First, let's cut to the video.  (Sound levels may be different from clip to clip, so you may want to adjust your volume before clicking on each link.) Chinese mob assaults Korean-Americans in a hotel lobby for holding a Tibetan flag.  (According to a written account at Chosun.com, 400 angr...

Saturday's editorial from Taiwan's China Post: This week, we have seen the sadly unsavory spectacle of the Beijing-bound Olympic torch being blocked and harassed while passing through London, Paris and San Francisco. [...] It is so ironic that the Olympic flame, which symbolizes peace, friendship an...

Guess the Chinese are hell-bent on showing the world a thing or two about crowd control: China’s blue-clad flame attendants, whose aggressive methods of safeguarding the Olympic torch have provoked international outcry, are paramilitary police from a force spun off from the country’s army. The s...

[Click to read earlier Parts I, II and III] Cool stuff, this.  From pages 124-128 of Tony Perrottet's The Naked Olympics: It takes a serious leap of our modern imaginations to remember that the pagan Olympic Games were devoted first to religion and only second to athletics: every sporting conte...

[click to go to Part I or Part II of this series] The front page of yesterday's Taipei Times featured the story of two men in China who were sentenced to 3 1/2 and 5 years in prison for dissent.  Keep their fates in mind while you read about the leniency with which the ancient Greeks handled Di...