Results tagged “crack”

Coming up on a year since Berdymukhamedov took power, the Internet is not really any more accessible than it was under Niyazov. There are only a handful of government-run Internet cafes in the capital, Ashgabat, which opened in March.

... at least that is what Shirley Phelps-Roper of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas would have us believe (h/t to Danwei). She recently wrote in to China Daily columnist Raymond Zhou after reading his opinion piece on recent comments by Chinese celebrity Sun Haiying (孙海英) who not too long ago ignited a huge debate with his comments that homosexuality was unequivocally "criminal in nature" ("同性恋就是犯罪“):

Dear Raymond

Continue reading "God hates China?"

If you've been still wondering how the woman who rammed her bike into the bus actually managed to do it, this one takes the cake! Today's Shanghai Daily tells us of a truck that got stuck under a bridge while trying to force its way through on Songxing Road in Baoshan District yesterday at 7pm. In fact:

Police said the driver knew the crane bases on his truck were taller than the bridge, but he still decided to "try his luck." Once the truck got stuck, the driver sped up to force his way out instead of backing out, police said.

The novel tells the story of a teenage boy who receives a special notebook. Whenever he writes the name of an enemy in the book, along with a description of how and when that person dies, the enemy dies exactly as described.

Shanghai Daily tells us that all businesses in Xintiandi and along Huaihai Road, "especially foreign-brand stores", must add Chinese names to their signs and must do so before this Sunday.

The hostage crisis at the Putuo KFC two nights ago was a shining triumph for the Shanghai police, who managed to kill the bad guy and save the migrant worker's little four-year-old girl. Now, you can relive the glory with this account of the proceedings (in Chinese). Although we would have preferred to see Samuel L. Jackson or Kevin Spacey handle something of this danger, there was some local talent on hand. One of the negotiators dressed up and pretended to be the store manager, but to no avail. A female special forces officer also dressed up as a KFC employee and brought food and drink, but evidently, someone didn't do the chicken right, because the hostage-taker got nervous. The special forces officer had a gun stuffed in her pants but decided that this wasn't the best moment to use it.

... on the line—June 7-10 are the dates for that annual rite of passage known as the university examination (高考). This year is also special in that it marks the 30th anniversary of the reinstitution of the examinations after the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Part of what piques our interest about the examinations are the ingenious cheating techniques that have proliferated with the spread of mobile devices such as phones, laptops, and walkie-talkies. Each year, they try to crack down, and this year is no different: the new rule is that you can't leave the test room prior to the last half-hour of each test session. But we trust after the tenth, we will find some more reports about how some people managed to cheat the system. It's hard to not be amazed by the progress has been made since the days where we scribbled history notes on the inside of our hand or the old crib-sheet-in-the-baseball cap days.

We are all for this whole harmonious society thing, but when someone sent us this link on popular Chinese message board Tianya today, we couldn’t help wonder ... just what exactly is harmonious these days. We didn’t look at the images posted in the thread (we warn you, don't do it if you don't want nightmares), but they were screen captures from a video uploaded to tudou.com on March 25 (after we protested, the site deleted the video today, but you can still see a small captured image on the uploader's profile.) This user, named "fenluodeiren" posted a video named "黑白双杀" (or "killing white and black"), which basically is about how four guys, allegedly from Hunan, skinned one black and one white cat while they were ALIVE!

"A local education official who organised the song and dance performance, Kuang Li, locked herself in the toilet, keeping out children who suffocated, according to Chen's blog. Kuang was jailed for four years."

Pornography charges against a 36 year old woman arrested three years ago after taking off her clothes and chatting with other Internet users via webcam have been dropped in Beijing's Shijinshan district after prosecutors found that nude chat rooms were not defined in China's pornography laws. This case is understood to be the first of its kind in Beijing.

Are you in the Chinese stock market? We're guessing the answer is no for most of you — by law, only Chinese nationals are allowed to purchase A Shares traded on the Shanghai and Shenzhen exchanges. Well, sucks to be you (and us). We're missing out on a get-rich-quick opportunity of a lifetime, as millions of Chinese are swept up in stock trading mania. The International Herald Tribune reports:

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Despite our recent red fog alert, Shanghai can not crack the top five in the rankings of the major Asian cities with the dirtiest air. Here's the top/bottom five:

From The Search Engine Journal we discovered that Baidu won an intellectual copyright infringement case against some major music companies. From Interfax:

Many of you might have read our post regarding the horrible mass-slaughter of dogs in August. Sadly, it seems we could be experiencing the third wave of the canine cull, based on this Economic Daily report (in Chinese) that says five major cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Guangzhou and Wuhan are going to address "dog problems".

