Free Republic

A Hawaiian defense contractor will serve more than seven years in prison for giving classified documents to a Chinese citizen, the Justice Department announced. Benjamin Pierce Bishop, 60, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, gave classified information to a 27-year-old Chinese woman he was having a romantic relationship with, prosecutors said Wednesday, including information on U.S. nuclear weapons capabilities. Bishop also gave the woman classified information on training and planning sessions between the U.S. and South Korea, prosecutors said.

BEIJING – A newborn girl has been cut out of a sewer pipe at a college dormitory after cries were heard near a toilet, according to local reports. Unable to free the baby from the toilet in Linyi University in eastern China’s Shandong province, firefighters cut the pipe from below and delicately nudged the child free. Video footage of Sunday's incident emerged on Wednesday.

ORIGINAL TITLE IN CHINESE: 关注性别失衡：艺术家创作女兵马俑(双语) When Emperor Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China, anticipated his death more than 2,000 years ago, he wanted an army of warriors to guard his mausoleum forever and protect him in the afterlife。 　　So he ordered the creation of some 8,000 terra-cotta soldiers, along with hundreds of terra-cotta horses and chariots, to be buried with him in his tomb. Historians speculate the soldiers were modeled after eight individuals. When the statues were discovered by workers digging a well in Xi'an, Shaanxi Province, in 1974, the world was stunned by the spectacular funerary art...

Premier Li Keqiang is determined to drive through deep reforms and wean the economy off exorbitant levels of debt before the damage becomes irreversible ___ China’s leaders have brushed aside warnings of an incipient credit crunch in the Chinese economy, determined to purge excesses from the financial system despite falling house prices and the deepest industrial slowdown since the Lehman crisis. Industrial production dropped 0.4pc in August from a month earlier, a rare event that highlights how quickly China is coming off the boil. The growth of fixed asset investment fell to record lows. “It is a shockingly sharp deceleration,”...

A Welsh nurse has been forced to wait for potentially life-saving treatment after local health bosses refused to fund her care in England. Beth Prout, from Pembroke, West Wales, has been diagnosed with a rare form of stomach cancer. There are two hospitals in the UK able to provide the treatment the 57-year-old needs. But NHS chiefs in Wales have refused to cover the cost of sending her to England for therapy. A hospital in Manchester has agreed to provide the care, which could save Ms Prout's life.  Welsh NHS bosses have agreed to pay £1,000 for an assessment, but...

A Barclays' survey of over 2,000 individuals with a net worth over $1.5 billion contains some pretty interesting results. Those in China and Singapore are most likely to leave their country, while those in the US and India were most likely to stay. Please consider Almost Half of Wealthy Chinese Want to Leave.

BEIJING --- The PLA Daily reported that the naval and air forces of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) will conduct its first free air-combat confrontation drill. According to the drill plan, an aviation detachment equipped with several fighters under the East China Sea Fleet of the Navy of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLAN) and a troop unit under the PLA Air Force (PLAAF) will join the confrontation drill. It is the first of its kind in the history of the PLAN and the PLAAF. The free air-combat confrontation drill will be conducted on the one-to-one and two-to-two basis...

ROUGH GOOGLE TRANSLATIO: Beijing and Moscow divided Central Asia Disputed borders September 14, 23:49 Contested borders: Moscow and Beijing shared Central AziyuV Dushanbe concluded the regular summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. In addition to the leaders of the member countries (Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan) to the summit of the heads of income of Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Mongolia, India's foreign minister and the president is not a member of the SCO, and not even having observer status in Turkmenistan. It is possible that as a result of countries still managed to decide on a common interest, which...

In China's parliament - National People's Congress - introduced a bill very similar to the bill now under consideration by the State Duma of the Russian accession Crimea to Russia. We are talking about a document that provides for the accession of China to the part of a foreign country if the local residents in a referendum will decide on becoming a part of the Chinese state, according to ICTV. The project, which made ​​the deputy Wang Han Sun Feb. 28, actually involves the annexation of the territory of a neighboring state - in particular, the Russian Far East. At...

China Could Upend Elon Musk's Renewable Energy Dreams By Travis Hoium | More Articles September 13, 2014 | Comments (0) Elon Musk has as much as $10 billion, not to mention his own personal fortune, riding on the growth of Tesla Motors (NASDAQ: TSLA  ) EV sales and SolarCity's (NASDAQ: SCTY  ) solar and energy storage system growth. It's one of the biggest bets ever made on renewable energy and it's made him a household name across the country. To dominate EVs, solar energy, and energy storage Musk is trying to build out battery capacity before competitors can gain traction, and thus far...

[Russian tourists kidnapped in China????] Chinese hoteliers fraudulently lure vacationers from the rooms, and then block their keys, hold baggage and documents, without giving visitors the opportunity to leave the hotel. Passengers with their luggage in the international airport of Beijing, Beijing, China. Archival photo © AP Photo/Andy Wong MOSCOW, Sept. 12 - RIA Novosti. Association of Tour Operators of Russia reported that China has not given "Turpomoschi" permission for export of Russian tourists. "Turpomosch" take out customers, "Southern Cross" from China on Friday-Saturday On Friday and Saturday, "Turpomosch" was going to take out all the customers of China tour...

