Chinese Tibet

"Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion," the most comprehensive and devastating documentary yet on that tragic country, ends with a note of optimism from the Dalai Lama in the face of the suffering and oppression of his people. However, the breadth and depth that director Tom Peosay and writers Sue Peosay and Victoria Mudd have brought to their film suggest how bleak the prospects really are for the Tibetan people.

Samsung probably thought it was a slam-dunk marketing scheme: As the Olympic torch made its way around the world, people could send text messages to the company with the word "torch" and win a new cellphone. As scores of demonstrators crowded the streets of downtown San Francisco on Wednesday to protest China's occupation of Tibet, forcing a re-routing of the relay and the deployment of the city's entire police force, it might not have looked like such a good idea.

Walk softly and carry a message of mutual respect. That was the Obama administration's initial approach to China, part of a broad policy of seeking dialogue on difficult issues with friends and enemies alike. In that spirit, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton visited the People's Republic on her first trip abroad and avoided public expressions of concern about Chinese human rights abuses. President Obama put off meeting China's nemesis, the Tibetan Dalai Lama, ahead of his own foray to China, hoping to focus attention on core U.S. concerns such as nuclear proliferation in Iran and North Korea, trade relations and climate change.

A photo that seems to show Chinese paramilitary forces carrying monks' robes provides conclusive evidence, those spreading it through e-mail claim, that the Chinese staged Tibet riots last month to justify a government crackdown. But the photo, widely distributed via the Internet, appears likely to be a 7-year-old image taken during a film shoot.

Imagine a world in which Scotland gains independence from Britain and Italy divides in half. Russia and China both fragment into a dizzying array of new states, while Canada disappears altogether. Along the way, a host of new states--including Samiland, Pushtunistan, and Zululand--are born. And those are only a few of the possibilities that a panel of eminent political geographers predicted for the next decade as the world map is redrawn.

Adelaide "Su-Lin" Young, the first American woman to explore the rugged Himalayas in the 1930s and for whom the first giant panda brought to the United States was named, died April 17 of cardiopulmonary arrest at a home-care facility in the Bay Area community of Hercules. She was 96. An unlikely explorer, the pampered and glamorous daughter of a New York nightclub owner probed the arduous territory of southwest China as a newlywed in 1934.

Someday, maybe, Los Angeles will go momo mad. But right now, the momo is an unknown delicacy--unless you're lucky enough to have met some of Southern California's 85 resident Tibetans. The momo is a Tibetan dumpling--ground meat mixed with savory seasonings such as green onions, cilantro, ginger and cumin and wrapped in a thin circle of dough. You could call it a Himalayan hamburger, except that the momo is steamed, not grilled.

Chris Bonington, who climbed to the top of Mt. Everest four years ago, now hopes to become the first person to fly over the world's highest mountain in a hot-air balloon. "We have a good chance of landing on target north of Everest on the Tibetan plateau, but something could go wrong and we might be forced down above the snow line in the narrow Himayalan valleys," he said. "That's where I come in."

Dawa Tsering emerged from six years of humiliation and torture in a Chinese prison ready to take up arms to expel the Chinese from Tibet. He did not, Tsering said, because the Dalai Lama preaches peaceful resistance. Yet, inside Tibet and among young refugees like Tsering who slip across the border into India, militancy and impatience are confronting the Dalai Lama, exiled leader of Tibet and apostle of nonviolence.