In case you just thought that Iran launched a rocket today just to remind everyone about their rockets, they also sent up some unfortunate animals on a scientific mission: 

On Wednesday, Press TV said, the Iranian Aerospace Organization said live video transmission from latest launch would “enable further studies on the biological capsule — carrying a rat, two turtles and worms — as it leaves Earth’s atmosphere and enters space.”

I'm pretty sure Laika already covered this ground in 1957. Then again, if the rat starts training the turtles in martial arts, it will all have been worth it. 

Google might be getting out of China, but international investors are going all in on Chinese search giant Baidu, the company that likely stands to gain the most for Google's departure. Here's a report from UBS via the FT's Alphaville blog:

Baidu would benefit most from Google’s departure. The Chinese search engine market is a duopoly with Baidu and Google together accounting for 90% of revenue and 95% traffic market share (Baidu itself has 62% and 74% respectively). Baidu would emerge as the dominant player with even more bargaining power with its customers. And even if Google can successfully solve this problem and continue its presence in China, in our view Baidu will still benefit incrementally from advertisers’ concerns over spending on Google.cn.

We upgrade Baidu to Buy from Neutral and PT from US$380 to US$523. This incorporates a 50% probability weighting to our new base case valuation of $453 (assuming Google continues to operate in China) and 50% weighting to our bullcase valuation of $593 (assuming Google closes its Chinese operations).

Investors don't feel it's likely that another foreign search engine, such as Microsoft's Bing, will step in to fill the void since local affilates are going to be wary about collaborating with another foreign company.

As a weird coda to this story, Yahoo, whose executives were lambasted as moral "pygmies" on the floor of congress two years ago for their role in the arrest of a Chinese dissident, for once look like they've outsmarted their arch-rival. TechCrunch writes;

In retrospect Yahoo has played China far better than Google. It pulled out of the country years ago, knowing it wouldn’t win and owns nearly 40% of the [Chinese internet portal] Alibaba, a company that very definitely knows how to grow in China. Entrepreneur and angel investor in China Bill Bishop —who hasn’t always agreed with my China coverage in the past—pointed this out, adding “Not often Yahoo looks smarter than Google.”

My colleagues here have been weighing in on Google's "bombshell" revelation that China has been spying on dissidents and human rights activists, trying to crack open their Gmail accounts, presumably with the aim of monitoring and disrupting their activities. A lot of commentary is so far focused on the immediate issue at hand -- China's crushing censorship and Google's controversial policy of accomodating it in the hopes of gaining market share (see Jordan Calinoff's excellent dispatch on how this policy has largely failed). Of course, we already knew China did this sort of thing, but having the details so dramatically thrust into the public sphere is shocking. This is going to be a huge, ongoing story, not only because Google and China are two of the biggest and most widely debated news topics in the world, but also because nearly everyone's going to sympathize with the people whose privacy and peace of mind has been violated.

There's a larger story developing though, of a very tense year in relations between China and the West. Eurasia Group's Ian Bremmer made that prediction earlier this year, and it's probably happening even faster than he imagined. In addition to this Google story, which U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has already jumped on, there's also a brewing U.S.-China fight over arms sales to Taiwan, China's recent missile test in retaliation, and a guerrilla trade war that now seems more likely to develop into a full-blown trade conflict.

By overplaying its hand with the activists, and messing with a huge global company with a massive ability to get its message out, China has foolishly just thrown away whatever goodwill it has built up over the years through its "charm offensive" -- at least in the West. Now, those arguing across a range of issues that China is a bad actor have been handed an enormous rhetorical club to beat Beijing over the head with. It's going to get ugly.

Y2K has finally hit... about ten years late. Millions of Germans are currently coping with the effects of a systemic breakdown in the country's credit and debit card services. The episode is -- amusingly, except to those affected -- reminding many of the much-feared millennium computer bug.

"A piece of software on the affected cards, programmed by our suppliers, is defective, and cannot correctly recognize this year's number, 2010," the German DSGV banking association said on Tuesday.

Germans have been caught without massive supplies of bottled water, canned food, flashlights and first-aid kits -- but it seems life will go on. Fewer than half of German cards are affected, though that's little comfort to the many that've had their credit card eaten by the ATM.