KARACHI: While the Navy continues to remain tight-lipped about the attack on its dockyard in West Wharf on Sept 6, having issued a bare-bones statement 48 hours after the incident, further details have been obtained by Dawn that reveal the extent of radicalisation within the Navy. According to informed sources, the attack was carried out entirely by serving Navy personnel, along with Owais Jakharani, a former Navy cadet who could have been given access inside without too much trouble. “It seems the intention was to hijack PNS Zulfiqar [a frigate purchased from China and inducted in July 2009],” said one...

DON'T mind the gap. A woman has reached the age of 24 without anyone realising she was missing a large part of her brain. The case highlights just how adaptable the organ is. The discovery was made when the woman was admitted to the Chinese PLA General Hospital of Jinan Military Area Command in Shandong Province complaining of dizziness and nausea. She told doctors she'd had problems walking steadily for most of her life, and her mother reported that she hadn't walked until she was 7 and that her speech only became intelligible at the age of 6. Doctors did...

WESTERN PACIFIC OCEAN (NNS) -- Two F/A-18 Hornets from Carrier Air Wing 17 embarked on the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson (CVN 70) crashed at 5:40 p.m. local time, today, while operating at sea in the western Pacific Ocean. The initial report is that the two aircraft are assigned to Strike Fighter Squadron 94 (VFA-94) and Strike Fighter Squadron 113 (VFA-113). One pilot was rapidly located and returned to Carl Vinson, and is currently receiving medical attention. Search efforts continue for the second pilot. The search for the second pilot includes guided-missile cruiser USS Bunker Hill (CG 52) and guided-missile...

A U.S. immigration program that grants visas to foreigners who invest in U.S. businesses and create local jobs, has for the first time in its 24-year history run out of quota due to the overwhelming demand by Chinese applicants and will thus no longer be China's newly rich's fast passage to America. The U.S. Department of State said the EB-5 program, which gives visas to those who invest at least 500,000 U.S. dollars and create at least 10 jobs in development projects, has hit its annual quota of 10,000 visas for the fiscal year, and will not receive new applicants...

A Hongqi-10 ship-based missile defence cell installed on a Chinese warship. Photo: SCMP Pictures China has shown off the People's Liberation Army's latest hardware on primetime state television, an advanced short-range missile defence system said to have a “high success rate” destroying incoming missiles and aircraft. The Hongqi-10 (Reg Flag 10) surface-to-air missile was shown in China Central Television's evening news bulletin Wednesday being fired from ships and land-based mobile launchers, and exploding in the sky on impact with its target. It will protect warships against rockets over a limited area, and will be used alongside an “area defence system”...

In China, local bureaucracies are “effectively on strike,” notes John Fitzgerald, director of the Asia-Pacific Center of Swinburne Business School in Australia. Decision makers are not making decisions, he tells me, and business deals are being held up because officials are refusing to approve or disapprove them. A foreign professor I know reports that two well-placed academics in Beijing and Shanghai told him this month that those in charge, in their universities and elsewhere, are now so scared that “nobody dares to make decisions or do anything.” From one side of China to another, officeholders are working as little as...

An interesting trend: America has supplanted Russia as New Delhi’s primary supplier of defense materiel. Will it last? In August, the Indian Ministry of Defense approved the $2.5 billion purchase of 22 Boeing AH-64E Apache attack helicopters and 15 CH-47F Chinook heavy lift helicopters. The sale still has one last hurdle—Indian Cabinet approval—but if completed it will be the latest example of a major shift in U.S.-Indo relations that in the past three years have seen Washington become India’s top defense equipment supplier. The approval of the Apache and Chinook deals comes about a month after Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel...

More types of aircraft are still needed for Beijing to establish its first carrier air wing on China's first aircraft carrier the Liaoning, according to Wendell Minnick, in an article written on Sept. 7 in Washington-based Defense News. 24 J-15 Flying Shark fighters, six Z-18F anti-submarine warfare helicopters, four Z-18J airborne early warning helicopters and two Z-9C rescue helicopters will together form the first carrier air wing of the People's Liberation Army Navy according to an article in Chinese-language newspaper Shanghai Morning Post published Aug. 28, citing an interview with Cao Dongwei, a senior colonel and researcher at the PLA...

Turkey has resumed talks with France on purchasing a new missile system after negotiations on a controversial deal with a US-blacklisted Chinese company hit a rock, the Turkish President Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan was reported Sept. 7 as saying. "Some disagreements have emerged with China on the issues of joint production and technology transfer during negotiations over missile defence system," ErdoÄŸan told reporters as he returned from the NATO summit in Wales, according to private television NTV. "Talks are continuing despite that, but France which is second on the list has come up with a new offer. Right now we are...