Back in June, I blogged a too-good-to-check item from the Daily Mail about rapper Snoop Dogg trying to rent the entire country of Liechtenstein for a music video shoot. As absurd as that story sounded, I was reminded of it by the news that New Zealand has just agreed to rewrite its labor laws to accommodate the filming of Peter Jackson's new Hobbit movie: 

Warner Bros and New Line had considered taking the production elsewhere after acting unions threatened to boycott the films in a row over wages.

"I am delighted we have achieved this result," PM John Key said at 0720 BST. "Making the two Hobbit movies here will not only safeguard work for thousands of New Zealanders, but it will also follow the success of the Lord Of The Rings trilogy in once again promoting New Zealand on the world stage."

As part of the arrangement, the New Zealand government will introduce legislation to clarify the distinction between independent contractors and employees working in the film production industry.

Thousands took to the streets in Wellington and Auckland earlier this week carrying signs with slogans like "New Zealand is Middle Earth" and "We Love Hobbits," when Jackson suggested he might move the production elsewhere. Economists have said that losing the production could have cost New Zealand as much as  $1.5 billion -- more than 1 percent of its GDP. Precious!

Public figures are making a habit of lying on their resumes, but (now former) New Zealand military scientist Stephen Wilce has won the prize for most absurd claim.

Wilce claimed that he was a member of the British Royal Marines (Wilce was born in Britain), which isn't true. But that's been done before, and if that were Wilce's only falsehood, his story would have likely attracted very little media interest.

The claim that raised suspicion of Wilche's qualifications was refreshingly ridiculous. He alleged that he was a member of the 1988 British Olympic bobsled team, and that he raced against -- and personally knew -- the Jamaican team that was later immortalized in the 1993 movie "Cool Runnings." Wilche was caught on a secret tape, aired by "60 minutes," a New Zealand-channel TV3 program, saying,"I knew all the Jamaican guys" and that they were "mad, absolute nutters."

Not only does Wilche's claim scream fabrication, but why the hell did he have it on his resume in the first place? What employer did he think would be so impressed by him simply having met the Jamaican team? But it seems he's somewhat of a serial resume embellisher:

Previous employers and colleagues told the programme Mr Wilce had claimed he designed guidance systems for Britain's Polaris nuclear missiles, a now-defunct system that was launched in 1960, at the height of the Cold War.  He also said he had worked for MI5 and MI6, the British secret services, the program reported. 

It said at one previous workplace he was known as "Walter Mitty," a reference to U.S. author James Thurber's fictional character who lives in a fantasy world.

I have a hard time believing Wilche will find work in the near future.

H/T to Boing Boing.

Another side effect of summer heat? In August, according to CNNGo, Japanese monkeys "get most feisty." This year, at least 43 people in Shizuoka prefecture have been injured due to monkey transgressions. On August 25 alone, about 15 people in the city of Susono were injured. Residents have been bitten and scratched; one 73-year-old woman reported that a monkey grabbed her leg from behind.

In Tokyo, a wild monkey was caught two weeks ago after hiding out in a three-story house. In Mainichi, the local newspaper reported a lack of progress in halting the monkey mayhem: "Police, firefighters and local hunters have been searching for the monkeys but so far none have been captured."

Barack Obama's emerging reputation is as a president who doesn't put much stock in personal relationships with other world leaders, but he apparently told an Australian interviewer that he felt a particular bond with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd:   

O'Brien says during his 20-minute interview with Mr Obama, the US president shed some light on his relationship with Australia's Prime Minister.

"It was interesting. Diplomats and politicians say nice things about each other when they're having international chats," O'Brien said.

But O'Brien says Mr Obama spoke candidly about their relationship - which has in the past been described as a "meeting of minds".

"He was quite expansive and quite genuine on what he saw as the commonality and connections between [he and Mr Rudd]. One of which was humility," O'Brien said.

Granted, Obama was playing to the Australian public, but he hasn't exactly taken the bait on similar opportunities to say nice things about his relationship with, say, Gordon Brown. 

Obama is also not the first U.S. president to talk up Rudd. Bill Clinton told FP last December that Rudd was a leader everyone should be paying attention to because he "has a thirst to know and figure out how to do things." At a bloggers' round-table I went to with Clinton last year, he positively gushed about Rudd, calling him one of the smartest world leader's on the scene today. The Australian PM has also reportedly wowed Chinese President Hu Jintao with his knowledge of Chinese. 

