The BBC quotes Black Eyed Peas star Will.i.am as rejecting a boycott of the Beijing Olympics because it isn't right to "punish a whole country." Fair enough. The Black Eyed Peas are planning to gig in China in June.

But then, Will.i.am, who says the events in Tibet are "messed up," suggests a far more radical tack:

If America really wants to make a difference, it should stop importing China's products and pay back its debt."

What we have here, folks, is the fallacy of the excluded middle. There's actually a lot the United States can do in this here. For some more coherent thoughts on how to pressure Beijing on human rights, check out the new Web exclusive by William F. Schulz, the former head of Amnesty International USA.

From Shanghaiist comes this disturbing story of a young American attacked by a mob of angry Chinese outside a Carrefour store in Zhuzhou, Hunan Province, on Sunday night:

Last night [Sunday, Apr. 20] around 7pm my friend was attacked by a mob of about 150 people outside the Carrefour in Zhuzhou, Hunan.... When leaving Carrefour some of the crowd started shouting at him and he tried to say he didn't have anything to do with the Olympics, but 3 men started to push him and then he was hit in the back of the head at least 3 times. He started to run, and the mob chased him. He jumped into a cab, but the mob surrounded the car and started shaking and rocking it. The cab driver was shouting at him to get out. Then they started hitting the car. The crowd was shouting "kill him! kill the Frenchman." He called the Field Director while in the back of the car. The cab driver abandon the car when he saw police coming. Two police made there way though the mob and managed to drive the cab away. The Field Director alerted.... The police got him another cab and he took it from Zhuzhou to the field director's home in Changsha. He spending the night here in Changsha and is likely leaving China as soon as possible.

The French supermarket chain has been under siege in China over the past week. And it's hardly alone. A similarly disturbing, though less violent, episode took place last week right here at home -- at Duke University -- when a 20-year-old freshman from China who had tried to encourage dialogue between Chinese student demonstrators and a smaller group of Tibetans found her personal information published on the Internet. Hundreds of thousands of angry and threatening posts appeared on Chinese Web sites. Back in China, the student's parents were threatened and had to go into hiding.

It's all part of an increasingly scary rise in nationalism on the mainland. According to the IHT, Beijing has encouraged such nationalistic fervor to run amok by easing up on restrictions on online forums in recent weeks. If true, that news is disturbing. Because in just a few months, 500,000 foreign tourists will begin arriving in China for the Olympics. What kind of welcome are they going to receive?

(Hat tip: Passport reader hdp)

Armend Nimani/AFP/Getty Images

Kosovo is one step closer to full statehood. Today, its assembly officially adopted a new constitution declaring Kosovo a democratic, secular, multiethnic state. Right from the start, the constitution makes clear that Kosovo will not be partitioned nor will it be joining a Greater Albania.  From Article 1:

The Republic of Kosovo is an independent, sovereign, democratic, unique and indivisible state . . . The Republic of Kosovo shall have no territorial claims against, and shall seek no union with, any State or part of any State."

Per recommendations from U.N. Special Envoy to Kosovo Marti Ahtisaari, the constitution also includes an entire chapter spelling out the rights of and provisions for Kosovo’s minority groups, including parliamentary seat allotment. Twenty of the assembly’s 120 seats shall be reserved for minorities, each of whom are guaranteed a respective minimum number of seats as follows:

the Roma community, one (1) seat; the Ashkali community, one (1) seat; the Egyptian community, one (1) seat; and one (1) additional seat will be awarded to either the Roma, the Ashkali or the Egyptian community with the highest overall votes; the Bosnian community, three (3) seats; the Turkish community, two (2) seats; and the Gorani community, one (1) seat. . ."

Bet you didn’t know that Kosovo even had an ethnic Egyptian community.

Pieter Feith, head of the EU-led supervisory office in Kosovo, has already approved of the new constitution, but Kosovo's U.N. mission (UNMIK) has been less than eager to react. In 1999, U.N. resolution 1244 granted UNMIK the authority to administer Kosovo until the Security Council could agree on a more lasting solution. But because Russia has blocked all efforts to pass a new Kosovo resolution, UNMIK now lacks the mandate to actually hand over their authority to Kosovo’s fledgling government, new constitution or not.

