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TKACIK: China: No longer 'rising' John J. Tkacik OPINION/ANALYSIS: Beijing's 60th National Day celebrations last week featured a "Springtime for Mao" battalion of high-stepping, 5-foot-11 female army recruits decked out in hot magenta miniskirts, white boots and petite submachine guns. But that did not necessarily mean the event's organizers had a Mel Brooks sense of humor. The rest of the People's Liberation Army parade, in ironic procession down Beijing's Avenue of Eternal Peace, featured a solemn march of advanced military equipment - 52 brand-new weapons systems ranging from airborne combat vehicles to colossal intercontinental ballistic missiles on mobile launchers -...

Dong Hoi, Vietnam, Jul 28, 2009 / 09:29 pm (CNA).- Two priests were hospitalized in the central Vietnamese coastal city of Dong Hoi after being beaten brutally by plain-clothed police and a gang employed by the local government. One of the priests, who is now comatose, was thrown from the second floor of the hospital where he was visiting the first victim. On Sunday, Fr. Paul Nguyen Dinh Phu, parish priest of Du Loc, was attacked by a group of plain-clothed police and thugs when he was travelling to Tam Toa parish to concelebrate morning Mass with five other priests...

The Obama administration lacks a foreign policy ideology as a matter of ideology. Speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations, Secretary of State Clinton asserted, "Rigid ideologies and old formulas don't apply."...But even lacking an ideology, the administration does have a doctrine. The defining principle of President Obama's foreign policy is engagement with America's adversaries...expressing respect for legitimate grievances, apologizing for past wrongs and offering dialogue without preconditions. Six months on, how fares the Obama doctrine? Concerning North Korea and Iran, the doctrine is on its deathbed. North Korea responded to administration outreach by testing a nuclear weapon, firing missiles...

Iranian consumers boycott Nokia for 'collaboration' Saeed Kamali Dehghan guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 14 July 2009 21.22 BST The mobile phone company Nokia is being hit by a growing economic boycott in Iran as consumers sympathetic to the post-election protest movement begin targeting a string of companies deemed to be collaborating with the regime. Wholesale vendors in the capital report that demand for Nokia handsets has fallen by as much as half in the wake of calls to boycott Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) for selling communications monitoring systems to Iran. There are signs that the boycott is spreading: consumers are shunning SMS...

At this point, only the short-term future of Iran's clerical regime remains in doubt. The current protests could be repressed, but the unelected institutions of priestly rule have been fatally undermined. Though each aspect of the Islamic Republic has its own dynamic, this is not a regime that can last many more years. When it comes to repression, Iran has a spectrum of security instruments that can be used...The national police can take care of routine crowd control; riot-police units can beat some demonstrators in order to discourage others; the much more brutal, underclass Basij militiamen enjoy striking and shooting...

You would think with all of the embargoes that the US government has on doing buisness with Iran and its crazy President Ahmadinejad , that it would be pretty difficult for companies that do buisness with the United States to sell systems to the terrorist regime that would enable it squash dissidents. Of course if you thought that, "you would think..." wrong. Back in April, Eli Lake of the Wash Times times Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN), a joint venture between the Finnish cell-phone giant Nokia and German powerhouse Siemens have sold a "big brother-like" spy system to Ahmadinejad's nut house:

I am under assault, directly from my government and the president, due to belonging to a small minority. The president and congress has vilified my minority in the press repeatedly, and is pushing laws to impoverish us and push us out of our homes. In response, I am wondering if I can apply for political asylum from the US to Great Britain? I am part of the vilified 5% of the population that makes over $150k/yr. Our members include the AIG execs which have been harassed on their property, molested in markets and have had their property confiscated without due...

Tax on non-Muslims is a threat that violates basic human rights. In tribal areas near the border with Afghanistan more than 700 non-Muslim families are persecuted and forced to pay. Federal Religious Minorities minister strongly condemns the tax, pledges help for the victims. Lahore (AsiaNews) – The National Commission for Justice and Peace (NCJP) has condemned the imposition of the Jizya, the poll tax for non-Muslims, in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) on the border with Afghanistan because of its discriminatory nature and because it constitutes a direct threat to basic human rights. Mgr John Saldanha, archbishop of Lahore,...

...Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, in concert with Barack Obama, is laying the groundwork for a far grander and more sinister plan [than Clinton's], which if suggested only a few years ago would have been instantly consigned to the realm of paranoid conspiracies. Such transparent deflection notwithstanding, the evidence is far too extensive to allow for deniability. This is the meanacing reality of the Obama White House.

Amid contending descriptions of the prevailing economic crisis, and candidates for causes and responses, I nominate The Great Repression and, in doing so, point out how unconscious exclusion of painful realities from the conscious mind caused the crisis and continues to infect policy responses to it. No consensus appears on what to call the prevailing economic crisis, let alone diagnostics of its causes or prescriptions for cure. It’s not yet so severe to warrant Great Depression II or so mild to be called a mere recession. As something in between, some are tempted to call it a Great Recession. People...

DHARMSALA, India — Chinese rule in Tibet has created a "hell on earth" that has caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Tibetans, the Dalai Lama said Tuesday in a speech to mark the 50th anniversary of the failed uprising that sent him into exile. Speaking to thousands of supporters, the Tibetan spiritual leader said Chinese martial law, and hard-line policies such as the Cultural Revolution, had devastated the Himalayan region. "These thrust Tibetans into such depths of suffering and hardship that they literally experienced hell on earth," he said in this Indian hill town, where he and the...

China and the United States approach politics differently, but their teenagers share a favorite means of communication — text messaging. What these teens say to each other may matter only to them. But that they are able to communicate this easily, openly and even cheaply matters to us all. Without the freedom to have these little conversations, a nation is not equipped to have the bigger ones. It is with the vigilance of a teen facing time without texting that we should take a day to focus not on the small phone screen or the bigger laptop screen, but the...

Last summer, a priest was tortured and a nun gang-raped in Kandhmal, a cauldron of radical Hinduism and the site of an anti-Christian pogrom in August. The depressing details of it all have been previously described by this writer: 70,000 homeless Christians, more than 5,000 homes destroyed, 3,000 people missing and/or hiding in the nearby jungles for the past five months, 87 people burned or hacked to death and the infrastructure of the Catholic Church destroyed. Hundreds of their schools, churches and other institutions have been destroyed. Displaced people sitting in refugee camps are afraid to return to their villages.

Central Asia has escaped Soviet domination, but the newly independent states have replicated communist repression. Nations like Kazakhstan never really moved forward. Now it is retreating on religious as well as political liberty. The U.S. and Europe have to decide whether to allow the Kazakh government to take over leadership of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

Tibetan exiles rethink struggle against Chinese rule by Ben Sheppard DHARAMSHALA, India (AFP) – Leading Tibetan exiles kicked off a week-long meeting in northern India Monday that could usher in a more radical approach to their long struggle against Chinese rule in Tibet. The Dalai Lama, Tibet's spiritual leader, called the gathering after admitting that his attempts to secure greater autonomy for the region through negotiation with the Chinese government had failed. Before the talks began, he had urged the 500 participants to consider all aspects of policy regarding China -- ensuring that the thorny issue of whether to push...

Want a preview of what an Obama Department of Justice would look like? Look no further than Obama for America General Counsel Bob Bauer’s letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey from last Friday. Bauer wants the Special Prosecutor investigating the U.S. Attorney firings to start investigating John McCain, Sarah Palin, and other Republicans including Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI). Their crime? Calling on our nation’s law enforcement officers to investigate wide spread reports of voter fraud. Bauer writes:As Election Day approaches - just as in 2004 and 2006 - Republican Party officials and operatives nationwide, including...

By Michelle Malkin  •  August 20, 2008 07:06 PM Photoshop - Lundesigns The ChiComs get a another gold medal for Olympic tyranny. Ruthlessly perfect 10s across the board: Two elderly Chinese women who applied to hold a protest during the Olympics were ordered to spend a year in a labor camp, a relative said Wednesday. Police later squelched a pro-Tibet demonstration.The women were still at home three days after being officially notified they would have to serve a yearlong term of reeducation through labor, but were under surveillance by a government-backed neighborhood group, said Li Xuehui, the son of one of the...

