By MARK MACKINNON, Toronto Globe and Mail

BANGKOK - It was supposed to have been a safe haven, a place where those who didn't want to fight could take refuge from the violence and anarchy in Thailand's capital. Instead the Wat Pathum Buddhist temple was a place of death and terror as perhaps 1,500 civilians huddled inside as the fighting raged all around.

BEIJING - There was a time when Su Yang would drop off her 7-year-old daughter a few blocks from school, and let little Yu Haifei walk the rest of the way. But not these nervous days in China.

Already strained by everything from Internet freedom to Iran's nuclear program, relations between the United States and China have now plunged to their lowest point in nearly a decade amid a new dispute over the planned sale of advanced U.S. arms to Taiwan.

China's army of knockoff artists has long irritated the powerful by producing cheap DVD copies of movies still in theaters and imitation clothing at prices so low, designers faint with embarrassment. Now, an Internet-savvy copycat has gone even further, producing a look-alike of a very familiar billion-dollar search engine that just happens to be in hot water with the Chinese government.

GUANGZHOU, China - At first, Rao Yuansheng didn't even realize he was doing it. He was sitting in the bustling newsroom of Guangzhou Television, worrying aloud about the declining use of Cantonese here in the land of its birth, and he was speaking in Mandarin.

GUANGZHOU, China - For decades, China's citizens have lived with the controversial one-child regime imposed on them by the government. Now, pet lovers in this southern factory city are frothing over the latest official intrusion into their lives: a one-dog policy.

BEIJING - Was Mao Zedong the Abraham Lincoln of China?

In an attempt to convince President Barack Obama of its claim to Tibet, the Chinese government has likened the 1959 Communist takeover of the area to the American Civil War, inferring that Mao freed Tibetans from slavery much as Lincoln ended slavery in the United States.

China has never been a patient, wait-in-line kind of place.

The history of the vast and populous nation is a tale of chaos repeatedly triumphing over calm, order over disorder. On many occasions -- the Boxer Rebellion, the Cultural Revolution, the subway each day at rush hour -- things have degenerated into mob rule.

But that, Shu Xiaofeng swears, was the old China.

In 14 terse lines, saved on his hard drive in a file named "Many have suffered too much because of me," former South Korean president Roh Moo-hyun tried to explain why he would kill himself a few hours later.

North Korea is preparing to launch a missile designed to reach as far as the west coast of Canada or the United States, while leader Kim Jong-il praises his country as an invulnerable "socialist fortress."