Davos blogs
Naturally, the World Economic Forum in Davos has gone and gotten itself a blog. What self-respecting event/entity doesn't have one anymore? So, who's blogging Davos? Well, there's the very talented Rebecca MacKinnon who'll be moderating a panel on China and speaking on another panel on blogging. Yes, there's a Davos panel on blogging now! For the technically minded, it's worth noting that Davos posts will be equipped with del.icio.us tags and Technorati tags. What? Suffice it to say that these are two of the hottest developments in blogging right now. And of course there'll be webcasts of the main panel discussions.
BTW, Jim Fruchterman, the president of The Benetech Initiative is blogging Davos for the BBC and Eric Le Boucher is doing the Chroniques de Davos thing for Le Monde. Rainy Day prediction No. 582: blogging will lead to the establishment of a distinct class of news/opinion reporters/pundits who'll earn their living by following the global events calendar.
AUSCHWITZ Continuing our series of diary entries that mark the week of the liberation of Auschwitz, we turn today to this ominous note made by Victor Klemperer some four years before the full horrors of the concentration camps were revealed to the world:
21 May 1941 "Sonnenstein has long ceased to be the regional mental asylum. The SS is in charge. They have built a special crematorium. Those who are not wanted are taken up in a kind of police van. People here all call it 'the whispering coach'. Afterward the relatives receive the urn. Recently one family here received two urns at once. We now have pure Communism. But Communism murders more honestly."
Victor Klemperer (1881-1960) was the son of a rabbi. He studied in Munich, Geneva, Paris and Berlin, where he became a journalist. He taught at the University of Naples and served with distinction in the German army in the First World War. He was a professor of Romance Languages in Dresden until he was fired in 1935 as a result of Nazi race laws. Klemperer survived the Holocaust and lived in East Germany until his death. The first volume of his diaries (1933-45) was published in 1998 and the combined works provide a gripping, graphic account of life under Nazi rule.