David Frum: China's brightest day may have just passed Posted: August 09, 2008, 11:57 AM by Kelly McParland David Frum, Full Comment The leaders of China have carefully planned an imposing Olympics. They have bought new stadiums, new airports, new facilities of every kind — in fact, just about everything available to an authoritarian state with a full treasury and low labour costs. They overlooked only one possibility: that the Olympics would arrive at the same time as China’s economy braked to a stop. To understand what is happening in China, compare two statistics. In the 12 months ending December...

Olympic repression and a gutless IOC Published: August 14 2008 19:30 | Last updated: August 14 2008 19:30 It has taken less than a week for the contradictions between the reality of Communist party rule and China’s pre-Olympics promises of openness and press freedom to burst unpleasantly into the open. Perhaps the party’s decision to order a pretty nine-year-old girl to lip-synch the patriotic singing of another girl deemed insufficiently cute for the opening ceremony can be dismissed as a misguided quest for artistic perfection. Nor is the manhandling of journalists by police – as happened on Wednesday during a...

Western flattery ignores the dark reality of Russia By Garry Kasparov Published: July 10 2008 18:21 | Last updated: July 10 2008 18:21 Recently we have witnessed a flurry of high-profile and contradictory statements on the Russian state. In a role reversal, Russia’s leaders have been abnormally candid while several prominent western politicians and pundits have lavished undeserved praise. Russian president Dmitri Medvedev was bold enough last week to state that democracy is irrelevant to the Group of Eight leading nations. It is sad to see that some of Europe’s leaders seem to agree with him. He also accidentally told...

/begin my translation [Teheran Report] 'Turbaned Dictatorship' Ignores Economic Hardship Despite high oil price and galloping inflation, power struggles are the order of the day "The government will be toppled in a month or two..." ominous rumors swirling Teheran/Qom(Iran) = Lee Tae-hoon About two hours of drive to the south west of Teheran is Qom, the cradle of 1979 Islamic Revolution, and the religious city of supreme authority. A woman with thick eye makeup, wearing Armani sunglasses, and her hairs colored in yellow and silver, passes by 'Khojeye Elmieh(sp?)' Islamic seminary building, where Khomeini, the father of Iranian Revolution(1902~1989) once...

Paddy Ashdown: Military intervention in Zimbabwe 'would be justified' Lord Ashdown says terror must be ended Michael Evans, Defence Editor and Catherine Philp in Harare Military intervention in Zimbabwe would be justified to stop the violence there deteriorating into mass slaughter, Paddy Ashdown told The Times last night. Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon said: “The situation in Zimbabwe could deteriorate to a point where genocide could be a possible outcome - something that looks like [another] Rwanda.” In that case, international military action, with Britain playing a “delicate role”, would have to be considered, said the former European Union High Representative...

WASHINGTON: Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy has a malignant brain tumour, his doctors said last night, of a type considered potentially very dangerous. Kennedy has a glioma and likely will require chemotherapy and radiation therapy, neurologist Dr Lee Schwamm of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and Dr Larry Ronan, a primary physician there said. Kennedy, 76, has been admitted to hospital since he had a seizure on Saturday. He was airlifted to Massachusetts General Hospital on Saturday morning after being rushed by ambulance to a local hospital near his family's Cape Cod vacation compound.

Freedom of Press and Speech Sacrificed to Islam by Reginald Firehammer The world's governments, especially those that pride themselves on being secular, are being used to force religious compliance on everyone. When an Ideology is given special status, so that any speech, article, book, or commentary is repressed if it is unfavorable toward that ideology, it has become the state religion, in this case, the "state" is comprised of most of this world's governments. These two articles: "Holy Smoke, Don't criticise Islam, says UN," by Damian Thompson, and, "Here's what offends this writer," by Mark Steyn are just two of...

