A woman was arrested in a Sunrise supermarket while she was allegedly poisoning jars of baby food in the grocery aisle.
Shirley Ybarra, 50, is charged with Poisoning Food or Water, a felony, as well as violation of probation.
Detectives say Ybarra put rubber gloves on her hands Thursday before mixing and acrid, black substance into baby food and juice containers.
Publix surveillance cameras caught her wheeling her shopping cart down the aisle, where she worked on the jars and bottles for about 15 minutes - all while shoppers and employees walked by.
Here’s the weird thing. Click on the link above, they have a picture of the woman. She isn’t even Chinese!
Many years ago I worked for a time in Shanghai. One night I was at a popular expat bar and struck up a conversation with a guy who said he was the editor of one of the city’s English language dailies. I asked him about censorship in China, and inquired as to how much autonomy he had in deciding what to write. He said that if the building across the street burned down he couldn’t write about it without prior permission from the censors.
I was reminded of this anecdote today when reading in the New York Times that the people responsible for the inferno in the building next door to the CCTV tower was, in fact, CCTV itself.
China’s national television network on Tuesday blamed an illegal fireworks display by its employees for igniting a blaze that destroyed a futuristic luxury hotel and theater here.
In a statement posted on its Web site, the network, China Central Television, said the illegal pyrotechnics on Monday, the final night of the Lunar New Year celebrations, were staged too close to the unfinished Mandarin Oriental Hotel, which is part of the network’s headquarters complex. The network apologized for “the severe damage the fire caused to the country’s property.”
Xinhua, the official news agency, reported Tuesday that one firefighter had died from smoke inhalation and that six firefighters and a construction worker had been injured.
The apology was a rare gesture of contrition by the powerful state-owned network.
But wait, it gets better.
Beijing residents who wanted to see the smoking shell of the hotel had a harder time on Tuesday finding images of the fire on the Internet, on television or in the city’s newspapers.
There were no pictures on the front page of The Beijing News. On Tuesday morning, the home page of Xinhua featured a photo from another event: a stampede in South Korea that left four people dead. Throughout the day, CCTV’s brief bulletins about the blaze omitted images of the burning tower. By evening, the newscast skipped the story entirely.
Even before the flames had been put out early Tuesday, pictures of the burning hotel had been removed from most of the main Internet portals serving China. In the afternoon, the story had been largely buried, although by the evening, news of the fire was accessible on the Xinhua and CCTV Web sites.
The network’s unusual public apology and the media’s skittish approach to covering the fire suggested that the authorities were struggling with how to deal with a delicate event in the age of cellphone cameras and YouTube.
A directive sent out by propaganda officials, which found its way to the Internet after it was leaked, made it clear that the authorities were eager to reduce public attention to the blaze, a colossal embarrassment that many people believe augurs poorly for the new year. “No photos, no video clips, no in-depth reports,” read the memo, which instructed all media outlets to use only Xinhua dispatches. “The news should be put on news areas only, and the comments posting areas should be closed.”
So not only did CCTV censor itself over a fire next door, it censored itself over a fire started by ITS OWN EMPLOYEES. Indeed, here’s the website for CCTV 9, their English language station. See how long it takes you to find their apology. There are stories about a government official meeting with a Saudi official, a koala rescued from the fires in Australia, and the upcoming Valentine’s Day.
The fire across the street, which they started, resulting in the deaths of and injuries to firefighters, not to mention ¥4,000,000,000 (about $600,000,000) damage to a brand new luxury hotel? Buried in small text in the middle of the page. To put this in perspective, imagine if employees of the New York Times had started a fire which engulfed the skyscraper next door, then the Times refused to even publish a story about it while every other newspaper in the country ran with it. I mean, look at the aftermath.
This wasn’t a small blaze in a few rooms, they gutted a luxury hotel worth almost three quarters of a billion dollars, and this is their apology in its entirety.
A devastating fire took place in the adjacent building of the new CCTV complex in Beijing last night around 8.30 pm.
Beijing Fire Control Bureau says CCTV staff responsible for the construction of the new TV complex, hired staff to ignite large festive firecrackers outside the building, and caused the fire. The move did not receive approval from related authorities.
The fire has caused severe damage. CCTV sincerely apologizes for the damage that the fire caused, and the inconvenience it has brought to the public.
