An international news agency has released photos of an attack that took place early this month against Chinese security forces in the remote Silk Road oasis town of Kashgar. Chinese officials have said the assault killed 16 paramilitary officers and wounded 16 others, making it the deadliest attack on Chinese security forces in recent years.

The unprecedented audacity of Tuesday’s attack on one of the largest U.S. bases in Afghanistan reflects the growing confidence of the Taliban: Six men wearing suicide bomb-vests attempted to rush the entrance gate of Camp Salerno in Khost Province. But unlike most suicide bombers, these men were not simply looking to blow themselves up in order to kill those within range of their blasts; instead, they were the human battering ram of a kamikaze infantry attack, sent to blow a breach in the security barrier for the fighters following in their wake to penetrate the base and spread maximum devastation inside a well-protected concentration of American power.

Aryn Baker (’01) reports from Kabul for TIME.
Read the story.

Photo via TIME via Reuters

Before the Beijing Olympics, China’s results in beach volleyball were hardly smashing. But at the Aug. 21 final, the country’s women’s side showed just how far they’ve come. After finishing 19th in the sport at the 2000 Games and 9th four years ago, Chinese teams took silver and bronze in Beijing. Austin Ramzy (’03) writes from Beijing for TIME.

Read the full story.

Two Beijing women in their late 70s have been sentenced to a year of administrative detention after applying to protest in the Chinese capital’s Olympic protest zones.

Austin Ramzy (’03) writes for TIME.

Read the full story.

Photo via TIME via Associated Press

Sa Dingding has made a tremendous impression on the West. It could be the 24-year-old Chinese singer’s florid costumes. Perhaps it’s her music videos, which feature psychedelic graphics and monks striding to fashionable breakbeats. Or maybe it’s her songs, which incorporate Buddhist mantras, traditional Chinese instruments and electronica. At any rate, the U.K.’s Sunday Times has anointed her “the Asian Björk.” The Guardian gave her debut album, Alive, four stars upon its U.K. release last October, adding, “Sa Dingding deserves to be the first Chinese singer-songwriter to become a celebrity in the West.”

Ling Woo Liu (’06) writes for TIME.
Read the full article.

The President of Afghanistan remains unrelenting in his criticism of neighboring Pakistan, even as that nation begins a sensitive political transition. In an interview with TIME in Kabul, Hamid Karzai said the way to fix Afghanistan is to fix things in Pakistan.

Aryn Baker (’01) reports for TIME.

Read the story.

Photo via TIME via Getty

The flags were everywhere when I returned home. I had been reporting in the western desert right before the start of the Olympic Games, and in the 48 hours I had been gone, my gray alleyway in Beijing had been splashed with the bright red of dozens of Chinese flags.

There were grand flags and faded flags and flags that billowed at the slightest gust of wind. But my doorway was conspicuously bare. I was a man without a flag, and the afternoon before the Olympics began, I decided to get one.

Edward Wong (’98) reports from Beijing for The New York Times.
Read the full article.

 In the 1930s and 1940s, great numbers of Jews fled Germany to the U.S. and parts of Europe, seeking to escape Nazi persecution. Rather less known is the exodus of 30,000 Jews eastward — to Shanghai. The community they formed is the chief focus of the city’s newly renovated and expanded Jewish Refugees Museum.

Ling Woo Liu (’06) writes for TIME.
Read the full article. 

Photo via TIME via Corbis

It is becoming less unusual to hear of American journalists abroad who are detained, kidnapped or even killed in the line of duty. But for local journalists across Africa, Asia and the Mideast, kidnapping, detentions and threats to their families are disturbingly familiar.

Journalists from these places assume a target on their backs the moment they pick up a pen, and conduct their work dodging the scopes of local mafias, corrupt officials – and now, the U.S. government.

On Oct. 26 of last year, a 22-year-old Afghani journalist named Jawed Ahmad, working for Canadian Television, was arrested in his own country by the U.S. military.

Anna Sussman (’05) reports for the San Francisco Chronicle.
Read the full story

Nid Paw remains calm when describing the Burmese government’s destruction of her village, her forced relocation to a refugee camp in Thailand and threats of deportation by local police. But it’s a question about her future that seems to agitate her the most.

“In America, it’s very hard for people who resettle,” said Nid Paw, 28, who asked that her real name not be used because she is an illegal immigrant. “I know it will be difficult, but I have hope for the next generation.”

Thanks to a new U.S. policy, Nid Paw hopes to become one of 18,000 Burmese refugees allowed to settle in the United States in 2008.

Claire Trageser (’09) reports from Thailand for the San Francisco Chronicle.
Read the full article