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Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai has an op-ed in today's Guardian in which he predicts that President Robert Mugabe is about to bring the hammer down to maintain power after last week's election, the results of which have still not been released:

Adept at stealing elections from the hands of voters, Mugabe is now amassing government troops; blocking court proceedings where we have attempted to seek an order simply for the electoral commission to release the final tally of the March 29 poll; raiding the offices of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC); and casting a pall of suppression and gloom over the country. The feared militias, made up of misguided activists and the same war veterans who pushed for and benefited from the disastrous land confiscations from the late 1990s, are being mobilised. This can only mean, despite some earlier evidence to the contrary, that sanity has been discarded along with truth in the offices of Zanu-PF.

Tsvangirai goes on to promise Mugabe that he need not fear prosecution if he steps down.

Mugabe, predictably, is going back to one of his favorite tactics by raiding the country's few remaining white-owned farms and accusing white farmers of trying to regain their lost property amid the election chaos:

"Land must remain in our hands. The land is ours, it must not be allowed to slip back into the hands of whites," President Mugabe told a crowd gathered at a funeral of his wife's uncle.

Stoking racial tensions has worked for Mugabe in past times of crisis, but the fact that election results have still not been released and he is accusing his own handpicked election commission of "errors and miscalculations" is probably a sign that Mugabe did much worse than expected. Mugabe's "father of the nation" routine is going to be harder to pull off this time. Short of resorting to brute force on a massive scale, it's hard to see how he gets out of this one.

China said yesterday it had restored order to the heavily Tibetan areas of Western China. Now, it turns out, that claim may have been a bit of an exaggeration. London's Times is reporting from Sichuan that as many as 1,000 paramilitary police opened fire late last night on a group of several hundred monks and other protesters, killing eight and wounding dozens:

Chinese paramilitary police have killed eight people after opening fire on several hundred Tibetan monks and villagers in bloody violence.... Witnesses said the clash – in which dozens were wounded – erupted late last night after a government inspection team entered a monastery in the Chinese province of Sichuan trying to confiscate pictures of the Dalai Lama.

Here's the background:

Officials searched the room of every monk in the Donggu monastery, a sprawling 15th century edifice in Ganzi, southwestern Sichuan, confiscating all mobile phones as well as the pictures. When the inspectors tore up the photographs and threw them on the floor, a 74-year-old monk, identified as Cicheng Danzeng, tried to stop an act seen as a desecration by Tibetans who revere the Dalai Lama as their god king. A young man working in the monastery, identified as Cicheng Pingcuo, 25, also made a stand and both were arrested. The team then demanded that all the monks denounce the Dalai Lama... At about 6.30 p.m., the entire monastic body marched down to a nearby river where paramilitary police were encamped and demanded the release of the two men. They were joined by several hundred local villagers, many of them enraged at the detention of the 74-year-old monk Cicheng Danzeng, who locals say is well respected in the area for his learning and piety. Shouting 'Long Live the Dalai Lama,' 'Let the Dalai Lama come back' and 'We want freedom,' the crowd demonstrated until about nine in the evening. Witnesses said that at around that time, as many as 1,000 paramilitary police used force to try to end the protest and opened fire on the crowd.

Watch for more trouble when the Olympic torch comes to London this weekend.

NBC Sports Universal Chairman Dick Ebersol says viewers of the network's coverage of the XXIX Olympiad shouldn't expect a lot of superfluous reports on political protests and whatnot. NBC is planning 3,600 hours of television and Internet coverage of the Games, but Ebersol says NBC Sports will cut to news about unrest "only if it interferes with the competition or hinders athletes from getting to the competition." It's a policy that is not dissimilar from that of the Chinese state media, which spent all of yesterday pretending that the protests in Athens never happened.

As Anne Applebaum points out in today's Washington Post, we always expected this kind of "see no evil" behavior from the Olympics' corporate sponsors. But the media? There was always the danger that, with the Games being covered primarily by sports reporters ill-equipped to handle the complexities of modern day China, the political angle would be under-covered or simply ignored. Which is why this comment by Ebersol is concerning:

I believed in July of 2001 and believe today that the I.O.C. gave the Games to Beijing because it was really important for them to take place for the first time in the largest nation in the world. As it relates to the mysteries of China, including human rights, I believe giving the Games to China shines a light on a part of the world that wouldn't otherwise exist.”

China's human rights record is hardly a "mystery." Check out the U.S. State Department's country report on the subject, which lays out Beijing's dismal record in no uncertain terms.

