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Shaolin Temple, in the northern province of Henan, became famous in the West as the training ground for Kwai Chang “Grasshopper” Caine in the 1970s “Kung Fu” TV series.

Ninjas — professional assassins trained in martial arts — date back to mediaeval Japan.

“The so-called defeat is purely fabricated, and we demand the Internet user to apologise to the whole nation for the wrongs he or she did,” the Beijing News said, citing a notice announced by a lawyer for the Shaolin monks.

Relations between Chinese and Japanese are sensitive at the best of times, with emotions still running high over Japan’s invasion and occupation of parts of China in the first half of the 20th Century.

The Internet user, calling themselves “Five Minutes Every Day”, said on an online forum last week that a Japanese ninja came to Shaolin, asked for a fight and many monks failed to beat him, the newspaper said.

“The facts that the monks could not defeat a Japanese ninja showed that they were named as kung fu masters in vain,” the Internet user was quoted as saying in the post.

The Shaolin temple “strongly condemned the horrible deeds” of the user, the newspaper said.

Backstop heights can vary according to the site and use. General dimensions are as follows:

1. Height. A minimum height of 15 feet is acceptable but 20 to 25 feet is recommended. This height is the compacted or settled height. Height should also be consistent with other barriers that may be incorporated into the range design.

A ricochet catcher, ricochet baffle or eyebrow can be installed to reduce the incidence of bullets escaping the range by sliding up the face of the backstop. The ricochet catcher is designed to retain only those ricochets that occur on the face of the backstop. While the distance traveled by such a ricochet would be nominal, this factor will nevertheless need to be included in the design calculations. These devices are installed approximately perpendicular to the backstop face and extend 4 to 6 feet out from the slope. The base of the ricochet catcher is typically 12 to 15 feet above the range floor, measured vertically from the ground surface at the target line. This prevents direct bullet impact into the catcher. Once major specification is that the ricochet catcher must be impenetrable to ricochets and should extend completely from side to side and connect the sidewalls. If overhead baffles are employed, the top of the backstop need only be 3 to 5 feet higher than the ricochet catcher. Specific construction details of the ricochet catcher will dictate the amount of material needed to ensure that the catcher is held securely in place.

2. Width. The width of the backstop should extend at least 5 feet beyond the intersection of the toe/bottom edge of the side berm and the outside targets/firing position. If the range has high side berms that closely match the height of the backstop then this requirement does not apply. Keep in mind that repair equipment needs adequate area to maneuver and work behind the target line. Therefore, this allowance may need to be greater.

3. Slope. The range side slope (side facing the shooter) must be as steep as possible, but not less than a 45-degree slope (a ration of 1-to-1). If a soil analysis determines that the soil will not support construction equipment, maintain the minimum required slope angle, or support vegetation, then it may be more economical to remove the poor soils and replace it with more suitable material. Special techniques may be required to stabilize the backstop.

In poor soil areas, gabions or rip-rap may be used on the offside of the backstop to stabilize materials.

Sandbags or automobile tires may be incorporated to maintain the bullet impact side of the slope. A major consideration if automobile tires are to be used is that they will present significant additional work time when the backstop is mined for lead. It is also necessary to fill the interior of the tires as they are put into place and before they are covered with clean fill. Steel-belted radial tires should not be used at all. There are many materials that can be used to stabilize the slope until vegetation can be established. Special netting material is especially useful to establish plants. Heavy vegetation such as large plants or trees should not be permitted on the top or range side of the backstops.

If columns of automobile tires are used as the core of the backstop, these columns must be supported by using utility poles inside each column with clean fill material added to the interior of each tire as it is put into place. Without filling the interior of each tire, the columns of tires will collapse, requiring the use of more tires. Not using utility poles or some other support for the column may cause the backstop itself to collapse. The use of wooden cribs for a backstop is labor intensive to maintain and is a less desirable construction method. They should be used only as a last resort.

Steel backstops are also an acceptable alternative when soils are inadequate. The primary drawback is the initial cost. However, if the projected quantity of shooting is substantial, the ease of recovering lead may quickly offset the initial cost. Basic maintenance costs also will be lower. Expect foundation work to be required to set and support this type of backstop. Because these backstops are constructed to the same specifications as indoor range backstops, an additional earthen barrier behind them may be needed.

Side berms and walls

These protective barriers may be constructed from earth, precast concrete panels, masonry walls, wooden cribs, wooden box-type structures filled with pea-gravel, crushed rocks, rubber tires filled with soil and/or poured concrete walls or panels. The specific type of structure will depend on available space, type of range being built and the relative initial cost. A major consideration that should be evaluated during the initial planning process is the long-term maintenance cost of the barrier being considered. Most times it is far more cost-effective to select the construction material that will provide the longest life while requiring the least maintenance.