Banking officials are claiming the problem will be fixed by next week.

New reports of 11,000 people killed by Brazilian police over the past six years are perhaps one indication that violence in the super-star Amazon country has gotten a wee bit out of hand.

Never fear, there is a long term solution already under consideration: prohibit "offensive" video games, with the option to punish their distribution with jailtime. In all honesty, Brazilian Senator Valdir Raupp probably did not have human rights violations in mind when he proposed the bill, which was recently approved by Senate's Education Committee. It follows on the ban last year on violent computer role-playing games "Counter-Strike" and "EverQuest," and Venezuela and China's bans on warlike and mobster-glorifying games respectively.

CNET's Dave Rosenberg has lambasted Brazil's move, suggesting they deal with "larger social issues, including lack of parental oversight," instead. They praise the US system of industry self-regulation, which relies on ratings to isolate children from violent games.

The Brazilian law is probably overkill, but lets not get all starry eyed about the glories of free-market entertainment violence. Did nobody notice a few years back when U.S. generals begged Hollywood producers to stop showing torture in a favorable light, since troops were getting inspiration on prisoner treatment from 24?

Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images

We've reached a very strange point in human history when it is assumed that people who don't have access to food will have working cell phones:

In a test project targeting 1,000 Iraqi refugee families, the United Nations agency will send a 22-dollar (15-euro) voucher every two months by SMS to each family, who will be provided with a special SIM card.

The beneficiary can then exchange the electronic voucher for rice, wheat flour, lentils, chickpeas, oil, canned fish, cheese and eggs at selected shops.

Addressing concerns about mobile phone ownership among the refugee population, WFP spokeswoman Emilia Casella said all the 130,000 Iraqi refugees currently receiving food aid from the agency in Syria have mobile phones.

Update: UN Dispatch's Matthew Cordell has more.

Say what you will about Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, the man does not want to mislead the public about rocks. Grandpa Wen wrote this self-correcting letter to Xinhua this week:

In my article "Teachers Are the Pillars of Our Education," which was published by your agency yesterday, the categories of petrology ought to be "sedimentary, igneous, and metamorphic". I wish to make this correction and to express my apologies to all readers.

Wen had originally written "volcanic" instead of "metamorphic". Danwei.org's Eric Mu writes:

Needless to say, the apology burnishes the established reputation of Wen as a humble, down-to-earth, grandfatherly leader, even if, as a graduate of the Beijing Institute of Geology, he really ought to have known such basic information.

I can think of a few things I'd rather the Chinese premier apologize for, but I guess this is a start. 

Danger Room reports that the Taliban have finally embraced online video sharing and launched Istiqlal Media, an official YouTube channel. Terrorist media expert Evan Kohlman comments:

“The Taliban have really been latecomers to the world of online video, and their initial forays haven’t been terribly successful,” Kohlman tells Danger Room. While the group has used YouTube in an official capacity before, placing video of captured America soldier on the site, Kohlman says that the use of embedded YouTube video on their site is a first. In other words, the Taliban is actually more dinosaurish about social media than the Pentagon. Way to be Web 2.0, Mullah Omar!

So what finally pushed the Afghan insurgent group onto YouTube?  Bandwidth, Kohlman explains.

“Recent efforts to distribute high-resolution jihadi media in standard formats — RMVB, AVI, MPEG — have simply overloaded their web servers and exhausted their bandwidth.  Now, it appears that the Taliban webmasters have finally come around and recognized the merits of YouTube, using the U.S.-based service to test out directly embedding video into their sites.  By turning to YouTube, the Taliban gain a free, highly-reliable video broadcast service with the potential to reel in a vast, viral audience.”

And that's not the Taliban's only foray into Web 2.0. The "Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan" Website allows readers to share posts via Twitter, Facebook, Digg, and other social networking services. 

The YouTube channel isn't much right now. Just a few non-narrated montages of car bombings and gun battles set to music (Judging from the soundtrack, the Taliban has also embraced auto-tuning.) But it will be interesting to see if YouTube moves to shut it down.