Another Chechyan War in the Offing?

It's really nice when terrorists owe up to their acts of terrorism, like this Chechen fellow:

Chechen rebel leader Dokku Umarov claimed that he personally gave orders to attack the Moscow subway this week, according to a Chechen rebel Web site. [CNN]

Usually terrorists remain faceless and speechless, letting the imagination take hold on what they look like and meditate on why they did it. The attacks on the Moscow subway system, it seems, was a simple act of revenge, with a challenge to Moscow to "bring it on", a phrase made famous by President Bush.

Will Moscow "bring it", so to speak? Given that they wrecked Chechnya twice already, another drubbing is in the cards. Russians are well-known for their cruelty and their lust to blow everything in front of them -- men, women and children -- to smithereens.

Google: A Simple Choice

This whole China-Google troubles is rather irritating in that choices, for Google, are rather simple: comply with the law and make money in the world's biggest online market or leave the country and keep a clean conscience.

China is not a democracy. We know this. China does not respect, which we in the free world, call human rights. We know this. Yet the expectations for China are the same as a democracy. It's an incongruity that seem to be overlooked by some critics. China is a sovereign country, whose laws we may not like but nevertheless must comply. We would expect the same of any Chinese company operating in the United States.

That Google is wringing its hands over the matter is just drama to me.