SWEDEN

SWEDEN

Dagens Nyheter, Stockholm, Aug. 6: Muslim extremists in China didn’t use to be a well covered topic. In the prelude to the Olympic Games it has been reported that a number of terror acts and taped threats warn of terrorism. ... Police men were killed in a bloody attack against a police station in Xinjiang, the northwestern province where about eight million Uigurs live — most of them Sunni Muslims.

It’s the most serious incident in many years and is described by authorities as a terror attack. China accuses Muslim separatists in the province for more than 200 terror acts between 1990 and 2001. “Muslim terrorists” are also thought to be behind the latest attacks.

Domestic threat

The most serious domestic threat is thought to come from East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM). The group demands independence from China and has been labeled terrorist by the U.N. and the U.S. In the beginning of last year, China executed one of ETIM’s founders for having “attempted to split the mother country.” On July 9 this year, two Uigurs were executed because of their membership in ETIM.

Two Japanese journalists were assaulted by Chinese police ... when they tried to cover the aftermath of the terror attack against the police station in Xinjiang. The lack of further information surrounding China’s domestic terrorism seems to depend on the communist power’s scanty reports and oppression of the free word — not the lack of incidents to report.

BRITAIN

The Observer, London, Aug. 3: Since oil and gas are costly to produce and much in demand, it makes sense that they are expensive to use. Given the additional cost to Britain of dependency on unreliable energy-exporting regimes and the cost to the world of climate change it is also, arguably, no bad thing if high prices encourage people to be frugal with fuel.

But that is no consolation to those who struggle to pay for even modest energy consumption. It is the poorest in society who suffer most when heating bills soar.

Anger

So when last week, customers of British Gas learnt simultaneously that their fuel bills would go up by around a third and that the company’s owner, Centrica, made profits of 992 million pounds, they did not accept the news as evidence of global markets not working properly. They were angry.

The utility companies have responsibilities to the public just as pressing as the commercial dues they owe to shareholders.

JAPAN

Asahi Shimbun, Tokyo, Aug. 5: The government’s response to the possible leak of radiation from a U.S. nuclear-powered submarine that stopped at Japanese ports earlier this year was surprisingly lukewarm.

Cooling water that may have been slightly radioactive leaked within the USS Houston. The U.S. Navy discovered the leak while the submarine was in dry dock for routine maintenance in Hawaii and alerted the Foreign Ministry in Tokyo ... because the vessel had called at ports in Sasebo, Nagasaki Prefecture, and Okinawa Prefecture in March and April.

Minor accident

But the Foreign Ministry didn’t immediately relay the information to the local governments concerned on the grounds that it was a minor accident. The ministry notified Nagasaki Prefecture and the other local governments of the leak only on Saturday after CNN reported the accident.

According to the U.S. Navy, the estimated total amount of radioactivity released into the environment from the USS Houston during its recent operations in the Pacific was about the same as the radioactivity contained in a common bag of fertilizer.