It's good news for those of you who stand accused of one of the nearly 70 offenses that are punishable by death in China. Under legislation enacted on Tuesday, as of January 1, all death sentences handed out by provincial courts must be reviewed and ratified by China's Supreme People's Court. This reverses a 1983 law which gave such powers to the provincial courts in an effort to crack down on rising crime and corruption that occurred early under the reforms implemented under Deng Xiaoping. However, such liberal use of the death penalty in the world's most populous country and in a poor legal environment led predictably to large numbers of death sentences, many of them carried out on innocent people. Last year, a woman in Hunan reappeared 16 years after her accused killer had been executed for her murder.

As the convential wisdom goes, China will not respect other's intellectual property rights (IPR) until its own IPR needs protection. If this is true, then IPR in China recently took a significant step forward as the Financial Times is reporting that a litigious Shenzhen USB flash drive manufacturer Netac has hired Morgan Lewis & Bockius to sue New Jersey computer hardware manufacturer PNY Technologies for infringing upon Netac's patent for USB flash memory drives, or key drives (that's US Patent #6,829,672 for you IP boffins out there).

Local police said the lecture was "unacceptable", the newspaper said.

The online version of Radar magazine has published a selection of Sinclair's Pink Box pics (WARNING: They are not safe for work). Here's a snippet of the magazine's intro:

A report on Yahoo! China got our attention because of it's uh, attention-grabbing headline: 中国游客海外不文明行为震动高层 ("The uncivilized behavior of Chinese tourists abroad shocks the upper levels of government"). The central government's "Civilization Bureau" recently ran an internet survey and just published the results (in Chinese) a little over a week ago. This includes the top 10 uncivilized Chinese behaviors abroad as well as 20 suggestion about how to improve the situation.

Photo by captainvideo taken from the Shanghaiist Contribute page. To see your photos on our Contribute page, use Flickr and tag your photos “shanghaiist”. Or you can email your photos to photos@shanghaiist.com and they will automatically appear on our site.

A Chinese reporter recently called the Shanghai Education Bureau to find out what was going on with regard to the newly revised high school history textbooks that supposedly minimize Mao and other Chinese historical figures and represent a somewhat radical departure from the kind of history taught in China in the past.

Photo by 2dogs taken from the Shanghaiist Contribute page. To see your photos on our Contribute page, use Flickr and tag your photos “shanghaiist”. Or you can email your photos to photos@shanghaiist.com and they will automatically appear on our site.

Shanghaiist reported on the suicide of a Japanese diplomat based here in Shanghai where the theory of his death was that he'd fallen in love with a beautiful Chinese woman (said "honey trap"), found himself in a compromised position, and was then blackmailed by a Chinese intelligence agency, thus leading to his death.

At least they don't lag behind in anything important!

This has been a rough week for your -ist pals, though you wouldn't know it from the great posts all over the network. Plagued with server problems, our tech team (led by the great Neil Epstein) toiled around the clock to solve the glitches as they arose. Seriously, we've said, typed, and thought the phrase "server problems" more in the past week than we have for the last 35 years combined. Why not say it a few more times, just for fun? For example, SFist is sure the San Francisco Chronicle wishes they could blame server problems for this error. But this San Francisco man that appeared on "The Daily Show" is, sadly, no glitch in the system.

Sometimes you need to clean yourself up, get serious, and move in with daddie for a few months before you head to Latin America for a new gig. The District bid's Jenna Bush adios. D.C.-based television shows have an elderly audience and DCist has some suggestions to fix that. They're also throwing Butterstick the panda bear a birthday bash.

Sampaist is on the scene in São Paulo beginning this week to become the only ist south of the Equator. Editor Leandro M. Pinto leads the paulistanos down there.

Photo by Captainvideo taken from the Shanghaiist photos page. To see your photos on our photos page, use Flickr and tag your photos “shanghaiist”. Or you can email your photos to photos@shanghaiist.com and they will automatically appear on our site.

In Catholicism related news, Stephen Hawking, world-reknowned theoretical physicist and sometimes Simpsons guest star was just in Hong Kong and is now in Beijing, where he planning on giving talks at the Strings (as in string theory) 2006 conference being held up there.