Communists are still Number 1

The Committee to Protect Journalists reports:

China continued to be world's worst jailer of journalists, a dishonor it has held for 10 consecutive years.

By CPJ's count, China currently imprisons 28 journalists. In second place is Cuba with 21 imprisoned journalists.

In related news, the International Herald Tribune reports on China's continuing use of an old Stalinist tactic:

Local officials in Shandong Province have apparently found a cost-effective way to deal with gadflies, whistleblowers and all manner of muckraking citizens who dare to challenge the authorities: dispatch them to the local psychiatric hospital.

The Buddha of the Kremlin

How would you describe Joseph Stalin? tyrant? mass murderer? If so, the New York Times would likely not have hired you. On Nov. 20, 1927, their reporter, Ms. McCormick who had just returned from a trip to the USSR, called him the "buddha of the Kremlin." She praised him as "calm" and "steady."

This is the same reporter who, six years later, would praise Mussolini's devotion to the "cause of world peace."