Exposed tires present problems such as bullet bounce-back that must be addressed before they are used. If earthen side berms are selected, the construction methods will be the same as that used for the construction of the backstop. If concrete panels are selected, then some site work will be required to build their foundations. Concrete panels can be tipped into place or set into place using a crane. If masonry walls are selected, only skilled masons should be used. A substantial foundation will be required to prevent settling cracks or major damage caused by ground shifting. Experienced engineers and concrete companies should be employed to erect concrete structures, especially in earthquake-prone areas. If concrete walls (precast or poured-in-place panels) are selected, the specifications cited in the “NRA Range Manual” should be strictly adhered to.

Generally, earthmoving equipment will be used to construct the main backstops. If earthen side berms are the choice then retaining the equipment onsite to construct the side berms is often the most cost effective. Side berms generally vary in dimensions according to the specific need. However, if a side berm is to be used also as a backstop, as some shooting activities may require, then the side berm is considered to be part of the backstop and should conform to the same specifications as the backstop. In this situation, the overall height of the side berm, for at least that portion that is used as a backstop, should be the same as the backstop. It is important to remind all range owners/operators to carefully evaluate the shooting activities to be incorporated into their range facility and include them in the master plan.

Side berm, walls or barrier specifications are as follows:

1. Height. Generally, side berms, walls or barriers are suggested to be a minimum of 8 feet high, with 10 to 12 feet recommended. Side berms may be used on all ranges and on ranges that go a distance of 1,000 yards. Side berms, walls or barriers are used to allow shooters and range personnel to use adjacent ranges simultaneously. Another reminder: backstops, side berms, walls or barriers, in and of themselves do not eliminate the requirement for safety fan areas.

2. Length. Except as indicated above, side berms may be the same height and the full length of the range-from the backstop back to even with the most distant firing line.

3. Slope. The range side (the side facing the shooter) of the side berm should be as steep as is possible, but not less than 45 degrees or a ration of 1-to-1. These specifications are the same as those for the backstop.

Masonry walls are an alternative, but they should not be selected over precast or tip-up walls. The repair work for damaged masonry walls is often both labor intensive and expensive, whereas a precast panel can be removed and replaced with minimal effort and expense. Initially, an additional number of the precast panels can be purchased, which should significantly reduce the cost of such panels over having them cast again at a future date. Masonry walls using voided concrete block should be fully grouted and filled with concrete to add strength and impenetrability to the structure. Masonry walls should be reasonably protected against bullet strikes.

Wooden side baffles filled with selected materials may be used, but are not easily constructed, repaired or maintained. Obviously, the designs for side baffles will depend upon local site conditions and available materials. A point to be made about wooden box side baffles is that they must be tested before being built to ensure that they will stop the bullet for the caliber to be used. It is the rare exception that will require this type of structure to be more than 4 inches thick. A structure made to the thickness of 6 inches will stop all bullets from normally accepted sporting arms and individual infantry military small arms. If there are doubts, construct a test panel and conduct the appropriate tests before committing to any major construction expense. Test twice before building once. [See the “NRA Range Manual” for dimensions and drawings to construct a test panel.]

In a truly moral and civilized society, people exclusively interact through persuasion. Force has no place as a valid method of social interaction, and the only thing that removes force from the menu is the personal firearm, as paradoxical as it may sound to some.

When I carry a gun, you cannot deal with me by force. You have to use reason and try to persuade me, because I have a way to negate your threat or employment of force. The gun is the only personal weapon that puts a 100-pound woman on equal footing with a 220-pound mugger, a 75-year-old retiree on equal footing with a 19-year-old gangbanger, and a single gay guy on equal footing with a carload of drunken guys with baseball bats. The gun removes the disparity in physical strength, size, or numbers between a potential attacker and a defender.

There are plenty of people who consider the gun as the source of bad force equations. These are the people who think that we’d be more civilized if all guns were removed from society, because a firearm makes it easier for an armed mugger to do his job. That, of course, is only true if the mugger’s potential victims are mostly disarmed either by choice or by legislative fiat – it has no validity when most of a mugger’s potential marks are armed. People who argue for the banning of arms ask for automatic rule by the young, the strong, and the many, and that’s the exact opposite of a civilized society. A mugger – even an armed one – can only make a successful living in a society where the state has granted him a force monopoly.

Then there’s the argument that the gun makes confrontations lethal that otherwise would “only” result in injury. This argument is fallacious in several ways. Without guns involved, confrontations are won by the physically superior party inflicting overwhelming injury on the loser. People who think that fists, bats, sticks, or stones don’t constitute lethal force watch too much TV, where people take beatings and come out of it with a bloody lip, at worst. The fact that the gun makes lethal force easier works solely in favor of the weaker defender, not the stronger attacker. If both are armed, the field is level. The gun is the only weapon that’s as lethal in the hands of an octogenarian as it is in the hands of a weight lifter. It simply wouldn’t work as well as a force equalizer if it weren’t both lethal and easily employable.

