november 4, 2005 [...] Sure, Zen gardens, sushi and the Sony Walkman are great, but the greatest Japanese invention of all time has to be the love hotel. In the concrete wasteland of the modern Japanese city, the love hotel stands out as a refreshingly off-the-wall escape from conformity, a monument to hedonism, and a libertine's paradise. It's also a godsend when you're tired of taking your girlfriend back to your gaijin apartment with its half-inch plywood walls and nosy neighbours. Nearly every foreigner in Japan has a love hotel story to tell and number of Japanese people who were conceived in one must be enormous. [...]

http://www3.tky.3web.ne.jp/~edjacob/hotels.html

von patricia engelhorn, 22. oktober [...] Die jetzt noch eine eher beschauliche, offiziell nach Ho Chi Minh benannte Stadt mit nostalgischem Charme entwickelt sich zur Mega-Metropole Vietnams
.... dass Ho Chi Minh City nicht mehr für das verwunschene Indochina aus Graham Greenes «Der stille Amerikaner» steht, sondern zu einer dynamischen Acht-Millionen-Einwohner-Metropole geworden ist. [...]

http://www.welt.de/data/2005/10/22/791957.html

von johannes francke, 21. oktober 2005: Gebucht wird All-Inclusive mit Doppelzimmer für 314 Euro: einmal Nordkorea in fünf Tagen. Zu sehen gibt es leere Strassen, stalinistische Protzbauten und wenig Pärchen. Eine Pauschalreise von Peking nach Pyongyang. [...] Vor den Schaltern des Pekinger Hauptbahnhofs stehen die Reiselustigen drei Stunden Schlange, der Schwarzmarkthandel mit echten und gefälschten Tickets floriert ...
...Irgendwann am fünften Tag fährt der kleine japanische Bus mit den chinesischen Touristen plötzlich nicht mehr zum nächsten Kim-Denkmal, sondern zum Flughafen. Die zu Beginn der Reise abgenommenen Handys und Pässe werden zurückgegeben ... [...]

http://www.stern.de/lifestyle/reise/fernreisen/:Nordkorea-Pauschalreise-Stacheldraht/548132.html

october 21, 2005 [...] Reporters Without Borders today called on the Chinese authorities to stop blocking accessing to the website of the independent online encyclopedia Wikipedia, whose popularity has been growing steadily in China.

...This latest online censorship paradoxically comes at a moment when China is openly raising the issue of democracy by publishing its first white paper entitled “The construction of political democracy in China” on 19 October.

The authorities are censoring Wikipedia in the same way that they censor thousands of websites with information that strays from the official Chinese propaganda on certain issues as Tibet and human rights in China.

Internet users trying to visit the Wikipedia site since 18 October get an error message referring to temporary connection problems for unknown reasons. [...]

http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=15374

october 20, 2005: Yahoo Hong Kong ratted out a Chinese dissident journalist to the Chinese government, sending the journalist to prison for ten years. Yahoo founder Jerry Yang shrugged off the public outcry over this by saying that helping to send Yahoo customers to jail was just the price of doing business in China. Now Chinese human rights activist Liu Xiaobo has responded with an open letter to Yang, and it's a scorcher:
International companies are ignoring basic human rights in return for business opportunity, while the Communist party is offering profits in return for continued control of the internet and the ability to intimidate dissidents, Mr Liu writes.
«The collusion of these two kinds of ugliness means that there is no way for western investment to promote freedom of speech in China, and that in fact it greatly increases the ability of the Communist party to blockade and control the internet.»
«You are helping the Communist party maintain an evil system of control over freedom of information and speech,» he writes.

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/10/20/chinese_activist_to_.html

by david plotz, october 19, 2005 [...] The Chopstick Theory is how Hwang Woo-suk, the world's greatest cloner, accounts for his nation's stem-cell success....
The Chopstick Theory of Scientific Supremacy goes like this: Koreans eat with narrow, metal chopsticks. Nabbing grains of rice with slippery, steel sticks requires a surgeon's dexterity. That's why Koreans have mastered extraordinarily precise «micromanipulation» of eggs and embryos required for stem-cell and cloning research.
...Last year, Hwang and his colleagues were first to clone human embryos and first to extract stem cells from them. [...]

http://slate.msn.com/id/2128361/?nav=ais

von can merey, october 19, 2005 [...] Es ist noch nicht lange her, dass sich Kaschmirer in der zwischen Indien und Pakistan geteilten Region am Gebirgsfluss Neelum trafen.... Jetzt hat der pakistanische Präsident Pervez Musharraf für die vom Erdbeben verwüstete Region das bislang Undenkbare angeboten: Die De-facto-Grenze für Kaschmirer zu öffnen.

...Noch in der Nacht begrüsste Neu Delhi das Angebot - man warte nun auf konkrete Vorschläge aus Islamabad zur Realisierung, sagte Aussenamtssprecher Navtej Sarna.
.... «Das beispiellose Angebot, wenn es auch wie waghalsige Politik wirkt, könnte sich als wegweisende vertrauensbildende Massnahme erweisen, sollte es verwirklich werden.» [...]

http://www.merkur-online.de/nachrichten/vermischtes/weltspiegel/art85

october 17, 2005 [...] China ... announced completion of a history-making railway on the «roof of the world» — a 1,956-kilometer-long project comparable to the Great Wall.
...It marked the country's success in making the impossible possible, by building a railway line across 5,000-meter-high mountain ranges and a 550-kilometer-long frozen belt.
...Tibet's regional capital basked in glory as merrymaking crowds of builders, officials and residents hailed the completion of the railway that is soon to prove a more efficient and affordable means of transport. [...]

http://ningboexpats.bravejournal.com/entry/14459/

october 2005 […] In early 2004, photographer Hu Yang began documenting the lives of ordinary Shanghai residents. He originally planned to include 100 households in his survey, but over the course of the year 500 families allowed him to interview and photograph them in their homes. Unlike the New York Times’ Faces of Shanghai slideshow, which focused on the middle class consumer culture, Shanghai Living covers Shanghai residents from a surprisingly wide range of backgrounds. From poor migrant workers to expats to billionaires, nearly all of Shanghai is represented.
While Hu Yang says he hoped to demonstrate some of Shanghai’s social problems, such as the gap between the rich and the poor, he presents his work without editorializing. Every photo could stand alone as a candid family portrait, and taken as a whole the exhibit allows visitors to draw their own conclusions. […]

http://www.shanghaiist.com/archives/art/index.php

october 15, 2005 [...] It's all been a bit of a disaster on the blog front - but here's the first blog entry since landing in Phuket, Thailand, two weeks ago. I have travelled here with Matthew Eaves on a project jointly supported by the British Council, Ultralab and Apple. The aim has been to work with children from Pattani on a digital creativity project with the intention of bring together communities of children as part of the Connecting Futures outreach work that has been very successful.
...Two workshops had been arranged during the two weeks we had been invited and used the well-respected SummerSchool format where the participants gained new skills with using digital video cameras and iMovie software.
...Even though we already know lots about children making movies (our research in digital creativity work using the SummerSchool format stretches back over the past 6 years) there were still several surprises.
...What was exceptional here wasn't just the comments the pupils made, but their confidence to speak in front of the camera. [...]

http://www.jonathansblog.net/digital_creativity_roadshow_thailand