As I am busy translating (ie. working!) another calligraphy course...
As autumn rains pour and my new roommate takes a nap....
Here are several things that inspired me today:
Fiercely Good People Winning Awards!
NYT: Chinese Activist wins European Human Rights Award
Hu Jia, a soft-spoken, bespectacled advocate for democracy and human rights in China, was awarded the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, Europe’s most prestigious human rights prize. Last year, Mr. Hu testified via video link before a hearing of the European Parliament about China’s human rights situation. Weeks later, he was jailed and later sentenced to three and a half years in prison for subversion based on his writings criticizing Communist Party rule. Mr. Hu has been one of China’s leading figures on a range of human rights issues, while also speaking out on behalf of AIDS patients and for environmental protection.
“Whatever he does, he always stands in the forefront,” Mr. Teng said in an earlier interview. “Everything he wrote, everything he said, is straight from his heart. We have poor people and marginalized people in society whose voices are being muzzled. Hu Jia was trying to be the spokesman for the unheard voices.”
Packer: Burmese Journalist wins Media Foundation Courage Award
There’s one journalist in Burma who, through guts and guile, somehow finds a way to write real news stories: Aye Aye Win, the country’s A.P. correspondent. At a rare government press conference after last year’s suppression of the monks’ demonstrations, she kept pressing a police official for information about how many people had been killed.
Yesterday Aye Aye Win was awarded the Journalism and Courage Award of the International Women’s Media Foundation. The ceremony took place at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria; the winner’s remarks, which had to be delivered in absentia, make me slightly ashamed of the slackness and mediocrity of most American journalism: “I have pledged to work as a journalist in my own country, Myanmar, to serve the people and country with a firm belief that a free and independent press is vital to a free society…Journalism in Myanmar is a risky business. Anyone in my country, particularly journalists, can at any time be arrested, interrogated and charged without any sound reason. A knock on the gate at midnight unnerves and traumatizes our lives.”
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