Rudd doesn't get the international press of a Sarkozy or a Lula, but he seems to be emerging as the world leader's world leader. 

The editor of China's most influential financial muckraking journal, Hu Shuli, has resigned. For several months, Hu had been under pressure to tone down the aggressive, investigative tone of the magazine from Caijing's business partners, who in turn had come under pressure from government officials. Hu will assume a new post as dean of Sun Yat-sen University's School of Communication and Design, and is expected to launch another editorial venture, likely involving several of her top editorial staffers, who quit alongside their editor-in-chief.

More details will surely come out in the coming days, but already one thing the incident shed light on is how censorship works in China. To western audiences, when we hear about "state-run media," we are accustomed to envisioning a censor with a red-pen, a list of forbidden topics, and an army of automaton scribes marching out to do the state's bidding.

In fact, the reality is much more subtle, and pernicious. There are indeed directives sent from the central propaganda office to the editors of major news outlets in China detailing forbidden topics. But aside from this high level communication, most censorship actually happens internally -- Chinese journalists, who by and large are bright and inquisitive (and drawn to journalism for the same reasons as western journalists: curiosity about the world, desire to travel, etc) work within the system and gradually learn the boundaries of what can and can't be said.

Official politics, for instance, are off-limits, as are details about the personal lives of political leaders. A friend who edits the Beijing-based Environmental Protection Journal once complained to me that he was struggling to make climate change interesting, and lamented that he couldn't tally and lampoon Hu Jintao's carbon footprint, as American publications have done for Al Gore. (Also off limits are any details about Hu Jintao's hair dye, which a reporter at Beijing Youth Daily classified, only half-jokingly, as "deepest state secret.")

What makes Hu Shuli so unique is that she's operated effectively within this system, without ever internalizing it. She has spent time studying and working abroad, not uncommon among Chinese journalists, but never accepted that the rules must be entirely different in China. Caijing has not been directly dependent on state-funding, also relatively rare in China, because Hu went out and secured independent financial backers who, until recently, allowed her greater editorial space.

Now this delicate balancing act has fallen apart, as Hu's departure indicates. It's also telling of how Chinese bureaucracy and censorship works that she wasn't fired. There were no high-profile stories that inflamed the government into a high-profile response and rebuttal. Instead, the end of Hu's tenure at Caijing has been brought about in subtler ways, through pressure exerted by middle-managers raising complaints about whether certain editorial content will turn off readers or advertisers, always tip-toeing around the real issue at hand. 

This, too, is typical. When activists or trouble-makers, from the official point of view, face censure in China, they are usually presented with relatively benign-sounding charges. Xu Zhiyong, the pioneering rights lawyer in China and founder of Gongmeng (Open Constitution Initiative), was held in detention earlier this year after being charged with tax irregularities. Environmentalists in Beijing who come under scrutiny have been cited for failing to obtain the proper motorcycle licenses. In other words, small alleged sins (and the chaos of daily life in China means almost everyone has something on their record) are suddenly discovered and pounced upon by authorities when an individual begins to be seen by the government as too troublesome.

We don't know the full details of what's happened behind the scenes at Caijing. Likely we will know more in the coming days, though Hu, as a smart, savvy operator, probably won't fully spill the beans,

But I am reminded, sadly, of the fate of another, much smaller, but also innovative publication in China that met an unhappy end two years ago. ChinaDevelopmentBrief.com was a bi-lingual Chinese and English web site founded by a Brit, Nick Young, and employing several Chinese reporters, that examined a variety of development and environmental issues facing China. The staff was smart and sometimes cutting-edge in its analysis, but always extremely cautious not to finger-point or inflame the authorities.

Still, as environmental topics became hotter in China, and the site's traffic grew, it was perceived as a threat. (Being run by a foreigner was also a liability.) Young, who is no longer in China, left an account of how the house of cards fell, which is painful, haunting reading for the mundaneness of the charges: "On July 4 [2007] our Beijing office was visited by a joint delegation of a dozen officials from the Beijing Municipality Public Security Bureau, the Beijing Municipality Statistical Bureau, and the Beijing Municipality Cultural Marketing General Legal Implementation Team ... I, as editor of the English language edition of China Development Brief, am deemed guilty of conducting "unauthorized surveys" in contravention of the 1983 Statistics Law."