All of this talk of shining a light on China reminds me of the way corporations -- automakers, banks, oil -- talked about doing business in apartheid South Africa back in the 1970s. Their pretense was the same one that NBC and the Beijing Games' corporate sponsors are employing today: that engagement encourages change from within. A quarter of a century later, in 2002, the victims of apartheid filed multi-billion dollar class-action lawsuits against IBM, Ford, Citigroup, British Petroleum, and other multinationals for collaborating in a crime against humanity. At least some firms, such as BP, defended their South African operations by arguing that they demonstrated to white South Africans that integration and profits can go hand-in-hand.

In the face of Beijing's quashing of political dissent, what will NBC and the other corporations that have gotten into bed with Beijing be able to say in defense of themselves? NBC paid nearly $900 million for the right to broadcast the Olypmics and China is already censoring its coverage. If that isn't enough to dispel any "mysteries" of authoritarianism, what is?

Ma Ying-jeou; Photo: Andrew Wong/Getty Images

Saturday's presidential election in Taiwan is fast approaching, but until the last few days, the outcome had seemed fairly predictable. The Kuomintang (KMT), which favors better relations with Beijing, appeared to have a lock on the presidency after voters voiced their disapproval of current President Chen Shui-bian's more confrontational stance during January's legislative contests.

Now, many analysts are wondering if China's ongoing crackdown in Tibet is going to help Frank Hsieh, the candidate from Chen's Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). The DPP is certainly seeking to capitalize, upping its anti-mainland rhetoric and warning that Taiwan could suffer Tibet's fate if the KMT wins. Ma Ying-jeou, the KMT's candidate, has pushed back, saying, "Tibet is under mainland China rule, and Taiwan is not" and that the comparison "hurt Taiwan's status."

In the end, I'd still bet Ma will be able to pull it out after a bitter campaign (at a DPP rally on Sunday, the education minister accused Ma's father of "screwing" his adopted daughter). But the situation in Tibet may push Ma to be a lot less friendly to Beijing than he originally intended to be -- and those hoping for a reduction in tensions across the Taiwan Strait may be sorely disappointed.

(Hat tip: China Digital Times)

BEHROUZ MEHRI/AFP/Getty Images

(Editor's note: Please see update at bottom.)

If you were gay and your country hanged your partner for homosexuality, wouldn't you be justified in fearing that your government would be coming for you next?

That's the position that a young Iranian is in. Nineteen-year-old Mehdi Kazemi came to Britain to study. While there, he learned that his boyfriend back in Iran had been executed after confessing to being in a relationship with Kazemi. Officials had also visited Kazemi's parents' house with an arrest warrant for him.

Kazemi did the logical thing. He applied for asylum. Britain denied it on the grounds that gay people in Iran aren't systematically persecuted on the basis of their sexual orientation. Since then Kazemi has made it to the Netherlands, but his asylum petition there was recently rejected on the grounds that people can plea for asylum in only one European Union country.

Currently, Kazemi risks being deported back to Britain, which may send him back to Iran, a country that has executed at least 4,000 gay people since 1979's Islamic Revolution, according to one estimate. Sixty members of the European Parliament have signed a petition requesting British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to overturn the decision to deny asylum.

Kazemi isn't the only gay person in this predicament. An Iranian lesbian in Britain, Pegah Emambakhsh, was also denied asylum and faces deportation to Iran, where Iranian gay-rights groups say her partner has been sentenced to death by stoning.

These cases are rather ironic. Iran pays for sex-change surgery for transgender people. Additionally, the first rock group it officially approved was Queen, which was headed by Freddie Mercury, a gay man of Iranian Persian ancestry (by way of his Parsi roots). More importantly, though, if the facts of these cases are correct, it's utterly shameful that Kazemi and Emambakhsh were denied asylum.

UPDATE (March 17): Britain has stopped deportation motions against Medhi Kazemi. His case is being reconsidered.

MANAN VATSYAYANA/AFP/Getty Images

Major international events often impose enormous burdens on poor and minority communities. Roughly 1.5 million people, for instance, will be displaced by the Beijing Olympics. For the 1988 Summer Games in Seoul, South Korea forcibly evicted 720,000 people while the homeless population was detained in the city's outskirts. The 1996 Atlanta Games uprooted about 30,000 poor residents, and Sydney, Athens, and other Olympic cities witnessed similar social dislocations. But New Delhi has taken its "preparations" for the 2010 Commonwealth Games, kind of a mini-Olympics involving current and former British colonies, a step further: by arresting and imprisoning beggars.

