“Beijing” on The Daily Caller

(Reuters) – U.S. President Barack Obama’s defense chief begins a visit to South Korea on Monday in one of the strongest shows of support for its military ally locked in a bitter feud with North Korea over a deadly torpedo attack. (more)

BEIJING—Google Inc. said Friday that China’s government renewed a license the company needed to continue using its Chinese Web address, despite tensions over censorship requirements. (more)

China has at least $2.5 trillion in foreign exchange and must, due to its own balance of payments rules, invest it all overseas. Most unavoidably goes into American bonds, the only market big enough to absorb it.[1] However, since the beginning of 2005, the PRC has invested almost $200 billion in foreign assets outside bonds. Official Chinese data are unhelpful, but The Heritage Foundation’s China Global Investment Tracker sorts non-bond spending by country and sector. The tracker is current through June 30, 2010. (more)

When Austin Sendek was growing up in Northern California, he was never allowed to use the regional slang term “hella.” (more)

Officials said CNC World would present “an international vision with a China perspective”. (more)

Google Inc. said late Monday that it will stop automatically redirecting visitors from in China site to one in Hong Kong, a practice it started in March to defuse its censorship fight with Beijing. (more)

Here are some thoughts on a few recent and important money-politics headlines: (more)

Not surprisingly, Obama and Congress keep adding “fixes” to ObamaCare, quietly adding to the cost of that man-made disaster. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the other supposedly “honest economists” and estimators in Washington who “score” the fiscal decisions of politicians remind me of an old joke I heard when I was in an economics program at Georgetown University. (more)

JOHANNESBURG — The flight alone would cost at least 100 times the average North Korean worker’s yearly salary, and nearly as hard to come by is the permission to leave one of the most strictly controlled communist states. (more)

We see through a glass darkly, said the Apostle Paul, and that is certainly the case when it comes to North Korea. Power appears to be shifting as the Supreme People’s Assembly meets in Pyongyang. (more)

A diary which publishers claim is that of the man many blame for the Tiananmen massacre is to be published in Hong Kong. (more)

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korea’s most powerful state organ said Friday that South Korea faked the sinking of one of its own warships and warned that the Korean peninsula was edging ever closer to war. (more)

BEIJING – China will chart its own course on currency reform based on its needs, and external pressure will only delay the reform, Assistant Finance Minister Zhu Guangyao said on Tuesday. (more)

ELMENDORF AIR FORCE BASE, Alaska (AP) — China has signaled it could soon join the U.S. and its allies in blaming North Korea in the sinking of a South Korean warship, senior American officials said Wednesday. (more)

While the U.S. remains involved in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, East Asia contains the seeds of potentially bigger conflicts. China holds the key to maintaining regional peace. (more)

Today’s release of Wenlock and Mandeville, the latest additions to the Olympic mascot family, caused many to do a double take. (more)

The latest session of the U.S.-China bilateral human rights dialogue is taking place in Washington this week, the first such meeting since May 2008. These sporadic, formulaic meetings long ceased to be useful in addressing China’s most serious human rights offenses. They have degenerated into surreal exchanges that give equal time and weight to Chinese critiques of America’s human rights “problems” and Chinese filibusters on the “progress” China is making in developing the “rule of law.” There is little reason to expect this upcoming dialogue will see any improvement, particularly given the low priority that the Obama administration has placed on human rights issues in the larger context of the U.S.-China relationship. The Obama team is anyway looking ahead to the “more important” Strategic and Economic Dialogue that is scheduled to take place in Beijing later this month. (more)

Every war requires a unique grand strategy, but certain strategic principles never change. They apply to all wars and are essential to victory. So why is the Obama administration deliberately avoiding the one most essential to winning the war with Islamist-Jihadism? (more)

EDITOR’S NOTE: Have a burning sensation? Consult your doctor. Have a burning question for Matt Labash? Submit it here.
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The new White House plan to “elevate development as a pillar of national security strategy, equal to diplomacy and defense” may spark the biggest political fight over development since Jesse Helms made the head of development report to the Secretary of State. The impending brawl may not be immediately obvious. After all, the Obama administration’s goal of boosting development resembles the ‘3-D’ triad of defense, diplomacy, and development crafted by the George W. Bush administration. But whereas the Bush administration sought to tightly circumscribe the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the Obama administration seeks to restore USAID to its glory days of the 1960s. (more)