引述 :『As Asian markets surge ahead, tiny Cambodia—short on credit but big on ambition—is rushing to join the crowd. The country has been moving full speed ahead since Sept. 6, when it announced an agreement with the Korea Exchange to launch a Cambodian stock exchange by 2009—and a handful of the country's biggest corporate players are lining up to get in first. Even as the stock exchange backers passed their first hurdle—a securities law slid through Parliament days after the kickoff—some people wonder how a stock market would operate in this corner of Southeast Asia where luxury villas and country plantations of corrupt government officials dot impoverished cities and former jungle landscapes. Even the World Bank lost its temper with Cambodia last year, temporarily suspending several of its projects and demanding repayment of money wasted on bribes. It has since resumed work. Another reminder of the corruption problem arrived in late September, when Transparency International's yearly rankings of the most corrupt countries listed Cambodia No. 162 out of 180 countries.』

引述 :『China's Internet censors have been busy in recent days. Google's (GOOG) Chinese search engine was shut down (BusinessWeek.com, 10/22/07) for parts of Thursday and Friday, a spokesman for the company says. There were reports of similar actions against the search services for Yahoo! (YHOO) and Microsoft (MSFT). And one Chinese blogger reported that YouTube, the video service that Google recently bought, had been blocked last week. "Is that true another top website is going to leave us?" wrote Shi Zhao, a 34-year-old chemical engineer, on his blog. There are no official statements explaining the crackdown. But it seems likely that China's censors have been particularly sensitive because of the gathering of the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing (BusinessWeek.com, 10/1/07), an event that occurs every five years. In addition, the blocking of American search engines comes shortly after President George W. Bush met with the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan Buddhist leader. Web surfers who tried to reach Google.cn ended up being forwarded to Baidu (BIDU), the Chinese search engine that dominates the market in that country.』

引述 :『NEWSWEEK: In 2004 candidates and advocacy groups spent about $673 million on broadcast commercials. That figure is expected to hit $1 billion this cycle. Why the surge? David Schwartz: The media landscape is much more crowded than it used to be. As a result you have to run an ad more in order to make an impression. A viewer needs to see an ad about 18 times before it sinks in. Plus, it used to be just national advertising, but the spending has gotten more and more targeted. In the last few elections we've seen a big percentage of the money being poured into swing states, and in the last election some of those ads were around-the-clock.』

引述 :『Like its namesake, the Great Firewall consists of hundreds of individual fortifications spread out along a vulnerable frontier. At its core is a giant bank of computers and servers. Traffic generated by China's 162 million Internet users is routed through the shield, which checks all requested URLs against a blacklist of tens of thousands of Internet addresses. The list includes pages offering political information deemed dangerous by the government, like BBC News and Voice of America. Access to these sites is blocked (at least in theory), and when users attempt to view one of them, they are punished with an involuntary time-out lasting anywhere from 30 seconds to 30 minutes. Search engines are similarly restricted. If you enter the characters for "democracy" or "Tiananmen Square massacre" into Google.cn you will generally get zero results. This is a technological breakthrough for the Chinese government. Until recently, it could not interfere with the inner workings of search engines and instead blocked entire sites, not just individual pages of a site.』

引述 :『NEW YORK - Even with the NBA season under way, commissioner David Stern hasn't forgotten the New York Knicks' embarrassing offseason. In an interview broadcast Tuesday, Stern questioned the conduct of Knicks management, which lost a sexual-harassment case in early October. Asked about the state of the Knicks, Stern told ESPN: "It demonstrates that they're not a model of intelligent management. There were many checkpoints along the way where more decisive action would have eliminated this issue." Madison Square Garden chairman James L. Dolan, who hasn't spoken publicly since a jury ordered his team to pay $11.6 million to former Knicks' executive Anucha Browne Sanders, said in a statement Tuesday that "we have high regard for the commissioner.』

引述 :『BEIJING/SHANGHAI (Reuters) - China's worst fuel crisis in two years spread to the capital and other inland areas by Wednesday, and one man was killed in a brawl at a petrol station queue, upping pressure on the government to intervene. Diesel shortages in China's political heart, which escaped previous supply crunches unscathed, highlight tensions between the government and its increasingly independent oil firms about who should pay for the country's generous fuel subsidies. At stake are profits for oil majors Sinopec and PetroChina from selling motor fuel in the world's second-largest consumer, where pump prices have not been raised in 17 months even as crude costs hit a series of record highs.』

引述 :『YANGON (AFP) - About 100 Buddhist monks marched Wednesday in central Myanmar for the first time since the junta's deadly crackdown on anti-government protests last month, witnesses said. The peaceful demonstration came as officials said UN envoy Ibrahim Gambari would arrive in Myanmar at the weekend for his second round of talks with the ruling generals amid ongoing international concern over September's violence. The monks marched for about 30 minutes in the town of Pakokku, the scene of one of the most serious confrontations with the military as mass street rallies escalated towards their bloody conclusion, which left 13 people dead.』