Travels in the Riel World

I’m a big believer in the benefits of spending time abroad. I think it’s pretty much a necessity nowadays for anyone who wants to work at the top echelons of a major corporation, and it really should be a requirement for anyone who aspires to national political office. Here is what I wrote about the topic in my travel memoir:

The world would be a saner place if more travelers went into politics. Consider the different perspective government leaders would have if they’d spent months of their lives taking buses and trains through other countries, staying in local hotels and conversing with foreigners in bars and cafés. Envision a world where presidents and prime ministers had experience as private citizens wandering through Asia, Africa, Latin America or the Middle East simply because they found it interesting. Think of how their own personal experiences with different cultures, faiths and worldviews would influence policy discussions.

So I was pretty happy to see this story in Newsweek about the worldview shared by numerous members of the Obama administration, including the president, because of their experiences living and working abroad.

The fact that Valerie Jarrett spent her early childhood in Iran made it easier to bond with Barack Obama. The subject came up the first time the two met, at a restaurant in the Loop area of downtown Chicago in 1991. Obama had grown up overseas—spending four years in Indonesia as a boy—and Jarrett was born in the ancient city of Shiraz, where her American father, a medical doctor, helped found the city’s first modern hospital. Valerie’s early languages were Farsi, French and “a little bit of English.” To this day, her favorite foods include lamb and rice with Persian spices. “If I walk into a house and I smell saffron, I’m happy,” she says.

In that first encounter, Jarrett recalls discussing with Obama how their years overseas helped shape their world views. “I guess the most basic way is by being around people who have such a broad diversity of backgrounds,” she says.

For Jarrett’s family, who traveled extensively even after they returned to the United States when Valerie was six, that meant socializing with people from Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. “You appreciate and are maybe more open to different perspectives,” she says.

It’s a common point among Obama’s top aides, a surprising number of whom grew up in other countries—the insight they developed by seeing America from the outside in. The former expats include retired Marine Gen. James L. Jones, the incoming national-security adviser, who lived in France for most of his childhood; Timothy Geithner, the nominee for Treasury secretary, who grew up in Zimbabwe, India and Thailand; retired Maj. Gen. J. Scott Gration, a child of missionaries in Africa who is a leading contender to become the new NASA administrator; and Jarrett, a close personal friend of the Obamas’ who will serve as a top domestic-policy adviser.

Obama has identified his years in Indonesia, and later travels in Pakistan, as critical to shaping his views on America’s role in the world. “If you don’t understand these cultures, then it’s very hard for you to make good foreign-policy decisions,” he told an Iowa campaign crowd in 2007. “The benefit of my life of having both lived overseas and traveled overseas … is I have a better sense of how they’re thinking and what their society is really like.”

Check out the whole article for more about the experiences and views of these refreshingly global members of the Obama administration.

Could the West gain a foothold in the battle against Islamic terrorism by working to strengthen Islam? Yes, under certain conditions, suggests this intriguing essay in the Boston Globe. According to the author, Philip Jenkins, the West has a natural ally in the Sufi Muslim movement, which is a more mystical branch of Islam that has traditionally battled the fundamentalists in their faith.

Many observers see a stark confrontation between the West and Islam, a global conflict that entered a traumatic new phase with the Iranian revolution. But that perspective ignores basic conflicts within the Muslim world itself, a global clash of values over the nature of religious practice, no less than overtly political issues. For the Islamists — for hard-line fundamentalists like the Saudi Wahhabis and the Taliban — the Sufis are deadly enemies, who draw on practices alien to the Quran. Where Islamists rise to power, Sufis are persecuted or driven underground; but where Sufis remain in the ascendant, it is the radical Islamist groups who must fight to survive.

Around the world, the Sufis are struggling against violent fundamentalists who are at once their deadly foes, and ours. To look at Islam without seeing the Sufis is to be ignorant of a crucial clash of civilizations in today’s world: not the conflict between Islam and the West, but an epochal struggle within Islam itself.

Who are the Sufis?

If the word “Sufi” conjures up any images for Americans, they normally involve mystical poetry or dance. Thirteenth century poet Rumi was a legendary Sufi, as are Turkey’s whirling dervishes. But these are just the most visible expressions of a movement that runs deeply through the last thousand years of Islam…

They are, potentially, the greatest hope for pluralism and democracy within Muslim nations. The Sufi religious outlook has little of the uncompromising intolerance that characterizes the fundamentalists. They have no fear of music, poetry, and other artistic forms — these are central to their sense of the faith’s beauty — and the brotherhoods cherish intellectual exploration. Progressive Sufi thinkers are quite open to modern knowledge and science.

