China Chronicles July 23, 2012
- Police hunts for man squirting glue on women's hair
POLICE in Chengdu, capital of southwest China's Sichuan Province, are investigating several cases in which a man has squirted super glue on long-haired women.
More than 10 women in Chengdu complained on the Internet that a man had put the powerful glue into their hair while they were waiting at bus stations, Chengdu Business Daily reported today.
The man was described to be in his 30s, with a skinny build, often dressed in a white t-shirt and sometimes wearing glasses.
As the glue is very strong, some women have had to cut their hair or have the liquid removed by professionals in salons.
The police have called for more victims to come forward and provide evidence.
- Candy Seller #01
- Shenzhen Sunset
Mr. Pemberton has added a photo to the pool:
This was the sunset that greeted us when we got back from Thailand. It was a week of interesting and beautiful skies.
- Beijing's heaviest rain in 60 years leaves 37 dead
Beijing's heaviest rainstorm in six decades killed at least 37 people, flooded streets and stranded 80,000 people at the main airport.
The storm, which began on Saturday afternoon and continued late into the night, flooded major roads and sent torrents of water tumbling down steps into underpasses.
The Beijing city government said last night that of the people who died, 25 drowned, six were crushed when their homes collapsed, five were electrocuted and one was struck by lightning.
Twenty-two of the bodies have been identified, it said.
More than 500 flights were cancelled at Beijing's Capital International Airport, The Beijing News said.
The subway system was largely unaffected by the floods but was swamped with people desperate to get home and unable to use cars, buses or taxis.
The city received about 170 millimeters of rain on average, but one township in Fangshan District to Beijing's west was hit by 460mm, officials said.
About 1.9 million people were affected by the downpour which also incurred nearly 10 billion yuan (US$1.6 billion) in economic losses, according to Pan Anjun, deputy chief of the Beijing flood control headquarters.
Multiple damage
As of last night, about 66,000 residents had been relocated, including 20,990 in Fangshan alone, Pan said.
The rains caused multiple damage to roads and bridges, including 31 road cave-ins. More than 1,200 houses or buildings had seen leakages and 736 houses were flooded, Pan said.
The Beijing city government said it was working to get the metropolis back on its feet, but warned people to prepare for further bad weather.
Many residents post dramatic pictures of the storm online. Some said the city should have been better prepared, especially as the government had issued a severe storm warning the day before.
The clouds had at least one silver lining. The official pollution index, which rated unhealthy before the storm hit, registered "excellent" yesterday.
On Sat! urday ni ght, the rain knocked down trees in the capital and trapped cars and buses in waist-deep water.
Train services between Beijing and Guangzhou were suspended because of the deluge, the flood control headquarters said.
More than 12,000 people worked to drain 1 million cubic meters of water from the streets and most was cleared by 6am yesterday.
A flash flood in Fangshan stranded 104 primary school students and nine teachers at a military training site. They were all evacuated yesterday.
Elsewhere, landslides triggered by heavy rain on Friday and Saturday killed eight people in the southwestern Sichuan Province. Another 17 people were missing in Shaanxi Province, where 131mm of rainfall was reported from Friday night to Saturday afternoon.
The government yesterday warned of more storms over the following 24 hours for China's northeast, the port city of Tianjin east of Beijing, Inner Mongolia in the north, Sichuan and neighboring Yunnan Province, and Guangdong and Hainan provinces in the southeast.
An orange rainstorm alert, the second highest, was issued.
- Residents, workers quick to offer help
BEIJING residents got together to help each other during the massive rainstorms that turned many parts of the city into swimming pools on Saturday.
The rainfall was so overwhelming that a number of motor vehicles could be seen floating in the streets and many people rushed to help neighbors and even strangers who found themselves besieged by the floods.
Residents helped drag vehicles out of flooded areas and made sure the people inside got home safely.
With at least 80,000 travelers stranded at the Capital International Airport due to the cancellation of outbound flights, hundreds of taxi drivers and motorists in the nearby Wangjing neighborhood drove to the airport to offer rides to strangers.
The city's sanitation workers also performed above and beyond the call of duty to clean up the mess caused by the flooding. One sanitation worker was spotted submerging himself almost completely to clear a blocked sewage drain in Haidian District.
