What's in the News

'World Cup air' sale hits wall in China
CanWest News Service
Published: Thursday, June 21, 2007
BEIJING - A Chinese firm that once tried to sell land on the moon has been banned from a more down-to-earth venture of selling bags of "World Cup air" to fans hoping to recreate the football tournament's atmosphere.

Beijing Lunar Village Aeronautics Science and Technology Co. lost a suit last year against the Beijing Administration for Industry and Commerce, which refused its application to sell green plastic bags full of air from stadiums that hosted matches in the Germany 2006 World Cup.

Company chief executive Li Jie had planned to sell the bags to football fans for 50 yuan ($7 Cdn) each, the agency said.


"My idea was that fans unable to make the trip to the World Cup soccer tournament in Germany earlier this year could hang the green plastic bags around their necks and breathe in the air while watching matches on television," Li was reported to have said last year.

Oh, my splitting sides...laughing too much

I don't understand why they lost the suit though. It makes perfect sense to want to have relatively clean air from Germany when you're only alternative is Beijing air.

Prediction: 42 athletes drop dead at the 2008 Olympics, just from being unable to chew the air enough to breath.

Air? They have air in Beijing now? How quickly things change...

NEW YORK (AP) -- A peacock that roamed into the parking lot of a Burger King in New York City was beaten by a man who insisted it was a vampire.

Animal control officials in Staten Island say the bird was beaten so fiercely that most of its tail feathers fell out and it had to be euthanized.

The seven-year-old male peacock wandered into the restaurant parking lot and perched on a car hood last week. Charmed employees had been feeding it bread when the man appeared.

A restaurant worker says the man grabbed the bird by the neck, hurled it to the ground and started stomping it. She says when he was asked what he was doing, he responded, "'I'm killing a vampire!"'

Employees called police, but the man ran when he saw them.


Maybe he watched "The Birds" one too many times. Normally I find loonies highly amusing, but not animal cruelty loonies. I hope the peacocks take revenge.

China is to make the Guinness Book of Records...for a 4-storey buildng, housing over 1,000 toilets & urinals!!! (in many different colours, shapes and sizes). 
Chongqing in SW China is very proud of their new, public facility, and many Western news agencies are picking up this report.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1864916/posts
I hope this link works. Spy squirrels??? Mwahahahaha...soon my army of small, furry animals will be ready!!!  soon my small friends will know all your secrets and you will bow down to this 

BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese state television has begun sacking contract staff after a bogus news report about toxic dumplings that drew international alarm and angered propaganda chiefs, newspapers reported on Monday.

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A report made by Beijing TV and shown on China Central Television (CCTV) this month claimed to show a vendor selling steamed dumplings stuffed with chemical-laced cardboard masquerading as pork.

The report brought a crescendo of domestic and international alarm about the country's lax product safety, with news of bogus food, drugs and other products ranging from seafood and toothpaste to tires.

And it was with both relief and shame that officials announced days later that a Beijing TV contract worker had fabricated the report.

Propaganda officials are now seeking tighter control on the mammoth, multi-channel national broadcaster by sacking masses of contract and informal staff, according to Ta Kung Pao, a Hong Kong paper under mainland control.

A staff member told the paper that after the scandal, the ruling Communist Party's propaganda department and the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television had demanded that media "carry out resolute self-examination and self-correction."

"CCTV is following the demand and has begun dismissing employees," the employee said. "Those with ability can stay, those that aren't qualified must all be dismissed."

Reflecting its status as an arm of state, CCTV has a limited number of formal staff positions authorized by the government. But as channels and the chase for ratings and advertising revenue have expanded, the broadcaster has taken on many hundreds of contract and informal staff.

"These irregular staff are huge in number -- about as many as there are formal staff," commented the Yangcheng Evening News, a state-run paper in Guangdong province, which also reported the dismissals.

They now face official wrath over the scandal.

The move was confirmed to Reuters by several employees of the state broadcaster. "People must go even if the number of programs is reduced," said one, who said the sackings had begun in recent days.

"These media laborers are too sad. They rushed into CCTV full of ideals ... and now they're being kicked out the door," said one commentator on a Chinese blog.

But staff were also skeptical about how deep and lasting the cuts would be. One CCTV worker said many dismissed staff were likely to be re-employed because many programs could not be made without them.

