In Xuzhou, Jiangsu, a woman in the waiting hall of the high-speed rail station used one swift punch to take down a thief trying to escape his pursuers. He never saw it coming.
Good Samaritan laws, anyone? Here's a story that -- if you let it -- might scare you away from helping those in need. Global Times:
A 28-year-old man who failed to save two teenaged girls from drowning in a lake has paid 50,000 yuan ($8,150) in compensation to their families, Chengdu Business Daily reported Tuesday.
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.
This is nice. In China -- undisclosed city, undisclosed time -- a driver saw an elderly woman walking slowly on the side of the street, and a water truck coming toward her from the other side. The sprayage would almost assuredly have soaked her, so the driver sped up, then parked the car between the oncoming truck and the woman. It's the road equivalent of laying a raincoat over a puddle so that a woman in heels can cross the road.
What separates losing 10,000 dollars from not losing it?
The honesty of the person who finds the money, nothing more.
In Hong Kong, 23-year-old pub manager Lin Ho-kit fell asleep on a bus and dropped a small bag containing HK$74,000, or about 59,000 yuan ($9,500). Other passengers, probably not knowing there was a small fortune inside, kicked the bag off the bus, where it was scooped up by 60-year-old Chan Chung-lam.
A residential building fire on Monday near Yuegezhuang Bridge in Beijing forced one particularly desperate man scurrying out of his fifth-floor window and onto a very thin ledge, where he held on for several white-knuckle minutes. Then, at the 5:07 mark of the above video, he falls — simply falls. People gasp, then scream.
Throughout all this, a woman behind the camera can clearly be heard asking, “What’s to be done?”
The woman in the video, reportedly pregnant, would have had her wallet (or something) wrested out of her hand if not for the guy who walks out of a nearby store and intervenes just as she's calling for help. The mugger, dealing with someone his own size and gender, succumbs quickly.
Good on you, man.
Ah, the classic China story: toddlers falling off balconies. I've gotten a bit complacent and let a few of these tales go unblogged, but this one from Zhongshan, Guangdong province has to go up.
On March 21 at about 11 pm, a small girl crawled or walked out of her sixth-floor apartment balcony. She clung onto the ledge for dear life. Seeing this, about 10 passersby quickly grabbed a tarp in expectation of catching her if she fell. Sure enough, because she's a toddler, she fell.
We’ve seen people behaving poorly upon finding wads of cash floating in the wind. This is the obverse of that type of story. In Shanghai on Saturday morning, a drunken man threw 10,000 yuan ($1,608) into the air at the intersection of Gonghexin and Baode roads, according to Shanghai Daily, reason unknown (repeat: he was drunk).... Read more »