So far, related details of the fire are still under investigation. And CCTV will do everything it can to cooperate with related departments in the aftermath.
Basically, “Oops, our bad. Dude, that blows.”
It’s the “lack of permission from authorities” aspect which will all but guarantee a number of life imprisonments and a few death sentences for those involved. But, considering the damage caused and the deaths and injuries to the firefighters, I won’t lose any sleep over it.
See, this is why you don’t set off fireworks in the middle of a city. This is happening about two miles from my apartment. The odd-looking building in the foreground is the CCTV tower, which is China’s state-run television center.
There isn’t much news yet. Here’s a Google translation of a Chinese news site. It looks like the building on fire is a hotel. Now, even with fireworks going off everywhere there’s no excuse for an entire building to torch up like that. It’ll be interesting to see how this is spun tomorrow. I imagine a few people will be arrested, some imprisoned, one or two executed. Problem solved.
Update: Check out this translated page. Note the way they proudly stress that the first thing the government did was declare martial law for that area, with armed police quickly taking control of the situation. Much less was said about rescue efforts, firefighters, and the like. Order is paramount above all other considerations.
And here we see just the latest in a long string of Chinese tainted food scandals.
A Shanghai dealer has issued an emergency recall of a batch of Optima dry dog food with a production date between August and September last year.
Some dogs eating “Optima Puppy Lamb and Rice Dry Dog Food” have been poisoned by aflatoxin - a naturally occurring toxic chemical that comes from a fungus found on corn and other grains.
It can cause severe liver damage.
“Three dogs have been confirmed dead, and they all ate the batch of Optima food,” said the Shanghai Naughty Family Pet Co, a pet clinic on Hongqiao Road. These dogs were fussy about their food, had diarrhea and vomited, all symptoms of aflatoxin exposure, staff said.
What the hell is it with these people and tainted food? I can only begin to imagine the bad publicity this is going to get in the western press. “Chinese, once again, poison the world.”
Yidi purchased the batch of Optima dog food from a Taiwan supplier, according to an agent who declined to be named.
An imported feedstuff registration list posted by China’s Ministry of Agriculture shows that the Optima dog food’s production enterprise is Australia-based Doane International Pet Products.
But Tan said her purchase order said the food was made in the United States. “American-made Optima is a very famous brand. That’s part of the reason I chose it,” Tan added.
Ah, so the food came from Taiwan, it’s from an Australian corporation, and was manufactured in the United States. Anyone want to get bets going on how much negative press this gets in western papers?
The Chinese may be a lot of things, but stupid is definitely not one of them. They are apparently the first country in the world to officially qualify “internet addiction” as a disease. And, surprise surprise, they have a treatment.
Nanometre wave machines, military formation drills, gruelling exercise regimes and electric shocks are being used to cure China’s ballooning number of internet addicts.
Some 300 treatment centres across the country hope to tackle the growing social problem of web addiction that has accompanied rapid modernisation.
“[Internet addicts] can’t adjust to school and society, so they try to escape their difficulties and avoid problems,” psychologist Tao Ran, who runs a treatment centre on a military base outside of Beijing, said.
“They lack self-confidence and often don’t have the courage to continue their lives,” he is quoted by ABC News as saying.
See, in the West, we call these losers World of Warcraft fans. However, you need to read the subtext here. China clearly censors the internet, they admit that, so I’m not giving away any state secrets. And I’m sure that in China, just like in other countries, there are antisocial losers who have no lives outside their computers. All this is stipulated.
However, methinks there’s a little more than meets the eye here. Suppose there was someone who was writing something on the computer here wasn’t supposed to, something that agitated the people and stirred up discontent. Why, all it would take was a diagnosis from a doctor and he could be whisked off to one of these “rehabilitation camps” which sound oddly like Abu Ghraib. When the western media eventually find out about it the Chinese now have plausible deniability—“No, no no. He’s not being locked up for what he said, he’s been locked up for his terrible affliction in a facility where he can get the political reeducation, uh, I mean medical care that he needs.”
You gotta hand it to them sometimes, you really do. Now if you’ll excuse me I think I’ll go download a few gigs of porn.
Former Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was beaten by medieval prince Alexander Nevsky in a poll held by a TV station to find the greatest Russian.
Stalin came third, despite being responsible for the deaths of millions of Soviets in labour camps and purges.
