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Pat sent me and I presume everyone he knows on Facebook this photo. The story is that Chinese soldiers dressed up as Tibetan monks and caused a riot at a rally. After a quick search it appears this is a photo taken on a movie set. This post has much more detail including the following:

UPDATE - TUES. APRIL 8: The International Campaign for Tibet made a statement via their website that they do not regard this photo as credible evidence of Chinese soldiers disguising themselves as Buddhist monks during unrest in Lhasa last month. They acknowledge that they are in possession of similar images of soldiers carrying monks robes in the Jokhang temple in Lhasa, which were taken during a film shoot in 2001 which involved soldiers appearing as monks.

UPDATE - SUN. APRIL 20: The photo is from the set of “The Touch”, starring Michelle Yeoh, shot in Tibet in 2001. This has been confirmed by the films’ distribution company, and am waiting to hear about a supporting confirmation from an inside source. Will update soon.

(thanks, Roland)

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A congressional candidate is defending his speech to a group celebrating the anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s birth, saying he appeared simply because he was asked.

Tony Zirkle, who is seeking the Republican nomination in Indiana’s 2nd District, stood in front of a painting of Hitler, next to people wearing swastika armbands and with a swastika flag in the background for the speech to the American National Socialist Workers Party in Chicago on Sunday.

“I’ll speak before any group that invites me,” Zirkle said Monday. “I’ve spoken on an African-American radio station in Atlanta.”

And you think that makes it all right? You are too stupid to hold office.

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In 1993, when Travis Hofmann was a freshman of 15, he had traveled little beyond the sand hills that surrounded his hometown, Alliance, Neb. He was the son of a railroad engineer, a trumpeter in the high school band, with a part-time job changing the marquee and running the projector at the local movie theater.

In Travis’s class in global geography at Alliance High School, however, the teacher introduced the outside world with the word and concept of genocide. The teacher, Tim Walz, was determined that even in this isolated place, perhaps especially in this isolated place, this county seat of 9,000 that was hours away from any city in any direction, the students should learn how and why a society can descend into mass murder.

[..]

“The Holocaust is taught too often purely as a historical event, an anomaly, a moment in time,” Mr. Walz said in a recent interview, recalling his approach. “Students understood what had happened and that it was terrible and that the people who did this were monsters.

“The problem is,” he continued, “that relieves us of responsibility. Obviously, the mastermind was sociopathic, but on the scale for it to happen, there had to be a lot of people in the country who chose to go down that path. You have to make the intellectual leap to figure out the reasons why.”

So Mr. Walz took his students — Brandon Bell, the wrestler; Beth Taylor, the cheerleader; Lanae Merwin, the quiet girl always reading some book about Queen Elizabeth; and all the other children of mechanics, secretaries and a town dentist — and assigned them to study the conditions associated with mass murder. What factors, he asked them to determine, had been present when Germans slaughtered Jews, Turks murdered Armenians, the Khmer Rouge ravaged their Cambodian countrymen?

[..]

For nine weeks through the winter and early spring that school year, through the howling blizzards and the planting of the first alfalfa on the plains, the class pored over data about economics, natural resources and ethnic composition. They read about civil war, colonialism and totalitarian ideology. They worked with reference books and scholarly reports, long before conducting research took place instantly online.

[..]

When the students finished with the past, Mr. Walz gave a final exam of sorts. He listed about a dozen current nations — Yugoslavia, Congo, some former Soviet republics among them — and asked the class as a whole to decide which was at the greatest risk of sliding into genocide.

Their answer was: Rwanda. The evidence was the ethnic divide between Hutus and Tutsis, the favoritism toward Tutsis shown by the Belgian colonial regime, and the previous outbreaks of tribal violence. Mr. Walz awarded high marks.

[..]

THE next April, in 1994, Mr. Walz heard news reports of a plane carrying the Rwandan president, Juvenal Habyarimana, being shot down. He told himself at the time, “This is not going to end up good.”

It did not.

[..]

“You have to understand what caused genocide to happen,” Mr. Walz said, with those grim anniversaries in mind. “Or it will happen again.”

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ASHCROFT: No.  No it doesn’t violate the Geneva Conventions.  As for other laws, well, the U.S. is a party to the United Nations Convention against Torture.  And that convention, well, when we join a treaty like that we send it to the Senate to be ratified, and when the Senate ratifies they often add qualifiers, reservations, to the treaty which affect what exactly we follow.  Now, I don’t have a copy of the convention in front of me…

ME: (holding up my copy) I do! (boisterous applause and whistling from the audience)  Would you like to borrow it?

[..]

ME: Actually, Mr. Ashcroft, my question was about this other document. (laughter and applause)  This other document is a section from the judgment of the Tokyo War Tribunal.  After WWII, the Tokyo Tribunal was basically the Nuremberg Trials for Japan.  Many Japanese leaders were put on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including torture.  And among the tortures listed was the “water treatment,” which we nowadays call waterboarding…

ASHCROFT: (interrupting) This is a speech, not a question.  I don’t mind, but it’s not a question.