The reporter who made the dumpling report, Zi Beijia, and a handful of others have been detained.

Now, which version do we believe?

In re: "dumplings" made of cardboard......But it sounds so very plausible!  TIFC, after all.  Cheap, convenient and tasty....Yummm.

I'm sitting here reading the numerous articles reporting that the Danish troops have pulled out of Basra. One sentence struck me as being worthy of quoting: the human cost has been significant. Six soldiers have died since the four-year occupation started and numerous soldiers have returned with emotional and psychological scars.

Six soldiers??? Four years and six soldiers died? I may be a bit callous here but don't find that to be a terribly high body count. I do remember that every time one soldier died, there were several articles in which the parents of the deceased soldier would rant and rave against the government who killed their darling little boy. Now, what do people think happens when soldiers go to war? Their little sweet boy did not go to the Iraq pillow-fight or the Iraq sit-in-a-circle-while-making-sarcastic-comments-about-the-enemies-relatives-and-general-personality conflict. If we put the Iraq war in a historical perspective, especially given the time frame, does six soldiers really seem a lot? How long did WWI last? Or the Crimean war? Or the Korean war?
I think Danish journalists might benefit from a bit of a reality check or a history lesson.
Now they are also debating if we had any positive impact in Iraq. And honestly, I don't think we did. From what I can read, Iraq is currently much worse off than it was under the oppressive rule of Saddam.

Now they are also debating if we had any positive impact in Iraq. And honestly, I don't think we did. From what I can read, Iraq is currently much worse off than it was under the oppressive rule of Saddam.

The "positive impact" is that European/US have now freed the Iraqi citizens from the tyranny and cruelty of Saddam so that they can now conduct their own civil war. 

Trying to impose peace and civility on others seldom works.  Iraq is the prime paradigm.











I'm feeling a bit cynical today.  Can you tell???

You and me both. Søren Gade, the deranged junkie-smurf who somehow got to be minister of defense, is jumping around saying we brought peace to Iraq whle rockets are dropping all around him. The power of denial is amazing.

Mississippi Bridge collapse.......
http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/i-thought-i-was-dead/2007/08/02/1185648017276.html

What a horror show. The pictures and videos are almost unbelieveable.

That is just effing unbelievable! How does a gigantic bridge just suddenly collapse? According to authorities, the collapse is not attributable to terrorists but rather maintenance and the severe lack of same. I'm flummoxed.

MOSCOW, Russia (Reuters) -- Russia staked a symbolic claim to the resource-rich Arctic on Thursday when a submersible dived beneath the ice directly under the North Pole and planted a Russian flag on the seabed.


The Akademik Fedorov research ship carried about 100 scientists to the region.

 The rust-proof titanium flag was planted on the seabed 4,261 meters (13,980 ft) under the surface of the Arctic Ocean, Itar-Tass news agency quoted Vladimir Strugatsky, vice president of Russia's polar exploration association, as saying from a support vessel.

Russia wants to extend the territory in the Arctic it controls right up to the North Pole. The region is believed to hold vast untapped oil and gas reserves.

Under international law, the five states with territory inside the Arctic Circle -- Canada, Norway, Russia, the United States and Denmark via its control of Greenland -- have a 320 km (200 mile) economic zone around the north of their coastline.

But Russia is claiming a larger slice extending as far as the pole because, Moscow says, the Arctic seabed and Siberia are linked by one continental shelf.

One of the aims of the expedition is to allow oceanographers to study the seabed and establish that Russia and the North Pole are part of the same shelf.

Don't Miss
Russia in Arctic Sea oil and land grab
"It was a soft landing ... There is yellowish gravel down there. No creatures of the deep are visible," Tass quoted expedition leader Artur Chilingarov as saying.


Soviet and U.S. nuclear submarines have often traveled under the polar icecap, but no one has so far reached the seabed under the Pole, where depths exceed 4,000 meters (13,100 feet).

Expedition leaders have said their main worry is to resurface at the ice hole where they dived as the mini-submersibles are not strong enough to break through the North Pole's desolate ice cap.

Tumtitum....and the Ship of Fools sail merrily on...not that the Russians are fools, not at all. All the Russians I have ever encountered were delightful. The world, from what I can tell, just seems to have morphed into a Ship of Fools or the lunatic asylum described in Poe's "Dr.Tar and Professor Feather".