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Britain has joined the US, Japan and Australia's condemnation of China after the communist country destroyed a satellite in space using a ballistic missile.The British embassy in Beijing said it had raised the test, the first of its kind for 20 years, with the Chinese foreign ministry noting that the Government believed it was “inconsistent” with China’s opposition to the development of space weapons. A spokesman refused to elaborate on the form the protest took or on the Chinese government’s response. Later, a Downing Street spokesman said: "We are concerned about the impact of debris in space and we expressed...

MOSCOW, Feb. 2 (UPI) -- U.S. and Russian officials changed the International Space Station's orbit to keep it clear of debris from a satellite destroyed by China, a report says. "We are diverting the orbit of the ISS to prevent a possible collision with large fragments of space debris, a decision the Russian Mission Control took together with the Johnson Space Center in Houston," a Russian Mission Control spokesman told Novosti Friday. The spokesman said the debris did not threaten the space station, and that an anti-meteorite system protected it from smaller fragments. China set off an international protest when...

CHINA'S military is harvesting organs from unwilling live prison inmates, mostly Falungong practitioners, for transplants on a large scale - including to foreign recipients- according to a study. The report's authors - Canada's former secretary of state for the Asia Pacific region David Kilgour and human rights lawyer David Matas - implicated dozens of hospitals and jails throughout China in July, after a two-month investigation. Chinese officials denied those allegations. Mr Matas and Mr Kilgour's second report, released today, includes interviews with organ recipients in 30 countries and Canadian hospital staff who cared for more than 100 patients who had...

WASHINGTON - A Republican senator criticized the Bush administration Monday for failing to aggressively confront China over its test of a satellite-killing weapon, which he called a provocative militarization of space. "Key policy makers seem oblivious to the nature and the urgency of the threat," Sen. Jon Kyl (news, bio, voting record), Ariz., told an audience at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. "It's time to start speaking out about this." The Jan. 11 test destroyed a defunct Chinese weather satellite by hitting it with a warhead launched from a ballistic missile. A week later, National Security Council spokesman...

During the Cold War, Western leaders characterized communist China's armed forces as long on manpower and short on military technology. Jan. 11, a perfectly aimed Chinese missile blew an old weather satellite to smithereens, demonstrating that China has potential to wage modern, high-tech war. What happened in the interim is a scandal that makes Watergate, Monicagate and all the other -gates look like spitting-on-the-sidewalk offenses. During the 1996 presidential election campaign, the Democratic National Committee under then-General Chairman Christopher J. Dodd (yes, that Chris Dodd) accepted large, laundered contributions from the Red Chinese and from U.S. industrialists eager to enrich...

SHANGHAI, China (AP) - China has sent men into orbit and launched dozens of satellites, but its test of a satellite-killing weapon is shaking up perceptions about where the Chinese space program is headed. The test, confirmed by Beijing on Tuesday after nearly a two-week silence, has drawn criticism from the U.S. and Japan, and touched off fears of an arms race in space. The Chinese test "was an overtly military, very provocative event that cannot be spun any other way," said Rob Hewson, the London-based editor of Jane's Air-Launched Weapons. "So a bald assessment of that is that it's...

TWO British mountaineers described in graphic detail yesterday how they saw Chinese border guards shoot dead one of a group of Tibetans trying to cross the border into Nepal last month.Steve Marsh and a British police officer who asked not to be identified were having breakfast at Advance Base Camp beneath Mount Chu Oyu, near Everest. “As we watched, first I heard a shot, then I saw one [guard] stop and there was a second shot and a third,” Mr Marsh told The Times. “The rearmost of the group fell to the ground. Someone helped them up and they continued...

The pace and scope of China's modernization of its strategic forces and other surprising military developments could pose a credible long term threat to the United States, the Pentagon warned. In an annual report to Congress, the Defense Department said China's ability to sustain military power at a distance is limited but it has the greatest potential of any nation to compete militarily with the United States. "Long-term trends in China's strategic nuclear forces modernization, land- and sea-based access denial capabilities, and emerging precision-strike weapons have the potential to pose credible threats to modern militaries operating in the region," the...

A Chinese cosmetics company has been using skin taken from the bodies of executed convicts to develop beauty products for sale in Europe, a London newspaper reported. An agent for the company informed customers it is developing collagen for lip and wrinkle treatments from skin taken from prisoners after they had been shot. The agent said some of the company‘s products have been exported to Britain, and that the use of skin from condemned convicts was “traditional" and nothing to “make such a big fuss about,“ the Guardian reported In addition to ethical concerns, there is the potential risk of...

SEOUL (AFX) - China's top envoy to South Korea has expressed concern that US troops based here could be deployed elsewhere in the region under a new Seoul-Washington accord. Chinese Ambassador Ning Fukui told a security forum that the role of some 32,000 US troops based in the peninsula must be limited to providing security for South Korea. 'If they work in a bilateral framework, we can understand it. But if they act against a third party, we cannot but pay attention to it,' Ning said at a forum held by the Korean Institute of Defense Analyses. Ning did not...

Beijing plans for national greatness. IT SEEMS LIKE ONLY A few months ago that commentators were blithely babbling about how much relations between Beijing and Washington had improved since the start of the Bush administration, which was marred by China's downing of an American EP-3 surveillance plane and the detention of its crew. The conventional wisdom was that the war on terrorism had united the United States and China against a common enemy. This rosy scenario is, unfortunately, being undermined almost daily by Beijing's actions. Consider what the Chinese Communist leadership has done just in the past year: It passed an...