Obama tells Muslim world vaccines are not CIA front, then runs CIA vaccine front.

In his 2009 speech to the Muslim world, President Barack Obama announced a new effort to eradicate polio, which persists in three Muslim countries. One of the biggest hurdles had been persuading some local leaders that vaccination campaigns were independent health efforts, not nefarious programs being run by the CIA.

With the Obama administration's assurances, Muslim scholars issued a religious decree that parents should vaccinate their children. The administration and public health officials cheered as the number of new polio cases began to fall in some hard-to-reach areas.

Recently, however, as the U.S. closed in on Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan, the CIA used a vaccine program as cover, a way to try to collect DNA from bin Laden's family and confirm he was hiding inside a walled compound.

Public health officials swiftly criticized the move, saying the independence of health workers must be sacrosanct. World Health Organization spokeswoman Sona Bari said health officials were caught by surprise when the story was first reported by the Guardian newspaper in London. The Associated Press has confirmed details about the vaccination program from U.S. officials.

"It's just so unfortunate. It's the worst kind of labeling you could put on a public health campaign," Bari said Wednesday. "Any backlash against this will hurt the children of Pakistan."

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Why China may worry about North Korea just as much as America does

"SUCH reports have been heard before and smack of wishful thinking. But there are more reasons than usual to believe China’s promises that it is trying to rein in its unruly, pugnacious little ally, North Korea. South Korea’s president, Lee Myung-bak, has said that China has promised not to side with North Korea if it stages further provocations towards the South. That would be a big shift. Last year China failed to condemn either the sinking by North Korea of a South Korean naval vessel in March, or the shelling in November of a South Korean island. Now Chinese scholars and officials do indeed seem to be sending strong signals to North Korea that enough is enough.

In June Liang Guanglie, China’s defence minister, told a regional-security forum in Singapore that China had done much more in communicating with North Korea “than you can imagine”. At another conference, in Kuala Lumpur, Zhu Feng, a professor at Peking University, contradicted a North Korean participant who argued that the security issue on the Korean peninsula was one of reunification and a legacy of the cold war. It was also a result, Mr Zhu said, of the unchanged nature of the North Korean regime and its behaviour. North Korea, he argued, “risks biting the Chinese hand that feeds it.”

China has been exasperated with North Korea before, not least in 2006, after its first test of a nuclear weapon. Mutual suspicion and animosity go back much further. In a recent paper*, You Ji, a former Chinese foreign-ministry official now at the University of New South Wales, reports that Kim Jong Il, North Korea’s dictator, never forgave China for its disapproval of the hereditary succession in which he took over from his father, Kim Il Sung. Sulking, he did not visit China once from 1983 to 2000." Read More