Another explosion rocked southern China, this time in Guangzhou. At 11:50 am today, according to Xinhua, a storehouse in the Ezhangtan area of Baiyun district went up in flame, rubble, and smoke. Four are confirmed dead, and at least 36 others injured.
The exact cause is unknown, but initial reports are that -- unlike the blast outside a Guilin primary school yesterday -- this was an accident.
After a handful of English-language publications declared that authorities had "shut down" the Beijing Independent Film Festival (BIFF), many people likely dusted their hands of the matter, thinking censorship had once again triumphed over artistic expression. But as James Hsu discovered more than a week after the festival’s supposed cancellation, BIFF held a successful, albeit quiet, closing ceremony following a full program of screenings and panels.
So what happened? A few days after the closing, I met with artistic director Dong Bingfeng to ask him about that and other issues on censorship, film in China, and independent festivals in the future.
An explosion outside Balijie Primary School between 7 and 8 am today in Guilin, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region has left at least two dead and 17 injured. Witnesses told Xinhua that the explosion happened when "a man riding a three-wheeled motorcycle passed the entrance," though the exact cause of the blast remains unknown.
Dennis Rodman has returned from Pyongyang. No Kenneth Bae (of course), but Reuters reports he "spent quality time" with Kim Jong-un, and has pictures (above) to prove it. That's something. The hilariously mismatched friends apparently watched a basketball game, according to KCNA news agency.
This comes via Valentina Luo's review of Hu Xijin's new book, Hu Xijin Talks About the Complex China (he put his own name in the book title?), in That's Beijing:
Yang Dacai, dubbed the "smiling official" after he was pictured grinning ear-to-ear at the scene of a horrific traffic accident last August, has been sentenced to 14 years in jail for accepting bribes. He smiled. As Wall Street Journal notes, he looked "oddly beatific."
The parents of kidnapped children are often anguished, distraught, hysterical, and other things we can't begin to imagine. That's easy enough to understand, because we've all had something stolen from us, maybe even something valuable, so we can at least appreciate what it's like to lose a child.
But this -- this is slightly tougher to fathom.
We apparently have closure in the disturbing case of the six-year-old boy who was blinded after a vicious attack in Linfen, Shanxi. By closure, we mean that police are going to stop investigating. But what actually happened on that fateful evening, when both of Guo Bin's eyes were gouged out, remains very much unknown.
Dennis Rodman arrived back in North Korea today for the first time since March, when he became the first American to meet Kim Jong-un since the marshal took power. Rodman was greeted at Pyongyang Airport by the Associated Press, to which he said:
A professional thief who was fired by his gang because he had put on too much weight got revenge on his former colleagues by ratting them out to police.
