Tenzing Tsondu’s rise to fame happened seemingly by accident. One day, he was an ordinary teenager and herder in his native Garzê Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, part of the southwestern province of Sichuan; the next, a short video of him went viral and he was the “horse prince,” a little fresh-meat idol to be salivated over on social media. Better known by his Mandarin name, “Ding Zhen,” Tenzing Tsondu’s Chinese fans invented all kinds of secondary nicknames for him, from the above-mentioned horse prince to tianye nanhai: the “sweet-wild boy.”

http://www.sixthtone.com/news/1006739/ding-zhen-and-the-myth-of-the-true-khampa-man

January 26, 2021 marked 30 years since the capture of Mogadishu by opposition forces and their overthrow of the pre-war government at the dawn of Somalia’s civil war. Decades of conflict have left innumerable visible and unseen scars on the city and its inhabitants. An ancient African city once known as the “Pearl of the Indian Ocean,” Mogadishu was previously a prosperous part of the many sultanates that burgeoned along the coast of East Africa. Also known as Xamar, for a millennium, the city’s openness, ordinary cosmopolitanism, and lure of opportunities have attracted people from the Somali hinterland and beyond.

https://africasacountry.com/2021/02/the-pearl-of-the-indian-ocean

Beef consumption was taboo in much of China for millennia before Western missionaries began evangelizing for the nutritional and cultural value of red meat.

http://www.sixthtone.com/news/1006796/its-the-year-of-the-ox%2C-so-wheres-the-beef%3F?

Bill Gates and his technofix dream for the planet

Philanthrocapitalists are driving massively profitable schemes dressed up as eco-friendly, pro-poor solutions to climate disaster.

https://africasacountry.com/2021/03/bill-gates-and-his-technofix-dream-for-the-planet

young Chinese are in the midst of a major reappraisal of their country’s modern history, one that is reshaping their attitudes toward the so-called socialist period, roughly defined as the years between the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 and the start of “reform and opening-up” in 1979.

Contributing to this shift has been a wave of pop history articles and videos on social media seeking to revise popular understandings of socialism, Mao Zedong, and the early history of the People’s Republic. But articles on their own don’t make a movement; they’ve resonated so deeply because of how very different young Chinese experiences and attitudes are from previous generations. Put simply: Life under capitalism isn’t all it was cracked up to be.

https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1006523/fed-up-with-capitalism%2C-young-chinese-brush-up-on-das-kapital

Aktualni regionalni problem u raspodjeli vode Nila stvorila je Etiopija koja je prije deset godina na Plavom Nilu počela graditi golemu branu, nazvanu "Brana velikog etiopskog preporoda". Kada bude zgotovljena, ta bi brana trebala uvelike riješiti elektroenergetske probleme Etiopije. Po potencijalu (6,45 gigavata instaliranog kapaciteta) to će biti najveća brana u Africi i jedna od najvećih na svijetu. No brana bi trebala donijeti blagodati Etiopiji, ali probleme državama nizvodno od nje – Sudanu i Egiptu. 

https://portalnovosti.com/borba-za-nil

"Bread, on the other hand, is practically sacred. In Bosnian, there is an idiom applicable to a saintly good person: “As good as bread.” Although it does take land and hard work to produce wheat and grind it into flour that will become dough to be kneaded and baked into bread, its symbolic value has less to do with all the effort than with the fact that it is the poor people’s most basic staple – if you have bread, you have food, and if you have food, you live. Bread, in another words, equals life." - Aleksandar Hemon on "how the taste of home sustained my refugee parents"

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China Faces Long March to Herd Immunity

The country’s massive population, moderately effective vaccines, and success in controlling outbreaks all strain its national inoculation drive.

http://www.sixthtone.com/news/1006956/china-faces-long-march-to-herd-immunity

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jan/24/serial-stowaway-marilyn-hartman-mental-health-homeless

Prica iz 2018. o (bolesnoj) bakici koja se godinama ilegalno ukrcavala na vise letova, bez karte, nekad i dokumenata.