The other telling detail of Young's account was this: "After investigations and interviews lasting around three hours, they ordered the Chinese edition of China Development Brief to cease publication forthwith. The authorities are now deciding what punishment to apply. It appears that initially they were considering a relatively modest fine." In the end, the publication was permanently banned, and Young's visa revoked. But that wasn't a foregone conclusion.

There can be an extraordinary arbitrariness to how rules, including rules pertaining to media, are enforced in China. That's easy to miss if, from the outside, one has the impression of the PRC as an efficient police station. If you've lived in Beijing, you quickly realize that it's anything but.

And so, with regards to Hu Shuli and her new venture, it's clear that everyone -- muckraking scribes and wary officials alike -- are improvising their roles, and circumspect about what comes next. There isn't a firm policy, or clear marching orders. If this was China of 40 years ago, Hu might have been jailed, or exiled, or worse. But today, China's government is trying to control and curb the influence of independent voices like Hu Shuli in a more circuitous and at times uncertain way, with the final outcome - what degree of editorial freedom Hu will have in her next incarnation -- still unwritten.

China Photos/Getty Images

Only two countries supported the United States in a U.N. General Assembly vote condemning the embargo on Cuba yesterday: Israel (not exactly a surprise) and Palau. While these votes do little more than force commentators to write that "virtually the entire world opposes the embargo" rather than "literally the entire world opposes the embargo," it is interesting to see how Palau seems to be going out of its way to support the United States's most controversial policies.

Remember, Palau famously joined the "coalition of the willing," supporting the invasion of Iraq (despite not having a military) and agreed to take in Uighur detainees from Guantanamo Bay. (Granted, Palau was a U.S. protectorate until 1994 and still depends on the U.S. military for its defense.)

It would be nice to think that the U.S. might return the favor by taking significant action to prevent the global climate change that is literally wiping Palau off the map.

As far as executive tributes go, Australia's latest ranks pretty low.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd spoke today in fond memory of Sam the koala, who died in surgery six months after she was rescued from the country's worst wildfires and became an international "symbol of hope."

The four-year-old koala suffered second- and third- degree burns on her paws in the February fires across southern Australia that killed 200 people, destroyed 1,800 homes and devastated more than 1,500 square miles of land. A video of Sam's rescue by a volunteer firefighter made celebrities of them both. But during a risky operation to remove life-threatening cysts associated with urogenital chlamydiosis, which affects more than half of Australia's koala population, the disease was determined to be far too advanced and Sam was, sadly, euthanized.

To all those who question Australia's political relevance, Rudd retorts:

The symbol of hope for so many people around the world was the great picture of that wonderful koala being fed water by one of our firefighters. And I think that gave people of the world a great sense that this country, Australia, could come through those fire -- as we have, and Sam the koala was part of the symbolism of that and it's tragic that Sam the koala is no longer with us.

Mike Clarke/AFP/Getty images

Australia's National Parks and Wildlife Service, troubled by recent fox attacks on little penguins, have taken protecting the endangered species to the next level:

Fox attacks on endangered penguins have led Australia's wildlife authorities to post snipers at night to protect the birds.

A colony of about 120 little penguins (Eudyptula minor), also known as fairy penguins, at Quarantine beach in Sydney has recently lost about nine of its number to attacks. On Sunday night, the two snipers took their first watch but were unable to shoot the animals responsible[...]

Meanwhile, the snipers are there to stay. "We've had no luck so far finding what has done this so we'll keep on trying," the parks service said. "We'll be there for as long as necessary."

No word yet on whether the Parks Service will be deploying a special cat sniper squad.

Brendon Thorne/Getty Images

The New York Times reports:

Two years after [Australian] Prime Minister Kevin Rudd drew worldwide applause for reversing Australia’s longstanding refusal to ratify the Kyoto protocol on global warming, the government’s ambitious plan to change the way Australians use energy is facing major obstacles, raising the prospect of an early election with climate change as the central issue.

