Only a few hours before suspected shooter Adam Lanza began his attack on Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, a 36-year-old man went on a similar rampage in China's Henan province. Using a kitchen knife, a farmer that police have identified as Min Yingjun stabbed 22 children and one adult just before 8:00 in the morning yesterday.
Two thousand twelve. The future. We order our hair online and we get our clothes from a pill. We don't have time to cut a piece of chicken or open a can of soda. We only have time for chips.
Up until 1968, the United States government had a Top Secret plan for what to do in the event that the president died or went missing under mysterious circumstances. The plan was: Nuke the shit out of everyone right now.
Chen Guangcheng, the blind legal activist and NYU fellow, just released a new video where he calls for the release of Chinese political prisoners and urges other nations to intervene and tell China to loosen some of its more restrictive laws. The video was released just in advance of the United Nation's Human Rights Day, which is slated for December 10th.
As our wonderful presidential debates constantly reminded us, China is the biggest foreign threat to American world domination since Usain Bolt or something. I don't know, I don't remember the debates. Do you remember the debates? Pouches full of something, am I right? Anyway, China is going to ruin us and our children and our children's children because they simply do things better than us. That now includes political sex scandals, which means we're really in trouble.
China may be leading the US in many areas, but, thankfully, we've still got a clear edge in both satire and snark.
Faced with a failing class and few motivational options, one teacher in China's Guangxi province decided to bargain with her students in a last-ditch effort to get them to study hard.
We've known for a while now that Foxconn, the Chinese mega-plant where Apple and other technology companies have their gadgets manufactured, has struggled with suicides and rampant worker dissatisfaction. But today comes confirmation that Foxconn's labor force is involved in yet another ugly scandal: child labor.
Think your commute is rough?
Late Sunday night, a riot involving 2,000 workers broke out at a Foxconn plant in northern China that manufactures the iPhone 5, reportedly sparked by a fight between workers and security guards. Like the parade of horror stories out of Chinese factories, the riots once again underscored the notoriously dismal labor conditions of the young workers who make our gadgets. But it also highlighted a growing level of worker unrest in China. More than ever, Chinese workers are struggling to help themselves, which could improve labor conditions more than a thousand tearjerking This American Life exposes.
Nobody would bat an eye if U.S. Vice President Joe Biden went missing for more than a week. We'd all assume he was on an epic ayahuasca trip and he'd be back when he got it out of his system. But when Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping goes missing, people freak out. He's presumed to be the next leader of China, slated to take over as chief of the Communist Party in just a few weeks. But he hasn't been seen in public or heard from since September 1st. *ominous music*
A beauty contest seeking to discover the ten most beautiful college students in China's Hubei Province has come under fire for requiring applicants to prove that their nipples are a specific distance apart from each other.
To deal with the problem of having to tell one of her quadruplets apart from the others, a mother in China came up with a novel approach: She shaved the numbers one through four on their heads.
