On Wednesday, Tunghai University student Cheng Chieh (Zheng Jie), 21, got on a subway from downtown Taipei and began indiscriminately stabbing people. Four were dead and 24 injured when the horrific attack ended, a portion of which was captured on video, above.
HBO's Game of Thrones arrived in China last week, but the fit-for-CCTV broadcast was so rigorously edited to conform to some "public morality" that one netizen hilariously called it "a medieval European castle documentary." But amid all the articles about this development, we may have lost sight of a more amazing fact: Game of Thrones -- a show about political wrangling, skulduggery, sabotage, dissolution, sex, etc. -- was allowed to air on Chinese TV. It took two whole days before we got this Ishaan Tharoor post on the Washington Post, titled:
An AH-64E Apache helicopter appears to have tried to land on the side of a residential building on Zhongzheng Road in Longtan, Taoyuan, Taiwan around 10 am this morning. Helicopters should not try to land on the side of buildings. The two pilots -- one of whom was reportedly a student -- were sent to the hospital.
Taiwan's basketball team has done it again. For the second time in two months, it erased a double-digit second half deficit en route to an upset of China.
Florentijn Hofman's rubber duck is the goldmine that will never be depleted. Deflated, maybe, but never depleted. This we know because his rubber duck arrived in Kaohsiung, Taiwan on Thursday ahead of Typhoon Usagi -- that storm that's killed 33 people in southern China and southeast Asia so far, i.e. around where Taiwan is located -- and attracted half a million spectators.
On Saturday, more than 100,000 people marched in Taipei, as citizens remain furious over the suspicious circumstances surrounding the death of 24-year-old conscript Hung Chung-chiu on July 4.
And then they gathered on a square and sang Les Miserables.
The talk of the day has been Mark Griffith and Andrew Dougherty's brilliant music video Beijing State of Mind, a tribute to this city of ours, set to the beat of Jay-Z's famous homage to New York. The Brooklyn native's Empire State of Mind has, of course, inspired countless spin-offs, about Chinese cities other than Beijing, too.
