voavyesintzve

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin plans to visit Haiti amid a period of political upheaval this weekend to aid humanitarian efforts in the Caribbean country.

A Palin staffer confirmed Thursday that Palin, the 2008 vice presidential nominee and a potential 2012 presidential contender, planned to travel to Haiti with the Rev. Franklin Graham as part of the outreach of his Samaritan's Purse relief organization.

A spokeswoman for the group confirmed Palin planned to visit relief sites this weekend.

A cholera outbreak has killed more than 2,000 people in Haiti, a country that is still recovering from a devastating earthquake earlier this year and is in the midst of a disputed presidential election.

Gunfire and barricades were reported Thursday in the capital city of Port-au-Prince, and the U.S. State Department reissued a travel warning to the country and recommended against nonessential travel.

Graham said he appreciates Palin's willingness to visit Haiti during such troubled times.

"I believe Gov. Palin will be a great encouragement to the people of Haiti and to the organizations, both government and private, working so hard to provide desperately needed relief," he said in a statement.

Graham heads the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, founded by his father, the Rev. Billy Graham. His Samaritan's Purse has maintained a presence in Haiti, treating thousands of people, building a cholera clinic and bringing in plane loads of medical aid, according to its website.

Palin staffer Rebecca Mansour said plans called for Palin to be joined by her husband, Todd, and, Mansour believed, daughter Bristol as well. She described the plans as fluid.

After resigning as governor last year, Palin focused heavily on getting conservative candidates elected, earning a reputation as something of a kingmaker during the midterm elections and raising her own political profile.

Her travel outside the country has been limited since she burst onto the national stage, including a trip last year to Hong Kong, where she delivered a speech on U.S.-China relations.

Dissident Liu Xiaobo, imprisoned in a Chinese jail and winner of the Nobel prize, is not expected to appear in Oslo on Friday to accept the award. Likewise, Taiwanese politician Lien Chan, recipient of the first Confucius Peace Prize, did not show in Beijing on Thursday.

But he had a good excuse — Lien' s office only heard of the award Wednesday from media reports, and Lien has no plans to accept it, reported the Taipei Times newspaper.

Liu, 54, is serving an 11-year sentence for inciting subversion of state power. His crime was to be a founder of Charter 08, a statement that says it is wrong for a government to deny its citizens election of public officials and freedom of religion and expression. Liu was convicted Christmas Day 2009 after a two-hour trial.

In awarding him the peace prize, the Norwegian Nobel Committee said Liu was being recognized for "his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China" despite severe punishment for doing so against him and his family.

China will not allow Liu or any of his family members to leave the country to accept the prize and its $1.4 million award in Oslo. His wife, Liu Xia, has been under house arrest since the award was announced Oct. 8.

The haste with which China's rival event was organized became clear at its chaotic award ceremony Thursday in the Chinese capital. Committee chairman Tan Changliu, a writer on philosophy, insisted that his committee was a private group without links to the Chinese government. He denied it was formed in response to the Nobel committee honoring Liu, a decision that has outraged Beijing.

Tan said the prize had been prepared for a long time. Yet, philosophy professor Zhou Guidian, one of five judges, said he had been informed only at the end of November and first met his fellow judges on Dec. 5.

Tan on Thursday consistently deflected questions about the Nobel award and Liu Xiaobo, whose name he could barely bring himself to say, preferring instead "those three characters," which comprise Liu's name in Mandarin.

A committee brochure distributed at the Confucious ceremony made explicit the Nobel connection. China "is a symbol of peace," and with its 1 billion-plus population should have a greater voice on the issue of world peace, announced the Confucius Peace Prize jury.

In contrast, the announcement said, Norway is a small country of few people which can only put forward minority choices for the Nobel Peace Prize, making "bias and even falsehoods" inevitable.

Lien Chan, now the honorary chairman of Taiwan's ruling Kuomintang Party, was chosen for his "contribution to the bridge of peace" between the mainland and Taiwan, read the award. Cross-Straits relations have long been fraught as Beijing considers the island a breakaway province.

Lien has not responded publicly to the award. Fellow nominees included Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, and former president Jimmy Carter, a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Carter has called for Liu's release.

Other nominees were Yuan Longping, a Chinese rice expert; poet Qiao Damo, the Beijing-appointed Panchen Lama, Tibetan Buddhism's second highest figure; Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas; and Nelson Mandela, another Nobel laureate.

In contrast to the pomp and traditions of the Nobel ceremony stretching back over 100 years, Thursday's event was understandably more modest.

In an over-crowded meeting room in downtown Beijing, the organizers presented a certificate, trophy and a bundle of bank notes, tied up with ribbon to a bemused-looking schoolgirl, Zeng Yuhai, who stood in for the winner. The prize money of $15,000 was donated by a "peace-loving" benefactor, whom Tan did not identify.

China has waged a diplomatic lobbying campaign that has persuaded 18 nations to boycott Friday's Nobel ceremony.

Those boycotting include Russia, Kazakhstan, Colombia, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Serbia, Iraq, Iran, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Venezuela, the Philippines, Egypt, Sudan, Ukraine, Cuba and Morocco.

Some of the boycotters share China's intolerance of dissent, but all have growing economic ties with China that some say they are afraid to jeopardize.

