Sushi pillows! My favoritest food, in cushion form. Link (via Cribcandy)

A group of ethnic Tibetans trying to flee Tibet were shot dead by Chinese troops on September 30, at a Himalayan pass near the border of China and Nepal (Tibet is an "autonomous region" of China, having been taken over by the PRC in the 1950s). Reports are emerging that Communist party officials have attempted to silence witnesses, including Western trekkers who were in the area when the killing occurred. Snip from The Independent:

Chinese diplomats in the Nepalese capital of Kathmandu are tracking down and trying to silence hundreds of Western climbers and Sherpas who witnessed the killing of Tibetan refugees on the Nangpa La mountain pass last week. This ominous development comes as fears grow for the safety of a group of Tibetan children, aged between six and 10, who were marched away after at least two refugees including a nun, were shot dead.

Link to article. See also related coverage of the incident on The Adventure Blog, GoBlog, MountEverest.net, and The Piton.

Today, a Romanian television network released a video said to show PRC guards fatally shooting one of the refugees. Snip from Associated Press report:

The video from Pro TV shows a distant figure that its narrator says is a Chinese border guard firing a rifle and a separate scene of a person in a line of figures walking through the snow falling to the ground. An unidentified man near the camera can be heard saying in English, "They are shooting them like, like dogs." Pro TV, Romania's biggest private TV station, said the video was shot Sept. 30 by Sergiu Matei, a Romanian cameraman with an expedition climbing Cho Oyu, a Himalayan peak near China's border with Nepal. The activist group International Campaign for Tibet, in a written statement, said the video proves Chinese troops fired at unarmed Tibetans and disproves Beijing's statement this week that its forces acted in self-defense after being attacked.

Here is a link to a video clip of the shooting on Pro TV's website (warning: graphic violence), and here is the network's interview with the man who videotaped the incident (pop-up ads abound on the site).

Adam of the adventure travel website Getoutdoors.com says,

The Agence-France Presse has picked the story up and is reporting that the Chinese claim their soldiers acted in self defense. Right. The nuns and kids tried to kill them in a barrage of snowballs.

Snip from AFP story:

China admitted that its soldiers killed a person who was trying to flee Tibet, but the official account contradicted eyewitness reports that the troops had shot at unarmed refugees.

The state-run Xinhua news agency released a short report of the September 30 incident that occurred near Mt Everest, saying soldiers had found nearly 70 people trying to illegally cross the Tibetan border into Nepal.

The soldiers tried to persuade the group to go back home, according to Xinhua, which was citing an unnamed Tibetan government official. "But the stowaways refused and attacked the soldiers," Xinhua said.

More about the video here, at International Campaign for Tibet's website. The group reports that the refugee children are now in Chinese custody: Link. Here is a photo of the body of the Tibetan nun who was shot.

When I traveled to this region earlier this year, I heard personal accounts of incidents like this from Tibetans who crossed the border to refugee camps in India. If their stories are to be believed, what is remarkable about this incident is not that it occurred, but that it receiving any attention in the West at all. (thanks, Adam)

Link to full-size computer desktop (16K gif), and you can buy t-shirts here. Moscow-born comic artist and illustrator Vera Brosgol designed it for DieselSweeties. (Thanks, R. Stevens!)

Christopher Martin -- formerly "Play" of the '80s hiphop duo Kid 'n Play -- is now teaching a class called "Hip Hop in Context" at North Carolina Central University. ABC News posted a video essay by Martin about his history, and the class, here. The university hosted a HipHop Summit earlier this year, "[offering] a scholarly approach to the music form that university officials believe could provide new opportunities to at risk males, better prepare students for industry careers and serve as a vehicle for creating successful experiences in educating youth." (Thanks, Zach Fanning)

Reader comment: Colleen Muldoon says,

I just read the post, "Kid 'n' Play alum now teaches history of hiphop", and read "the music form that university officials believe could provide new opportunities to at risk males." At risk males? Isn't that just reincforcing the concept that hiphop is only for black gangsters in ghettos, or as put, "at risk males"? I'm sorry I couldn't phrase it better, but I hope you get what I mean.

Robert Gale says,

I don't see the problem with the university's word choice. The view that hip-hop is only for gangsters is not problematic because it exclusively connects the two, but because it puts hip-hop in a negative light. This program, and the university's phrasing, doesn't negate the connection between "at risk youth" and hip-hop, but rather redefines that connection. The program and its publicity allows people to see how hip-hop can be a positive force in violent, low-income neighborhoods. Even better, this class will most certainly teach how hip-hop historically has been a positive force in low-income neighborhoods: no history of hip-hop is complete without stories of Afrika Bambaataa and the Zulu Nation's efforts for "at risk youth."

Strand says,

The Sound of Young America, mentioned in a recent Hodgmania post has an excellent podcast episode with Killer Mike, a rapper and entrepeneur who has toured with Outkast. He was an at risk male. In the podcast he talks extensively about how rap gave him an out when life had given him few options.

