If you've been gearing up for the annual dog eating festival in Jinhua City, China, you'll have to find something else to do that weekend: "Internet-savvy" animal rights activists and dog lovers convinced the local government to cancel the fest, originally scheduled for October.
A Chinese civil servant has been arrested and accused of kidnapping six women from karaoke bars to imprison and keep as "sex slaves" a secret room he'd dug underneath a rented basement. So, naturally, the city government arrested a journalist who wrote about the story.
Chinese censors have suspended Super Girl, their nation's answer to American Idol, because the show's audience-voting feature was too Western and democratic for their Communist tastes. The hard-to-please, no-fun bunch also didn't like the show's potential to offend the Olds, its "vulgar" hosts, the songs, the dances, or the outfits people wore.
Angry Birds enthusiasts, gather ‘round. Your dream of entering a larger than life, Angry Birds-themed world is now a reality. A theme park based on the popular cellphone videogame has opened in Changsta, a city in China's Hunan province. Now, I have never played the game in my life, but I know that there are many crazed fans out there for whom this is excellent news. Congrats, you guys, and finally!
Now that Wikileaks has been forced by circumstance to release the full, unredacted archive of its 250,000-plus classified diplomatic cables, we can see what the New York Times voluntarily redacted, at the request of the State Department, from the cables that it published. Among the things it hid: Muammar Qaddafi has a bisexual son, and a Reuters correspondent is a source for State Department intelligence.
It sure seems unlikely that David Petraeus, the married director of the C.I.A., would be seducing Taiwanese engineers on Skype in order to cash his, uh, paychecks from the NATO operation in Libya, doesn't it? But try telling that to Liu Shuzhen, who is pretty insistent that she and Petraeus are getting married, any day now.
The reaction to the Obama Administration's decision to send Vice Talker Joe Biden to China on a supremely delicate diplomatic mission was pretty universal: Fuck! Please please please tell us that he didn't terrify them with awkward jokes about their large holdings of U.S. Treasuries?
See that screenshot above? That's the nerve center for Operation Shady Rat, the newly notorious cyber attack possibly set up by some government-sponsored Chinese hackers. I just spent the last 30 minutes exploring it and managed not to get cyber-annihilated. No big deal. (Seriously, it wasn't.)
Cathay Pacific airlines says it is investigating two leaked pictures (NSFW) that allegedly show a stewardess giving a pilot a blow job in the cockpit of one of its planes. The pictures first appeared in Chinese-language newspapers late last week. An airline spokeswoman said in a statement, "We are conducting a full investigation into the matter and there are some indications that the female shown in the photos may be a member of our cabin crew." And it sounds like the pictures could be legit. From AFP:
Foxconn Technology Group — the company that assembles iPads and iPhones in hellish Chinese factories that have had at least 13 workers commit suicide — might have found a solution to its disgruntled worker problem. Over the next three years, the company will increase the number of robots on factory assembly lines from about 10,000 to 1 million. One analyst told Reuters, "Rising salary costs should be the key reason why Foxconn is doing this."
Fertile China! Psychic dogs! Killer papaya! ADHD safety! Internet addiction! Breastfeeding asthma! Shrinking brains! Love psychology! And uncalled-for lizard posing! It's your Monday Health Watch, where we watch your health—out of sheer desperation!
An apparently long running dispute between China and Nepal over the exact height of Mount Everest should be put to rest, after Nepalese officials said they would measure the mountain using GPS. Today, Nepal and China both recognize a height of 8,848 meters — but in recent border talks China has used the rock height of Mount Everest, while Nepal wants to recognize the snow height, which is about meters higher. Global positioning systems will be set up at three separate locations, but it will be two years before the official height is measured.
How are your baby-catching skills? Probably not as good as those of Wu Juping, a 32-year-old Chinese woman who apparently caught ("bare-handed," according to state news agency Xinhua) a two-year-old girl who'd fallen from a tenth-floor apartment.
Here's a video of an unidentified male cheerleader performing a dance routine at China's Shandong University. There are several female cheerleaders in the video, too, but you won't notice them. Because you won't be able to take your eyes off of this guy—not the first time you watch it, nor the tenth. Because you probably will end up watching it 10 times. [via Towleroad]