From their beginnings, too, Sufi traditions have been religiously inclusive. Wherever the orders flourish, popular Islamic religion focuses on the tombs of saints and sheikhs, who believers venerate with song and ritual dance. In fact, they behave much like traditional-minded Catholics do when they visit their own shrines in Mexico or southern Italy. People organize processions, they seek healing miracles, and women are welcome among the crowds. While proudly Islamic, Sufi believers have always been in dialogue with other great religions.

This open-mindedness contrasts with the much harsher views of the fundamentalists, who we know by various names. Salafism claims to teach a return to the pure religion taught by the prophet Muhammad in the seventh century, and in that early Islamic community Salafis think they can find all they need to know about life and law. The most powerful and best-known version of this back-to-basics ideology is the Wahhabi movement that emerged in the 18th century, and which in modern times has built a worldwide presence on the strength of Saudi oil money. At its most extreme, this exclusive tradition rejects knowledge that is not clearly rooted in the Quran and Islamic legal thought, and regards other religions and cultures as dangerous rivals lacking any redeeming virtues. Al Qaeda and its affiliates represent an extreme and savage manifestation of this fundamentalist current…

Nobody is pretending that building bridges with Sufis will resolve the many problems that divide the West from the Islamic world. In countries like Afghanistan or Somalia, warfare and violence might be so deeply engraved into the culture that they can never be expunged. Yet in so many lands, reviving Sufi traditions provide an effective bastion against terrorism, much stronger than anything the West could supply by military means alone. The West’s best hope for global peace is not a decline or secularization of Islam, but rather a renewal and strengthening of that faith, and above all of its spiritual and mystical dimensions.

America is changing. Always. It’s part of the deal in this country of immigrants. And yet, for all of the ways in which immigration has in the past forged new concepts of nationhood, nothing really compares to the present. The United States has become a stunningly multicultural place and is becoming more so with each passing year.

Newsweek did a nice job of covering this topic recently in a story titled Who We Are Now. They noted that:

The tension between assimilation and separation is eternal, but there is no doubt that this flood of immigration and the breaking down of barriers between previously estranged groups within the country has created a much more fluid culture than previous generations might have thought possible…

And 2009 is only the beginning of the story. According to Pew, if current trends continue, the U.S. population will rise from 296 million in 2005 to 438 million in 2050. Eighty-two percent—let me repeat that: 82 percent—of the increase will be attributable to immigrants arriving after 2005 and to their descendants. By that point, whites may make up only 47 percent of the country, ending centuries of a majority-white America.

Meanwhile, this passage also caught my eye in an article about the country’s new first family:

For well over two centuries, the United States has been vastly more diverse than its ruling families. Now the Obama family has flipped that around, with a Technicolor cast that looks almost nothing like their overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly Protestant predecessors in the role. The family that produced Barack and Michelle Obama is black and white and Asian, Christian, Muslim and Jewish. They speak English; Indonesian; French; Cantonese; German; Hebrew; African languages including Swahili, Luo and Igbo; and even a few phrases of Gullah, the Creole dialect of the South Carolina Lowcountry.

That’s the changing face of America.

Anyone who is familiar with the Netherlands knows that the Dutch have a unique and special relationship with the water. And in the winter, what they really want to do is to skate on the frozen water of the canals that crisscross their country. Sadly, though, an activity that was once an annual obsession now happens much less frequently, as the canals rarely freeze these days. But it happened this winter, and the Dutch gleefully laced up their skates and took to the ice once more.

For the first time in 12 years, the Netherlands’ canals froze this month, bringing the Dutch, who like their tulips in neat rows, a heady mix of pandemonium and euphoria…

In the 19th century, when Hans Brinker, the hero of the novel in which he tries to win a pair of silver skates, coasted along Holland’s ice, the canals froze almost every year. But water pollution and climate change have made this so rare that today a boy of 15, Brinker’s age, may never have seen a frozen canal, or at least remember one. Until, that is, this year.

