The Houston Chronicle reports that police and firefighters responded to the Chinese consulate last night because of reports of smoke. Witnesses in nearby apartment high-rises told police that people were burning paper in what appeared to be trash cans.

The consulate has been ordered closed by Friday afternoon.

A personal note: One of the activities I supervised while in Viet Nam was a classified communications center. This incident reminds me of the care we had to take for certain kinds of documents and the detailed plans we had to destroy the center and its contents if necessary. The fact that a modern state would not have provided one of its consulates with the capability of quickly and reliably destroying key documents would have been puzzling to me if the Chinese had not previously demonstrated their incompetence in keep a bio lab safe and secure.