beyondBeijing2008.com

By Charlene Gubash, NBC News ProducerJIDDAH, Saudi Arabia – The road to Mecca for Islam’s annual hajj is littered with needles this year. Before you even leave your country of origin you have to get vaccinations for meningitis, seasonal flu, yellow fever, and for the lucky, the H1N1 vaccine. 
Our trip started in Cairo, where [...]

By Adrienne Mong, NBC News Correspondent
BEIJING – Five months after violence broke out in the northwestern Chinese province of Xinjiang, the area still remains under tight control. International calls are barred to and from Xinjiang. There is no Internet access available to the general population. And the government is in the midst of waging a “Strike Hard” [...]

Esha Momeni, an Iranian-American student who was taken into custody for protesting Iran’s elections, talks about her participation in the protests and the time she spent in prison. NBC’s Ali Arouzi reports.

VIDEO: Iranian-American goes from grad student to government threat …(read more)

Giz reader, Jake Kirshner, needs your help. He’s one of the final five semi-finalists in a Microsoft-sponsored competition to find a U.S student blogger/athlete to report from next year’s Consumer Electronics Show (where we’ll be ourselves), in addition to the Vancouver Winter Olympics. Jake’s a Computer Science major at the University of Utah, a competitive [...]