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Today's Links: Obama & the Dalai Lama, China helps Jamaica and Pentagon project hacked

China says Obama should not meet the Dalai Lama [Associated Press] “China said Thursday that President Barack Obama should not meet the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, when he visits the United States in October. Although a meeting has not been confirmed, every president since George H.W. Bush has met the Dalai Lama, raising the ire of China, which says the Nobel Peace laureate is bent on splitting Tibet from China. "We firmly oppose the Dalai's engagement in separatist activities in any country under whatever capacity and under whatever name," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said when asked to comment on a possible meeting.”

China Uses Global Crisis to Assert Its Influence [Washington Post Foreign Service] “BEIJING -- With Jamaica's currency in free fall, unemployment soaring and banks heavily exposed to government debt, the Caribbean island's diplomats went into crisis mode earlier this year. They traveled to all corners of the world to seek help. Jamaica's traditional allies, the United States and Britain, were preoccupied with their own financial problems, but a new friend jumped at the opportunity to come to the rescue: China. When contracts for loan packages totaling $138 million were signed between the two countries in March, China became Jamaica's biggest financial partner. Headlines in Jamaica's leading newspapers, which only a year ago were filled with concern about China's growing influence in the region, gushed about its generosity.

Fighter Jet Files Stolen [IGN] “Think you have got problems when a bitter ex-lover hacks into your Myspace profile? Try having computer spies break into your $300 billion war machine developments systems. Yep, that is right, our nation's defense structure was cracked into once again recently when unidentified hackers made their way into the Pentagon's Joint Strike Fighter project, causing unknown amounts of potential national security concerns.”

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