[at 27:10 in the podcast] "Well The only people that seemed to care about the world to me were rappers. Public Enemy, NWA with "F the Police," Ice T with Power and later on The Iceberg/Freedom of Speech...Just watch What You Say So if it wasn't for these revolutionary teenagers at the time being willing to simply say "Hey, the emperor has on no clothes," to be like that little boy in that play they take you to when your a kid. If rap hadn't had the courage to do that, I don't know where I'd be today. So rap was my friend."

While it would be absurd to say that rap and hip-hop is only for black males, it would be hard to deny how powerfully it speaks to "at risk males," black or otherwise.

Tinyfrogs says,

I've lived in Chapel Hill, next door to Durham, for 6 years. NCCU (it's an HMU) serves the large black community in Durham, and though most of the town is middle-class, there are some poor areas with significant gang violence (that spills over to clubs in Chapel Hill a couple of times a year). Durham also has a small but vibrant and growing rap scene. I think it's fantastic that NCCU is doing something to serve the poorest communities of Durham in a culturally relevant way, which is a lot more than Duke has been willing to do. That class alone could give a lot of gangsters a reason to enroll at Central, and thus, a means of escaping the gang life.

An essay by Jasmina Tesanovic. Photos by Women in Black, Serbia (click image to enlarge).

WHERE ARE YOUR AMERICANS NOW?

Today , in the special court for war crimes in Belgrade, eight paramilitary police were indicted for torturing, killing, looting and dispersing the Albanian civil population in March 1999, when the NATO bombings against Yugoslavia under Milosevic started.

This specific trial is concerned with 48 members of an unlucky family named Berisha, who were executed in a couple of hours in a village called Dry River. The dead included women, children, the elderly: from yet unborn babies to a 100-year-old grandmother. The Dry River is bloody and full of tears.

The eight out of ten indicted (two others died in the meantime) are sitting in the courtroom in front of us. They look so normal and common that, compared to them, their lawyers seem like freaks. They are men, along with one young curly haired blonde with a gypsy skirt like mine.

This morning I thought twice when I dressed in order to be admitted in the courtroom. My clothes are simply not proper for this country and its dark history; the best I could find was a black T shirt with the English word REVOLUTION written on it in big letters of hot pink.

[Continue reading this essay after the jump: 2500 words.]

Link. Like Pepto-Bismol for your eyes. (about)

Artist Andrew Krasnow crafts art objects from human skin. An exhibit of his work will run at Los Angeles art gallery A.D.M. Project from Oct 27 through Dec. 14. Snip from show blurb:

Of Jewish descent, Krasnow's work recognizes inevitable associations with the holocaust. In the past, he has expressed his own fears about clinical distance, the ability of audiences to overcome repulsion and the process of dehumanization that this kind of art making requires. While the work does raise the ethical question of making human skin into art, it also deconstructs the predication of prejudice and hatred upon skin-deep identity, assessing sources of cruelty, legend, and mythmaking along the way.

Um. Whatever, man, but, ‹squick›. Seriously. Link

Mark Pesce -- author, lecturer, Virtual Reality pioneer, and co-author of VRML -- says,

After reading the recent BoingBoing post about Craigslist and the TOUs of relationships (hilariously well put), I put down my own thoughts about how to improve the CL experience for all its millions of users.

Link to his essay, "Trust But Verify." Snip:

You need present no credentials to post to Craigslist, other than a valid email address. Since these are notoriously easy to acquire – and easy to spoof, or make opaque and anonymous – an email address provides no trust information whatsoever. Yet Craigslist does have a login capability, so it can potentially record each of the interactions users have through the system. It could collect data about the quality of the trust interactions users experience on Craigslist, and use this information to annotate all of the postings on the system.

In short, every posting on Craigslist could be accompanied by metadata which allows users to have some basic sense of the trustworthiness of the other participant in a given transaction. With each successive transaction, Craigslist could begin to model an emergent digital social network, developed from observation, and supplemented by a user’s list of first-degree contacts.

With over 10 million visitors a month – many of them repeat users – it should be relatively easy to develop a strong trust model, combining elements of both the eBay and Friendster systems, to produce an effective and anonymous solution (anonymous, that is, from the user’s perspective, as this information can be maintained opaquely within Craigslist, though this brings up a further question of whether Craigslist itself can be trusted, which can only be learned via a user’s long-term interactions with Craigslist itself).

Link

India-based blogger and journalist Scott Carney says he will co-author the new Wired News blog Bodyhack "to up the publicity on the open source investigation on the one eyed baby," among other things.

He tells BoingBoing, "Now with a little editorial backing behind me, I hope to be able to get bloggers to send in their tips about unethical pharma trials, all manner of medical foibles, and, of course, infant cyclopses."

Background: Scott broke the story of the one-eyed baby girl born to a mother in Chennai, India (BB posts: 1, 2). The child died. When Scott continued to pursue the cause for the baby's condition -- possibly a fertility drug clinical trial gone horribly wrong -- the hospital and other authorities cut him off.

Chris says,

Montreal photographer François Brunelle is trying to track down and photograph 200 people with their doppelgängers. His website has a form where people who've identified their nonrelated look-alikes can sign up.

Link.

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