Search Results

“... I took these pictures in the villages around Turpan, a small oasis town an hour's drive from Ürümqi, earlier this year. Propaganda murals used to be common throughout the Chinese countryside, but are much rarer now. The slogans are in both Uighur and Chinese. Language is a tricky political subject in Xinjiang at the moment, as it is in Tibet – there have been protests over plans to phase Uighur and Tibetan out of classrooms ...”

“... Around 600 protesters gathered in Prague on Saturday morning near the Old Town Square. 'No Corruption', the banners said: 'We are One'; 'Game Over. Insert CHANGE to Continue.' We marched first to the stock exchange, then on towards the Vltava River, surrounded all the way by police, who often stopped us for no obvious reason. At one of these halts a man in plain clothes took photographs, which caused some anger, but otherwise the mood was cheerful ...”

“... A friend who works in my local Blackwell’s told me that Conservative Party members get a discount at the bookshop. This seemed so unlikely that I phoned the Blackwell’s helpline pretending to be a paid-up Tory, and sure enough was told that I would get 20 per cent off. Joining the Conservative Party costs £25 a year: if you spend £125 a year on books at Blackwells you essentially get your party membership for free (a less catchy offer perhaps than ‘3 for 2 ...”

“... On 13 February a documentary entitled Immoral Holiday was broadcast on state TV in Uzbekistan. The problem with Valentine's Day, apparently, isn't the crass commercialism or anodyne sentimentality – how could it be, when president Karimov's daughter makes pop videos like these – but that it promotes terrorism. Olloyor Bobonov, the head of the Uzbek Republican Spirituality and Enlightenment Centre, said that the aim of Valentine’s Day is to make young people 'slaves of their sexual pleasures', which makes their minds easy to control ...”

“... Last Thursday the Chinese police claimed they had ‘cracked a terrorist cell headed by [Uighur] separatists’. At a press conference in Beijing, a Ministry of Public Security spokesman said that 10 people had been detained for their role in attacks on a police station in Kashgar in August 2008, and for ‘bombing supermarkets, hotel and government buildings’ in Kuqa ...”

“... The idea of film ‘trailers’ for books may look like yet another unpleasant twist in the commodification of literature, or, at the very least, an attempt to convince consumers that books really are just like movies, but all the same there have been some enjoyable results. Most trailers consist of the author reading a short (and usually dramatic) extract from the book over a montage of images ...”

“... The people behind Game The News describe themselves as ‘the world’s first news correspondents who cover global events as games’. In Endgame: Syria, for example, you guide the political and military actions of ‘the rebels in their struggle’. Political events such as ‘Libya has recognised the Syrian National Council’ lead to changes in support for the rebels; troop deployments against the regime’s forces affect the levels of civilian casualties ...”

“... pre-Liberation China with the promises of the new regime. The comic was recently posted on Weibo [Nick: isn’t Weibo like Twitter? In what way was the comic posted on it?], and generated a lot of online discussion before its removal. Though some of its predictions have come true, such as the rise of the renminbi against the dollar and the need for foreigners ...”

“... Yesterday the People’s Daily reported that there had been an explosion in Aksu in southwest Xinjiang. Seven people were killed and 14 injured when a Uighur man drove a three-wheeled vehicle into a crowd and detonated explosives. This is the first major act of violence in the region since the Urumqi riots in July 2009, which led to more than 200 deaths ...”

“... In 2002 the photographer Lisa Ross was taken to the edge of the Taklamakan Desert in western China by her driver. She did not know why, but there was a path in the sand, and so she followed it, over the dunes:Colours began to reveal themselves. In the distance I could see what looked like wooden cribs or rafts, cresting on dry land, animated by coloured flags beating in the wind ...”

“... One way to keep track of the shifts in belief and allegiance as you walk through Beirut is by watching the walls. In the backstreets of Gemmayzeh and Ashrafieh in the east of the city, they are covered in stencil graffiti for the right-wing, Christian Lebanese Forces Party: As you enter the predominantly Shia neighbourhood of Zkak el-Blat, a large banner hung over an intersection by the People’s Movement of Amal exhorts you to ‘Be Good Believers’: There are photos of weapons and martyrs everywhere, along with stencilled images of the Amal logo and such slogans as ‘There is only Ali and only his sword’: I changed memory cards in my camera (the old one was full) and had taken a few more pictures – two cats in an alley, a vegetable stall, a large poster of a muscle-bound man and the words ‘Power Gym’ – when I heard a shout ...”

“... In 1997, I did a research project at the National CJD Research and Surveillance Unit at Edinburgh’s Western General Hospital, supervised by Robert Will and James Ironside, who co-authored the 1996 paper in the Lancet that proposed the existence of vCJD in the UK. The only reliable way to diagnose the disease was by post-mortem examination of the brain, which would reveal the tiny holes in the brain tissue caused by massive cell death – giving it a sponge-like appearance – and allow us to test for the presence of abnormal proteins ...”

“... Toxic smog in Beijing, 16,000 dead pigs in the tributaries of the Shanghai river, birth defects from pollution, no safe drinking water in any Chinese city: Premier Li Keqiang has promised to respond to China’s environmental problems with an ‘iron fist and firm resolution’. But one crucial aspect of China’s energy strategy unlikely to change soon is its reliance on coal – it burns almost as much as the rest of the world combined ...”

“... Last week a jeep exploded in Tiananmen Square after crashing into the wall of the Forbidden City. Five people were killed, including the three passengers, and more than forty injured. The Beijing police said it was a suicide attack, and that the passengers were all ethnically Uighur. The five people they arrested the next day were all Uighur too. The suspects' ethnicity was enough to provoke speculation, both in China and abroad, that the incident might be linked to the sporadic violence in Xinjiang ...”

“... Lake Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan was a popular holiday destination during the Soviet era. After independence the tourist industry struggled, but in recent years the visitors have started returning,from elsewhere in Kyrgyzstan, Russia or Kazakhstan. But they don’t go to Balykchy (‘the fisherman’), a town of 42,000 people at the western end of the lake ...”