Other workers were seen acting as "human road signs" near the Beitaiping Bridge, standing in deep pools and guiding vehicles to avoid manholes, as the water had washed away a number of covers.
Li Fanghong, a police inspector in suburban Fangshan District, died while trying to rescue villagers trapped by floodwaters. Li was electrocuted by a live wire that had fallen into the water. Colleagues said that he had rescued 50 people in Fenghuangting Village before he was killed.
While many cheered the acts of bravery during the storm, there was anger at police who were ticketing stranded cars yet to be reclaimed by their owners.
Toll staff were also criticized for continuing to collect fees at toll gates on the airport expressway, despite vehicles, in long queues, being mired in knee-high water.
Xia Xueluan, a Peking University sociologist, said city authorities should take a more "humane" approach when handling such emergencies.
"More flexible measures should be adopted in those cases," Xia said.
The ur! ban drai nage system also came under fierce criticism, once again, as heavy rains and snow have often disrupted traffic in the capital in recent years.
- Counterfeit millions
CHINESE police have caught 463 suspects and seized 118 million yuan (US$18.5 million) worth of counterfeit money in 374 cases since the launch of a campaign in March.
In one case, police in Guangdong Province caught four people in a counterfeit money-making den where 80 million yuan worth of counterfeit money had been half completed.
Since 2010, police have seized 946 million yuan in counterfeit money.
- 15 suspects held in cloned cards scheme
POLICE have apprehended 15 people in China and Myanmar, including one in Shanghai, suspected of involvement in a scheme where cloned bank cards were used to steal nearly 10 million yuan (US$1.6 million) from victims' accounts.
Special card readers were installed at ATM machines at banks on the border between China and Myanmar to read cards inserted into the machines, police told Xinhua news agency yesterday.
At the same time, tiny cameras installed on the machines filmed the victims as they typed in their passwords, police said.
The information was then sent to China's Jiangxi Province where other members of the gang used the information to clone the cards.
The group in Jiangxi then checked the account balances and whenever they found a large amount of money being deposited, instructed other members to withdraw the money from ATM machines or use the cards to buy gold in Guangdong Province, police said.
The scam was uncovered in April, when a Beijing company which manufactures card reading machines noticed during checks that on two days in January, there were more than 5,000 account balance checks on 359 bank cards on 14 machines. The unusual activity prompted them to call the police.
Police contacted the card holders and some said money had been stolen from their accounts.
Shanghai police then worked with counterparts in Jiangxi, Guangdong and Yunnan provinces to investigate.
Police said the two leaders of the gang, a couple from Yugan County of Jiangxi Province, had divided the gang into two groups.
A 28-year-old man surnamed Xiong and his wife surnamed Tang were in charge of the group who went to banks on the border between China and Myanmar to collect card details, while another group led by Xiong's brother were based in Jiangxi.
Police said seven of the suspects were caught in Jiangxi, three in Guangdong, one in Shanghai and the other four in Myanmar.
- Mildew found in infant formula
AUTHORITIES in Guangzhou said they discovered mildew contamination in some infant formula products.
Excessive amounts of aflatoxin were detected in five formula products produced between July and December last year in central China's Hunan Province.
Four of the products were produced by Ava Dairy Co Ltd based in Hunan's capital of Changsha, while the fifth was produced by its parent company - Hunan Ava Dairy Holdings Co Ltd, authorities said.
High levels of aflatoxin have led to cancer in animal tests.
- Houhai, Beijing
Noppanan Arunvongse Na Ayudhaya has added a photo to the pool:
Leica X1, 24mm, f/16, 30s, tripod with timer, natural light
- Railway to 'sea of death' to haul mineral lifeblood
CHINA yesterday finished construction on a railway to Lop Nur, a dried lake in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region that is known as the "sea of death" for its high salt content.
The construction on the railway, which stretches from Hami Prefecture on the China-Mongolia border to Lop Nur near China's largest desert, the Taklamakan, started two years ago with an investment of 3 billion yuan (US$476 million).
The railway was co-sponsored by the Ministry of Railways, the regional government of Xinjiang and a branch of the State Development and Investment Corp, a state-owned investment giant that has a potassium fertilizer base in Lop Nur.
Trains will stop at nine stations before reaching Lop Nur, an area that has some 500 million tons of potassium salt.