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia — Police rounded up scores of people demonstrating against President Vladimir Putin on Sunday, dragging protesters toward buses and beating some who tried to escape. Hundreds of police armed with shields, body armor and truncheons bore down on demonstrators chanting "Russia without Putin!" in St. Petersburg. Among those detained was a likely contender in next March's presidential election, Boris Nemtsov. "So many police proves they are afraid of us," Nemtsov told reporters before being taken away. Police said he was released soon after. It was the second time in two days police have broken up an opposition...

Women are being given controversial "virginity repair" operations on the NHS, it emerged last night. Taxpayers funded 24 hymen replacement operations between 2005 and 2006, official figures revealed. And increasing numbers of women are paying up to £4,000 in private clinics for the procedure apparently under pressure from future spouses or in-laws who believe they should be virgins on their wedding night. Doctors said most patients are immigrants or British of ethnic origin. The trend has been condemned by critics as a sign of social regression driven by Islamic fundamentalists. Some countries have made hymen reconstruction operations illegal. ...Tory health...

When the history of Vladimir Putin’s first decade in national politics is written, it will read like pulp fiction. One moment in the spring of 1997 he’s an unknown KGB spy plagiarizing his thesis at an obscure institute; the next he’s deputy chief of staff to Boris Yeltsin, and soon after that boss of the entire KGB. Within months of reaching that pinnacle, Russia’s leading human rights activist, legislator Galina Starovoitova, is shot dead, and a prosecutorial investigation into Kremlin corruption has been squashed by the revelation of the prosecutor, Yuri Skuratov, on secret sex tapes. No sooner has this...

Tehran, 7 May (AKI) - Nureddin Zarrinkelk, a celebrated Iranian animated cartoonist, has been expelled from the fine arts department of the university of Tehran where he taught, reports said Monday. He is accused of having made fun of a female student who was wearing the full Islamic chador covering calling her a "primitive" according to pro-government news agency Rajanews. Zarrinkelk, 70, an icon of Iranian animated cinema, will not be allowed to teach anymore as part of new punitive measures in a moralization campaign which kicked off late last month and provides for the arrest of women who do...

Tehran, 7 May (AKI) - Female public employees in Iran will soon have to wear a uniform abiding by new Islamic dress code rules. The measure, under which all female employees will be given two uniforms, is part of a new "moralisation" campaign that kicked off last month under which Iranians who do not abide by Islamic dress rules can be jailed, said Fereshteh Sasani, a top official at the office for women's affairs of the presidency. Sasani said the measure will cost Iran the equivalent of two million euros. The government has also ordered all public institutions to abolish...

In today's Germany, almost anything goes. Just don't try to teach your children at home. Because if you do, you'll be sent to jail. German parents who want to homeschool have to decide. This, in a western democracy that is tolerant of just about anything, except teaching your children at home. In a little town near Heidelberg, we met members of four German homeschool families who either had already served jail time or were about to be arrested. They are actually German Baptists from Russia. Because of their German blood, they were allowed to return to Germany to become citizens...

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1107AP_Iran_Liberal_Bastion.html Monday, October 2, 2006 · Last updated 12:23 p.m. PT Iran island defies nation's conservatism By JIM KRANE ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER KISH, Iran -- This coral-rimmed vacation island could pass for Iran's Key West - a place where the sexes mix and the music flows, and where women let slip their head scarves and frolic with their husbands on the gleaming sands. Although island authorities draw the line at booze and bikinis, Kish remains a haven of freedom in an Islamic republic under the deepening conservatism of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Lately, however, Kish has lost a few...

IAPA worries that Venezuela "is going the way of Cuba" "It is itself creating a repudiation against the media with the motto 'kill the messenger.'" "The strong rhetoric worries [the IAPA], but it rules out some type of immediate rupture." Mexico City -- The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) showed its preoccupation with Venezuela directing itself towards a similar scheme as that of Cuba of the persecution of freedom of expression on the part of the state. It also warned that in countries like Mexico the press is the victim of organized crime. "It worries us that Venezuela is...

If chills did not run down your spine when you heard the tune for the Soviet national anthem, written to glorify the mass-murdering dictator Joseph Stalin, playing for Russia at the Winter Olympics this year in Italy, if you do not shiver every time you hear about Russian people favoring Vladimir Putin, a proud KGB spy, with 70%-plus approval in opinion polls, then perhaps you are ready for this: Russia is re-weaponizing psychiatry as a method of dealing with anti-Kremlin dissent, just as in Soviet times. Two major articles from leading newspapers have documented the early stages of the phenomenon....