“For us, it’s in our genes,” said Gus Gustafsson, 68, a retired insurance executive, explaining why he and his wife rushed out to buy new skates and take to the ice under a cloudless blue sky. “It was like a frenzy that came over people, including lots of kids, like my granddaughter, who is 5.” With thousands of others, they skated northeast toward Utrecht, then toward the cheese capital, Gouda.

With an influx of immigrants, the country has been struggling to maintain what it considers its Dutch soul, and Mr. Gustafsson was one of many here who thought the skating experience enabled the Dutch to reconnect with their identity.

Those are three of the places marked as “destinations to watch in 2009″ by USA Today, along with Kansas City and the Mexican Riviera. An eclectic list, to be sure. Here is some of what they have to say:

Peru - More people are visiting Peru every year. In fact, the country has the second highest tourism growth estimate in Latin America…But because Peru is home to Machu Picchu—a destination already feeling the ill-effects of overtourism—the country as a whole is invested in building a sustainable tourism program focused on creating and fostering destinations around Peru so that as visitor numbers increase, tourism doesn’t endanger the very sites and cultures people come to see…

Lima concentrates the appeal of Peru into an urban center. Rich in museums celebrating the heritage, culture, and natural beauty of the country, it also has colonial architecture, archeological ruins, scenic landscapes, and even beaches…There’s also Lake Titicaca, the world’s highest navigable body of water, known for its floating islands housing entire communities of people; Colca Canyon, a canyon twice as deep as the Grand Canyon; and hundreds of other destinations worth exploring.

Vancouver - With the 2010 Winter Olympics just around the corner, Vancouver is going all out with preparations for its time in the spotlight. By visiting in 2009, you can reap the benefits of all the new infrastructure developments while enjoying the city and everything it has to offer. And as a place voted Best City in the Americas by Conde Nast Traveler three years running, the expansions and improvements are really just icing on the cake.

Lithuania - Each year, the E.U. bestows the title Capital of Culture to one or more European destinations. The cities celebrate the designation with a year of major arts and culture events and by hosting exhibitions. This year, Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, has the honor along with Linz in Austria.

Vilnius is putting on quite a show in 2009 with 120 art and culture projects and 900 events. The city will also be part of a countrywide celebration of Lithuania’s millennial year, as 2009 marks 1,000 years since the first known mention of the country in written records.

So Barack Obama is officially the 44th president of the United States. Has anyone ever seen such a depth of emotion for a presidential inauguration? Have so many people ever stopped what they were doing in the middle of a work day in order to watch the ceremony? It just speaks to the fact that our nation is ready to turn the page. Ready to hope again.

I can’t add anything original to the hundreds of thousands of words that have already been written about yesterday’s events. But for the sake of this blog, I thought it would be interesting to copy some of the words from Obama’s inaugural address that relate to the world. Not the economy, not the wars, but rather the cultural diversity of our nation and the world beyond our borders.

Here is Obama addressing the people of the world…

And so, to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and we are ready to lead once more.

Here he specifically addresses the Muslim world and the people or leaders of particular nations…

To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect.

To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict or blame their society’s ills on the West, know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy. To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.

To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds.

And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to the suffering outside our borders, nor can we consume the world’s resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it.

And here Obama speaks about the strengths that the United States draws from its cultural diversity…

We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth.

And because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.

Just thought you’d enjoy pondering these words as we enter a new era.

And I’ll leave you with this photo of Sasha Obama giving her father the thumbs up at yesterday’s inauguration. It’s a nice sentiment. Lets hope the good feelings last for a while.

Today, Barack Obama is being inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States. Yesterday, though, there was a fascinating article in the NY Times about Obama’s reading habits. Written by the paper’s book critic, Michiko Kakutani, the piece explores how Obama has been shaped by the books he has read and, by extension, how books affect all of us and help to mold our worldviews.

An excerpt:

Much has been made of Mr. Obama’s eloquence — his ability to use words in his speeches to persuade and uplift and inspire. But his appreciation of the magic of language and his ardent love of reading have not only endowed him with a rare ability to communicate his ideas to millions of Americans while contextualizing complex ideas about race and religion, they have also shaped his sense of who he is and his apprehension of the world.

