). The pair evidently decided the amount was insufficient, and reportedly killed Thapar by strangling her to death and then beheading her.


Meenakshi Thapar

Bollywood actress Meenakshi Thapar reportedly has been gruesomely killed by two of her co-stars in a failed attempt to extort money from her family.

26-year-old Thapar was strangled and then beheaded after allegedly being kidnapped by two aspiring actors that she worked with on her latest film “Heroine”.

Amit Jaiswal, 36, and his lover Preeti Surin, reportedly decided to kidnap Ms. Thapar after listening to her boast about her family’s wealth and status in Dehra Dun, in the Himalayan foothills of northern India, according to Britain’s Daily Telegraph.

The New York Daily News quotes Indian police as saying Amit Jaiswal and his girlfriend Preeti Surin allegedly lured Thapar on a trip with them to the town of Gorakhpur. According to the report, the pair then took Thapar captive and sent threatening communications to her mother, saying they would force her to make pornographic films if their demands were not met.

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Posted in Asia, Crime, Entertainment, Murder

April 17, 2012

Son’s Parties and Privilege Aggravate Fall of Elite Chinese Family

Posted on April 17, 2012 by ifnm| Leave a comment

“If you’re discreet, they look the other way,” the former government employee said. “But Guagua’s behavior was striking by the standards; urinating against a fence at Oxford, kissing foreign girls — it all goes down bad in China.”


Bo Guagua, a Harvard student, in Cambridge, Mass. Some of his friends say he is an indifferent student, but one professor called him “a smart lad.”

As the grandson of revolutionary giants, Bo Guagua enjoyed the prestige and privilege that accompanies membership in China’s “red aristocracy.”

After a pampered childhood in the walled compounds of the Chinese capital, he was sent off for schooling in England, where he developed a reputation as an academically indifferent bon vivant with a weakness for European sports cars, first-class air travel, equestrian sports and the tango.

Mr. Bo’s flamboyance, a staple of social-media gossip in China in recent years, became another liability for his father, Bo Xilai, who faces charges of corruption and abuse of power, and his mother, Gu Kailai, accused of murdering a British businessman who was also close to the young Mr. Bo.

Although Communist Party insiders say it was Bo Xilai’s populist reign in the southwestern municipality of Chongqing that ultimately brought him down, Bo Guagua’s high living clearly irritated party leaders, who named the son, a 24-year-old student at Harvard, in the official statement describing the reasons for his father’s fall from power.

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Posted in Asia, Education, Radicals

April 1, 2012

‘Counterterrorism Czar’ Says Every U.S. Company Has Been Infiltrated by China

Posted on April 1, 2012 by ifnm| Leave a comment

Who is it we should be most afraid of when it comes to cyber attacks? According to Clarke: China. He said that the countless amount of electronic material imported by the U.S. from China could be implanted with “‘logic bombs,‘ trapdoors and ’Trojan horses’”.


Richard Clarke claims every U.S. company has been penetrated by the Chinese.

The April issue of Smithsonian Magazine focuses on Richard Clarke, a man who has served as the “counterterrorism czar” under three presidential administrations. In the feature, Clarke makes some strong claims, the most notable of which are that every U.S. company has been penetrated by China through cyberspace and remains vulnerable to attack, and that the United States made and launched the infamous Stuxnet worm.

Clarke, who is famously known for warning the White House to expect a “spectacular attack on American soil” from Al Qaeda and after 9/11 said “Your government failed you,” is now issuing another warning. Ron Rosenbaum for Smithsonian writes:

Clarke now wants to warn us, urgently, that we are being failed again, being left defenseless against a cyberattack that could bring down our nation’s entire electronic infrastructure, including the power grid, banking and telecommunications, and even our military command system.

“Are we as a nation living in denial about the danger we’re in?” I asked Clarke as we sat across a conference table in his office suite.

“I think we’re living in the world of non-response. Where you know that there’s a problem, but you don’t do anything about it. If that’s denial, then that’s denial.”

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Posted in Asia, Business, Technology, Terrorism

February 29, 2012

Deadly Violence Resurfaces in Nepal’s Political Turmoil

Posted on February 29, 2012 by ifnm| Leave a comment

The United Ethnic Liberation Front claimed responsibility for Monday’s attack. The group could be trying to get attention for its demands by attacking the state oil company at a time of public grievance against recent fuel-price increases and energy shortages, experts said.

A bomb exploded near a government office in Katmandu, Nepal, killing three men and injuring seven in what appeared to be the first major terrorist incident in the country since the end of a civil war six years ago.

The police said a group calling itself the United Ethnic Liberation Front took responsibility for Monday’s blast, which went off near the gate of state-owned Nepal Oil Corp. and close to government offices. No details about the group were immediately available.

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Posted in Asia, Multiculturalism, Terrorism

Riots flare in China’s region of ethnic tension

Posted on February 29, 2012 by ifnm| Leave a comment

In recent years, the region has been quiet, but in 2009 almost 200 people died in race riots in the capital of Urumqi, which saw ethnic Uighurs fight against Han Chinese.

At least 12 people have been killed in riots in western China, according to state media.

A mob armed with knives attacked victims outside the city of Yecheng, in the Xinjiang region, early yesterday (Tuesday) evening. Xinhua state news agency said the rioters had killed 10 people, and that police had shot two of them dead.

