“The Chinese need to learn that public spaces aren’t garbage dumps”, said Raymond Zhou. During a recent national holiday, visitors dropped a staggering 32 tons of litter in Tiananmen Square in just four days. Beijing’s army of street cleaners rushed in and quickly cleaned up the mess. But large areas of the country don’t have those resources, and by the […]
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A study shows that the smoking addiction is growing in China and by the year 2050 it may be the cause of about 3 million deaths a year in China. This growing epidemic smoking addiction is the leading cause of premature death of half of the Chinese males. There are at this time about 300 million smokers and they are […]
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Thousands of pigs were found dead in rivers supplying Shanghai’s water, a grisly discovery that has drawn attention again to China’s toxic pollution, which contributes to some 700,000 deaths each year. Here are some points of concern: WASTE Tai Lake—a massive basin that holds China’s third largest body of freshwater, providing water for 30 million people—has been classified as a […]
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The Republicans have a euphemism for undocumented workers— illegals — said Peter Beinart. With a tone of disgust, that single, dehumanizing noun has become the GOP presidential candidates’ preferred way to describe the millions of human beings picking our produce, cooking our food, cutting our lawns, and watching over our kids. It’s “the latest in a long line of euphemisms […]
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BEIJING – The greatest risk China faces in its historic modernization is the massive imbalance between urban and rural areas, according to the country’s top agriculture official. “The most important and difficult task is to resolve issues concerning agriculture, countryside and farmers … to realize the agricultural modernization and the urbanization of most farmers,” said Minister of Agriculture Han Changfu […]
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China’s wealth gap has widened so much that the country now one of the most unequal outside of sub-Saharan Africa. A respected Chinese institute found this week that China’s Gini coefficient, a number that represents income inequality, has soared from 0.41 a decade ago to 0.61 today. Anything over 0.5 is considered to be destabilizing, and South Africa, where opulent […]
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Prague, Okla Tremors from fracking: Scientists have linked Oklahoma’s largest earthquake—a 5.6 magnitude quake near the town of Prague, in 2011—to hydraulic fracturing, supporting claims that the process increases seismic activity. Fracking, as it is known, injects water and chemicals into petroleum deposits in order to extract trapped gas. This week, researchers at the University of Oklahoma, Columbia University, and […]
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Beijing Mass arrests: In one of the biggest crackdowns on civil society groups in decades, Chinese authorities have detained and questioned at least 238 lawyers and human rights activists over the past two weeks. At least 20 activists remain incarcerated, and the whereabouts of six of them are unclear. Maya Wang, a researcher with Human Rights. Watch, said those still […]
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On Aug 12, two blasts ripped through a warehouse in Tianjin Port, where large amounts of toxic chemicals were stored, including around 700 tonnes of sodium cyanide. Death toll from the blasts exceed 160. Thousands of dead fish washed up on a riverbank near the site of the explosions last week. White foam filled the streets during the first rain […]
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“None of my business” is the motto of most Chinese and it is costing lives. A school bus full of South Korean children was traveling through a tunnel near Weihai, China when it caught on fire. No one stopped to help these children and the eleven kindergartners died. Back in 2011 a toddler was run over a couple of times […]
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