Nineteen feet in diameter, the clock atop Shanghai's Customs Building is by far the largest timepiece in China. After the frenzied Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, it tolled each new hour by blaring through 40 loudspeakers the melody of the ubiquitous Communist anthem, The East Is Red (sample lyric: "China has brought forth a Mao Tse-tung/ For the people's happiness he works").
To eliminate a vestige of the turbulent past, the Shanghai city council has changed the clock's tune. This month it began sounding stately bongs, much as it did in the pre-Communist era, when the clock chimed as sonorously (and undogmatically) as London's Big Ben.
UGANDA Honeymoon's Sad EndHe was widely hailed in January as the leader who would put an end to Uganda's 23-year cycle of bloodshed and turmoil, but President Yoweri Museveni seems merely to be presiding over its latest chapter. Museveni's regime last week filed treason charges against 18 political activists, including three ministers in the 36-member Cabinet. The alleged conspirators, members of the dominant Baganda tribe, which backed Museveni during the five-year civil war that brought him to power, apparently were unhappy with their lack of rewards.
Rebel forces in recent weeks have attacked military and civilian targets in the north. The insurgents, who have been striking from bases in southern Sudan, include many soldiers who battled Museveni in the war.
ISRAEL Friendship Yields to FuryThe 2,000 mourners who gathered last week in the town of Ashkelon were there to pray for Taxi Driver Yisrael Kitaro, whose throat had been slashed by unknown attackers the day before in the nearby Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip. Grief quickly gave way to shouts of "Death to the Arabs!" as the crowd vented its rage at the second murder in two weeks of a Jewish visitor to the predominantly Arab Gaza.
The killings undermined a recent gesture aimed at promoting Jewish-Arab amity in Ashkelon, whose residents are mainly Jews of Moroccan origin. A week earlier a main square was named for Moroccan King Mohammed V, father of the reigning Hassan II, who protected Jews during World War II. Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who resigned as expected last week under a job-swapping agreement with Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir, two weeks ago had unveiled the square's plaque honoring Mohammed. When vandals damaged the plaque after Kitaro's murder, authorities ordered the marker removed.
UNESCO M'Bow Bows OutBeset by numerous, largely self-inflicted wounds, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, universally known as UNESCO, has in recent years seemed close to collapse. The Paris-based entity has come under fire for severe budget mismanagement and for serving as a forum for attacks on the West. The U.S. and Britain have resigned from UNESCO, slashing its $187 million annual budget by 30%.