"It's the victim wot did it"

Fu Xiancai in the People's Hospital in Yichang, Hubei on 16 June (BBC News)

Police in Zigui county, in China's Hubei province, have concluded their investigation into the beating of Three Gorges activist Fu Xiancai on 8 June that left him paralysed.

This attack had followed a string of other incidents of harassment and assault, in which the same county police appear to have been complicit.

Perhaps it is this last fact that makes the result of their investigation less stupefying.

Human Rights in China reported yesterday that the Zigui county police have found that Fu Xiancai beat himself up.

Oh China.

As read on BBC News today.

Yet another reason not to bother watching CNN

Eric Boehlert describes watching CNN's Situation Room last week in a contribution to the Huffington Post:

Thanks to CNN, I'd learned that Israeli forces had bombed Beirut International Airport and a blockade was in place to cut off Lebanon's ports, that president Bush announced Israel had the right to defend herself, that Hezbollah had fired missiles into the seaside city of Haifa, and that an Israeli woman in Nahariya had been killed amidst the cross-border violence. But I hadn't learned many details about the more than four dozen civilians in Lebanon being killed, a fact that struck me as central to the unfolding story."

With this kind of negligently unbalanced reporting in the US mainstream 'news' media, perhaps it's less surprising that there is often such a slick of pro-Israel nonsense from US contributors in response to perfectly sensible posts on The Guardian's Comment is Free site.

David Clark's article today questions any notion that the ends of the government of Israel are in line with those of the West.

Notice your nuts

Everyman has launched an interesting new campaign called Notice Your Nuts promoting awareness of testicular cancer and encouraging men to check their balls.

The organisation's communications manager Alison Morgan says:

We realise that showing men with giant testicles is quite controversial, but the advert has been filmed in such a humorous way that we feel it will appeal to young men, which helps us to spread important messages to them."

As seen on Gay.com.

Inauspicious signs for ID cards

It seems that at least some of those charged with establishing the government's ID register are as aware of its flaws as the rest of us.

Yesterday, the Sunday Times published leaked emails between Office of Government Commerce mission critical director (identity and defence) David Foord and Identity and Passport Service acting commercial director Peter Smith that revealed plans to implement a scaled-down scheme in order to meet target dates. According to Foord:

This has all the inauspicious signs of a project continuing to be driven by an arbitrary end date rather than reality... I conclude that we are setting ourselves up to fail."

This month, the LSE Identity Project also released Reflections on the academic policy analysis process and the UK Identity Cards Scheme (pdf), which includes discussion on how academics were accused by then home secretary Charles Clarke of 'spinning' earlier this year when they challenged the facts behind the government's justifications for the scheme.

Nefarious net narcissism #563

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You can create your own visited country map at World66.

A naturally selective anniversary

Charles Darwin in 1880 (photo from Wikipedia).

As noted by Afarensis, yesterday marked 148 years since the first time Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection was published, in a contribution to the proceedings of the Linnean Society in London.

Having developed, mulled over and collected evidence for his theory over a period of twenty-odd years, Darwin's hand was apparently forced by his receipt of a letter from Alfred Wallace, who had independently come to similar conclusions.