For a few tense days this week, the port of Morehead City, one of the deepest-water ports on the East Coast, threatened to become even deeper when a forklift operator punctured a shipment of Pentaerythritol tetranitrate, or PETN. The accident cleared the city and shut down traffic on major roadways, then kept the port itself closed for additional days while the spill was cleaned up.

The American public became familiar with PETN when a Nigerian would-be suicide bomber failed to ignite the PETN hidden in his underwear while his plane was landing in Detroit. With that incident fresh in everyone’s mind, you would think that many questions would be asked about what this dangerous explosive was doing in Morehead City and where it was going.

Local officials aren’t talking. To its credit, the News and Observer’s editorial staff raised similar questions but doesn’t seem willing to commit the resources it takes to dig out the answers. Where was it bound? How could a forklift operator make such a mistake? And why did it take almost four hours after the spill to shut down U.S. 70 and evacuate the city? Who is responsible? Who will pay for the cleanup efforts?

I hope someone’s willing to get answers on this. As of now it’s still a mystery.

I read this morning that Google is threatening to pull out of China in response to what Google says are coordinated attacks against the email accounts of human rights activists. Google has also stopped filtering search results to users of its Chinese site. Word of the changes has apparently spread quickly among Chinese Internet users, many of whom see this as a positive move.

I’ve lost count of how many Internet attacks my website has received from computers in China. It is almost impossible to say for sure who is responsible for the attacks. It could be government-sponsored or it could be independent Chinese hackers. It could also be foreign attackers taking advantage of the language barrier and lazy system administrators who don’t keep their computers patched. If those attacks seem to target activists, however, that becomes a powerful “smoking gun” for implicating the Chinese government.

Some Chinese say this will hurt Chinese Internet users. Personally, I found the so-called Great Firewall of China to be quite porous. I suspect savvy Net users in China will have little problem steering to their favorite Internet sites, regardless of what Google and the Chinese government do.