Three items from this past Friday's New York Times:

BEIJING — Tibet will be reopened to tourists on May 1, a decision announced Thursday even as Chinese authorities showed no sign of lifting restrictions preventing foreign journalists from freely visiting Tibet to report on episodes of ethnic unrest.

Tibet has been closed to domestic and foreign tourists since March 16, two days after violent riots erupted in Lhasa. State media have reported the police in Aba fired on Tibetan protesters after they tried to storm a police station. Overseas Tibetan advocacy groups have asserted that up to 20 Tibetans were killed...

BEIJING — A Chinese court sentenced an outspoken human rights advocate, Hu Jia, 34, to three and a half years in prison after ruling that his critical essays and comments about Communist Party rule amounted to inciting subversion. Critics say his conviction is part of a government crackdown to silence dissidents before Beijing hosts the Olympic Games in August...

SEOUL — North Korea's rising tensions with the West, along with soaring international grain prices and flood damage from last year, will probably take a heavy toll among famine-threatened people in North Korea. The warnings followed a report on Thursday that North Korea's government had suspended distribution of food rations for six months in Pyongyang, the capital. The report was released by Good Friends, a relief group in Seoul that collects data from informants in the North.

Korea's isolationist government asked for foreign aid in the 1990s only after a famine killed more than one million people of an estimated population of 23 million...

This week's Torah portion, Metzora, discusses tzara'at, a disease that causes skin discoloration. Though the symptoms of this ailment are physical, our sages teach that it is triggered by lashon hara, evil talk about another. Lashon hara isn't (only) slanderous talk; we are forbidden to discuss another's faults and misdeeds even if true. The Rebbe explains that speech has the ability to reveal that which is hidden. Speaking negatively about another reveals and reinforces those very negative qualities—just as speaking about another's strengths and talents brings those qualities to the forefront of his consciousness.

Is this an endorsement of the Chinese and North Korean simple philosophy: instead of dealing with an issue, deny its existence—and then silence anyone who dares to suggest that the problem does exist?

Let's hear what you guys think...