Two key points to note here: first, new elections could give the liberal Labor party a serious leg up on the climate change issue and increase the chances for the passage of future green legislation. But if Rudd wants to hold elections and gain that edge before the world meets to talk about climate change in December, that means losing today's battle to win the war. 

Second, and more importantly, is this plan as "ambitious" as Australian officials are making it out to be? It proposes a cut in carbon emissions by "at least" five percent of 2000 levels by 2020. Granted, Australia is responsible for only two percent of the world's carbon output, but if it wants to be seen as a leader on climate change (as Rudd allegedly wants), it'll have to do better than that.

Despite a recession dramatically affecting some of the biggest and most robust economies in the world, Australia has managed to have an economic improvement. In the fourth quarter, not only did the GDP creep up 0.4 percent while others stalled or fell, but stocks rose and the value of the Australian dollar increased to 82.40 U.S. cents, the highest it's been in several months, thanks to generous government cash handouts intended to stimulate spending. 

Craig James, the chief equities economist at Commonwealth Bank of Australia explained:

"Rumors of the death of the Australian economy have been highly exaggerated... Much of the credit for Australia's resilience must be given to the swift actions of the Reserve Bank and government in stimulating our economy."

So even though China is on the verge of buying out a huge portion of the country's natural resources, and its soldiers are the world's pickiest eaters, Australia does seem to be doing something right.

Think Pat Robertson et al. are uniquely American? Think again. Here's an item in the Sydney Morning Herald about the leader of a fringe church in Australia:

The Pentecostal church's leader, Pastor Danny Nalliah, claimed he had a dream about raging fires on October 21 last year and that he woke with "a flash from the Spirit of God: that His conditional protection has been removed from the nation of Australia, in particular Victoria, for approving the slaughter of innocent children in the womb". [...]

Pastor Nalliah said he was helping to co-ordinate fire relief, including providing trucks to distribute clothes and food and giving his own blood, but he said he must tell "the truth".

Asked by the Herald if he did not believe most Australians would regard his remarks as being in appallingly bad taste, he said today: "I must tell people what they need to hear, not what they want to hear."

He said it was no use "molly-coddling" Australians.

Asked if he believed in a God who would take vengeance by killing so many people indiscriminately - even those who opposed abortion, Mr Nalliah referred to 2 Chronicles 7:14 to vouch for his assertion that God could withdraw his protection from a nation.

"The Bible is very clear," he said. "If you walk out of God's protection and turn your back on Him, you are an open target for the devil to destroy."

TORSTEN BLACKWOOD/AFP/Getty Images

Who'd have guessed it? U.S. President George W. Bush might be going down as the greatest protector of the seas ever. Later today, he is to announce the establishment of the "largest area of protected sea in the world." Commercial fishing and mining will be largely prohibited in protected zones of the remote Pacific that include some of the most biologically diverse locations on Earth.

Critics say that any benefit from the establishment of protected areas will be cancelled out by the effects of greenhouse gases and climate change. Nevertheless, Joshua Reichert of the Pew Environment Group told the BBC that Bush has "protected more special places in the sea than any other person in history."

It just might be another achievement to add to Bush's legacy.

Photo: SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images

Yesterday's Washington Post Quote of the Week:

And I reminded the president that I am reminded of the great talent of the—of our Philippine Americans when I eat dinner at the White House.

—U.S. President George W. Bush with Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, referring to White House chef Cristeta Comerford, who was born in Manila.

GREG WOOD/AFP/Getty Images

Felix Salmon weighs in on the unintended consequences of water pricing:

[P]ricing water can have interesting and not necessarily intended effects. In Australia, for instance, water rights can be traded. When the country was hit by drought, the price of those rights rose, and wheat growers started selling their water rights to the vineyards, because doing so was more profitable than growing wheat. And that, in turn, contributed substantially to the rise in global wheat prices.

The world would be better off right now if Australia's wheat growers had continued to grow wheat, and if Australia's wine growers had simply produced less wine. But that's not how the market incentives played out.

Well, the problem is about to get worse. The Australian government announced today it is buying $2.9 billion worth of water rights from farmers in an effort to safeguard drinking-water supplies. People have been predicting for years that water would become more precious than gold. Now, drip by drip, it's happening.