When I carry a gun, I don’t do so because I’m looking for a fight, but because I’m looking to be left alone. The gun at my side means that I cannot be forced, only persuaded. I don’t carry it because I’m afraid, but because it enables me to be unafraid. It doesn’t limit the actions of those who would interact with me through reason, only the actions of those who would do so by force. It removes force from the equation…and that’s why carrying a gun is a civilized act.

About that time, Julian Gutierrez walked into the store to pay for gasoline he had just pumped and heard someone say, “Give me all your money.” Gutierrez looked up from counting his own money to see a man pointing a gun at Nguyen’s chest.

The steady drumbeat of DNA exonerations — pointing out flaws in the justice system — has weighed against capital punishment. The moral opposition is loud, too, echoed in Europe and the rest of the industrialized world, where all but a few countries banned executions years ago.

Street-legal? No, these beauties are countertop kitchen mixers.

And not racy Italian espresso machines or imposing German slicer-shredder-blenders, either. They’re KitchenAid mixers, the workhorses — the John Deere tractors — of American kitchens for more than 80 years.

The same impulse that makes Americans customize their Chevys seems to be causing them to pimp their KAs.

Forget brushed-aluminum chic. It turns out there’s a whole mixer-customizing subculture that rejects the austere high-tech aesthetic, favoring instead the bright colors of custom paint jobs and lowrider-style decals for mixers. One entrepreneur already has gone commercial with a selection of mixer flame decals.

When Food Network Good Eats host Alton Brown started using an electric mixer painted with swirling flames on his show, viewers sent hundreds of e-mails about it. Fans brought their own hot-rod mixers to Brown’s book signings.

It was Brown’s show that inspired Jennifer Spurlock of Fort Worth to trick out her own cobalt-blue KitchenAid.

Hours later, her pastor said she had been deported to Mexico, the Associated Press reported.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested Arellano, 32, shortly after 2 p.m. Los Angeles time (just after 4 p.m. Chicago time,) as she and her supporters were leaving a downtown church where she sought sanctuary after slipping unnoticed out of the church on Chicago’s Northwest Side where she had avoided deportation since August 2006.

As Arellano, her 8-year-old son Saul and others headed in a sport-utility vehicle along Main Street toward another leg of their trip in Northern California, several unmarked cars swarmed the vehicle, ordering her to get out as they grabbed the driver and handcuffed him, said Chicago activist Emma Lozano, who was with Arellano.

Before surrendering, Arellano asked for time alone to console her crying son, telling him: “Calm down. Don’t have any fear. They can’t hurt me,” Lozano said. The entire incident lasted about two minutes, she said. The driver was released.

Arellano was taken in handcuffs to a nearby federal detention center, from which she was to be routed to Tijuana, according to Mexican officials.

U.S. authorities on Sunday night did not detail the next steps in the legal process or reveal her location.

But early this morning, the Associated Press reported that Arellano was deported several hours after her arrest. The AP quoted the Rev. Walter Coleman, pastor of Adalberto United Methodist Church in Chicago, where Arellano had taken refuge.

“She has been deported. She is free and in Tijuana,” said Coleman, who said he spoke to her on the phone. “She is in good spirits. She is ready to continue the struggle against the separation of families from the other side of the border.”

Lozano and others earlier vowed they would fight to keep her from being deported.

“We have several lawyers already working on it,” Lozano said, her eyes red as a group of Arellano supporters sat in stunned silence inside the Our Lady Queen of Angels Catholic Church at “La Placita,” the historic center of Mexican Los Angeles. The Catholic church is among about a dozen in several states that have served as sanctuaries for illegal immigrants who, like Arellano, have already been ordered out of the country.

Federal authorities earlier said they had begun the deportation process for Arellano, who was originally ordered to leave the country in 1997, according to a statement from Immigration and Customs Enforcement put out after the arrest.

In recent months, arrests of fugitives such as Arellano have been occurring at a pace of some 675 per week. Federal authorities have ramped up workplace raids and increased other types of immigration enforcement as part of a hardened approach to illegal immigration after a bipartisan bill that would have offered legalization failed in the Senate earlier this month.

Much of the anger from across the political spectrum surrounding illegal immigration has been crystallized by Arellano’s story. After entering the country illegally twice, she became an activist shortly after she was arrested in 2002 during a federal sweep at O’Hare International Airport, where Arellano cleaned airplanes. She was later convicted of using a fake Social Security card.

Last week, Arellano announced she would try to mobilize efforts for more lenient reforms by leaving the Adalberto United Methodist Church for the first time since arriving there last August and traveling to Washington for an 8-hour prayer and fast vigil scheduled for Sept. 12.