ME: It will be, sir, just give me a moment.  The judgment describes this water treatment, and I quote, “the victim was bound or otherwise secured in a prone position; and water was forced through his mouth and nostrils into his lungs and stomach.”  One man, Yukio Asano, was sentenced to fifteen years hard labor by the allies for waterboarding American troops to obtain information.  Since Yukio Asano was trying to get information to help defend his country–exactly what you, Mr. Ashcroft, say is acceptible for Americans to do–do you believe that his sentence was unjust? (boisterous applause and shouts of “Good question!”)

ASHCROFT: (angrily) Now, listen here.  You’re comparing apples and oranges, apples and oranges.  We don’t do anything like what you described.

ME: I’m sorry, I was under the impression that we still use the method of putting a cloth over someone’s face and pouring water down their throat…

ASHCROFT: (interrupting, red-faced, shouting) Pouring!  Pouring! Did you hear what she said?  ”Putting a cloth over someone’s face and pouring water on them.”  That’s not what you said before!  Read that again, what you said before!

ME: Sir, other reports of the time say…

ASHCROFT: (shouting) Read what you said before! (cries of “Answer her fucking question!” from the audience)  Read it!

ME: (firmly) Mr. Ashcroft, please answer the question.

ASHCROFT: (shouting) Read it back!

ME: “The victim was bound or otherwise secured in a prone position; and water was forced through his mouth and nostrils into his lungs and stomach.”

ASHCROFT: (shouting) You hear that?  You hear it?  ”Forced!”  If you can’t tell the difference between forcing and pouring…does this college have an anatomy class?  If you can’t tell the difference between forcing and pouring…

ME: (firmly and loudly) Mr. Ashcroft, do you believe that Yukio Asano’s sentence was unjust?  Answer the question. (pause)

ASHCROFT: (more restrained) It’s not a fair question; there’s no comparison.  Next question! (loud chorus of boos from the audience)

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So last week 26 Americans, most of them CIA employees, went on trial in Milan for kidnapping, albeit in absentia and to little notice here. They are fugitives from justice, with international warrants issued for their arrests.

The central figure in the case has always been “Mr. Bob,” Robert Seldon Lady, a bear-like man with a pasha’s grin who spent a lifetime in the CIA.

He and his wife loved Italy so much they bought a house in the foothills of the Alps and retired there in 2004.

Months later an urgent call came, warning Lady to get out of Dodge — don’t even pack.

The cops were on their way.

Tipped off, the Ladys successfully fled the country. But they left behind a bonanza of evidence in their dream home, not the least of which was a CIA surveillance photo of the kidnap victim, Osama Mustafa Hasan Nasr, known as Abu Omar.

How dumb can you get? Sometimes it seems the CIA’s ineptitude knows no bounds.

[..]

“I’ll probably be convicted,” Lady told Cole. “But I won’t go to the trial, and I’ll never see Italy again.”

In the ultimate irony, his house could end up the property of al Qaeda suspect Abu Omar, who’s recovering in Egypt from wounds suffered at the hands of Egyptian interrogators, to whom the CIA delivered him in February 2003.

Italian investigators, tracing Lady’s cell phone calls, put him in Cairo the same time Omar was there.

So it’s hard to be too sympathetic for his plight.

Except for this: He was abandoned on the field.

The CIA has disowned him. It hasn’t provided him a lawyer, or helped him pay for one. Lady is on his own.

[..]

“Leaders used to protect those below from the top as they went up,” Lady groused. “It’s a way of harnessing the loyalty of those they led.”

He is bitter. “Now they protect the top. They manage down and step on anyone below.”

I bet CIA campus recruiters don’t talk about that.

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No, John Edwards has not yet endorsed a candidate.

But nearly 50 of his most prominent backers lined up behind Senator Barack Obama today, in a gesture designed to give Mr. Obama a heavy boost of support less than two weeks before the North Carolina primary on May 6.

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Two signs on the doors leading from the visitors’ clubhouse at U.S. Cellular Field to the first-base dugout read, “NO BOTTLED WATER ON THE BENCH.”

What’s this? Athletes can’t drink water? Even in the humid Chicago summers?

Here’s the explanation I got:

Gatorade is Major League Baseball’s “official sports drink.” So instructions were sent that no player could be seen drinking anything but Gatorade in the dugout. Not even Aquafina, which is the “official water” of MLB. Not even bottles of water with the labels removed.

White Sox clubhouse personnel said if players take bottled water onto the bench, all the bottled water will be removed from the clubhouse as punishment.

So remember, the biggest threat to baseball isn’t steroids or HGH or amphetamines or runaway ticket prices or four-hour games.

It’s water.