-- SHANGHAI -- Police forced the wife of 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo to leave her Beijing home Friday night, in a bid to stop her talking to foreign media crowded outside her apartment block.**********
It was part of China's "damage control" efforts that began with blacking out television coverage Friday when the announcement came that the jailed Chinese rights activist is this year's Nobel Peace laureate.
Only satellite television, of course. No Chinese stations were even covering the news that China had won its first ever Nobel Prize.
UPDATE: Chinese bigwigs lose...
...their collective mind...
The Chinese government's reaction was swift and unequivocal. A statement on the Chinese Foreign Ministry's website called the award "an obscenity" that goes against the aims of the award.
It warned the award also will hurt China's relations with Norway, the country where the Nobel Committee is based.