Alexander Nevsky fought off European invaders in the 13th century to preserve a united Russia.
In second place was reformist Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin, who was assassinated in 1911.
More than 50 million people voted by phone, the internet or via text messages in the poll held by Rossiya, one of Russia’s biggest television stations.
Stalin usually comes out on top of these things, and it appears he was in the lead at one point.
Stalin - born an ethnic Georgian - was riding high for many months and was in the number one slot at one point until the show’s producer appealed to viewers to vote for someone else, says the BBC’s Richard Galpin in Moscow.
Stalin sent millions of people to their deaths in the work camps of the Gulag. Millions more perished in political purges or during the forced collectivisation of farms during his rule from the 1920s to his death in 1953.
Many in Russia do still revere Stalin for his role during World War II when the Soviet Union defeated the forces of Nazi Germany.
This is similar in dynamic to why Mao is still revered in China.
But now there is a much broader campaign to rehabilitate Stalin and it seems to be coming from the highest levels of government, says our correspondent.
“We now have to think very seriously, why the nation chooses to put [Joseph] Stalin in third place,” said actor and film director Nikita Mikhalkov, one of the contest’s judges, after the results were released.
I don’t think it’s that complicated, really. Stalin made the USSR into the fucking world-feared USSR superpower. There has been a great emasculation since then as Russia has fallen to a second-tier player, which explains fully why Putin and his tactics are so popular, with something like an 80% approval rating—he’ll make Russia great again.
Living in this part of the world, and speaking to people who hold this mindset, has been one of the most significant intellectual awakenings of my life.
First read this post and my commentary to it, then read this.
In recent years, the international political structure has transformed gradually from “one superpower coexisting with several other powers,” formed after the Cold War, to multi-polarization.
The transformation picked up speed this year, with significant changes in the balance of international forces.
The United States has been acting as the world’s only superpower in 2008, but the financial turmoil, which broke out in Wall Street in September, showed its vulnerability.
In addition, the country is still deep in trouble with its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which has undermined its international image.
Some analysts attributed the waning U.S. strength to its policy of unilateralism and expansionism on international issues, and its practice of a laissez-faire free market economy at home. It remains to be seen what consequences of these policies will have on U.S. national strength.
When we’re all old men and women the world is going to be a vastly different place. Simply sitting back and assuming that we’re going to always be the top dog is going to end up our downfall.
A Chinese woman who became an online sensation after posting a homemade pornographic film of herself on the Internet has been detained in Shanghai, according to state media.
The 12-minute-video showed the woman, surnamed Huang, performing “sex acts,” the official China Daily said in its weekend edition, without elaborating.
“It soon became one of the most popular downloads on the mainland, with thousands of people downloading it last month,” the report cited the local police as saying in a statement.
The woman set up a blog, hoping to profit from her notoriety and sell interviews with herself for up to 30,000 yuan ($4,383) a time, the newspaper said.
Despite the police’s best efforts, the video is still available online, it added, without saying what penalty the woman may have to pay.
I can only begin to imagine how disgusting homemade Chinese porn would be.
Everyone, and I mean everyone, needs to read this interview in The Atlantic with one of the men in China who manages this country’s investments in the United States.
I can understand why Americans might feel that way. But, talking with my lawyer head once again, it’s not relevant to discuss how Americans “should” think. We should discuss how Americans might think.
This concern is not really about China itself. It could be any country. It could be Japan, or Germany. This generation of Americans is so used to your supremacy. Your being treated nicely by everyone. It hurts to think, Okay, now we have to be on equal footing to other people. “On equal footing” would necessarily mean that sometimes you have to stoop to appear to be humble to other people.
And you can’t think as a soldier. You put yourself at the enemy end of everyone. I grew up during the Cultural Revolution, when people really treated other people like enemies. I grew up in an environment where our friends, our relatives, people I called Uncle or Auntie, could turn around and put a nasty face to me as a small child. One time, Vladimir Lenin told Gorky, after reading Gorky’s autobiography, “Oh my god! You could have become a very nasty person!” Those are exactly the words one of my dear professors told me after hearing what I went through.
But over the years, I believe I learned to be humble. To treat other people nicely. I learned that, from a social point of view, no matter how lowly statured a person you are talking to, as a person, they are the same human being as you are. You have to respect them. You have to apologize if you inadvertently hurt them. And often you have to go out of your way to be nice to them, because they will not like you simply because of the difference in social structure.
