Results tagged “usatoday”

When we were growing up as super geeky elementary school kids in our hometown, we would be excited whenever the the Bookmobile, a large van equipped with tons of children's books for purchase, rolled onto our campus. We loved hopping in with our hard-earned allowance money balled up in our fists, waiting to get our grubby hands on the newest Judy Blume Encyclopedia Brown books.

As Malaysia celebrates its 50th birthday, the unity of the nation has shown cracks along racial and religious divides. Meanwhile, former premier Mahathir Mohammed is recovering after heart surgery

During her speech at a conference on quality and safety issues held on Thursday, Chinese Vice Premier Wu Yi described a new four-month nationwide campaign to improve the quality of goods and food safety as a "special battle" to ensure the people's health and interests and maintain a good image of Chinese products.

Whenever there is a crisis or a natural calamity, there are the people who lose money and then there are the entrepreneurs. It seems enterprising businessmen have decided to cash in on an outbreak of rodents in the Dongting Lake area in Hunan province which saw an estimated 2 billion mice on the run from the flooded Yangtse River by taking the matter into their own hands - literally.

For those expats out there who've ever wondered what it might be like to get behind the wheel of an automobile here in Shanghai, this is your lucky day. Thanks to the USA Today, that bastion of impartial journalism and cutting-edge video game development, you can now race the streets of Shanghai on 10 circuits in one of five super charged hot rods—all for the low price of only US$19.99. Think of how much money you will save on gas and hospital bills not having to brave the actual motorways; the roads in virtual Shanghai can cause no serious physical harm. Unless you brave them for 72 straight hours in a net cafe, that is.

These days, Shanghaiist is rarely surprised about anything that happens in China. However, we did think that this news story did come from a little out of left-field. A Henan-based investor group is constructing a 21-kilometre (13 mile) long metal Chinese dragon as a tourist attraction. The dragon's body forms a nine-metre (27-foot) high wall running along a ridge-line, with the dragon's head rising 10-metres (30-feet) above the surrounding land. This project plans to cover the metal structure in 5.6 million pieces of white marble and gilded bronze to form the dragon's scales which Xinhua reports should be "symbolic of the country's 56 ethnic groups". The dragon construction is planned to finished by 2009 to mark the 60th anniversary of the People's Republic of China. The investor group states that advertising space on the giant serpent also will be sold and tourists can pay to have their names and other messages inscribed on the walls of galleries located inside.

Eugene Nelson, who works for Intel in Dupont, WA, was supposed to board a plane from Hong Kong to Taiwan. Instead, he got on the plane to Taiyuan. It then took him an astounding five days to get home, as he only had American Express (hasn't he seen those Visa commercials?) on him and could not withdraw cash from ATM machines because they were not "foreign enabled". One would think that would be the end of the story. One would think that Eugene Nelson would have liked to keep his idiocy below the radar.

The Rolling Stones arrived in Shanghai yesterday and the media noticed. We read a couple of these stories before we got bored.

Geely Holding Corporation hopes to unveil its first hybrid car on December 26 of this year in honor of Boxing Day Chairman Mao's birthday. Geely's production center for the hybrids is in Xiangtan County in Hunan Province ... so is Shaoshan, Mao's birthplace. The Xiangtan factory can produce 50,000 hybrids a year.

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