Swift Justice in Murder that Stirred Anger in China

One month after a traffic fatality touched off widespread protests in the northern Chinese region of Inner Mongolia, a court has sentenced a coal truck driver to death for running over and killing an ethnic Mongolian herder. The rapid trial and sentencing showed the speed with which Chinese authorities have moved to tamp down unrest in the region.

Share

South Africa’s Public-Sector Strike a Dilemma for Zuma

The use of rubber bullets by South African police against striking public-sector workers in Soweto — erstwhile cauldron of antiapartheid protest — carries a symbolic significance that will send shockwaves through the country. But it also marks a milestone in the slow transition by the ruling African National Congress from being a rebel movement that reflexively backed striking workers to being a government that can’t afford to heed their demands

Share

Environment: Asia’s Lost Tribe of Aryans

An anthropologist finds a “living stone-age museum ” On a chilly September night in 1982, three men approached a police checkpoint at the village of Lotsum, along the tense cease-fire line between India and Pakistan in the Himalayas. The travelers looked like ordinary Kashmiri peasants, and the guards let them pass

Share

African Immigrants in Italy: Slave Labor for the Mafia

Xenophobes in homogenous European countries often complain that immigrants will erase their most precious cultural norms. The race riots in southern Italy last weekend may be one indicator that change is inevitable, as African immigrants who don’t live by the country’s infamous omert code of silence violently protested against the powerful Mafia clans that control their lives, says Roberto Saviano, author of Gomorrah, an anti-Mob book that earned him both critical praise and a 24-hour police guard.

Share

Why the Duke Cabdriver Could Also Help the Prosecution

The same Durham area taxi driver cited as an alibi witness for accused Duke university lacrosse player Reade Seligmann may end up hurting some aspects of the defense’s argument that no rape at all occurred at the off-campus party that night. Called in by investigators in the Duke rape case for the first time Tuesday, taxi driver Moez Mostafa told TIME in an exclusive interview, he stated he saw exotic dancer Kim Roberts exchange angry words with lacrosse players, enter “an old white car” and speed away from the scene.

Share