Two are dead and three injured after the third knife attack in the past week in China, this time in Guangxi province. Unlike the previous two incidents, both indiscriminate attacks in Beijing, the suspect on Tuesday had a target: family planning officials in Dongxing city.
Twin earthquakes of 5.9 and 5.6 magnitude struck near Dingxi in Gansu province on Monday morning, leaving at least 89 dead and hundreds more injured. (The magnitude numbers are via the US Geological Survey; the China Earthquake Networks Center measured it at 6.6). The latest from AFP states, "China's official Xinhua news agency said initial investigations showed at least 5,785 houses had collapsed and another 73,000 were severely damaged."
What you are looking at is Beijing Subway's Line 13 on the morning of Thursday, July 18, around 7:30. It's likely the Xierqi station -- a picture of which, tweeted out by Joe Xu, we linked to on Friday -- which is a transfer station and one of the cleaner, better-looking ones in the system. It has, like other stations in Beijing's vast underground transportation network, built-in artificial bottlenecks intended to relieve congestion in the form of gates and narrow staircases. On some occasions, however, those fail. For you see, in China, sometimes there are simply too many goddamn people.
Ji Zhongxin, a 34-year-old petitioner born in Heze, Shandong province, blew himself up on Saturday in Terminal 3 of Beijing Capital International Airport. Watch how he did it, above, in a video that's been viewed 2.6 million times on Tencent.
China's soccer team scored two goals in the final 10 minutes to snatch an improbable 3-3 draw against Japan in the opening game of the 2013 EAFF East Asian Cup on Sunday in Seoul.
China had lost three consecutive games, including an embarrassing 5-1 home defeat to a mostly junior Thailand team last month. Japan are Asian champions. This result was not expected.
A man from Yishui, Shandong province fatally stabbed two people yesterday around 5 pm in front of Chaoyang Joy City, a mall near downtown Beijing, and fatally stabbed two people, including a foreigner. He was then apprehended by unarmed police in dramatic fashion -- first, slowly backed into a corner as he's waving his knife, and then surrounded, and then taken down. You can watch all this happen on video.
Lionel Messi endorses WeChat, i.e. Weixin, i.e. the next Sina Weibo, as some people have called it on account of its functionality and interstellar growth. You can send texts for free (pending Internet connection), start group chats, and deliver photos and voice messages. And as Messi demonstrates in the above 30-second ad, you can communicate via video, too -- Instagram, Sina Weibo, and Vine all in one.
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.
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.
