This October, on a scheduled visit to the United States, the Dalai Lama will not be welcomed at the White House.

Tang Xiaozhao's is the 3,943rd signature on a list that has swelled to more than 8,100 from across China. Although their numbers are still small, those signing, and the broad spectrum from which they come, have made the human rights manifesto, known as Charter 08, a significant marker in the demands for democracy in China, one of the few sustained campaigns since the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.

But now the Chinese are in on the game and, surprise, they're even bigger...planning a solar project twice as large as any currently planned, with a capacity of a full gigawatt.

Corruption accounts for an estimated 3% to 15% of a $7-trillion economy, and party membership can be an invitation to solicit bribes or cut illegal land deals. Membership hit 74 million at the end of 2007, a 10% jump from 2002, as moneymaking opportunities increasingly trumped ideology.

More than 150 international scholars, human-rights activists and Nobel Prize laureates wrote to China's president calling for the release of one of the country's leading dissidents, Liu Xiaobo, adding new international pressure on Beijing over its human-rights practices.

Britain’s concession could be China’s most significant achievement on Tibet since American support for Tibetan guerillas was ended before Nixon’s visit to Beijing. Including China in global decision-making is welcome, but Western powers should not rewrite history to get support in the financial crisis.

What is most revealing about the financial meltdown and economic crisis, however, is that it illustrates that corporations — if left to their own worst instincts — will destroy themselves and the system that nurtures them. It is rare that this lesson is so graphically illustrated. It is one the world must quickly learn, if we are to avoid the most serious existential threat we have yet faced: climate change.

It is becoming increasingly clear which nation global corporations will be rooting for at this summer's Olympics: China.

China has clearly overtaken the United States as the world’s leading emitter of carbon dioxide, the main heat-trapping gas, a new study has found, its emissions increasing 8 percent in 2007.

The end goal of Chinese police state is to use the latest people-tracking technology - thoughtfully supplied by American giants like IBM, Honeywell and GE - to create an airtight consumer cocoon without the threat of democracy breaking out.

To Olympic athletes contemplating wearing messages of support for Tibet, Darfur or even the notion of a better world, the International Olympic Committee is saying, "Don't."

Green Wangari Maathai said that she would not run as planned in the Olympic torch relay in Tanzania this weekend, to protest abuses of human rights and destruction of the environment in China.

The FBI has opened a preliminary investigation of a report that China-based hackers have penetrated the e-mail accounts of leaders and members of the Save Darfur Coalition, a national advocacy group pushing to end the six-year-old conflict in Sudan.

Worldwide protests over China's crackdown in Tibet are spreading, putting pressure on Beijing's Communist leaders just months ahead of their showpiece Olympic Games in August.

In provinces outside China's Tibet Autonomous Region, protests have started to percolate.

Police opened fire on Tibetan protesters as anti-Chinese rallies spread outside of Lhasa on Sunday, a witness and activists said, amid warnings from the Dalai Lama of a "rule of terror" in his homeland.

European Union leaders yesterday threatened the United States and China with trade sanctions if the world's two biggest polluters don't commit to ambitious cuts in greenhouse gases by next year.

China kept government workers confined to their offices Saturday and ordered tourists out of Tibet's capital while lines of soldiers sealed off streets where riots had erupted, witnesses said. A Tibetan exile group said at least 30 people were killed in protests Friday.

Protesters in Tibet's capital Lhasa burnt shops and vehicles and yelled for independence on Friday as the region was hit by its biggest protests for nearly two decades, testing China's grip months before the Olympics.

Tibet's language, customs and traditions are fading away and Tibetans live in fear as they become an insignificant minority in their Himalayan homeland, the Dalai Lama will say in a speech on Monday.

For six years, the organisers of the Beijing Olympics have been planning an event that will restore China to the centre of the world stage.