Don’t take this as a full-blooded recommendation of the radio show Coast to Coast A.M., which I think is a kind of a radio version of The National Enquirer, but occasionally the show gives time to someone who just wouldn’t ordinarily get on the air. I mean that in a good way. 
Such is the case with this […]

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A Russian magazine has released photos of a Korean airliner, which on April 20, 1978, while flying from Paris to Seoul, strayed into Soviet airspace has shot by a Russian missile. The plane had to make an emergency landing on a frozen lake. Two died and 14 were injured as a result. Reportedly the magazine […]

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Terrific, must watch video courtesy of Shanghai List, about the Song Qing Ling Memorial, a little known cemetery in western Shanghai. The cemetery plays host to Song, who is amongst China’s most significant political figures of the early 20th century, but also scores of other Chinese historical figures.
As the documentary (which was produced by Daedalum […]

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I’ve been reading The Gulag Archipelago and my tolerance for Stalinist states is at an all-time low. I don’t consider North Korea to exclusively be a Stalinist state, but I suppose it’s close enough.
I have to admit, after reading an article or two concerning the freedom of Charles Robert Jenkins, I stopped paying attention. But he’s […]

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I’m a day late with this if you live in the east, but the China Beat has a good post largely concerning an article published by the New York Times on January 25, 1938, about the ongoing occupation of the Guomindang capital, better known as Nanjing, by Japanese troops.
From the NYT article:
“Stripping away all the Japanese […]

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Andy Young, who runs the well-known Siberian Light blog, wrote and tipped me off to an article he recently wrote about the battle of Khalkhin-Gol, which in Japan is known as the Nomonhan Incident.
I’d heard of Nomonhan, but only in reference to Haruki Murakami’s novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle which, you might notice bears a (purposefully) striking resemblance to […]

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