Ed’s note: On April 19, the US Department of State published its annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, which included a section on China. It was typical, mundane, and features nothing you don’t already know, including restriction of Uighur and Tibetan movement, harassment of journalists and dissidents, prison labor, discrimination, extrajudicial killings, etc. On... Read more »
If you'll allow yourself a quick moment of unabashedly sentimental feel-goodness, please turn your attention to this story out of Longmen Township in Sichuan province.
A Youku citizen journalist encountered an old couple walking down a mountain road in this earthquake-striken part of town on Monday at 9 am. The woman, hard of hearing, is 90 years old this year, while her husband is 88.
The couple has no home to return to -- "just a tent," says the husband.
The earth's convulsion along the Longmenshan front on Saturday jiggered a few rocks loose from the mountains of Sichuan, among other things, and on a narrow road connecting Longmentong and Baosheng Township, a boulder rested squarely in the middle, blocking everything. Two days later, the bulldozers were out, along with a demolition team. Uniformed young men, looking like China's version of the national guard, ushered villagers from the area. Experts drilled a hole into the boulder, then packed it with gunpowder. Then, beginning at the 2:40 mark, a silent countdown... toward... KABLOOEY.
The wife of jailed Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo was seen in public for the first time in more than two and a half years today as she attended the trial of her brother, 43-year-old Liu Hui, who has been charged with fraud. According to Tania Branigan of the Guardian:
Check out this young couple on the Taipei subway: he reads a book while she, um, sleeps on his lap... with a jacket over her head... bobbing up and down.
Yeah.
Sneaky, naughty, and bookish. Kids these days.
A week after a pair of bombs placed near the finish line at the Boston Marathon killed three, wounded 183 (including 13 with lost or maimed limbs) and ignited a weeklong manhunt that culminated in a violent standoff with a pair of ethnic Chechens, Lu Lingzi, the 23-year-old Boston University graduate student from Shenyang who was killed in the... Read more »
On April 19, 2012, a 41-year-old woman in Haikou, Hainan province was picking up her child when a 42-year-old shop owner confronted her because her bike was blocking his store. What happened next, one would never wish on his worst enemy:
On Friday, street enforcement officers of Huangshi, Hubei province entered a convenience store and began confiscating goods -- it's what chengguan do -- but before they could finish, local townsfolk decided they'd seen enough. In the ensuing scuffle, chengguan were subject to verbal abuse, followed by phsyical contact. It wasn't pretty for anyone, as you can see.
The suffering and grief that accompanies the loss of an only-child is already unimaginable, but what about the loss of two children, in the same place, five years apart, to the same natural disaster? Lu Jingkang, 50, has lost both her children: her son in 2008 to the Wenchuan earthquake, and her daughter on Saturday... Read more »
Wu Yong, who lost his only son in the Ya’an Earthquake, initially comes across as calm and collected as he recalls the story of how he discovered his child buried, while sleeping, under rubble. When his stoic front finally crumbles and he sobs into his hand, what we have is a human face, an individual,... Read more »