Fearing arrest, she kept secret the group’s plans of first going to other cities in an attempt to build national momentum leading toward the vigil. After leaving Chicago on Thursday, she arrived in Los Angeles Saturday morning for the first stop in that campaign, which coincided with a local immigration march.

Arellano spent most of her day Sunday urging audiences of several hundred parishioners inside four separate churches to lobby House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi and other congressional members from California to take up immigration reform immediately after returning from summer recess. Between stops, she donned a pair of sunglasses and slipped into the back of her group’s electric blue sport-utility vehicle with her son.

“It’s important that we are unified so that we can bring out the message that we’re all struggling together,” Arellano said at the Angelica Lutheran Church, inside Los Angeles’ Pico-Union neighborhood, a port of entry for Central American immigrants. “The hate you are seeing build around the country has no boundaries.”

Arellano took refuge inside the tiny Adalberto Methodist Church in Humboldt Park on Aug. 15, 2006, the day she was to report to federal authorities. Her freedom stoked the ire of conservative groups, who saw it as a glaring example of government inaction that has allowed the undocumented immigrant population to grow past 12 million people.

Rick Biesada, director and founder of the Chicago Minuteman Project, lauded the arrest, but he said it came a year too late.

“I was wondering why the police were dragging their feet,” he said. “By not going in there and getting her, other illegals were going to churches seeking sanctuary. Now we’re going to have hell to pay in this country trying to extract these people.”

Chicago Spanish-language radio host Javier Salas said he felt badly for what happened to Arellano. But in leaving the sanctuary of Adalberto United Methodist Church and heading to Los Angeles, it was only a matter of time before she was arrested.

“I’m not happy that this happened, but it was bound to happen because she was challenging the system,” said Salas, the host of the morning-drive talk show La Tremenda on WRTO AM-1200.

By Sunday afternoon, Salas was already on radio talking about the arrest, and callers were weighing in too.

Callers were “saying that she was traveling to Los Angeles and around the United States, she would provoke [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and the anti-immigrant groups,” he said. “There would be checkpoints everywhere.”

Salas questioned why it appeared that mainstream media make Arellano out to be the face of undocumented immigrants, while her actions have exacerbated the animosity toward them.

“She wasn’t down to earth,” he said, adding that Arellano acted entitled to rights “when there’s thousands and thousands of people in the same situation.”

“She made everything worse,” Salas said. “She’s not a face of the immigrants. My family without papers, she doesn’t represent them.”

Immigrant activists in Chicago, Los Angeles and other cities saw Arellano’s arrest as inevitable.

“Everyone knew it was probably a question of when, not if,” said Joshua Hoyt, executive director of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. “It just makes me feel really sad because she knows she’s looking at time in prison.”

Jacobita Alonso, a lay leader at the church who stayed with Arellano on the second-floor apartment during the last year, felt compelled to action.

“We cannot sit here only grieving. All we can do is organize our people. We want her to know she is not alone,” she said Sunday.

Amid heavy rainfall Sunday night, about three dozen people sang, prayed and read passages from the Bible during a vigil Sunday night outside the Chicago headquarters of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement downtown to show their disapproval of her arrest. They sang, prayed, read from the Bible.

“It’s a sad day,” said Ald. Ricardo Munoz (22nd.) “We need comprehensive immigration reform that keeps families together. A young boy, a U.S. citizen, lost his mother to a broken system. Elvira has put a face to this struggle. There are 12 million illegal immigrants that head to work every morning, not knowing if they’ll come home at the end of the day.”

Late Sunday, her son, Saul, was under the care of Coleman and Emma Lozano’s husband.

After the arrest, in a second-floor living space at the Our Lady Queen of Angels church where Arellano slept the night before, Saul sat on a leather couch and stared blankly at a nearby hamster cage.

An hour earlier, he and his mother had been playing with the hamsters, pets owned by the local pastor, the Rev. Richard Estrada. Saul’s mother squealed in mock fear of the creatures in a rare moment of easiness during their whirlwind trip.

Asked if he wanted to visit his mother in prison, Saul shook his head violently and yanked himself away.

“You don’t want to go?” Lozano asked him.

The company also billed and was paid $455,009 to ship three machine screws costing $1.31 each to Marines in Habbaniyah, Iraq, and $293,451 to ship an 89-cent split washer to Patrick Air Force Base in Cape Canaveral, Florida, Pentagon records show.

The owners of C&D Distributors in Lexington, South Carolina — twin sisters — exploited a flaw in an automated Defense Department purchasing system: bills for shipping to combat areas or U.S. bases that were labeled “priority” were usually paid automatically, said Cynthia Stroot, a Pentagon investigator.

C&D and two of its officials were barred in December from receiving federal contracts. Today, a federal judge in Columbia, South Carolina, accepted the guilty plea of the company and one sister, Charlene Corley, to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to launder money, Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin McDonald said.