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Exiled Tibetan spiritual leader The Dalai Lama greets the audience after speaking on "The Virtue of Non-Violence" at The Beacon Theatre in New York October 20, 2013 file photo. REUTERS/Darren Ornitz

By Ben Blanchard

BEIJING (Reuters) - China aims to stamp out the voice of exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama in his restive and remote homeland by ensuring that his "propaganda" is not received by anyone on the internet, television or other means, a top official said.

China has tried, with varying degrees of success, to prevent Tibetans listening to or watching programs broadcast from outside the country, or accessing any information about the Dalai Lama and the exiled government on the internet.

But many Tibetans are still able to access such news, either via illegal satellite televisions or by skirting Chinese internet restrictions. The Dalai Lama's picture and his teachings are also smuggled into Tibet, at great personal risk.

Writing in the ruling Communist Party's influential journal Qiushi, the latest issue of which was received by subscribers on Saturday, Tibet's party chief Chen Quanguo said that the government would ensure only its voice is heard.

"Strike hard against the reactionary propaganda of the splittists from entering Tibet," Chen wrote in the magazine, whose name means "seeking truth".

The government will achieve this by confiscating illegal satellite dishes, increasing monitoring of online content and making sure all telephone and internet users are registered using their real names, he added.

"Work hard to ensure that the voice and image of the party is heard and seen over the vast expanses (of Tibet) ... and that the voice and image of the enemy forces and the Dalai clique are neither seen nor heard," Chen wrote.

China calls the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Dalai Lama a "wolf in sheep's clothing" who seeks to use violent methods to establish an independent Tibet.

The Dalai Lama, who fled to India after a failed uprising in 1959, says he simply wants genuine autonomy for Tibet, and denies espousing violence.

Chen said the party would seek to expose the Dalai Lama's "hypocrisy and deception" and his "reactionary plots".

China has long defended its iron-fisted rule in Tibet, saying the region suffered from dire poverty, brutal exploitation and economic stagnation until 1950, when Communist troops "peacefully liberated" Tibet.

Tensions in China's Tibetan regions are at their highest in years after a spate of self-immolation protests by Tibetans, which have led to an intensified security crackdown.

(Editing by Jeremy Laurence)


China aims to quiet Dalai Lama voice in Tibet

Washington (AFP) - President Barack Obama on Saturday called for an end to "manufactured crises and self-inflicted wounds" as he urged Republicans and Democrats in Congress to approve a new federal budget.

Obama, speaking in his weekly radio address, said that what most people hear out of Washington is "a jumble of unfocused noise that's out of touch with the things you care about.

"So today, I want to cut through that noise and talk plainly about what we should do right now," he said.

"It begins by ending what has done more than anything else to undermine our economy over the past few years – and that's the constant cycle of manufactured crises and self-inflicted wounds."

Obama spoke a little more than two weeks after the United States scraped through a bitter budget and debt ceiling battle that threatened to send the country into default and forced the 16-day partial federal government shutdown, but only by using stop-gap measures that pushed the battle deadlines forward.

If a fresh budget deal is not found by January 15, when the temporary funding expires, a new round of automatic spending cuts will hit.

Obama said Congress should "pass a budget that cuts things we don't need, and closes wasteful tax loopholes that don't help create jobs, so that we can free up resources for the things that actually do create jobs and growth."

The president also had something to boast about, noting that this week "the Treasury confirmed that since I took office, we've cut our deficits by more than half."

The US deficit for the fiscal year 2013, which ended September 30, stood at 4.1 percent of gross domestic product, the Treasury Department announced Wednesday.

The deficit-to-GDP ratio was 7.0 percent in 2012 after hitting more than 10 percent in 2009, when the government was spending heavily to counter the worst recession in decades.

But the deficit reduction is largely related to the onerous automatic cuts known as the sequestration.

In the absence of a budget agreement between Republicans and Democrats, federal spending has been slashed in blunt, massive cuts since March.

