Results tagged “mrlu”

Anyone who has been following the circus surrounding the controversial report filed by The Guardian's new (maybe former?) Shanghai correspondent Benjamin Joffe-Walt needs to go read the explanation/examination filed today by Guardian ombudsman Ian Mayes. (Simon World has a nice primer for anyone who wants to get up to speed on the story ... or for all you Shanghai Foreign Corresponents Club members who have been deleting all those heated emails about the topic that have been cluttering your inbox. Jayson Blair? Come on. At least Joffe-Walt was in Taishi ... or on his way there.)

While noodling through a newspaper Shanghaiist came upon the story of an interesting archaeological find in Qinghai province: a remarkably well preserved bowl of mian that had been sitting there for 4,000 years. That's older than some of the stuff in our fridge.

Go here to read a gruesome, gut-wrenching, heart-breaking first-hand account of Shanghai-based Guardian reporter Benjamin Joffe-Walt's attempt to report from Taishi, a village in Guangdong, site of what Joffe-Walt calls "perhaps the most significant grassroots social movement China has seen since the Cultural Revolution, a rural revolt against corruption, against deterioration of healthcare, against the illegal sale of farmland, and broadly against urban capitalism that has reaped no benefits for these farmers." (For more on Taishi, visit ESWN.) Joffe-Walt never actually got to Taishi. He was on his way there with democracy activist Lu Banglie, when their car was stopped and Lu was brutally beaten, perhaps to death: