President Obama toured the Forbidden City in Beijing Tuesday, once the home to China’s emperors.
He called the walled compound “beautiful, spectacular” as he huddled against the sharp cold, his hands often in his pockets.
 
After a brisk walk through courtyards and palace buildings, Obama emerged at the Gate of Continuing Harmony and told his Chinese tour guide. “Thank you for a wonderful tour of this magnificent place.”

Obama said later he’d like to return with his daughters.

A CNN correspondent covering President Obama’s trip to Asia was detained by Chinese authorities in Shanghai for showing on camera a T-shirt portraying Obama as Mao Zedong.

The shirt features Obama in a Red Army uniform gazing into the distance in a pose reminiscent of Mao, the late Communist leader.

Chinese characters on the front of the shirt spell out the words, “Serve the People."  The back of the shirt features the word “Oba-Mao” in English.

Emily Chang, a Beijing-based correspondent for CNN, said she found the shirt precisely because she’d heard that they were being confiscated lest they offend Obama.

"Two security guards happened to pass by at the moment I announced to the camera: 'This is the T-shirt everybody is talking about,'" she said in a CNN blog posting.

"And that was it. They scrambled towards us and tried to pry the shirt out of my hands," Chang said. "I didn't give in.

"There was a bit of yelling and quite a scuffle…We ended up being detained for two hours in the cold, maze of a market … crowd gathered round. More security and then police showed up.

"They wanted our press cards, our passports, but most of all, they wanted the shirt," she said. "Finally, they let us go. Phew!"

SHANGHAI _ President Obama’s first big event in China happens Monday, when he holds a town hall meeting in Shanghai. It should be interesting because Chinese will get to ask him questions in addition to hearing his prepared remarks.

The on-site audience will include more than 400 students, and questions also are expected to come via the Internet. The forum also is to be televised. It’s not yet clear just how many questions the president will take, or precisely how questions were screened (or whether any of the town hall coverage will be blacked out or cut-away from in China by government censors depending on what’s said. That happened in China with part of Obama’s inaugural address).

A White House aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to make a statement, said that the students in the audience were selected by their universities, that President Obama would decide which of them to call on, and that he’d also take some questions submitted to the U.S. Embassy from Chinese “netizens.”

The White House aide couldn't speak to how Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, was handling the questions they collected. Xinhua's online site asked Chinese to forward their questions for Obama. So did several other online forums. Xinhuanet.com alone drew 3,290 reponses as of last count. A session just on Tibet was being conducted by huanqiu.com

Questions on such forums are all over the map:

Why does Obama deserve the Nobel Peace Prize when the U.S. is engaged in two wars? Why is the U.S. open to the Dalai Lama, and how would Obama feel if Chinese embraced a leader considered an enemy of the U.S.?

Do U.S. taxpayers underwrite First Lady Michelle Obama’s fancy wardrobe? Does Obama like Kung Pao chicken, and how much wine can he drink at one sitting?

Will Obama elaborate on his stance on Taiwan? How can the U.S. and China get North Korea to denuclearize? How can the U.S. guarantee the security of debt held by China? Will Obama lift restrictions on the export of high technology and weapons to China?

That’s just a sampling.

 
Worried that an upcoming climate summit might fall short of environmentalists’ hopes, President Barack Obama spoke with Chinese President Hu Jintao this week to urge that both nations lead the way to a new treaty reducing emissions that are accelerating global warming.

“Both leaders acknowledged each is taking significant actions to confront climate change and reduce emissions,” the White House said in a statement Wednesday summarizing the Tuesday night talk. “President Obama noted the importance of working toward a successful outcome at the December Copenhagen Conference and the importance of leadership from the United States and China in that regard.   

“To that end, the two Presidents committed to having their teams redouble efforts to work with each other and other countries to achieve success at Copenhagen.”

In broad terms, China acknowledged that there remain stumbling blocks to a broad international agreement that would commit countries to cutting the emissions from smokestacks and tailpipes that trap heat in the atmosphere.

“Although problems remain in talks for a final deal, there are hopes for a positive result at the Copenhagen Conference as long as the convening parties work together closely," Hu said, according to the Xinhua Chinese news agency.

The struggle to control emissions is likely to be high on the agenda during an upcoming trip by Obama to Asia, first at a summit of Asian leaders in Singapore and then in Beijing at a summit with Hu.

It’s also possible that Obama could travel to Copenhagen for the climate change meeting if the UN-sponsored meeting adds a summit for national leaders.

There will be an empty chair – and a big gap in the agenda – when many of the world’s leaders gather in Italy this week.

Chinese President Hu Jintao abruptly returned home from Italy even before the summit started, rushing back as ethnic tensions in Western China have erupted in violence.

That means President Barack Obama will not have a scheduled meeting Thursday with Hu, and he and other Westerners will have to wait to press their case at the highest level for Chinese concessions on such thorny issues as global warming and North Korea’s moves to develop nuclear weapons and long range missiles.