Potraga za korenima teorija zavera vodi nas ne na obode ljudskog znanja, već u samu srž zapadnog liberalnog poretka

Ispod površine, ali dovoljno blizu da se njihovi obrisi uvek naziru, izvirujući na videlo i na najmanji dodir, teorije zavere iskrivljuju, potiskuju i zamagljuju materijalnu realnost koja nas okružuje. Umesto smislene političke ili ekonomske kritike, umesto da razvijaju društvenu svest, one nude fantazmagorije o korona virusu i vakcinaciji, globalnom zagrevanju, zračenjima i zaprašivanjima, migrantima.

Odavno su prevazišle kuloare društvenih mreža gde ih obično smeštamo: samo u Srbiji, teorije zavere promovišu profesori sa Mašinskog fakulteta u Beogradu svojim izmišljotinama o HAARP-u, stručnjaci iz Republičkog hidrometeorološkog zavoda koji negiraju ljudski uticaj na klimatske promene, jedna psihijatrica postala je defakto lice antivakcionalnog pokreta, a poseban, autohton primer su sumanute teorije zavere o „skrivenoj istoriji Srba“ koje su uveliko postale deo javnog folklora, a koje je preuzeo i promovisao politički pokret Dosta je bilo. I svima njima, i mnogim drugima, nudi se otvoreni medijski prostor, uključujući i onaj na državnoj radio-televiziji.

Neće njih, drugim rečima, pobediti puko znanje, istina, činjenice. Uostalom, teorije zavere i nisu nastale (samo) iz neznanja, prevara i laži. Sve gorenavedene teorije zavere dele dve ključne osobine, koje će pomoći u njihovom rasvetljavanju: one su sa jedne strane antinaučne, a sa druge vrlo specifično desničarske – usmerene protiv pre svega državnih, zdravstvenih i drugih javnih projekata, kao što su vakcinacija i zaustavljanje klimatskih promena. Zašto je to tako?

https://www.odiseja.rs/srce-tame/

Ayear after COVID-19 was officially declared a crisis by the Chinese government in Wuhan Province, I traveled to Moi Ndabi on Christmas eve 2019, a fast-growing trading center 40 kilometers from Naivasha town and 140 kilometers northwest of Nairobi. The area is mainly populated by the Maasai people and migrant Kikuyus. I arrived in the sweltering heat of midday, my light blue surgical mask in place. It was the first thing that my hosts and the people at the trading centre noticed. “You people from Nairobi are the ones bringing this corona to us,” one of my hosts, Silvanus Kaamamia said, only half in jest.

“Can you see anybody wearing those things here? Here in Moi Ndabi there’s no corona, this is a foreign disease. It is a white man’s disease and we don’t believe it can infect a black man.” It was as if my mask had suddenly reminded the Moi Ndabi dwellers of the pandemic.

https://africasacountry.com/2021/04/the-unforeseen-threat

Meritocracy is marketed as a system for the management of scarce resources but is in fact the imposition and justification for scarcity. This article examines university education in Singapore as the prime site for the production of meritocratic ideology and considers the consequences more generally on the Singapore polity.

https://newnaratif.com/research/false-scarcity-singapore-meritocracy/

Seven creators reflect on the struggles and hopes of the ongoing pro-democracy protests in Myanmar.

https://newnaratif.com/comic/ar-myanmar-fights-for-democracy/

From fairy-rings to Lewis Carroll's Alice, mushrooms have long been entwined with the supernatural in art and literature. What might this say about past knowledge of hallucinogenic fungi? Mike Jay looks at early reports of mushroom-induced trips and how one species in particular became established as a stock motif of Victorian fairyland.

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/fungi-folklore-and-fairyland

On Jan. 2, 2011, Li Ruyi, a user of the popular question-and-answer platform Zhihu, created a new topic page on the site. There was nothing particularly extraordinary about this. Topic pages on Zhihu function like a cross between tags — collecting all Zhihu posts related to a given topic in one place — and a Wikipedia entry where curious netizens can read an open-source introduction to a subject or issue compiled by their fellow users. For the first three years of its existence, Li’s topic page attracted almost no interest or edits, but since 2014 it has experienced several bursts of user activity, amounting to thousands of modifications in the space of just a few years.

