Friday, October 23, 2009
What? No rights in prison?!?
A foreigner’s life in a Beijing jail
A foreign man who spent the last seven months in jail sent Danwei this description of his daily life at the Beijing No. 1 Detention Center after his release last week.
If I were a Chinese person and not a foreigner, a crime like mine would have been dealt with on the “city district” level, as opposed to the “municipal” level which is much tougher.
The other people incarcerated at Beijing No. 1 Detention Center were all facing life sentences or death sentences, at least as a possibility, so it’s not a place where detainees are given a lot of slack. It’s the site of Beijing’s newly constructed hi‐tech lethal injection chamber.
It was boring as anything, and the rules were strict.
Danwei II » Blog Archive » A foreigner’s life in a Beijing jail
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
News Analysis - Painful Mideast Truth - Force Trumps Diplomacy - NYTimes.com
Painful Mideast Truth: Force Trumps Diplomacy
Palestinians on the way from Bethlehem, in the West Bank, to attend prayers at Al Aksa Mosque in Jerusalem crossing an Israeli checkpoint.
JERUSALEM — As the Obama administration tries to broker a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there is a dark truth lurking: force has produced clearer results in this dispute than talk.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
I took pictures...
in a row; in China, I often remind them, there are a billion or so
people who find nothing odd about it.
-- Calvin Trillin
When I traveled to China I took along photographs of my children. The pictures showed my children eating with chopsticks. I mistakenly thought the Chinese people would be impressed that my children knew how to eat with chopsticks. Silly me! Every Chinese child knows how to eat with chopsticks. Sheeeesh!