Mr. Obama’s first book, “Dreams From My Father” (which surely stands as the most evocative, lyrical and candid autobiography written by a future president), suggests that throughout his life he has turned to books as a way of acquiring insights and information from others — as a means of breaking out of the bubble of self-hood and, more recently, the bubble of power and fame…

Mr. Obama tends to take a magpie approach to reading — ruminating upon writers’ ideas and picking and choosing those that flesh out his vision of the world or open promising new avenues of inquiry.

His predecessor, George W. Bush, in contrast, tended to race through books…or passionately embrace an author’s thesis as an idée fixe. Mr. Bush and many of his aides favored prescriptive books — Natan Sharansky’s “Case for Democracy,” which pressed the case for promoting democracy around the world, say, or Eliot A. Cohen’s “Supreme Command,” which argued that political strategy should drive military strategy. Mr. Obama, on the other hand, has tended to look to non-ideological histories and philosophical works that address complex problems without any easy solutions, like Reinhold Niebuhr’s writings, which emphasize the ambivalent nature of human beings and the dangers of willful innocence and infallibility.

What’s more, Mr. Obama’s love of fiction and poetry — Shakespeare’s plays, Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” and Marilynne Robinson‘s “Gilead” are mentioned on his Facebook page, along with the Bible, Lincoln’s collected writings and Emerson’s “Self Reliance“ — has not only given him a heightened awareness of language. It has also imbued him with a tragic sense of history and a sense of the ambiguities of the human condition quite unlike the Manichean view of the world so often invoked by Mr. Bush.

Mr. Obama has said that he wrote “very bad poetry” in college and his biographer David Mendell suggests that he once “harbored some thoughts of writing fiction as an avocation.” For that matter, “Dreams From My Father” evinces an instinctive storytelling talent (which would later serve the author well on the campaign trail) and that odd combination of empathy and detachment gifted novelists possess. In that memoir, Mr. Obama seamlessly managed to convey points of view different from his own (a harbinger, perhaps, of his promises to bridge partisan divides and his ability to channel voters’ hopes and dreams) while conjuring the many places he lived during his peripatetic childhood. He is at once the solitary outsider who learns to stop pressing his nose to the glass and the coolly omniscient observer providing us with a choral view of his past.

Check out the whole story, which includes a list of some of Obama’s favorite books.

A lot of people in a lot of countries complain about the bureaucracy of their government. But some just have it worse than others do. Take a look at this story:

To get life-saving medicine for her young son, Cecilia Velázquez embarks each month on a bureaucratic odyssey. First, two government doctors have to sign off on the prescription. Next, four bureaucrats must stamp it. Last, she has to present it (in quadruplicate) to a hospital dispensary.

The process takes at least four days and sometimes as many as 15. Since her son suffers from a hereditary immune system deficiency that could make an infection fatal, she said she asked God to keep him well on the months when he had to go without his medicine for several days.

She once complained to the government agency that runs the hospital where her 7-year-old son, Diego Emilio, is treated for his illness, agammaglobulinemia. But the comptroller’s office there told her that the procedure “just is that way.”

“I felt angry, sad, impotent,” she said in an interview. “But I had to stay quiet and be respectful.”

Wow. There is, though, somewhat of a happy ending. You see, Mexico’s government knows that it often ties its citizens into knots of inefficiency. And it’s at least trying to do something about it.

On Thursday, Ms. Velázquez finally got the vindication she had been seeking — from the president of the country.

Ms. Velázquez had won a government contest to identify Mexico’s most useless red tape, and President Felipe Calderónwas on hand to present her prize. Mr. Calderón, like presidents before him, has vowed to battle government inefficiency, which he sees as a serious drag on the economy.

“How many layers of resistance toward citizens, how many layers of insensitivity have built up?” Mr. Calderón asked during a speech he presented to the many bureaucrats who attended the awards ceremony.

We’ll see if Mexico succeeds. If it does, perhaps it could spread what it learns to a few other nations.

Well, the world voted for their choices for the seven wonders of the world. The man-made ones. Now it’s time to vote for the seven natural wonders. What are your choices? The Grand Canyon? Victoria Falls? The Great Barrier Reef? There are a lot of intriguing choices among the 261 sites that now have to be whittled down for the final rounds of voting.

The Official New 7 Wonders of the World campaign was a resounding success, in which more than 100 million votes were cast and which took democracy to a new global level. Now, the second campaign organized by the non-profit New7Wonders Foundation, to choose the New7Wonders of Nature, is off to a promising start: Some 430 nominations from 224 different countries were submitted by some half a million people within the first few months of the campaign.