Chinese State Councilor Dai Bingguo will attend the summit in Hu’s place, but won’t have the stature of his president.

“We have a broad based agenda with China,” Michael Froman, the White House deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs, said Wednesday at the summit site in L’Aquila, Italy.

“Since this meeting didn’t happen,” he said of the Obama-Hu summit, “they look forward to the next meeting.”

China is key to several of the top issues facing world leaders, including forging a global response to global warming and pressuring North Korea to stop its moves to become a nuclear power.

In addition to meeting one-on-one with Obama, Hu was supposed to be one of the leaders attending the Major Economies Forum hosted by Obama that will discuss global warming. Thus far, fast-growing China has resisted calls to cut its emissions of greenhouse gases from smokestacks and tailpipes.

China also has refused to go along with tough economic sanctions against North Korea, one of its trading partners.

As in Mother England. Thursday morning, Bermuda's premier, Ewart Brown, made the surprising announcement that four Uighur detainees from the American prison camp at Guantanamo had been resettled in the tourist mecca in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

The problem, reports Bermuda's only newspaper, the Royal Gazette, is that Brown forgot to tell the island's governor, the royally appointed official who is London's authority on the island. Bermuda isn't really an independent state, but a self-governoring overseas territory of the United Kingdom. And while Bermudans are at pains to point out that they approve their own laws and UK laws don't apply, the UK is supposed to decide Bermuda's foreign policy.

Which is why the island's governor, Sir Richard Gozney, thinks he should have been told before Bermuda agreed to take in the Uighurs, who'd been ordered freed last year by a U.S. district court judge and had grown tired of Guantanamo.

"The Government of Bermuda should have consulted with us because it carries with it foreign policy ground areas and security issues," Gozney is quoted as saying in the Gazette.

Brown disagrees, telling CNN Thursday afternoon that the matter is strictly an immigration one, which falls within local Bermuda officials' authority. He called the decision a "humanitarian one."

Brown acknowledged that he let Gozney know what was going on "rather late" -- apparently after the four Uighurs were already aboard a chartered flight from Guantanamo.

Why exactly wasn't clear. Brown told the Gazette the Uighur asylum had been in the works for a month.

As for the Obama administration, it expressed gratitude for the Bermudan hospitality and didn't address the issue of whether maybe some kind of headsup was owed to London.

And the Uighurs, who've been in Guantanamo for seven years? Their mental health appears fine, reports the Gazette, and they could barely contain their enthusiasm for moving to Bermuda during the flight from Guantanamo.

Still awaited is word that the 13 remaining Guantanamo Uighurs have made it to the Pacific island of Palau, which announced Wednesday it was taking all 17.

Apparently, no headsup for Palau, either.

President Obama on Saturday named Republican Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman as the U.S. ambassador to China.

Huntsman has a long resume, including stints as U.S. Ambassador to Singapore, Deputy U.S. Trade Ambassador, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce in the Trade Development Bureau and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce for East Asia and the Pacific.

He has a bachelor’s degree in international politics from the University of Pennsylvania.

On a personal note, the fluent speaker of Mandarin Chinese and his wife have seven children, including a daughter adopted from China.

From a White House statement following President Obama's meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao:

"The two sides agreed to work together to build a positive, cooperative, and comprehensive U.S.-China relationship for the 21^st century and to maintain and strengthen exchanges at all levels.  President Hu

 Jintao invited President Obama to visit China in the second half of this year, and President Obama accepted the invitation with pleasure." 

Florida Sen. Bill Nelson's office says cyber-invaders believed to be in China have recently hacked into the computer network in his office.

Two attacks on the same day this month and another one last month targeted work stations used by three Nelson staffers - a key foreign-policy aide, the deputy legislative director and a former Nelson NASA adviser. The hackers didn’t make off with any classified information, which isn’t kept on office computers, a Nelson spokesman said. 

The Florida Democrat is a member of the Senate’s Intelligence, Armed Services and Finance committees and heads a Senate subcommittee that oversees NASA. 

One of the attacks is believed to be serious, Nelson said during a Senate Armed Services hearing that touched on the subject of hackers trying to invade U.S. military computer networks.   

Besides the attacks on Nelson’s office, similar incursions on Capitol Hill computer networks are up significantly in the past few months, according to various information systems offices on Capitol Hill.  Nelson's office says last year, according to Newsweek, federal authorities showed up at the presidential campaign headquarters for both Barack Obama and John McCain and said information on the computers there was being downloaded by a "foreign entity." 

“The threat to our national security, to be sure, is real; and, it will require significant investment and inter-agency coordination at an unprecedented level to gain an upper hand against would-be cyber criminals and spies,” Nelson said. “These are anxious days, when you consider the threat from such espionage facing our country and recent developments on this front