Americans are not sensitive in that regard. I mean, as a whole. The simple truth today is that your economy is built on the global economy. And it’s built on the support, the gratuitous support, of a lot of countries. So why don’t you come over and … I won’t say kowtow [with a laugh], but at least, be nice to the countries that lend you money.
Talk to the Chinese! Talk to the Middle Easterners! And pull your troops back! Take the troops back, demobilize many of the troops, so that you can save some money rather than spending $2 billion every day on them. And then tell your people that you need to save, and come out with a long-term, sustainable financial policy.
I think that with the collapse of the Cold War, which the West won, there would be an acceptance on the part of the rest of the world of Western hegemony, especially that of the United States. After WWII there were the War Crimes trials in Germany and Japan, in which there was a clear verdict—they lost, their people knew it, their governments knew it, and so on. There was a sense of finality. The defeated parties accepted their defeat, and lived with restrictions placed on their armed forces, with foreign troops garrisoned on their soil, and other aspects of defeat.
With the communist world we never had that. The USSR collapsed, China abandoned Marxism, Vietnam is liberalizing, and so on. There never was a finality to the Cold War. We might view it as the end of a War, they saw it as the loss of a battle. The Chinese during the Cultural Revolution might have been one of the worst, most oppressive places in the world, but those days are over. The Chinese look forward to a bright future. They’ve seen 400,000,000 of their countrymen lifted out of poverty in the past 20 years, more than the population of the United States. Can you imagine the popularity of a US president who could accomplish something similar?
The communist world doesn’t view itself as having lost anything. Look at Putin and Medvedev, the former of whom is LOVED by Russians as he builds their authoritarian state once again brick by brick. China is utilizing the best parts of the free market to turn itself into a superpower, and the way things are going it will be THE superpower sometime during my lifetime.
My point is this: we in the United States have got to abandon the notion that we are always going to be the top dog by default. It’s been 60 years since the end of WWII, the world is a vastly different place. The UN Secrity Council, divided among the victorious powers in WWII, is an anachronism. As we go forward with globalization, and the economies of the world become more and more intertwined, we have got to take the blinders off and admit that we can’t go it alone. We need China and we need Japan and we need the other countries of the world, be it economically or militarily or what have you. There is no reason that the US cannot retain its role as the world’s premiere superpower, but we have got to abandon the idea that we will forever be the ONLY superpower, and that countries like China and India are going to sit by like subservient lapdogs doing our bidding.
In short, if we want to be the leader of the pack, we’re going to have to earn it. We earned it once by winning the Cold War, but we’ve been riding that victory by default for way too long. There are a bunch of youngsters nipping at our heels, and unless there is a sea change in attitude in our country we’re going to find ourselves in a place we really don’t want to be in.
Many years ago I read something which struck me. I don’t remember where I read it or who wrote it, but I still remember it: “There is no problem in America which couldn’t be fixed by another Great Depression.” While it’s way too early to pronounce the current economic situation as being akin to the Great Depression, we are living in perilous times, and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that we could end up in another Great Depression. You’ll never meet a more capitalist oriented, free market, consumerist whore than me, I’ve proudly been that way for most of my adult life. But I think the changes described in this article are necessary. Democracies very rarely go to war with each other, that’s been the prevailing wisdom for most of my lifetime anyway. Well, I think we ned to modify that a bit, since that idea was coined when the world was divided between the capitalist west and the communist east. What we’re seeing now in India (democratic socialist capitalism) and China (authoritarian socialist capitalism) is that there is not the clear distinction between “us” and “them” that there once was.
The secret to preventing wars is not to make sure that the other country is a democracy. The secret to preventing wars is to make it so that it’s in the other guys’ best economic interest not to go to war with you, nor to see you go to war with anyone else. It is in China’s best interest right now to see the US economy recover. This is the path of the future. We need to look past the old political labels and begin to viee the world in terms of economics.
Read the world article. The words this man speaks need to be read at the highest levels of the Obama Administration. As we prepare to begin to undo, or at least mitigate the errors of the Bush years, there is lot here to be heeded.
Tens of thousands of migrant workers are leaving the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou after losing their jobs, railway officials say.
The increase to 130,000 passengers leaving the city’s main station daily is being blamed on the credit crunch.
