BEIJING (Reuters) - China hit back at U.S. criticism of Internet censorship and hacking on Friday, warning that relations between the two global heavyweights were being hurt by a feud centered on web giant Google.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Thursday challenged Beijing and other authoritarian governments to end Internet censorship, an issue that has jumped to the heart of U.S.-China ties after Google threatened to quit China due to hacking and web restrictions.
China's Foreign Ministry said the U.S. criticisms could hurt relations between the world's biggest and third biggest economies, already strained by disagreements over trade imbalances, currency values and U.S. weapons sales to Taiwan.
"The U.S. has criticized China's policies to administer the Internet and insinuated that China restricts Internet freedom," said spokesman Ma Zhaoxu. "This runs contrary to the facts and is harmful to China-U.S. relations.
"We urge the United States to respect the facts and cease using so-called Internet freedom to make groundless accusations against China," Ma said in a statement carried on the Foreign Ministry website www.mfa.gov.cn.
But the spokesman also indicated that his government did not want to see the dispute overwhelm cooperation with the Obama administration, which has sought Beijing's backing on economic policy and diplomatic standoffs, such as Iran and North Korea.
Ma said each side should "appropriately handle rifts and sensitive issues, protecting the healthy and stable development of China-U.S. relations."
On Thursday, Chinese Vice Foreign Minister He Yafei played down the dispute with Google and indicated that his government was more worried about broader economic and political disputes that could flare up in coming months.
Clinton's speech criticized the cyber policies of China and Iran, among others, and demanded Beijing investigate the hacking complaints from Google.
Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are blocked in China, which uses a filtering "firewall" to prevent Internet users from seeing overseas web sites with content anathema to the Communist Party.
"Sino-U.S. ties have been impacted," Shi Yinhong, an international relations professor at Renmin University in Beijing, said of Washington's push on Internet controls.
"China has admitted there are areas where it can improve, and then Clinton made her comments in a public venue, comparing us to Egypt and Saudi Arabia," he added. "So I think over the past year Clinton's speech is the most undiplomatic thing she's said."
MURKY MEDIA RESPONSE
Some sections of the Chinese media were quick to criticize Clinton's remarks. But many of the Chinese reports were themselves cut from websites within hours of appearing.
It was unclear why they were removed, but Chinese websites often adjust or cut content based on propaganda authority instructions, especially for volatile issues.
Many cyber-experts suspect that the hacker attacks from China on Google and other targets were so sophisticated that official involvement was likely.
Ties between China and the United States have been put to the test in recent months over trade, currency, climate change and arms sales to Taiwan.
With the two giant nations joined at the hip economically, Sino-U.S. tensions are unlikely to escalate into outright confrontation, but could make cooperating on global economic and security issues all the more difficult.
Earlier this month, China denounced the U.S. sale of Patriot air defense missiles, capable of intercepting Chinese missiles, to Taiwan, which Beijing claims as its own.
China announced its own anti-missile test soon after.
Beijing has warned that more U.S. weapons sales to Taiwan could badly bruise relations with Washington, and has urged President Barack Obama not to meet the Dalai Lama, the exiled Buddhist leader of Tibet who Beijing denounces as a separatist.
"I think over the short haul (the Google issue) is going to go away because other problems that the U.S. and China face are rather numerous," said Niu Jun, an international studies expert at Peking University. "I think economic and trade issues are still more important."
(Additional reporting by Chris Buckley, Lucy Hornby, Yu Le and Huang Yan; Editing by Ken Wills and Jeremy Laurence)
Editor's note: Details were added after the fourth paragraph
Azerbaijan, Baku, Jan. 22 / Trend News E.Tariverdiyeva /
The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict can be resolved only by preserving the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan, said Ramiz Mehtiyev, Azerbaijani Presidential Administration head, at the first Azerbaijani-Russian Civil Forum today.
"The Foreign Ministers of Azerbaijan and Armenia signed a joint document at the OSCE Ministerial Council Meeting in Athens," he said. "Signing this document, for the first time Armenia recognized that the solution to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is possible only within the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan."
According to Mehdiyev, the forum could not bypass such a mandatory issue as the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
"Azerbaijan's territorial integrity is recognized by all world powers. I want to take this opportunity to ask journalists participating in this event to literate covering this complicated conflict. The situation with the media coverage of the conflict must change," he added.