At the end of the railway, a cluster of buildings have been built by an SDIC subsidiary for the purpose of tapping local resources. The company already has a salt mining project that turns out 1.2 million tons of salt annually and works on an even larger project.
China consumes more than 10 million tons of potassium salt each year, 70 percent of which is imported. China's reserves total about 457 million tons, less than 3 percent of the world's total. The "sea of death" also has large reserves of non-ferrous metals, including nickel, gold and copper, local authorities said.
The railway can haul 30 million tons a year and lower costs by 80 yuan per ton, the Urumqi Railway Bureau said.
- 5.23m yuan public toilets at tourism site criticized
A POPULAR tourism attraction in southwest China's Sichuan Province will spend heavily to renovate four public restrooms despite widespread complaints.
One of four public restrooms at the Du Fu Thatched Cottage, also known as the former residence of prominent Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD) poet Du Fu, in the provincial capital of Chengdu will receive renovations in compliance with "five-star" standards, while another three will be upgraded to "star-rated" status, a spokesman from the Du Fu museum said.
The total investment required for the project is estimated to be 5.23 million yuan (US$821,600), with 1.5 million yuan contributed by the city government and the rest raised by the museum, the city's development and reform commission said.
A preliminary design shows that the "five-star" bathroom will be designed to resemble an ancient courtyard, with more toilets for the disabled and elderly, a room for nursing mothers and a lounge equipped with chairs, a tea table, a TV set, a fish tank and Wi-Fi access. The "five-star" public toilet will have two full-time maintenance workers.
The spokesman said the "five-star" restroom can be used free of charge and the entrance fee for the tourism attraction will not be raised.
A poll on Weibo showed 90 percent of over 700 respondents oppose the renovations, seeing them as a waste of money, while 8 percent said the project will improve the urban environment and the public image of scenic areas.
"Being clean and bright is not enough for a toilet? A toilet is just a toilet," a netizen named "beicui" wrote.
- Modernization leaving out old-time porters
FOR more than two decades, Zhang Guangzhong worked as a self-employed porter in southwest China's city of Chongqing, carrying luggage, furniture and shopping bags up the city's steep hills in exchange for tips.
He searched for work at docks, train stations and department stores, carrying bags for tourists and locals on Chongqing's zigzagging roads and up the stairs of old apartment buildings with no elevators.
The job required no training or qualifications to speak of. Zhang's only limitation was how much he could carry on his shoulder using a wooden pole.
In his younger days, Zhang said groups of porters were often seen on downtown Chongqing streets, competing to offer their services to tourists and shoppers laden with goods.
"I often waited for business at community markets, helping old people carry loads of groceries through the narrow lanes," he said. "There were at least 30 others and we used to compete for potential customers."
The laborers were so popular in Chongqing that they became an icon of the city itself in the 1990s.
A TV series about the porters' lives, produced around 1997 - the year Chongqing, formerly a part of Sichuan province, was named China's fourth self-governing municipality after Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin - was a hit among Chinese viewers and made the workers famous nationwide.
But at the age of 57, Zhang is in danger of losing his livelihood. Few people demand the services of local porters.
"They all take taxis or drive their own cars," he said. "New apartment buildings are taller than before and are almost always equipped with elevators, so people don't need me to carry their bags." For several years, Zhang was the only porter on the old streets of downtown Yuzhong District. "My former colleagues are either too old to keep working or have left for other jobs," Zhang said.
Twenty years ago, taxis were not yet popular. Chongqing's streets were just narrow lanes.
Today, however, the city has a comprehensive ! transpor tation system consisting of highways, subways and light railways. Porters have apparently been left out of the city's urbanization drive. Zhang has turned to construction sites.
"Apparently this job has no future, but I'm proud that I once belonged to a group that was the city's icon," he said.
- Darkness over Beauty
JeffnCompany has added a photo to the pool:
Storm clouds creeping in as I was making my way to Tai Long Wan, Hong Kong.
Want to hear more about my adventures? Check out my blog at www.guymeetschina.blogspot.com - butterfly
/the DON/ has added a photo to the pool:
Nikon d7000
Nikkor 70-300mmVR @195mm
f 9
1/100
ISO 160
Flash mounted @1/8
68mm extension tube
Brightness increased in PP
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