Delhi's Social Welfare Department is organizing "cleanup operations," the Christian Science Monitor reports:

Every morning, it dispatches nine vans from its Beggar Raid Team. Each carries three plainclothes men, who scan the crowded streets of bullock carts, cows, motorbikes, cycle rickshaws, newspaper hawkers, and stray dogs for ragged people pleading for money.

"Since the end of last year, we've been told to increase the numbers we arrest," says Anand Pandey, a civil servant known as a "raid officer" ...

Warrants are not necessary for arresting beggars. Once picked up, they are tried in the city's Beggars' Court. Those whom Mr. Pandey calls "first-time offenders" often go free with a warning. Others are incarcerated until friends or family scrape together the money to pay their bail of about 3,000 rupees (about $75). Many are locked up in "beggars' homes" – dedicated jails – for a minimum of one year and a maximum of 10, the latter being the same penalty given for violent robberies. If they are "blind, a cripple or otherwise incurably helpless," according to the law, beggars can be locked up for life.

The city is also creating a "beggar database" to hold the photographs and fingerprints of offending beggars, so that "habitual" panhandlers can be convicted more easily. Already, during the past year, 2,537 beggars have been arrested and 1,133 convicted. Many of the city's beggars are elderly, ill, or amputees, and have little chance of finding regular work.

Let's face it, the city is arresting and locking up these beggars for no reason other than that they are poor. "Many of these people have no option but to beg. To arrest them without even providing the infrastructure that guarantees them the most basic needs is appalling," Anand Kumar, a human rights lawyer in New Delhi, told the Monitor. With such cruel and regressive attitudes toward the poor, New Delhi's efforts to portray itself as a modern "world-class city" for the Commonwealth Games are doomed to fail -- at least in the eyes of human-rights campaigners around the world.

FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/Getty Images

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) recently reached a shocking conclusion: Blogging is a "legitimate form of personal expression."

In the run-up to the Olympic Games, we've all heard about the Chinese government's restrictions on bloggers' freedom of expression, but not as many people seem to be aware of the blogging bans the IOC itself has imposed on Olympic athletes. In 2004, for the Athens games, athletes and coaches were not permitted to write firsthand accounts or maintain online diaries (a.k.a blogs). Posting personal videos and photos online was banned, too, unless permission was obtained first.

The IOC's brilliant rationale for gagging the athletes then: Protecting the interests of companies holding broadcasting rights comes first. (As if an athlete's blog is a direct competitor to an NBC sports commentator.)

This year, though, the IOC seems to have finally seen the light. Sort of. In Beijing, athletes can blog, as long as they follow some simple rules:

• No blogging about other competitors
• No videos, photos, or audio clips of sporting events and opening, closing, and medal ceremonies
• No ads or mention of sponsors (blogs can't be used for commercial gain)
• No domain names with words similar to "Olympics"
• No infringement of copyright agreements
• No information that could compromise security and staging of the events

My hunch is that as the Internet evolves and people become more tech savvy, some of these rules will prove tough to enforce. People will find ingenious ways to evade them; even at earlier Olympics, athletes are reported to have blogged "illegally." The IOC will learn sooner or later that trying to control people's online activities is a task of Olympic proportions.

Ben Sklar/Getty Images

We've finally gotten to the point where it's entirely plausible that the next U.S. president will have had a black father, a white mother, and a half-Asian sister. America has finally moved beyond race, right?

Not so fast. All you have to do is look to my hometown, "liberal" Boulder, Colorado, as this week's Exhibit A of how screwed up the United States still is when it comes to race. At the University of Colorado, a columnist for a student newspaper wrote that Asians should be rounded up with an "extra-large butterfly net," "hog-tied," forced to drink and eat sushi with a fork, and ordered to dance until their spirits are broken. Lovely, eh?

The university has issued an apology. So have the editors of the paper. They claim the column was meant to be a satire and a commentary on racism. But the column was never clearly labelled as a satire, and the columnist's writing skills are so poor, that... well, let's just say he will be getting employment at neither a reputable paper nor at The Onion. He may not even be really racist. But he's a total and complete idiot. I hesitate to bring his column to your attention because he's pulled immature, stupid, controversial stunts like this before.