Conceived in mid-2011 during the previous debt ceiling crisis, the spending cuts were to be an unthinkable option that would force the two sides to strike a deal.

But a compromise did not materialize ahead of the deadline.

The result was that public spending fell two percent, notably in defense and education.

Obama's plea to Congress

During his weekly radio address, the president asks Democrats and Republicans to stop the political bickering.
'Self-inflicted wounds'

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Starvation, poverty, flooding, heat waves, droughts, war and disease already lead to human tragedies. They're likely to worsen as the world warms from man-made climate change, a leaked draft of an international scientific report forecasts.

The Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will issue a report next March on how global warming is already affecting the way people live and what will happen in the future, including a worldwide drop in income. A leaked copy of a draft of the summary of the report appeared online Friday on a climate skeptic's website. Governments will spend the next few months making comments about the draft.

"We've seen a lot of impacts and they've had consequences," Carnegie Institution climate scientist Chris Field, who heads the report, told The Associated Press on Saturday. "And we will see more in the future."

Cities, where most of the world now lives, have the highest vulnerability, as do the globe's poorest people.

"Throughout the 21st century, climate change impacts will slow down economic growth and poverty reduction, further erode food security and trigger new poverty traps, the latter particularly in urban areas and emerging hotspots of hunger," the report says. "Climate change will exacerbate poverty in low- and lower-middle income countries and create new poverty pockets in upper-middle to high-income countries with increasing inequality."

For people living in poverty, the report says, "climate-related hazards constitute an additional burden."

The report says scientists have high confidence especially in what it calls certain "key risks":

—People dying from warming- and sea rise-related flooding, especially in big cities.

—Famine because of temperature and rain changes, especially for poorer nations.

—Farmers going broke because of lack of water.

—Infrastructure failures because of extreme weather.

—Dangerous and deadly heat waves worsening.

—Certain land and marine ecosystems failing.

"Human interface with the climate system is occurring and climate change poses risks for human and natural systems," the 29-page summary says.

None of the harms talked about in the report is solely due to global warming nor is climate change even the No. 1 cause, the scientists say. But a warmer world, with bursts of heavy rain and prolonged drought, will worsen some of these existing effects, they say.

For example, in disease, the report says until about 2050 "climate change will impact human health mainly by exacerbating health problems that already exist" and then it will lead to worse health compared to a future with no futher warming.

If emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of coal, oil and gas continue at current trajectories, "the combination of high temperature and humidity in some areas for parts of the year will compromise normal human activities including growing food or working outdoors," the report says.

Scientists say the global economy may continue to grow, but once the global temperature hits about 3 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than now, it could lead to worldwide economic losses between 0.2 and 2.0 percent of income.

One of the more controversial sections of the report involves climate change and war.

"Climate change indirectly increases risks from violent conflict in the form of civil war, inter-group violence and violent protests by exacerbating well-established drivers of these conflicts such as poverty and economic shocks," the report says.

Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann, who wasn't part of the international study team, told the AP that the report's summary confirms what researchers have known for a long time: "Climate change threatens our health, land, food and water security."

The summary went through each continent detailing risks and possible ways that countries can adapt to them.

For North America, the highest risks over the long term are from wildfires, heat waves and flooding. Water — too much and too little — and heat are the biggest risks for Europe, South America and Asia, with South America and Asia having to deal with drought-related food shortages. Africa gets those risks and more: starvation, pests and disease. Australia and New Zealand get the unique risk of losing their coral reef ecosystems, and small island nations have to be worried about being inundated by rising seas.

Field said experts paint a dramatic contrast of possible futures, but because countries can lessen some of the harms through reduced fossil fuel emissions and systems to cope with other changes, he said he doesn't find working on the report depressing.

"The reason I'm not depressed is because I see the difference between a world in which we don't do anything and a world in which we try hard to get our arms around the problem," he said.

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Online:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: http://www.ipcc.ch/

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Seth Borenstein be followed at http://twitter.com/borenbears

• by Kevin Mathews
• October 26, 2013