At the start of this POV video taken at Wednesday's protest near Jingwen Shopping Mall in Beijing's Fengtai District, the people chant kangyi, "protest." As a collective they rock back and forth, like a wave. It surges in fits and starts, apparently toward uniformed officers. There is safety in numbers -- civilians outnumber cops -- so individuals feel little hesitancy to shout whatever they please.
But there is also a kind of muted chaos.
A massive police and paramilitary presence has descended upon Fengtai District around Jingwen Clothing and Apparel Shopping Mall, the scene of either a suicide or murder last Friday.
On May 3, a young woman from Anhui province fell to her death from the Jingwen building after allegedly being gang-raped. Police hastily ruled her death a suicide and refused her family's request to see the surveillance footage.
This afternoon, thousands (edit: possibly only "hundreds") of people -- many who are migrant workers from Anhui -- gathered in a planned protest between Jingwen and Yongdingmen, a gate just south of the Temple of Heaven on Second Ring Road (a few kilometers north of Jingwen). Hundreds of police have shown up in turn, many in riot gear. Traffic is reportedly backed up for miles.
As Barack Obama's failure to close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp continues to anger his liberal base, interested observers outside the US are beginning to take their potshots at the reeling POTUS. The Chinese news media, for instance, has decided to lightly prod the American president with a little humor -- not with its own humor, mind you, but with The Daily Show's.
Via Deadspin, "The Dalai Lama Is A Giant Bandwagoner":
Tenzin Gyatso is the 14th Dalai Lama, the latest in a long line of reincarnations of Avalokiteśvara, the bodhisattva embodiment of compassion. He's also an insufferable homer who loves free hats.
Kenneth Bae, a Korean American sentenced to 15 years of hard labor in North Korea for crimes against the state, will not be used as a bargaining chip, says the DPRK. “Some media of the U.S. said that the DPRK tried to use Bae’s case as a political bargaining chip. This is ridiculous and [a] wrong guess,” Korean Central News Agency reported, via Washington Post. But would the regime, you know, release him, just because, pretty please, if Dennis Rodman asked?
Last week I got an invite to roll with some musician buddies up at Midi Festival and decided it’d be a great opportunity to grab a camera and capture the people and fashions that only “the biggest rock festival” in China can provide.
Undeterred by the lack of a fucking functional website, the promise of awe-inspiring traffic, and the threat of hours of shitty metal, I took a whiskey-soaked ride up to the Beijing Yuyang International Ski Resort and brought back photos from the Pulp Fiction/Sid and Nancy/The Last Waltz/skate video some kids from Ohio would make/Betty Boop/Hot Topic Lookbook fever dream that was Midi Festival 2013.
PR department for the win. Chimelong Water Park sent thousands of women in bikinis to do their bidding, and let's just say we're paying attention. In this video, girls form "2013" in the shape of a snake while getting sprayed down. Kids go on water rides. Everyone is happy. Sweet summer is here.
What happens when a bear races a monkey on a bicycle? First of all, stop. Why is a bear racing a monkey… Oh fuck it. Take over, Huffington Post: During the performance, two monkeys take the lead as onlookers laugh and cheer. The bear is hot on their heels, however, and a second-lap crash quickly turns... Read more »
Okay guys, shelve the jokes. Who among us has handled live explosives and knows the special feeling of a shrapnel-packed weapon ticking down to our doom? Adrenaline gushing through the veins of our throwing arm, would our toss be guaranteed a certain distance, the ideal trajectory, so that the projectile -- shrapnel-packed, explosive -- doesn't bounce back at our feet, as it does here, in this video, to the poor female recruit and her two companions?
