Word: islandness
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When I read Hong Kong Rose a few weeks ago, I recognized the places around the island that Xu Xi wrote about in her novel of transatlantic love, lust, and searching. Seeing it in fiction made Hong Kong more compelling to me and, paradoxically, more real...
...denim shirt and jeans, he gently leads a lady down King’s Road. Every morning the woman in an orange vest grins around sticking-out teeth, blithely handing out free newspapers. There is a man with a two and a half foot beard selling novels on Lamma Island. A shopkeeper in front of my apartment explains how her dresses can also be skirts. The squat blond ex-pat led by four Pomeranians on leashes crosses the bridge where the man with an egg-shaped back leans against the railing, looking over the harbor, as he does every afternoon...
...connection between nests and violence continues to this day. The island of Koh Mak gets about $1.1 million in nest revenue every year, eight times more than the budget of some other Phatthalung subdistricts unblessed by nesting swiftlets. In 1997, the Thai government passed legislation to make the industry more transparent and ensure that government revenue from concessions is funneled back into local communities. But a string of unsolved murders on Koh Mak indicates hazardous aspects of the harvesting trade linger. Pradit Jariya, 35, has been administrative chief of the island for a year now. It's quite an achievement...
...Jemaah Islamiah (JI), a homegrown terrorist network, has advocated targeting Westerners in the past, as it did to deadly effect during the 2002 and '05 bombings on the resort island of Bali and a previous assault on the same Jakarta Marriott six years ago. In the latest hotel attack, Indonesian police are now fingering a possible splinter group of JI run by a Malaysian operative named Noordin Top, who has evaded capture for several years...
...investigators follow the terrorist trail, there are, at least, encouraging precedents for the country's economic prospects: the 2003 Marriott bombing didn't result in a major investment outflow, and Bali eventually recovered economically from its attacks, which killed more than 220 people on the island. Indonesians can only hope that the latest effort to dissuade foreigners from doing business in Southeast Asia's biggest economy will also fail...