But the bottom line is, there's a very real danger that readers of his column will take him seriously. It wasn't that long ago that 120,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans were placed in internment camps in this country. The Jena Six incident, where nooses were hung on trees at a high school in Louisiana, took place only a few months ago. There are no excuses: Racial violence is not something to be taken lightly, whether you're a college student or not.

PHILIPPE DESMAZES/AFP/Getty Images

Author Ian Buruma, who is in Davos at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, has picked up on a tactic increasingly used by undemocratic countries such as China and Iran in defending themselves from international criticism: demanding that Westerners stop "imposing" their values on cultures that supposedly have a different understanding of what democracy means.

As Buruma put it me this morning, this is clearly self-serving hogwash. "It's much less a division between East and West along civilizational lines than some people like to see it," he said. "It's really a political division," he added, pointing out that the Indians and the Japanese, or even the Indonesians don't see things that way. Few people may buy the argument, Buruma said, but nonetheless it's an effective way of neutralizing the democracy issue because people don't want to be seen as dissing other cultures. "When people discuss this in terms of culture and civilization, then you get a lot of that pious stuff," he noted, referring to the kind of Kumbaya moments that former Iranian President Mohammed Khatami has made into a veritable Davos fetish. "People have the habit of expressing fine sentiments as soon as civilization and culture come up." 

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf pulled the culture card at a breakfast Buruma attended and found the Pakistani leader to be "completely out of touch," fixated on the notion that "any bad news about Pakistan is a distortion by the foreign press." After all, Nicolas Sarkozy, Gordon Brown, and George W. Bush had assured him that "everything is fine." Musharraf also tangled with Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch, who had the temerity to suggest that Pakistan's human rights record could use a little improvement. Musharraf's response, essentially "We have our own human rights," was underwhelming, to say the least.

Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

Someone please explain to me how this is supposed to be justice. A 23-year-old journalism student named Sayad Parwez Kambaksh supposedly goes online, finds an interesting paper, and prints it out. He supposedly brings it to class at Balkh University, discusses it with a teacher and some fellow students. The paper gets copied and distributed. Some students find it objectionable; they say it is offensive and that it insults Islam. They complain to the government.

Kambaksh is arrested in October and put in jail. He says he had nothing to do with the paper. His case goes to trial, but he has no lawyer. In fact, his family is not even aware that he's put on trial. A panel of three judges decides that he should be put to death because the paper he supposedly distributed "humiliates Islam." The Afghan Independent Journalists' Association reports that any paper in question may have downloaded from an Iranian blog, which contained articles questioning the origins of the Koran, among other controversial things.

Now, his case goes to the first of two appeal courts. But Fazel Wahab, the chief judge in the province where the trial took place, says that only President Hamid Karzai can pardon the student, since Kambaksh supposedly confessed to having violated tenets of Islam. Incidentally, Wahab has never read the paper (to be fair, he was also not on the panel that convicted Kambaksh). 

Kambaksh isn't the only Afghan journalist who's gotten into trouble with the law. Ghows Zalmai was also arrested three months ago, charged with distributing a translation of the Koran that clerics did not accept. Religious scholars have also called for him to be put to death.

At any rate, all of this raises the question: Why did the U.S. go into Afghanistan and topple the Taliban, only to have it be replaced with a system like this? So far, no comment from Karzai, who is attending the World Economic Forum in Davos. But he'd better step up.

THOMAS COEX/AFP/Getty Images

European military commanders have formally approved an EU mission to Chad and the Central African Republic. The mission, to protect and aid refugees from Darfur, has a Security Council mandate and, by most accounts, could help stabilize a dangerous situation.

But there is a danger that France—and perhaps Europe more broadly—is developing a perverse specialty: cleaning up after crimes it doesn't have the will to stop. European peacekeepers labored for several hard years protecting humanitarian aid deliveries in Bosnia as ethnic cleansing proceeded around them. And remember that it was the French who sent a military mission to protect refugees after the Rwanda genocide. That mission, Opération Turquoise, saved some lives (including the lives of many who committed the genocide), but was a pale shadow of the rescue mission that should have been launched weeks earlier.

My fear is that the combination of feel-good war crimes prosecutions and post hoc band-aid operations like this new one in Chad have sapped the will to take the needed hard measures.