This sudden surge in user interest comes down to the topic Li chose: feminism. 

https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1007168/chinas-3%2C500-post-edit-war-over-feminism

The crowds are back. Tourist sites across China are drawing enormous numbers of visitors over the Labor Day holiday, creating scenes of overcrowding rarely glimpsed since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Though there has been much grumbling about the holiday’s strange schedule — which requires people to work on weekends to compensate for their days off — millions of people have still taken advantage of the five-day break to go on vacation. And with international travel still restricted, domestic venues are cashing in.

https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1007377/people-mountain%2C-people-sea-chinas-labor-day-holiday%2C-in-photos

Julia Butterfly Hill lived for 738 days, from December 1997 to December 1999, in the canopy of a giant 1500 year old redwood tree named Luna. She ended her revolutionary action when an agreement was made with Pacific Lumber Company to spare the tree and a 200 foot buffer zone surrounding the tree. 

https://treesisters.org/blog/the-amazing-story-of-julia-butterfly-hill

“Utsurobune”: A UFO Legend from Nineteenth-Century Japan

n 1803, a round vessel drifted ashore on the Japanese coast and a beautiful woman emerged, wearing strange clothing and carrying a box. She was unable to communicate with the locals, and her craft was marked with mysterious writing. This story of an utsurobune, or “hollow ship,” in the province of Hitachi (now Ibaraki Prefecture) is found in many records of the Edo period (1603–1868), and Tanaka Kazuo, professor emeritus at Gifu University, has studied the topic for many years. What drew him away from his main research area, applied optics, to investigate this curious episode? And what really took place?

https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-topics/g00879/utsurobune-a-ufo-legend-from-nineteenth-century-japan.html

Remains of 215 children found at former Kamloops residential school: First Nation

KAMLOOPS — A B.C. First Nation has confirmed that the remains of 215 children who were students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School have been found on the reserve using ground-penetrating radar.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) noted that large numbers of Indigenous children who were sent to residential schools never returned to their home communities. Some children ran away and others died at the schools. The students who did not return have come to be known as the Missing Children. The Missing Children Project documents the deaths and the burial places of children who died while attending the schools. To date, more than 4,100 children who died while attending a residential school have been identified.

https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/remains-of-215-children-found-at-former-kamloops-residential-school-first-nation

China’s central government on Monday said couples are now allowed to have three children as the country eases its birthing policies in light of its aging population.

https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1007628/china-introduces-three-child-policy-to-ease-aging-crisis

What’s it like to live as a family in an eco-village in Serbia?

Marija Babic says she’s wanted to live close to nature for years, and finally, with her partner, three children and a dog, who go by the symbolic name of Walking By the Earth, she is in the process of moving from Belgrade to a community on the slopes of Stara Planina.

https://www.euronews.com/green/2021/06/15/are-eco-villages-the-future-for-serbia

Smoking is one of the largest health problems in the world:

– Globally more than one in five cancer deaths are attributed to smoking.

– Every year 8 million people die prematurely because of smoking.

– Smokers lose on average about 10 years of their life.

Progress against this massive global health problem is a way to improve the health of millions of people around the world.

And progress is very much possible – as Max Roser shows in his new post on Our World in Data.

https://ourworldindata.org/smoking-big-problem-in-brief

The jaw-droppingly high, out-of-this-world carbon footprint of space tourism

During launch, rockets can emit between 4 and 10 times more nitrogen oxides than Drax, the largest thermal power plant in the UK, over the same time period. CO2 emissions for the four or so tourists on a space flight will be between 50 and 100 times more than the one to three tonnes of emissions that are generated per passenger on a long-haul airplane flight.

https://ideas.ted.com/environmental-impact-carbon-emissions-of-space-tourism/

Information war se nastavlja.

Foreign video bloggers denouncing what they say is negative coverage of China on highly controversial subjects such as Xinjiang are attracting large numbers of subscribers on platforms like YouTube.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-57780023

Can big cities protect us from depression? Researchers think so

The commuter who holds your gaze on the train. The smiling barista at your neighbourhood coffee shop. The busker who nods gratefully as you toss some silver into their guitar case. 

Transient interactions like these are commonplace in big cities, occurring so frequently that they’re often forgotten after a long day. But according to new research, fleeting connections like these make urbanites less prone to depression than their small-town counterparts. 

https://www.positive.news/lifestyle/wellbeing/can-big-cities-protect-us-from-depression-researchers-think-so/

The fall of Kabul – in pictures

Desperate crowds gather at the airport as people try to escape after the Afghan capital fell to the Taliban on Sunday

https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2021/aug/16/the-fall-of-kabul-in-pictures