Davos Newbies Home

China views 

Dan Gillmor is teaching journalism in Hong Kong. Appropriately, he has encouraged his students to start weblogs. Simon Song‘s angle is to look at how the rest of the world views China. Song’s view is one Chinese persective (not the Chinese perspective), but it’s an interesting start for a blog.

He hasn’t yet commented on Nicolas Kristof’s disturbing report on Aids in China. “Chinese officials are killing peasants every day through their denial and cover-up of the AIDS crisis. Instead of leading a campaign against the disease, they have arrested a leading doctor for speaking out about the disease, barred foreign and Chinese journalists from the area, prevented even Chinese doctors from visiting affected villages and banned humanitarian organizations from helping AIDS victims in Henan.”

As Kristof points out, “If the authorities just committed themselves to attack AIDS as zealously as they fight unauthorized births, the battle could be won.”

Swahili coast 

Giles Foden, whose novel Zanzibar is about the al-Qaeda bombings in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi in 1998, offers his thoughts on the Swahili coast. “Mombasa itself has seen the rise and fall of civilisations, and it is from the embers of these that fundamentalist Islam has coaxed its flames.”

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