It doesn't get much more disturbing than this. Two girls were found starved to death on the fifth floor of an apartment in Nanjing, Jiangsu province last Friday. According to the Telegraph, the mother Ms. Le, was arrested on Sunday.
Talk about a publicity and soft power machine for China. On Saturday, June 22, a female panda named Haizi gave birth to twins at a conservation center in Wolong, and everyone is talking about it, from BBC to AP to the Telegraph, which reports:
Chen Guangcheng, who is in Taipei right now as part of an 18-day trip to meet with politicans and human rights activists, spoke to media on Monday, but notably refused to follow-up on his claim that New York University kicked him out due to pressure from Beijing.
According to Reuters, Chen "bristled" when asked.
A two-and-a-half-year-old girl is lucky to be alive after she fell from the fourth story of a building in Ningbo, Zhejiang province.
The toddler, identified as Qiqi, climbed on the window sill and -- sigh if you've heard this before -- crawled right on out. Her parents had left her home alone as she was sleeping, because toddlers never wake up when they're home alone.
A man with a shotgun -- shotgun -- killed six people in Shanghai's Baoshan District on Saturday evening, according to China.org.
He reportedly first killed a colleague at Guangyu fine chemical company out of "financial disputes." He then shot and killed a taxi driver, killed a guard at a military compound, then went back to his workplace and killed three more people.
We've never heard of death by shopping cart before, but two days ago in Shanghai, a man brought his own shopping cart to a supermarket, the kind that doesn't lock into the teeth of reclined moving walkways, and the result was fatal.
Edward Snowden -- ever elusive, unidentifiable -- is reportedly leaving Moscow for either Cuba or Ecuador. Reports AP:
The former National Security Agency contractor and CIA technician fled Hong Kong and arrived at the Moscow airport, where he planned to spend the night before boarding an Aeroflot flight to Cuba. Ecuador's Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino said his government received an asylum request from Snowden, and the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks said it would help him.
We don't really have an explanation for this. Edward Snowden is back in the news in a big way -- he left Hong Kong and is traveling to either Cuba or Ecuador via Moscow -- but check out what the Independent did with the front page of its newspaper, which hits newsstands today. The caption reads: "A red-shirted Edward Snowden, the man who leaked classified documents revealing US internet surveillance, among passengers at Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport yesterday after he flew in from Hong Kong. Reports say Mr Snowden has asked Ecuador for asylum. BARCROFT MEDIA."
And he's gone. Screams the latest SCMP headline (all-caps theirs):
SNOWDEN LEAVES HONG KONG ON COMMERCIAL FLIGHT TO MOSCOW
The report isn't confirmed, but SCMP notes that Snowden "would continue on to another country." The Hong Kong government issued a short statement today, in which it said the US's request for extradition "did not fully comply with the legal requirements under Hong Kong law."