Guangzhou is one of China’s largest manufacturing hubs, but many companies who export products have collapsed.
Chinese officials are worried that a sudden increase in unemployment could lead to social unrest.
By “social unrest” they mean “questioning the Party.” That being said, the Chinese aren’t going to pull an Obama and tighten up their trade agreements. If anything they’ll liberalize them further to provide an incentive for other countries to continue to buy products manufactured in China.
China said Thursday it hoped the United States would adhere to free trade under Barack Obama, while defending exchange rate policies criticised by the president-elect during his campaign.
“We will continue to follow a mutually beneficial foreign policy, we believe in free trade, and we believe America also believes in free trade,” foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang said.
“We hope that the policy of free trade will continue to be adhered to. We must prevent trade protectionism, which is no good for either side,” he said, when asked if he thought Obama would be more protectionist.
That’s right, folks. Communist China has a better perspective on international free trade than the guy we just elected president. This country has used capitalism to lift 400 million people out of poverty in the last 20 years. (That’s more than the population of the US.) In the last 20 years in the US we’ve gone from the free market ideals of Reagan to the neo-socialist protectionism of Obama, all while we’ve convinced ourselves that more government, law, and regulation are the best ways to help the poor.
As mentioned previously, this morning I watched the election at a breakfast event hosted by the American Chamber of Commerce in China. The place was full of people from the embassy and American business types here in China.
When you first registered they gave you an wristband to show you paid, and they asked who you were voting for, red for McCain, blue for Obama. I saw very few red armbands, it was a virtual sea of blue. Every time Obama won a state there was a cheer, and when he was declared president the place erupted. Remember, these are businesspeople. You can look at McCain’s stance on trade versus Obama’s, but the people here were clearly more interested in America’s long-term reputation in the world than they were any short-term economic considerations.
My absentee ballot never arrived. This year I will not be voting. It’s not that big a deal, though. If China has taught me one thing it’s how worthless voting is.
Think about it. The Chinese have no chance to vote, they’re told beforehand who their next leader is going to be. In America, depending on where you are registered, your candidate has no chance of winning. When I lived in California it went for the Democrat every year. Now I’m registered in Texas, and it goes Republican every year. It’s been pretty apparent for the past three months or so that Obama was going to win. Your vote, when you think about it, is functionally useless unless you happen to live in a battleground state.
I’m about 90% sure I’ll never vote again. Every year I vote for the lesser asshole, and I’m sick of it. Nobody I think will do a good job ever wins. McCain is a douche and Obama is a phony. (I mean, really. Hopes and dreams? Yes we can? Who the fuck believes this crap?) Unless there’s a sea change in the political landscape after this election I think I’ll be sitting in the bleachers drinking beer, watching the monkeys on teh field thinking their vote counts for something.
Obama proposes funding the tax cuts by closing corporate loopholes, cracking down on international tax havens and increasing the dividend-and-capital-gains tax for the wealthy, he said.
He called his proposal a “fair” alternative to the present tax code and said it was necessary because hard times on Main Street translate to hard times on Wall Street.
“When the changes in our economy are leaving too many people behind, the competitiveness of our country risks falling behind,” he said. “When that dream of opportunity is denied to too many Americans, then ultimately that pain has a way of trickling up.”
Sounds great, right? Let’s close all the loopholes those greedy corporate bloodsucking fat cats are stealing so they can light cigars with $100 bills! The problem is, the more you raise the cost of doing business in the US, the more you are going to pay for products, and the more likely that the corporation in question will seek to do business outside the US, and they’ll take their jobs with them.
As an American who is living in China, opening a subsidiary for a US corporation, which came here in part to escape America’s astonishingly high corporate income tax rate, you might want to think about this. Note that this isn’t specifically about Obama, the Congress hasn’t done jack shit about this issue for years, then everyone pisses and moans that their jobs are going overseas. Well, if we don’t cut corporate tax rates that’s only going to get worse, and there will be people like me who are more than willing to move to countries like China and profit from it.
If the decision were up to me I’d abolish corporate income tax entirely. There is no such thing as a corporate income tax, really, since the corporations just pass those costs on to the consumer in the form of higher prices. To put it in simple terms, if you levy a $1 per unit charge on widgets, the price of widgets will go up by $1. All you’re doing is taxing yourself.
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