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” -- Joseph Goebbels Of the many myths about the Vietnam War, the most prevalent is that...

LONDON (Reuters) - The union representing journalists in the UK and Ireland called on its 40,000 members to boycott all Yahoo Inc. products and services to protest the Internet company's reported actions in China. The National Union of Journalists said it sent a letter on Friday to Dominique Vidal, Yahoo Europe's vice president, denouncing the company for allegedly providing information to Chinese authorities about journalists. The union also said it would stop using all Yahoo-operated services. Yahoo has been cited in court decisions as supplying China's government with information to help them identify, prosecute and jail writers advocating democracy. "The...

Muslim Athletic Wear Covers Skin Without Cramping Style Jennifer Cutraro for National Geographic News April 27, 2006 The design of most modern sportswear puts many Muslim women athletes in a curious bind: adhere to their faith and have their motions hampered or compromise their beliefs in the name of athletic performance? The Koran requires women to cover everything except their faces, hands, and feet, says Tayyibah Taylor, editor-in-chief of Azizah Magazine, a publication geared toward Muslim-American women. "The idea is that your modesty in dress and behavior is a passport to public space," Taylor said. "It makes the statement that...

A 23-year-old monk, who wishes to remain anonymous, describes his recent decision to flee Tibet for the Indian town of Dharamsala, the seat of the Dalai Lama's government in exile.

March 14, 2006 -- Three independent Belarusian newspapers have suspended publication after a printing house in Russia said it could no longer print them. The newspapers -- "Narodnaya volya," "BDG Delovaya gazeta," and "Tovarishch" -- have been using a printing house in the Russian city of Smolensk after state printing houses in Belarus refused to print them.

On January 12, 2006, Pastor M. Aharon survived a brutal attack at the hands of Hindu radicals in the town of Nizamabad, Andhra Pradesh, located about 300 miles east of Bombay in central India. While he was distributing Christian literature, the pastor of Indian Pentecostal Church, who is in his 16th year of ministry, was mercilessly assaulted by a group of militant Hindus until his face was covered with blood from heavy blows to his mouth and nose. During this violent incident, a mob of over 100 radicals cheered and yelled for Pastor Aharon’s blood to be spilled, inciting the...

US Congress set to grill Internet companies over China clampdown Sun Feb 12, 8:14 PM ET US Internet giants will come under unprecedented grilling in Congress this week for joining hands with China to censor the Internet, despite the proud American tradition of free speech. Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and Cisco Systems have all agreed to appear on Wednesday before a House of Representatives human rights panel, which summoned them following public outcry over their compliance with Beijing. By complying with China's demand for censorship in order to enter the booming Chinese market, some of the top American Internet firms in...

CAIRO EGYPTIANS were hardly astonished when a ferry packed with more than 1,400 passengers sank in the Red Sea. Anyone who has struggled to navigate daily life here knows safety standards are virtually nonexistent, and the value of human life is often overlooked by a government widely considered to be driven by corruption and favoritism. But the loss of the ferry, Al Salam, on Feb. 3, and the government's delayed and limited response to the emergency, have implications that extend beyond the scope of the disaster, and beyond the borders of Egypt. The calamity speaks directly to the slow burn...

HAVANA - Bulldozers dug up a street in front of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Havana on Wednesday apparently preparing to block the view of an electronic billboard carrying human rights messages that has angered President Fidel Castro . Brigades of workers began the task on Tuesday night, hours after Castro and hundreds of thousands of Cubans marched past the mission to protest against the five-foot-high (1.5- meter) ticker that streams messages across the facade of the U.S. Interests Section. U.S. diplomats said Cuba‘s communist authorities were building a concrete wall or screen to obstruct view of the ticker, which...

Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday confirmed that it took down the blog of outspoken Chinese journalist Zhao Jing, saying that it was complying with China's laws. Blogger Rebecca MacKinnon, a former CNN Beijing bureau chief now a research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, first reported that Jing's blog was taken down New Years Eve by Microsoft's blog-hosting service MSN Spaces. The blog has been replaced with the message, "This space is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later." Zhao, aka Michael Anti, is among a number of Chinese bloggers that have grown in popularity...

Microsoft Aiding China's Repression? 3 January 2006 @ 1:48PM Is Microsoft helping the Chinese communists suppress speech that they don't like? It sure sounds that way. Reporter Rebecca MacKinnon tells the story of Zhao Jing who blogs under the handle "Michael Anti." MacKinnon notes that "Anti is one of China's edgiest journalistic bloggers, often pushing at the boundaries of what is acceptible." His blog, hosted on Microsoft's MSN Spaces website, was recently shut down, apparently by Microsoft. So MacKinnon conducted her own tests, and discovered that MSN Spaces is systematically censoring words and removing blogs thought to be threatening to...

"In Aug., 2003, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced the results of their $1.2 million tax-payer funded study.  It stated, essentially, that traditionalists are mentally disturbed.  Scholars from the Universities of Maryland, California at Berkeley, and Stanford had determined that social conservatives, in particular, suffer from 'mental rigidity,' 'dogmatism,' and 'uncertainty avoidance,' together with associated indicators for mental illness."  (B.K. Eakman, Chronicles, Oct. 2004, pp. 28-29)   As usual with leftists, the true meaning of their words is couched in deceptive code.  When the deceptions are peeled away we discover that ''dogmatism''...

#1: America Takes Off Gloves, Puts on Brass Knuckles Author: Propaganda Department, The United States has often been called, directly or indirectly, the most brutal, repressive, and rapacious empire ever to place its yoke on the shoulders of humanity. But today, in an alarming policy shift that has the world recoiling in horror, the Bush administration, fed up with its critics, announced that the United States will immediately begin to live up to its unflattering, media-driven image. "We're damned if we do and damned if we don't," a stone-faced Vice President Dick Cheney snarled at a morning press conference. "For...

Rome (AsiaNews) – Hundreds of faithful in the Xian diocese, along with their friends and relatives, protested in the streets of the city yesterday to call for justice against a group of “thugs” who, on the night of November 23, brutally attacked 16 nuns of the Congregation of the Franciscan Sacred Heart Missionaries. These nuns have been admitted to hospital: one has lost her eyesight and another is also in serious condition. The nuns were attempting to prevent the demolition of a school that belongs to the diocese but that city authorities sold to a commercial company. The nuns had...

VIENNA - Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi said on Tuesday she has been repeatedly threatened with death in her home country Iran. Winning the Nobel Peace Prize of 2003 did not protect her from repression, she said in an interview in the newspaper Die Presse while attending the current international conference in Vienna on Islam in a Pluralistic World. I am threatened with death in Iran. Im constantly getting anonymous threatening letters. I am accused of defending western human rights, and working against the interests of Iran. I was already in prison once, and there were two attempted terror attacks on...

Cuban police recently raided a home in the Cuban city of Colon and confiscated what officials later called "subversive and dangerous." But the contraband wasn't drugs, or pornography, or bomb-making instructions. What police confiscated were printed Gospels of John and a small printing press. It was Sunday morning, Oct. 9, and five plainclothes secret police entered the house. After calling for reinforcements, a truck arrived with 12 armed, uniformed police who seized the gospels and the printing press. Cuban officials called the materials "subversive and dangerous." Police then took Pastor Eliseo Rodriguez Matos, head of an Assembly of God church...

BEIJING - An underground Chinese Catholic bishop who served 24 years in jail for his loyalty to the Roman Catholic pontiff has died, a U.S.-based religious monitoring group said Thursday. Zhang Bairen, the Roman Catholic bishop of Hanyang, a city in China's northern Hubei province, died Wednesday from heart disease, the Cardinal Kung Foundation said in a faxed statement. He was 90 years old. Zhang, also known as Peter Chang, earned a doctorate in theology from the Pontificio Collegio Urbano in Rome and was ordained as a priest on Dec. 19, 1942, the statement said. Zhang wrote in 1997 that...