"China has been arm-twisting behind the scenes to stop governments from attending the Nobel Prize ceremony, using a combination of political pressure and economic blackmail," Sam Zarifi, Asia-Pacific director for human rights group Amnesty International, said Tuesday.

Thursday, Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu criticized U.S. lawmakers for calling on China to release Liu and his wife.

Websites of television networks CNN, the BBC and Norwegian public broadcaster NRK, which all will cover the Nobel ceremony, could not be accessed Thursday.

In principle, the prize committee's choice of Confucius, "a radical social critic who definitely aimed to bring about peace, is not a bad idea," said Daniel Bell, a philosophy professor at Beijing's Qinghua University, and author of China's New Confucianism. "But the way it's been carried out doesn't make it seem very serious."

In recent years, China's government and public have shown renewed interest in Confucius, once vilified under Chairman Mao, Bell said.

"People are looking for an ethical basis to counter the capitalism and individualism" prevalent today, and appreciate the Confucian emphasis on social responsibility, he said.

In the Confucian tradition, "it's important for diverse views to be aired so political rulers can improve," Bell said.

The new prize's hasty birth does not preclude a robust future, said judge Zhou Guidian. "We have an old saying in China, 'the latecomers surpass the old timers.' I am confident that in the future the authority of the Confucius Peace Prize will exceed that of the Nobel Prize."

The Beijing-born, New York-based filmmaker Miao Wang follows three cabbies around her old hometown in the picturesque documentary “Beijing Taxi,” filmed over several years leading up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The cabbies have interesting and poignant things to say about being left behind in China’s rush to modernize, and Ms. Wang; her directors of photography, Ian Vollmer and Sean Price Williams; and her editor, Sikay Tang, have produced an attractive and seamless set of images of working-class Chinese life. (The chronology gets a little herky-jerky, with major changes in the drivers’ lives happening entirely off screen.)
The film works quite well as a melancholy travelogue — an elevated version of something you might see on cable television — but its aspirations for depth of feeling or more profound social commentary aren’t quite realized. We learn a fair bit about the taxi drivers’ lives without really being drawn into them, and the film’s observations on Chinese society and its modern history are elegantly framed but are nothing you haven’t seen already, possibly in upscale travel magazines.

You suspect that Ms. Wang wanted to fit in everything she was seeing: forced relocations, the health system, Olympics propaganda, paunchy foreign men dancing with young Chinese women, and on and on. Her best material involves a headstrong female driver in her mid-30s, Wei Caixia, who is young by Western standards but close to being over the hill in Beijing. When she shows her wedding pictures to a group of women in their 20s, their disbelief and casual rudeness — “Not as pretty as the old days” — says more than any number of shots of Beijing streets and landmarks flowing by.

The Army is shipping powerful new rifles to its snipers in Afghanistan to kill insurgents who are firing from greater distances and shooting at troops more frequently than in the early years of the war.

The XM2010 sniper rifle can hit a target 3,937 feet away, which is a quarter-mile farther than the current Army sniper rifle shoots.

The added distance is important because insurgents have been shooting down from ridges and mountaintops where gravity helps their bullets travel farther and beyond the range of Army snipers.

"They're not outgunning us, but they are putting our soldiers in a predicament where 800 meters (2,625 feet) may not be enough," said Col. Douglas Tamilio, referring to the maximum range of the current M24 sniper rifle.

"Because of the expanse, you can see so far and you can engage so far," Tamilio said. "You want to give guys the capability to do those things they need to do at those ranges."

Afghan insurgents appear more willing to shoot at U.S. troops than in the past, according to Pentagon data. Gunfire attacks on U.S. troops in Afghanistan have spiked over the past year and in July 2009 topped 1,000 for the first time in the war. That mark has been topped several times since.

Afghanistan is full of craggy mountains, broad valleys and desert where insurgents can hide and shoot from long distances.

"There's an enormous amount of terrain there that favors snipers," said John Pike, a military analyst and director of Globalsecurity.org, a website dealing with defense matters.

The Army's 2,500 snipers are to start receiving the XM2010 early next year, said Tamilio, who manages weapons programs for the Army. The M24 has been in service since 1988.

Among other improvements contained in the new sniper rifle are more powerful telescope and a device on the muzzle that dampens the noise and flash of a shot, helping to conceal the U.S. sniper.

Prior to the Afghanistan war the Army spent about $400,000 per year on sniper equipment; it spends about $19 million now. The Army began seeking the more powerful rifle in February based on requests from commanders in Afghanistan.

The Pentagon would not say how much the new rifle costs, but said Congress appropriated $5.6 million in 2009 and 2010 for the rifle's development and production.

The snipers are an important part of the counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan, which is designed to minimize civilian casualties, Tamilio said. Insurgents often mingle among villagers as cover because they know that U.S. troops want to avoid harming civilians.

"A well-trained sniper taking out somebody he knows he has to take out — if it's a high payoff target — he can do that with almost no collateral damage," Tamilio said. "He's going to put his round on target."

Pike agreed, saying a bullet is better than a bomb in most circumstances.

"You don't want to kill the people that you're trying to defend," Pike said.

"We won't win the war doing that. Anyone other than a sniper runs a serious risk of killing innocent people in the wrong place at the wrong time."