The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. Armenian armed forces have occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan since 1992, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. Azerbaijan and Armenia signed a ceasefire agreement in 1994. The co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group - Russia, France, and the U.S. - are currently holding the peace negotiations.
Armenia has not yet implemented the U.N. General Assembly's resolutions on the liberation of the Nagorno-Karabakh region and the occupied territories.
"Azerbaijan said a firm 'No!' to the Soviet totalitarianism exactly 20 years ago on Jan. 20, 1990," he said.
In that fateful January, under Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev's order, the Soviet authorities sent a large contingent of the Soviet army to Azerbaijan. The contingent was composed of reservists of Armenian origin from the Northern Caucasus. This operation was accompanied by unprecedented brutality against the civilian population, he added.
"But for some reason Gorbachev did not sent troops to Yerevan in 1988-90, when the aggressively-minded group of Armenians forcibly expelled Azerbaijanis, including the elderly, women and children, from their historic lands, accompanying it all the numerous brutal murders," he said. "When a group of mad ripped open pregnant women, raped and rioted, the Soviet media was silent about it."
Speaking in the Academy of National Economy under the Government of Russia, Hayward said BP had worked for decades in offshore Arctic regions worldwide, such as the North Slope of Alaska, the Canadian Arctic and Northern Norway.
"Building on this expertise, we would certainly welcome the opportunity to deploy our technology and skills to explore and produce Arctic resources in Russia as well," he said.
Russia is claiming part of global Arctic believed to hold vast untapped oil and gas reserves. Hayward, however, referred specifically to undisputed Russian Arctic territories.
BP is present in Russia through TNK-BP, a highly lucrative 50-50 joint venture with four Russian billionaires, which accounts for about a quarter of BP's global oil output.
TNK-BP was embroiled in a shareholder conflict until recently, in which BP and its Russian billionaire co-owners clashed over strategy, management and control of the third largest oil producer in Russia. With the conflict now resolved, BP seems to be willing to expand its business in Russia.
Hayward said TNK-BP had started up three big new projects last year at the Verkhnechonskoye oil deposit in East Siberia, as well as the Uvat and Kamennoe oil fields in West Siberia.
At Kamennoe, TNK-BP is using "field of the future" technology where sensors in the reservoir send data to a remote control center using wireless networks, he said.
"These technologies and others are allowing us to develop major fields which were otherwise considered non-commercial. I believe that oil and gas should be seen as a cutting-edge industry - over the years, we have made extraordinary progress pushing back the physical and technical frontiers, whether into ultra deep water, complex gas reservoirs or generally the ice in the Arctic," he said.
Hayward also mentioned TNK-BP's Samotlor oil field in West Siberia as an example of using cutting-edge technology.
"Over the last few years, TNK-BP has used advanced three dimensional seismic imaging to reveal seven new satellite structures and recovery rates from mature parts of the field are being improved through advanced waterflooding techniques - increasing the resources and lifetime of the field," he said.
(Mainichi Japan) January 21, 201
Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama has expressed reservations over a proposed bill allowing the recording and videotaping of police and prosecutor questioning sessions.
The move comes amid the ongoing investigation into a fund-raising scandal involving Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) Secretary-General Ichiro Ozawa.
"The submission of the bill could be deemed as criticism of public prosecutors," Hatoyama claimed at his office on Wednesday. However, many in the DPJ are in favor of prioritizing the amendment to the Criminal Procedure Law following the land deal scandal, in which three aides to Ozawa have been arrested.
"There are opinions that the bill should be submitted (to the current Diet session). We need to handle the matter properly based on sober judgment," said Azuma Koshiishi, head of the DPJ caucus of the House of Councillors, at its general meeting on Wednesday. Some DPJ members are even calling for a bill sponsored by legislators.
The DPJ pledged in its manifesto for last summer's House of Representatives election to work toward allowing the audio and visual recording of questioning, and the bill is "not something that has popped up on the heels of the (land deal) incident," said Kenji Hirata, head of the Diet Affairs Committee for DPJ's Upper House caucus. DPJ Lower House member Hiroshi Kawauchi has also campaigned among party legislators to support the bill.
However, concerns over the ill-timed submission of the bill are strong among the ruling coalition parties. "It could lead to misunderstanding to take up the issue of recording at a time like this," said Mikio Shimoji, head of the Policy Research Council of the People's New Party, DPJ's junior coalition partner.
Meanwhile, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirofumi Hirano said on Wednesday that "the bill is not among those to be submitted by the government to the current Diet session."
