Roundup - 25/01/2010

• China has said accusations that it was behind the recent attack on Google were 'groundless.' An official spokesman for the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said that the accusations were designed to denigrate China and that the government had no explicit or implicit role in the attacks. He also pointed out that China is the largest victim of internet attacks with 42,000 website hacks last year and over a million IP addresses taken over by overseas attackers.
  
  Meanwhile the People's Daily has hit out at the US in an editorial accusing it of using the internet to stir up unrest in Iran. The editorial claims that unrest which followed elections last year in Iran only begun because of 'online warfare' via You Tube and Twitter.
  
  
  
• Three batches of products from three companies have been withdrawn from sale after it was found that they were tainted with Melamine. The companies, all of which sell their products in Guizhou, said that the contamination was due to a batch of powdered milk which they bought as an ingredient for their products in early 2009. A government official has suggested that this batch of powdered milk may have been left over from the 2008 Sanlu scandal. Sanlu's products caused illness in thousands of babies and six deaths.
  
  
  
• Four senior Communist party officials have signed an open letter criticising the trial of Liu Xiaobo. Liu was sentenced to 11 years in jail in December. He Fang, from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Dai Huang, a former Xinhua senior reporter, and Li Pu, former deputy chief Xinhua were co-signatories on a letter written by Hu Jiwei, former editor of the People's Daily. The officials are all in their 80s and 90s, a fact which may allow them to get away with more than their younger counterparts.
  
  
  
• Xie Zhenhua, WenJiabao's special representative on climate change, has caused consternation by saying that more scientific research needs to be done to prove the global warming is man made. Speaking at a meeting of the Basic group (China, India, South Africa and Brazil) he said that while the mainstream view was that global warming was caused by unrestrained emissions of greenhouse gases, there were alternative theories and that governments should remain open to these theories. Xie later assured reporters that this would not cause any delay in responding to the threat of man-made global warming.
  
  The meeting of the Basic countries is meant to coordinate negotiating positions before the climate summit in Mexico City later this year. The delegates pointed to the delivery of US$10 billion of aid to the least developed countries in the world by the end of the year as a key indicator of developed countries commitment to combating climate change.