To cast your vote, go to the New7Wonders site.

Here are some more top destinations for 2009, this time courtesy of Lonely Planet and the U.K. Times. Lonely Planet provides the background, while The Times online supplies a more detailed plan and resources. A sampling:

Bay of Fires, Tasmania: “White beaches of hourglass-fine sand, Bombay Sapphire sea, an azure sky - and nobody. This is the secret edge of Tasmania, laid out like a pirate’s treasure map of perfect beach after sheltered cove, all fringed with forest. It’s not long since the Bay of Fires came to international attention, and the crowds are bound to flock. Now is the time to visit.”

Chiloe, Chile: “With a newly inaugurated ecological reserve and the country’s oldest agro-tourism network, Chiloé has adventure on tap. This misty archipelago is the distilled, 80-proof version of traditional Chile. Witches and ghost ships go bump in the night, but modernity is on the march - the cool Museo de Arte Moderno is a worthy heir to Chiloé’s Unesco-listed shingle churches. Try a family homestay, outdoor lamb-roast and island-hopping via wooden fishing boat.”

The Big Island, Hawaii: “It may be less glam than its smaller siblings, but the Big Island has all the necessary tropical delights (plus lava-spewing volcanoes), and is less crowded and less expensive. You can stargaze from Mauna Kea, ride horses over grassy ranch land, and trip across lava wastes until you’re face to face with glowing magma - oh, and bake to a crisp on white-sand (and black-sand, and greensand) beaches.”

I just came across an interesting article in the Boston Globe’s Ideas section. The main point of the piece is that our brains benefit from time in nature, which is something that fewer of us get these days because a majority of individuals reside in cities.

“The mind is a limited machine,”says Marc Berman, a psychologist at the University of Michigan and lead author of a new study that measured the cognitive deficits caused by a short urban walk. “And we’re beginning to understand the different ways that a city can exceed those limitations.”

One of the main forces at work is a stark lack of nature, which is surprisingly beneficial for the brain. Studies have demonstrated, for instance, that hospital patients recover more quickly when they can see trees from their windows, and that women living in public housing are better able to focus when their apartment overlooks a grassy courtyard. Even these fleeting glimpses of nature improve brain performance, it seems, because they provide a mental break from the urban roil…

This research is also leading some scientists to dabble in urban design, as they look for ways to make the metropolis less damaging to the brain. The good news is that even slight alterations, such as planting more trees in the inner city or creating urban parks with a greater variety of plants, can significantly reduce the negative side effects of city life. The mind needs nature, and even a little bit can be a big help.

Yes, a little is good. But apparently, a lot is better. City parks are nice, but researchers have found considerably more benefit from a diverse park, such as Central Park in New York or the Emerald Necklace park series in Boston, than from a plain old green space dotted with a few trees and sports fields.

In a recent paper, Richard Fuller, an ecologist at the University of Queensland, demonstrated that the psychological benefits of green space are closely linked to the diversity of its plant life. When a city park has a larger variety of trees, subjects that spend time in the park score higher on various measures of psychological well-being, at least when compared with less biodiverse parks.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that we should all give up city life for a natural environment, though, because researchers have also found that dense urban spaces are hotbeds of creativity and innovation.

Recent research by scientists at the Santa Fe Institute used a set of complex mathematical algorithms to demonstrate that the very same urban features that trigger lapses in attention and memory — the crowded streets, the crushing density of people — also correlate with measures of innovation, as strangers interact with one another in unpredictable ways. It is the “concentration of social interactions” that is largely responsible for urban creativity, according to the scientists.

The density of 18th-century London may have triggered outbreaks of disease, but it also led to intellectual breakthroughs, just as the density of Cambridge — one of the densest cities in America — contributes to its success as a creative center. One corollary of this research is that less dense urban areas, like Phoenix, may, over time, generate less innovation.

The lesson, apparently, is that cities (especially dense cities) are good, but city dwellers need to take more breaks for nature.

Well, sort of. You can at least explore the ancient (and contemporary) Mayan world while biking through Guatemala and Belize. Matthew Kadey writes about his 11-day Central American biking trip for GoNomad.com.

Tiny Belize, tucked neatly between Mexico and Guatemala with the western hemisphere’s longest barrier reef system and an outstretched coastline, has long been a destination of choice for water sport junkies and beach bums.

