“I won’t comply!”
Those were reportedly the last words of Xia Junfeng, a street vendor who ran a kebab stall in Shenyang, Liaoning province, just before his excution on Wednesday. Four years ago, in what he insisted was an act of self-defense, Xia stabbed to death two urban city management enforcement officers -- chengguan -- and wounded another. Most Chinese, including many law professionals, believed Xia should have been charged with "excessive defense," but after four years of appeals, the Supreme Court finally approved his death sentence.
There's a horror movie in here somewhere -- or at least an unnecessary flashback to Thomas J's death in My Girl.
At least 18 people have died from wasp attacks in Angkang, Shaanxi province in recent months, according to the Guardian, citing city health official Zhou Yuanhong, who says more than 100 people in the area have been stung.
Global Times found a "scholar living in Japan" to write about Japan's misplaced "Olympics fever" this week, presumably because Global Times writing that editorial itself would have been a bit too ironic, a bit too laughable for even Global Times. Quick excerpt from Jiao Kun's piece, published yesterday:
Last month Adil Hushor (Ch: Adili Wuxor) pulled off his latest feat – walking over the Pearl River on a wire suspended 116 meters in the air. Over the past decades he has walked between skyscrapers, over China’s most iconic valleys, canyons, stadiums, lakes, and rivers. He’s broken multiple world records by doing it faster and longer, higher and weirder. As a 19-year-old he broke 12 bones when a rotten rope broke in Shanghai and he fell 15 meters. But the everyday trauma of risking his life has not stopped him from tackling bigger and more dangerous feats.
Seventeen-year-old Li Guanfeng -- alternately called Li Tianyi, problem child, brat, and rapist -- was found guilty of gang rape by Haidian District People’s Court in Beijing earlier this morning. His high-level connections -- his father is renowned PLA singer Li Shuangjiang, and his mother is singer Meng Ge -- apparently weren't enough to get him off the hook for allegedly sexually assaulting a young woman with four of his friends in a Beijing hotel on February 17.
Rabies is a third-world problem: it's treatable as long as you have money and access to the proper medical care. (Ninety-five percent of human deaths are in Asia and Africa, according to the World Health Organization.) In Jiangsu province, a father chose -- out of monetary reasons -- to not seek treatment after sucking blood out of a dog bite on his son, and is dead as a result.
