By Rand Paul
Obama acts as though we no longer have a Constitution
China is challenging a key American policy toward Japan: the unambiguous U.S. support of Japan's sovereign rights to the Ryukyu island chain, including the key strategic island of Okinawa.
China says the United States is "lifting a rock only to drop it on its own feet" in issuing the annual Pentagon report on the Chinese military.
SEOUL — Secretary of State John F. Kerry arrived here Friday, within range of North Korea's recent nuclear threats on his first trip to Asia as America's top diplomat -- an expedition that analysts say will be defined by efforts to persuade China to influence Pyongyang away from making further provocations.
The Department of Education pulled a "Quote of the Day" by Chinese dictator Mao Zedong from its children's website Friday after a screenshot of the quote went viral.
Lei Feng, the famed half-real, half-fabricated communist model soldier — killed when a telephone pole fell on him more than 50 years ago — is making a dramatic comeback in China's cultural and political life, thanks to vigorous promotion by the Communist Party's new leader, Xi Jinping.
No one lives forever _ nor do they last forever. At least not without a lot of tuneups.
For some gun shop owners, President Obama's push to tighten Second Amendment rights isn't all bad. One New Hampshire gun store has a picture of the president, along with photos of two AK-47s, next to this banner in its front window: "Firearms Salesman of the Year," CBS reports.
Name-checking Borges, Foucault, P.T. Barnum, Stephen Pinker and Mao Zedong along the way, Dutch IM Willy Hendriks has written a chess instruction manual quite unlike any other in the literature.
Xi Jinping, anointed last month as China's new leader, was an impressionable 9-year-old in 1962 when his father, a prominent revolutionary and vice premier, fell out of favor with Mao Zedong.
At a time when China's economy and society are under considerable strain and the country is embroiled in increasingly tense border disputes with its neighbors, the relatively peaceful once-in-a-decade political transition in Beijing has helped deflect attention from the underlying turbulence in the Chinese system.
Xi Jinping succeeded Hu Jintao as China's leader on Thursday, assuming the top posts in the Communist Party and the powerful military in a once-a-decade political transition unbowed by scandals, a slower economy and public demands for reforms.
During China's last party congress, the cadres in charge of the world's most populous nation didn't know a hashtag from a hyperlink. But five years on, there's a new message from Beijing: The political transition will be microblogged.
"How to Win an Election" is a little primer, published by Princeton University Press, that flew out of bookstores just in time for Tuesday's election. The bright red cover reminded some older purchasers of Chairman Mao's famous "little red book" of a generation ago. Several hundred copies seem to have found their way to President Obama's election headquarters in Chicago.
In a small town in northern China's Inner Mongolia, Fan Chen paid a Communist Party boss three times an average urban resident's annual salary to become a local police chief. The scheme was exposed and fell apart, but it was hardly explosive news. It received just a one-line mention in state media.
The next leader of China spent much of his youth living in a dug-out cave.
The reforms, he said, "have lifted hundreds of millions of peasants out of poverty and it has changed the life course of many individuals, including me."
New Chinese leaders Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang pledge clean government, less waste →
The team managed to restore Mao to a more normal appearance with hours of careful massage and makeup, he said, but, just in case, a wax copy of the body was readied as a stand-in.