The riot broke out on the opening day of a 3.64 billion yuan (pounds 364million) highway linking Yecheng to Kashgar, 155 miles away. Yecheng is a main entry point for Han Chinese migrants into western Xinjiang, and is also one of the closest points in China to the borders with Afghanistan and Pakistan.

For years, Beijing has said it is fighting terrorists who want to separate Xinjiang from Chinese rule. Between 1990 and 2003, according to state media, more than 300 terrorists escaped through Yecheng into Pakistan.

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Posted in Asia, Multiculturalism, Riots, Terrorism

February 9, 2012

Police revolt topples Maldives president

Posted on February 9, 2012 by ifnm| Leave a comment

“This morning, about 500 opposition supporters along with some Islamic hardliners protested outside the army headquarters, shouting slogans, and some police officers mutinied and joined them.”

The president of the Maldives, one of the world’s most popular honeymoon destinations, resigned Tuesday after a revolt by police officers, his spokesman said, leaving the normally idyllic chain of islands in chaos.

Mohamed Nasheed was the first democratically elected president of the Indian Ocean nation in three decades.

“This morning, about 500 opposition supporters along with some Islamic hardliners protested outside the army headquarters, shouting slogans, and some police officers mutinied and joined them,” Nasheed’s spokeman said. “And so, the president was in a situation where he could either tell the army to forcibly crack down on the protesters or he could step down. He chose the latter.

“This is a situation where the first democratically elected president in the Maldives is taken down by a former dictator and his supporters,” the spokesman said.

Nasheed said in a nationally televised address that he was stepping down because he didn’t feel he was able to maintain security and peace in the country, which attracts hundreds of thousands of tourists every year.

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Posted in Asia, Islam, Revolutions/Rebellions

February 6, 2012

Chill in Kathmandu

Posted on February 6, 2012 by ifnm| Leave a comment

The State Restructuring Commission by a majority wants the creation of 11provinces, most of them on the basis of ethnicity. “In a multi-ethnic, and multi-linguist country, it is only natural that different identities are recognised,” said Krishna Hatechhu, a member of the SRC.


Prime Minister Baburam Bhattarai

From scarcity to looming ethnic tensions, the city is slipping.

Nepal faces a daily 14-hour power cut crippling industry and normal life. A group of consumers took control of a vehicle headed towards the depot, and each of them “bought a cylinder” on the street itself. Nepal’s gas stations have thousands of vehicles parked outside waiting for their turn to refuel. The government has not been able to ensure adequate supply even after it hiked the price of petroleum products recently.

Nepal presents a case of scarcity, collapsing service delivery and order. The country’s prominent media recently published photographs of two top police officials seated together with a Maoist legislator convicted by the supreme court for murder, and who the police have said time and again is a absconder. Public security, the rule of law and government failure to check the price rise hardly triggers a debate in parliament.

Yet, the prime minister and his ministers try to inject a sense of hope in the scarcity-stricken people. “The Peace Process has entered an irreversible phase,” said Prime Minister Baburam Bhattarai. Over 7,300 combatants will start leaving their cantonments as part of the settlement package for Maoist fighters. Under the package, they will be given a financial grant between Rs 500,000 and Rs 800,000 each in two installments. But the trickier part of the peace process is yet to follow.

Another remaining 9,000 combatants want their integration into the Nepal army, and much against the previous understanding — that only a couple of combatants out of the 6,500 to be absorbed would be up to the rank of Major, or at most of Lt Colonel — they want ranks up to Lt General, and 443 of them. The army chief, Chhatra Man Singh Gurung, has said privately to the PM as well as the defence minister that foregoing academic qualifications, training requirement and physical eligibility while accommodating Maoist combatants is just not possible. But people are no more as euphoric as before. And Bhattarai, seen as a cure for all of Nepal’s problems till a few months ago, is not a politician held in esteem by the people any more.

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Posted in Asia, Democrats/Progressives, Government, Multiculturalism, Radicals

January 27, 2012

Vladimir Putin’s presidential campaign and ethnic Russian nationalism

Posted on January 27, 2012 by ifnm| Leave a comment

Racist tensions are growing in Russia, particularly in large urban centers like Moscow that host huge communities of darker-skinned and often Muslim “migrants” from Russia’s impoverished and strife-torn north Caucasus region, as well as millions of “guest workers” – who often live in legal limbo – from the now independent republics of former Soviet Central Asia.

Off and running in the presidential election that is now just over a month away, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has penned a lengthy article on nationalism, potentially Russia’s most explosive issue.

In the article, Mr. Putin warns that nationalist agitators, both those representing the ethnic Russian majority and those speaking for the country’s multitude of small minorities, are growing voices of destruction that threaten to drive Russia down the path of a Soviet-style breakup.

It’s Mr. Putin’s second program statement in less than a month, reportedly written by three speechwriters and republished on his official campaign website. Experts say it raises some very real dangers posed by Russia’s ethnic and religious complexity, but offers only more state control and curbs on democracy by way of solution.

Among other things, Putin calls for tougher controls on internal migration and illegal immigration from outside Russia, a clampdown on “separatist” political parties, and the creation of a new state agency to regulate interethnic relations. He suggests language testing for immigrants, to make sure they speak Russian, and also calls for creation of a list of 100 books that embody the “self-identity” of Russia, which would be mandatory reading for every Russian student.

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Posted in Asia, Europe, Immigration, Multiculturalism, Nationalism