“The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
— Milan Kundera
More than 100,000 people gathered in Hong Kong’s Victoria Park Saturday evening to mark the 22nd anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown. Under the starry light of the city’s skyscrapers, the crowd lit small, white candles and lay …
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P90juy2cDiE&w=400]
Pro-democracy campaigner Aung San Suu Kyi confirmed Monday that she’s planning a visit to Burma’s provinces this summer. “I hope to be able to travel out of Rangoon in the month of June, as soon as I have got rid of all the work that has piled up,” she said in a video …
Today, over supper in Hong Kong’s Western District, I picked up a copy of HK Magazine, an English-language alternative weekly. As I happily slurped my noodles, I stumbled on a particularly eye-catching piece of news. It was a story about Victoria Habour, the sweep of sea that separates the southern tip of the Kowloon Peninsula from Hong …
Nguyen Dan Que heard the call for revolution. But so did the government. On Feb. 28, the 68-year-old doctor and dissident was detained by Vietnamese authorities for posting internet messages that threatened the “stability and strength” of the country’s ruling party. He has since been released, but must attend daily “interrogation …
President Obama has reportedly told White House aides that he wants a “new Middle East policy” — one that urges beleaguered allies threatened by popular rebellions to “enact reforms that would satisfy the popular craving for change while preserving valuable partnerships on crucial U.S. interests, from soil security to counter-terrorism …
After the paranoid and sometimes violent response to yesterday’s thwarted “jasmine rallies,” a question hangs in the air: why would a government that seems so strong react with such fear? After all, few think that China will experience its own Middle Eastern-style “jasmine revolution.” The story from yesterday’s protest sites, at least …
Was the lifting Thursday of Algeria’s 19-year state of emergency a sign the country’s corrupt, authoritarian regime is responding to the growing public unrest that brought down the rulers of Tunisia and Egypt—and now looks set to topple Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi? Without any doubt. Yet it would be naïve to interpret the repealing …