The Authors@Google program welcomed Daniel Pipes to Google’s New York office to discuss his book, The Threat to Israel’s Existence. Daniel Pipes is one of the world’s foremost analysts on the Middle East and Islam and he is director of the Middle East Forum, a non-profit organization he founded in 1994 whose slogan is “Promoting American Interests”. His website, DanielPipes.org, is among the most accessed sources of specialized information on the Middle East and Islam. A graduate of Harvard University, with both a BA and PhD in history, he has been recognized as one of Harvard’s 100 most influential living graduates and is a Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. He taught at many universities, including Harvard, Princeton, Chicago, the U.S. Naval War College and Pepperdine.

Dr. Pipes is a prize-winning columnist, formerly for the New York Times syndicate and now writing independently for many newspapers. He is the author of 12 books and his writings have been translated into 33 languages. He has held two presidential positions in the U.S. government, testified before many congressional committees, and worked for five presidential campaigns – including serving as an advisor to Rudolph Giuliani’s 2008 presidential campaign.

This event took place on May 28, 2009.

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North Korea is being implicated in a cyber attack over the July 4 weekend, according to South Korean intelligence officials.

The attack brought down several major American and South Korean Web sites at least temporarily. But other South Korean officials expressed doubt that the North Koreans could carry out such an attack.

Keith Epstein, an investigative reporter for BusinessWeek whose specialty is cyber security, joins Martin Savidge to discuss who is behind the cyber attacks, the consequences of the attacks and how the U.S. can improve cyber security.

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Kenya has set a goal of testing 80% of its population for HIV by 2010. Currently, under 20% of Kenya’s population has been tested for HIV.

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Troops have flooded China’s western Xinjiang province to enforce a curfew after days of heightened tensions between ethnic Uighurs and Han Chinese in the regional capital Urumqi. More than 150 people have been killed and 1,000 injured in street violence that erupted on Sunday.

As Melissa Chan reports, there is no indication things will return to normal anytime soon.

More from United Press International:

The Urumqi ethnic riots have so shaken up China that President Hu Jintao was forced to cut short his Italy trip, canceling his highly promoted meetings with leaders of G8 and major developing countries.

The Italy agenda was expected to include issues important to China such as whether to let the U.S. dollar remain the dominant international currency, the future role for the Chinese yuan and global climate change.

The Urumqi violence also brought into sharper world focus the simmering racial tensions between the Turkic-speaking Muslim Uighurs and Han Chinese and how Beijing plans to settle the hot issue brewing in the oil-rich Xinjiang-Uighur region in its northwest, of which Urumqi is the capital. Many Muslim Uighurs resent being ruled in what they consider as their land by Han Chinese, transplanted from other sections of the society.

The Sunday incident, resulting from this simmering crisis, exploded into deadly violence leaving at least 156 dead and more than 1,000 injured. Despite heavy Chinese security that drastically curtailed Internet, cell phone and other communications services in the 2.3 million-population city, the protests resumed Tuesday but no new casualties were reported.

Chinese authorities have been open in acknowledging the riots were the worst casualty-related ethnic violence since the party took power in China in 1949. Authorities have been relatively open in allowing foreign journalists into the area.

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Al Jazeera profiles Rebiya Kadeer, the voice of the Uighur community.

And here’s the New York Times profile of Rebiya Kadeer.

As the global face of resistance to what she calls the worsening Chinese repression of the Uighurs, Rebiya Kadeer is displaying the tenacity and sense of destiny that drove her improbable climb inside China in decades past, from laundry girl to famed business mogul.

The Beijing government that hailed her as a model citizen in the 1990s, before imprisoning her for stealing state secrets and sending her into exile in the United States in 2005, vilifies her as the unseen hand behind protests that erupted Sunday in the Uighur homeland of western China.

“All the difficulties in my life prepared me for the tough times we face now,” said the woman, who is happy to be called the “Mother of the Uighurs,” in an interview on Tuesday.

In a plain wool suit and a traditional Uighur cap topping waist-length pigtails, Ms. Kadeer, 62, veered from impish humor and warmth — she leapt to pump the hand of a reporter who described visiting her childhood town — to intense, hand-waving condemnations of Chinese perfidy.

The walls of her small office in downtown Washington are covered with photographs of meetings with President George W. Bush and Laura Bush, and pictures of several of her 11 children, two of whom are now in prison in China. They were sentenced to long terms after she came to the United States and resumed work for Uighur rights.

The week’s events have catapulted Ms. Kadeer to a new level of global recognition, a prominence that seems belied by the few modest rooms here where she and a few aides press their cause with telephones, the Internet and passion.

This week, several office and personal phones rang incessantly, with reporters from around the world seeking a word. Still, it became clear that the Uighurs, long downtrodden and little known in the West, enjoy little of the glamour of their neighbors, the Tibetans. When Ms. Kadeer led a march to the Chinese Embassy on Tuesday, no more than several dozen supporters, mainly fellow exiles, showed up.

If she was disappointed, she gave no sign. In the interview and in her autobiography, “Dragon Fighter,” which came out this year, Ms. Kadeer described her survival through famine, persecution during Mao’s Cultural Revolution and then — as she threw herself into black-market trading of cloth, underwear and other items — the repeated seizure of her goods and money by corrupt or overzealous officials.

She claims that she had, from the beginning, an irrepressible devotion to Uighur self-determination. In her eyes, even her start in life brought an omen. Money and luck were running out in the mining settlement where her father hoped to strike it rich, she wrote, in a story that may be too good to investigate.

In accordance with tradition, her father went to bury the bloody birth linens. As he dug a hole, he suddenly shouted, “Gold!” From that moment on, she wrote, her parents said, “You don’t belong to us; you belong to the people.”

What is indisputable is that from early on she was a determined and shrewd businesswoman willing to sell goods from a sack at the side of the road when necessary, buying and selling thousands of sheepskins or logs when she saw the chance. As China’s economy opened up in the 1980s, she expanded into real estate and flourished. By the 1990s she was running trading companies all over Central Asia, had built a famous women’s bazaar and then a seven-story department store in Urumqi, the capital of the region of Xinjiang, and ran a charity for Uighur women.

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Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, and Barack Obama, the US president, discussed various contentious issues over a two-day summit that began on Monday. Both sides seemed to be committed to a new era of co-operation and have signed eight separate agreements to that effect.

A still looming question, however, is what future does Russia want for itself?

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Despite the election of younger heads of government in such countries as Britain, France, Germany, Japan and the United States, the face of politics in India is still one of relative seniority. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who has heart trouble, is 76. The head of the largest opposition party is 81. A much younger generation is beginning to enter the electoral stage in the world’s largest democracy but they belong to political families, raising questions about dynastic politics. More from VOA correspondent Steve Herman in New Delhi.

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