Free Republic

For the second year in a row, Angela Merkel, the first woman to become chancellor of Germany, ranks No. 1 on our list of the World's 100 Most Powerful Women. She continued to impress the world with her cool leadership at two back-to-back summits. First, she stuck to her principles, getting G-8 leaders to agree to significant cuts in carbon emissions, among other things. Merkel later corralled European Union countries into an agreement on a treaty to replace the E.U. constitution. Meanwhile, China's vice premier, Wu Yi (No. 2), continues to help lead a government that oversees an economy whose...

CHINA'S PIRACY DILEMMA – U.S. ACTION VIA WTO?Feb 15, 2005 - FreeMarketNews.comby Tim BrownChina’s protection of intellectual property rights is forefront in the news again. In January Vice-premier Wu Yi had told US officials and business people that China would need time to correct the problem of piracy. He provided huge numbers such as the confiscation of 10 billion pieces of fake goods as evidence that China is trying to solve the problem. According to a Newsweek article for the February 21 issue Beijing has been successful in eliminating pirated copies of its 2008 Olympics logo. Now music, film and...

The Chinese Army has just completed a series of Information Warfare combat exercises and the results do not bode well for America. The Info-warfare Group Army, attached to the Beijing Military Area Command, launched a series of "Red Force v. Blue Force" exercises during April that showed that China could indeed score a success against a superior western Army. According to the PLA Daily, the official media outlet for the Chinese People's Liberation Army, "the group army joined hands with the research institutes to develop a simulated communication confrontation training system by using computer network, multimedia and virtual technology." "The...