A 22-year-old man jumped out of a moving bus on a Sichuan province freeway and died, reports Chengdu Business Daily via Global Times. Why did he jump? "He asked me to park the bus because he needed to pee," said the bus driver, Liu Renzi, who was en route to Ziyang from Chengdu that day. "I asked him to wait because it's not safe to park on the freeway. I told him that there was a restroom at Shiqiao servic ...

Around 2 pm yesterday in Wenzhou, Zhejiang province, a brother and sister duo rode a motorcycle off the roof of a building, both of them dying in the fall. Preliminary reports have ruled it an accident. The siblings were practicing how to ride when the driver is said to have lost control. ...

On May 15, a 24-year-old nurse surnamed Wang was cut in half by an elevator after she found herself pinched between its closing doors. That sentence is horrific enough, but what about more details? The victim, a nurse surnamed Wang, was trapped in the elevator in Changhong Tower in Shenzhen's Luohu district, when it stopped due to failure. Since the door was open the woman attempted to exit, but the elevato ...

Morbid details have emerged in the story of the British toddler who was crushed by a "falling screen" last Monday in a Shanghai restaurant. The accident happened at Kervan Orient Express just after 8 pm when the three-year-old boy, playing with a seven-year-old girl, fell down and "touched the partition screen, which fell and hit him in the head," according to Shanghai Daily. The partition is taller than an ...

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 in the Ya'an earthquake, both occurring along the Longmenshan fault in Sichuan province ...

Police are investigating how a three-year-old boy could have been killed by a falling screen in a restaurant in Shanghai's downtown Huangpu District on Monday. According to Shanghai Daily, "Witnesses said the boy may have accidentally touched the screen before it fell on him. Screens are sometimes used by restaurants to divide dining areas." The boy was sent to a nearby hospital, but reportedly did not have ...

A first-year student at Jinggangshan University in Ji'an, Jiangxi province was killed on April 9 when a basketball hoop fell on him. This is not in dispute. What is less certain, however, is why the steel hoop fell. "The basket leaned down so it was easy for the 1.71m-height boy to reach. And there was problem with the base," says university publicity chief Guo Chunxin, relayed by Nick Bedard of The Basketb ...

A girl in her early 20s in Jiangxi province was surfing the web on her phone last September when she stumbled upon a website containing this kernel of titillating, dangerous insight: "Rope strangulation can yield pleasure." As Changjiang Network reports, the girl, called Lin, approached her longtime best friend, one year younger, with the idea. Both very bored, they decided to try it. They located a strap f ...

What a world we live in when the ground beneath our feet might open up any moment and suck us under. Yesterday afternoon, a five-by-eight-meter sinkhole that was reportedly four stories deep suddenly formed in a residential compound in Shenzhen. A very unlucky security guard, who happened to be walking past, never stood a chance. He died after efforts to revive him at the hospital failed. ...

The idea of falling down a hole and disappearing off the face of the earth is cartoonish, reserved for Warner Brothers animators, or the fear of an imaginative child for whom laws of physics have yet to squeeze order out of the world's underbelly of extravagant possibility. In China, however, the idea of falling down a hole and disappearing off the face of the earth is real. It happened on Friday night, in ...

The Xinhua News Agency is reporting that sources say Hangzhou mayor Shao Zhanwei, a deputy at the 12th National Party Congress, died of a "sudden illness" in Beijing this morning. All other details are sparse, but another report identifies the sudden illness as a heart attack. It was just yesterday that Shao spoke about Wen Jiabao's work report speech and mentioned the need for "strengthening the foundation ...

Yi Ruilong, an extreme sports trailblazer in this country known as China's "first flying man," disappeared on Sunday evening after his hang glider crashed into remote Hanyuan Lake in Sichuan province. You can watch the video of his fateful accident above, in which he loses control while trying to complete a 360-degree turn. Witnesses aren't sure whether Yi died on the spot, but search crews found no signs o ...

We just warned about the dangers of hotpot: last week, a man caught on fire when a waiter allegedly mishandled an alcohol-fueled hotpot stove in Beijing. An accident yesterday in Shouyang County of Jinzhong City, Shanxi province was much worse. At 7:52 pm, according to Xinhua, a large blast came from inside the hotpot chain Xiyangyang (Happy Sheep), leaving at least 14 dead (six at the scene). Early indicat ...

In the early morning of August 19, @安娜830321 of Shantou, Guangdong province posted this message on her Sina Weibo: “So drunk, but still gotta drive home." She didn't make it home. As Tea Leaf Nation tells us: The next day, local news in Shantou, Guangdong Province, reported that a white BMW rammed into a road barrier in early morning and the female driver was killed. ...

An appalling story to report from Hunan. On Tuesday at around 1 pm, a 24-year-old traffic cop named Li Xiaofeng made what appeared to be a routine stop at a toll booth of a truck that he suspected was overweight. He put himself in front of the truck, but the driver wouldn't stop. When a second officer approached, the driver actually sped up, and 10 meters later, Li stumbled and rolled underneath the truck's ...

Image via Xinhua If we've said it once, we shouldn't need to again: don't tailgate road tankers carrying highly combustible elements. Between 2 and 3 am earlier today in Yan'an, Shaanxi province, all but three people aboard a 39-seat double-decker coach bus perished when the bus collided with the back of a tanker carrying methanol. At least 36 people are confirmed dead, though as Global Times rather morbidl ...

An elevated stretch of highway on Third Ring Road in Harbin, Heilongjiang province collapsed at around 5:30 am today, according to China News, killing two immediately and injuring six others. One of the injured later died at the hospital. The accident happened about 3.5 kilometers from Yangmingtan Bridge, which we're told was built less than a year ago. Apparently the road collapsed when four full-capacity ...

In Chengdu recently, a speeding sedan driven by a drunk 19-year-old without a driver's license plowed into three roadside construction workers, killing one and injuring the others. After police and a news team arrived on the scene, cameras caught an astonishing sight: what appeared to be the driver and a young woman in a red dress being tender with one another. The journalist on scene reports that the man's ...

You don't want to go out this way. Recently, a man on a scooter in Yuhuan, Zhejiang province died when a truck carrying 10 tons of boiling tar tipped over and deposited its contents on him. "'The bitumen poured out all over the man on the bike. You could smell it burning. There were some terrible screams and then silence,' said witness Liu Jin," according to Daily Mail, which continues: Firefighters needed ...

How quickly fortunes change. On Tuesday in Urumqi, a blast of lightning struck and killed 173 sheep, inflicting up to 200,000 yuan of economic loss for the owners. (Technically, 143 died instantly, 30 more were swept away by rains.) This story comes on the heels of another sorry tale of lightning mishap: on July 6, a bolt found its way into a pigsty, electrocuting all 53 pigs inside. "There was a streak of ...