An AH-64E Apache helicopter appears to have tried to land on the side of a residential building on Zhongzheng Road in Longtan, Taoyuan, Taiwan around 10 am this morning. Helicopters should not try to land on the side of buildings. The two pilots -- one of whom was reportedly a student -- were sent to the hospital.
People's Daily, the gift that keeps on giving, did a most glorious thing at 1:39 am today by "publicly condemn[ing]" a parody Twitter account, The Relevant Organs. "We have noticed that a Twitter account has been misleading people by stealing People's Daily 's web address and National emblem of China to make false impression that the account is related to China officials or People's Daily," reads PD's tweeted statement.
The WeChat-Facebook conflict, a battle for hearts and minds that has simmered for months around hotpot tables where expats and exchange students boast about their respective weaponry, has turned hot.
A series of ads recently released on the Youtube channel WeChatSouthAfrica poke fun at Social Network Boy Mark Zuckerberg. The ads -- currently three of them -- are set in the study of a German psychiatrist who prescribes "ze WeChat" to a despondent Zuckerberg.
On April 13, 2014, Abdulbasit Ablimit, a 17-year-old from a small town near Aqsu, was shot twice. It appears he had run a red light on an electric scooter and, rather than stop and pay a fine, he had fled. According to his friends, he was gunned down three kilometers later. The official state narrative, posted a few days after the incident, says he attacked the police officers with stones, tried to grab their guns, and so on.
Regardless of how, Abdulbasit died within hours. His body was given to his family for burial. But he was not buried.
On a crisp September 1st morning in Beijing, I stood before a locked iron door. On the other side was a hutong that led to the streets and eventually my university dorm. On my side was a scruffy courtyard home, a room with no couch and only one big bed – on which slept my Chinese boyfriend. It was dawn, and the hutong roofs were limned by a light morning mist, releasing the heat of the night into a new day. Inside, I was trapped, faced with an undesirable decision: to take a hammer to the door, or to return to the bed and have sex with a person I no longer respected.
Around 3 am on Monday, April 21, a suspected carjacker in Foshan, Guangdong province was tailed by police into a toll booth / checkpoint, where he was surrounded and ordered to get out of the car. The suspect, surnamed Tan, did no such thing. He did the opposite of getting out, which is stepping on the accelerator, even if it meant ramming his car backwards into police vehicles and officers alike.
On April 14, New York Times reporters Kirk Semple and Eric Schmitt published an article titled “China’s Actions in Hunt for Jet Are Seen as Hurting as Much as Helping" that quoted two government officials -- one from the US and one from Malaysia, both unnamed -- who said China has not, to put it nicely, contributed much to the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370. It was a disturbing piece, not least because it seemed to signal the search may have entered a new phase in which the frustrations and difficulties of finding the missing jet could spill into finger-pointing and politics.
The fourth Beijing International Film Festival opened on Wednesday, and it looks like it's already less boring than last year's. For that we have the Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone to thank, who on Thursday in a panel discussion spoke provocatively on Mao Zedong and urged the Chinese to confront their history. As The Hollywood Reporter reports:
If you're not following Chris Buckley (@ChuBailiang) on Twitter, you probably should. The New York Times reporter who gave us panda TV (addendum: postmodern panda watching pandas on TV), double-decker bus-driving fail, and his timely "Pulitzer Prize" series of tweets (e.g., "...for urban planning goes to Zhengzhou for planting trees under an expressway") is who we should thank for the above, via People.cn, which really needs no additional commentary.
The new deputy chief of Qianjiang township in Laibin, Guangxi is dead. Zhong Xiefei, on the night of April 9, died while solemnly performing his duty as loyal servant of the people. Let this be a warning for all those in China who aspire for public office...
Those of you who follow us will know about C4, the sometimes funny, certainly unique, not-unnoteworthy comedy/variety show via China Radio International that we sporadically syndicate. Among the fun things that hosts Rob Hemsley and Stuart Wiggin have done recently -- though not quite as good as "The Panda" -- is a bloopers segment that featured none other than Xi Jinping.
"Unexplained disturbances" caused a glass door to shatter on Line 1 of the subway system in Shenyang, Liaoning province this morning, though the likely cause, per chatter on microblogs, is a fight that occurred inside the train.
The latest update on still-missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 -- New York Times: "China’s Actions in Hunt for Jet Are Seen as Hurting as Much as Helping" -- puts the attention on China's naval incompetence and prestige hunting. Apparently good intentions don't get you good press. I read the Times's article while slowly shaking my head at the entirety of the MH370 situation/mess. Then I came to this quote:
There are some serious amateur filmmakers working for the United States's Federal Bureau of Investigation -- I can think of no other reason why Game of Pawns would exist: a nearly half-hour mini-movie that tells the story of Glenn Duffie Shriver, who was bribed by Chinese officials when he was studying in Shanghai to pass along sensitive information. Shriver made $70,000 before he was caught. He's now in the US serving out a four-year sentence in federal prison.
Here's a strange little story from the other side of the world. Frances Chan, a 20-year-old history major at Yale, was apparently told by her school's health center officials that she was dangerously underweight at 92 pounds. She's 5-foot-2, and according to the ideal weight calculator, someone between her age and height should weigh at least 97 pounds. As Chan wrote on Huffington Post last month about her ordeal:
