Elizabeth Glassanos's blog

Members of a local Chinese dance troupe wait at the entrance to Sydney's Luna Park, 18 September 2007, for the arrival of the Special Olympics' "Flame of Hope". Sydney is one of the key international destinations on the Torch's epic world journey, which sees it touch down in five continents before arriving in Shanghai for the 2007 Special Olympics World Games being held 2-11 October. (Photo: GREG WOOD/AFP/Getty Images)

ELIZABETH GLASSANOS/FP Original

Cambodia is finally taking a baby step to address its ugly history. A new book by Khamboly Dy, an expert on Cambodia's genocide, came out on Wednesday. Dy's A History of Democratic Kampuchea is significant because it's the first history book written by a Cambodian on the period from 1975 to 1979, when the Khmer Rouge terrorized the population and caused the deaths of some 1.7 million people. However, it was only approved for use a "reference text" in schools, so Cambodia's government—which is led by people with Khmer Rouge pasts—isn't exactly embracing truth and reconciliation with open arms. But it's a start.

You can download a PDF of the book here from the Documentation Center of Cambodia's website. Eighty-four pages are in English, with the other 125 pages in Khmer.

It begins eloquently:

Many Cambodians have tried to put their memories of the regime behind them and move on. But we cannot progress—much less reconcile with ourselves and others—until we have confronted the past and understand both what happened and why it happened. Only with this understanding can we truly begin to heal.

ELIZABETH GLASSANOS/FP Original

Food waste is becoming so pervasive in Hong Kong that restaurateurs are charging diners for leaving leftovers on their plates:

Customers often order far more dishes to boil in a "hot pot" of broth than they are able to consume, and everything they leave has to be thrown away. That is not just wasteful; it is unprofitable for restaurateurs. One restaurant charges HK$5 (US64 cents) per ounce of leftovers.

"All you can eat" sushi joints also have a problem with diners who pile their plates high and then simply eat the raw fish off the top, leaving the rice. One sushi restaurateur, according to local media, charges HK$10 (US$1.28) per leftover sushi.

Perhaps due to a combination of this all-you-can eat dining culture and unprecedented prosperity, uneaten food is not just a problem for restaurants; it also makes up a disproportionate amount of Hong Kong's garbage. One third of the city's 9,300 tons of daily waste is food, compared to 12 percent in the United States. Although food biodegrades in landfills, it smells foul and emits methane (a greenhouse gas) in the process of breaking down.

And thus Hong Kong's government welcomes restaurants' efforts to penalize food waste as complementary to its own. So far, the city has built a food-to-fertilizer conversion factory and encouraged restaurants to install sludge-producing "digesters" that can "eat" over 2,000 pounds of food a day. But money talks, and it's likely that the new, privately-initiated fines will be the most effective encouragement of all.

Editor's note: This post co-authored by Henry Bowles.

ELIZABETH GLASSANOS/FP Original

Did Hollywood's campaign to link Darfur and the Beijing Olympics work? The New York Times treats China's envoy to Sudan with kid gloves:

A senior Chinese official, Zhai Jun, traveled to Sudan to push the Sudanese government to accept a United Nations peacekeeping force. Mr. Zhai even went all the way to Darfur and toured three refugee camps, a rare event for a high-ranking official from China, which has extensive business and oil ties to Sudan and generally avoids telling other countries how to conduct their internal affairs.

So what gives? Credit goes to Hollywood — Mia Farrow and Steven Spielberg in particular. Just when it seemed safe to buy a plane ticket to Beijing for the 2008 Olympic Games, nongovernmental organizations and other groups appear to have scored a surprising success in an effort to link the Olympics, which the Chinese government holds very dear, to the killings in Darfur, which, until recently, Beijing had not seemed too concerned about.

But are the Chinese sincere about using their influence to stop the slaughter in Darfur? It looks like their main concern is averting a PR disaster:

During closed-door diplomatic meetings, Chinese officials have said they do not want any of their Darfur overtures linked to the Olympics, American and European officials said.

In an e-mail message on Thursday, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington warned anew against such a linkage. "If someone wants to pin Olympic Games and Darfur issue together to raise his/her fame, he/she is playing a futile trick," the spokesman, Chu Maoming, wrote.

That doesn't sound like a changed regime to me. 

ELIZABETH GLASSANOS/FP Original

The International Herald Tribune sent its reporters to seven different cities to find out where the garbage goes. My favorite recycling story? Reporter Andréa R. Vaucher found that Los Angeles' trash sometimes ends up as carpets in Alabama and T-shirts in China.

And Meg Bortin raises a good question: "[W]hat will happen when Asian manufacturing powerhouses like India and China begin to produce even a fraction of the trash produced in the West[?]"

ELIZABETH GLASSANOS/FP Original

Passport blogged earlier about how the rare Year of the Golden Pig could usher in a baby boom in the relatively small country of South Korea. But what about enormous China, where tens of millions of couples likely believe that the Golden Pig can shower their offspring with good fortune?

Now, some numbers are coming out on the scope of the phenomenon:

According to forecasts by the Shanghai population and family planning committee, the city will see over 137,000 babies born in 2007, almost double the number in 2006. Beijing has also announced it expects 150,000 babies to be born in 2007, compared with 129,000 last year.

Chinese hospitals are already straining under the baby boom, and preschools are still struggling to cope with an influx of youngsters born in 2000, the auspicious Year of the Dragon. It's going to get pretty crowded in an already crowded China. So in the end, the Year of the Golden Pig may bring more good fortune to the Chinese diaper industry than anyone else.

ELIZABETH GLASSANOS/FP Original

It's a boy:

COVINGTON, La. - Sixteen months after being rescued as a frozen embryo from a hospital flooded by Hurricane Katrina, Noah Benton Markham entered the world Tuesday morning and was greeted by his cheering family.

The 8 pound, 6½-ounce boy was born by Caesarean section at 7:23 a.m. CST at St. Tammany Hospital. He was in good shape, doctors said.

Before the procedure Rebekah and Glen Markham had decided that if their baby was a boy, he would be named after the biblical builder of the Ark. A girl would have been Hannah Mae — Hannah means "God has favored us."

When Katrina slammed New Orleans, Louisiana's governor had already put into motion a plan to rescue of a number of frozen embryos being stored in a local fertility treatment center.

The embryos were carried out by a team of troopers and policemen in four large liquid nitrogen containers, each of which held many separate vials. After a long wade into the flooded building,  juggling power outages and an entire city in lock down, they brought the embryos to safety. Noah's the happy result of their foresight.

Elizabeth Glassanos/FOREIGN POLICY

In perhaps its most ambitious undertaking since James IV launched the Scottish Royal Navy in the early 1500s, Scotland plans to generate 40 percent of its total energy from renewable sources by 2020, more than double its current percentage.

Scotland already leads the United Kingdom in green power, which, despite a lot of Kyoto-related hot air from Tony Blair, only gets 4 percent of its total energy from renewables as a whole. And Scotland will soon boast the largest wind farm in the U.K., when construction finishes on a massive £300m project south of Glasgow.

But there are many hurdles ahead for the wind business in Scotland: complaints from farmers, rural residents, and the tourist industry about sullied vistas, confusing and ever-changing regulatory requirements, long waits for project approvals, and so on.

For now, it's a good time to be a Scottish wind energy entrepreneur.