But with vast chunks of protected fecund jungle, a scattering of some 600 Mayan ruins, a hospitable English-speaking populace and an abundance of serene, lightly trafficked roads it’s becoming a hot spot for spandex-clad cyclists.

Chicken noodle soup. It’s a staple, it seems, of childhood, winter, and flu season. The soup is warm and cozy, but hardly ever memorable or delicious. Well, if you want a heartier, zingier, more delectable version of chicken noodle soup then perhaps you should try a bowl from Southeast Asia. Julia Moskin of the NY Times writes about these soups:

Enter, steaming: the rich, spicy chicken noodle soups of Southeast Asia, the love children of Indian curries and Chinese noodle soups. These are chicken noodle soups you want to bathe in: sweet, spicy and fragrant, a happy contrast of hot broth, springy noodles and a madness of garnishes — from just a few rings of scallion to a spiky crown of caramelized shallots, steamed sweet shrimp and whole chilies stuffed with minced pork.

Popular throughout the region — native ground for the ginger, lemon grass, cinnamon, black pepper and turmeric that flavor them — the soups go by many names, including curry laksa, curry mee, la sa ga and khao poon, in Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam and other countries.

The most famous family member is curry laksa, a coconut-creamy one-bowl dish sold at hawker stalls in Malaysia and Singapore. “Curry laksa is like my entire country in one dish,” said Leemei Tan, a London-based telecommunications billing analyst who writes about the food of her native Malaysia at mycookinghut.com. “It’s not Indian. It’s not Chinese. But it has so many things in it, and the mix is so tasty.”

The first hit from any curry noodle soup is visual: steam rising from a gilded broth, dotted with burnt-orange oil, flecked with red from dried chilies and brown from warm spices like cinnamon, cumin, black pepper and coriander seed. The next is olfactory, as the perfumes of ginger, lemon grass, fresh curry leaves, lime leaves and turmeric kick in. And the rest involve inordinately elevated levels of flavor (recipes often call for huge handfuls of curry powder and paste), a riot of textural contrasts and the primal satisfaction of the slurp.

Check out the whole story, which includes two soup recipes.

Following up a recent post of mine about technology and the world, here is another example of how the new social media is transforming the way in which we receive and utilize information. NPR just did a story on how Twitter and other such media are being used in the current Gaza conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians.

The Gaza Strip may be closed to most traditional media, but the conflict there is still being reported — sometimes in cell phone interviews and through cell phone videos posted on YouTube — and increasingly on social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

People on the ground are telling their stories in 140-character bursts — “tweets” — on Twitter.com, as Hamas rockets crash into Israeli towns and Israeli forces bomb targets in Gaza. Online media are conglomerating their information, and governments are getting into the act.

There are reports coming out from individuals in Gaza…

Al-Jazeera television features Twitter and text message updates in the War on Gaza section of its Web site, and it is plotting the information it gets on a map of Gaza and the surrounding areas. The map shows the locations of airstrikes, rocket attacks, Palestinian and Israeli casualties and other information based on cumulative reports.

Al-Jazeera’s Twitter account has grown to close to 3,500 subscribers in about a week, and many of those subscribers multiply that effect by passing on what they receive in Twitter and Facebook messages, blogs and other online forums.

And there is even a Twitter feed to tell the story from the point of view of the Israeli government…

Meanwhile, Israel’s consulate in New York City has launched a Twitter feed that posts the Israeli government side of the story and responds to questions from the public. The Israeli account has about 4,000 followers…

David Saranga, Israel’s consul for media and public affairs in New York, says his government started using the Internet and social media well before the conflict in Gaza.

“Public diplomacy means you have to reach the public — and if the public is changing its pattern of gathering news, we have to change the way we deliver our message,” he says.

It’s fascinating. News reporting will never be the same again.

Most people know that Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the world’s three great monotheistic religions, all sprang from the Middle East. But how many are aware that another significant - and even older - monotheistic faith also arose in that region of the world? Zoroastrianism was born in the Persian empire, in what is now Iran, and was at one time the predominant faith across a wide swath of the ancient world. Today, somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 people still practice Zoroastrianism, mostly in India and Iran. Time magazine recently published a story on the Zoroastrians.

Far removed from Tehran’s bustling tin-roofed teashops and Isfahan’s verdant pomegranate gardens, the deserts known as Dasht-e Kavir and Dasht-e Lut meet at the city of Yazd, once the heart of the Persian Empire…

In Yazd, the holy flame has burned for 1,500 years without ever being extinguished. While Zoroastrianism was once the dominant religion in a swathe of territory spanning from Rome and Greece to India and Russia, the number of adherents has dwindled exponentially over the centuries. Although Yazd is the birthplace of the religion, only 200 of its 433,836 people still practice Zoroastrianism because migration, forced conversions, and centuries of oppression have diminished the population.

Worldwide, there are 190,000 Zoroastrians at most, and perhaps as few as 124,000 by some estimates. Although Zoroastrians are few in number, their faith has influenced Judaism, Christianity and Islam with its teachings of a single deity, a dualistic universe of good versus evil, and a final day of reckoning. The religion professes that humankind is designed to evolve toward perfection, but is complicated by evil forces such as greed, lust and hatred, explains Mehraban Firouzgary, the head priest of the Zoroastrian temple in Tehran. According to Zoroastrians, these evil forces must be challenged proactively by developing a “good mind” that embraces a life of good thoughts, good words and good deeds…

According to Parva Namiranian, a Zoroastrian medical student at Tehran University, the community in Iran preserves its identity by learning the Persian poetry of the Shah Nameh and holding religious classes and celebrations. She says Zoroastrians are accepted in Iran because they “represent a proud history” and all Iranians, regardless of religion, enjoy celebrating the Zoroastrian New Year, Nowruz, because it’s an excuse to buy clothes and eat sweets. Mehraban Firouzgary, the head priest in the Zoroastrian temple in Tehran, agrees that most Iranians regard the Zoroastrian minority favorably, but he worries about the community’s survival. “Zoroastrians have lived in Iran for over 3,000 years,” he says, “but there are so few left today.”

Happy New Year! It’s that time of year again - time for personal resolutions and for perusing various annual lists of top travel destinations for the coming 12 months. For the most part, this is a meaningless exercise. But it’s a fun kind of meaningless. Hey, it’s time to dream of all those places we still want and need to visit.

First up this year is Frommers with a list of 12 top destinations for 2009. Here are a few of them…

Cartagena, Colombia - After years of strife and violence owing to the drug cartel wars, Colombia has begun to emerge as a safe and vibrant travel destination…Cartagena has a highly developed tourist infrastructure, and it’s just a short hop from the U.S…Cartagena sits on the Caribbean coast and is a wonderfully picturesque, walled-in fishing village of pastel-painted buildings, fine cathedrals, and plenty of Spanish colonial architecture and 17th-century forts that allow you to steep yourself in history. The white-sand beaches are sublime, the restaurants are excellent, and lodging comes in all styles and prices.

Cape Town, South Africa - Cape Town, the oldest city in southern Africa, is regularly heralded as one of the most beautiful on earth. The massive sandstone bulk of Table Mountain, often draped in a flowing “tablecloth” of clouds, forms an imposing backdrop, while minutes away, pristine sandy beaches line the cliff-hugging coast where the Indian and Atlantic Oceans meet. You can visit African Penguin colonies at Boulders Beach along False Bay or take the ferry to Robben Island, the former prison home to political prisoners such as Nelson Mandela.

Cambodia (But Not Angkor Wat) - For people who have “done” Thailand and Vietnam, Cambodia seems like the next natural step. Tourism is taking off as a countrywide industry, and most people who contemplate Cambodia do so for a visit to Angkor Wat, the famed ruins in the jungle…We recommend casting a net beyond the limits of Angkor Wat and seeing a bit more of the country. Among the highlights are boat trips up the Mekong River and through the jungle to catch a glimpse of the rare freshwater Irrawaddy dolphins; or perhaps spending some time in vibrant, energized Phnom Penh.

Civil Rights Trail from Selma to Montgomery in Alabama, United States - What happened forty years ago between Selma and Montgomery — the antecedent for the Voting Rights Act — is why the U.S. will welcome Barack Obama into the White House this year. It’s additionally important because the U.S. southeast is rich both historically and culturally, and the Trail provides a very accessible window to an often overlooked region by tourists…Highlights include the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the Slavery & Civil War Museum, the Rosa Parks Museum, and the Maya Lin-designed Civil Rights Monument.