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Tainted Fish From Famous Chinese Lake Found OCTOBER 15, 2008 08:48 Tainted ayu, or “sweetfish,” with high levels of formaldehyde and as hard as rubber have been found in China’s Jiangsu Province. Chinese media reported yesterday that Jiangsu authorities found the tainted fish after studying ayu caught in Lake Tai (Taihu) and sold in a market in the city of Wuxi. A Wuxi agricultural official said, “The so-called rubber sweetfish has been a social issue after being found in Suzhou. But this is the first time for the contaminated fish to be found in Wuxi.” He said the rubber sweetfish...

Thus, learning English in China is no longer just important. It is the bare minimum for any serious student. Not learning English here would be tantamount to not studying math or science.Beyond that, Chinese students who want to use their English to further their career will have to do more than just become familiar with the language. They will have to become fluent in it because there is now simply too much competition. English speakers are a 'dime a dozen' in China and companies, especially foreign ones, can now be much pickier when they hire their English speaking staff members.

RUSSIA has ended a decades-old border dispute with China by giving it a stretch of river island territory in a ceremony symbolising the Cold War rivals' warming ties. Chinese and Russian flags were raised and new border markers erected as part of the handover at China's far north-eastern tip near the Russian city of Khabarovsk, Interfax news agency reported.

Hank Paulson’s friends in China are knocking on the door for a piece of Crap Sandwich 2.0. But of course. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

The rising yuan along with escalating production costs, drove half of China’s toy exporters out of the market in the first seven months of this year, the General Administration of Customs said in a report Monday. A total of 3,631 toy exporters or 52.7 percent of the industry’s businesses shut down in 2008.

Some 170 wedding banquet guests were rushed to hospital in north China when powdered rust remover was added to the pot instead of salt after they all decided it needed added flavor, Chinese media said. In a bizarre coincidence, 61 wedding guests were taken to hospital with similar symptoms a day earlier after a duck-and-donkey-meat banquet in northwest China. In the rust remover case, the bride's proud father invited 170 friends and relatives to the wedding banquet at a village in northern Hebei province on Friday, the night before the nuptials, the Beijing News said. "All food was stewed in...

To the consternation of U.S. trade officials, policymakers and private-sector trade groups, trade between Africa and China not only has exploded, but also continues to grow at a pace that eclipses the growth in trade between Africa and the U.S. “It’s a subject that is attracting a considerable amount of attention among members, but there is no one opinion as to whether it is detrimental to U.S. interests, neutral, or if it’s a good thing,” said Tim McCoy, vice president at the Corporate Council on Africa, a Washington-based trade association that focuses on commercial relations between the United States and...

KOLKATA: The Air Force does not see any immediate military threat from China , but is doing a 'lot of upgradation' of its bases in the eastern sector to maintain preparedness, chief of Eastern Air Command Air Marshal S K Bhan said. "There is no immediate threat from China. But we are well prepared. There is a lot of upgradation going on in the eastern sector," Bhan told newsmen after handing over a decommissioned MiG-21 fighter aircraft to the authorities of Kolkata's first theme park Nicco Park, at Salt Lake City.

China's weapons laws are among the world's toughest... Still, a gun culture is taking hold. China may be freer from gun crime than many nations, and official statistics show overall crime on a continuous down trend. Yet, these days, reports about gun crimes turn up as often as several times a week even in the tightly controlled state-run media... But the trend is about more than crime. Guns are now fashionable in paintings and movies, while Chinese-language Web sites and glossy magazines cater to gun buffs. And legal shooting clubs in cities let customers fire away at targets for a...

"BEIJING (AFP) - China said Monday its trade surplus hit a monthly all-time high of 29.3 billion dollars in September despite slowing global demand brought on by the financial crisis. Exports in September reached 136.4 billion dollars, up 21.5 percent over the same month last year, while imports during the period were 107.1 billion dollars, up by 21.3 percent, the General Administration of Customs said." For more: http://uk.news.yahoo.com/afp/20081013/tbs-china-posts-another-record-trade-sur-5268574.html

The African continent is quickly becoming a proxy battleground for Washington and Beijing, as the latter's appetite for emerging markets and raw materials grows. In July 2008, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Eric Edelman told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that "China's full court press to establish influence and connections in Africa and Latin America may be seismic in its future implications for the United States." China's burgeoning influence in Africa is now squarely on the Pentagon's radar screen. In October 2007, the United States affirmed its commitment to the continent by announcing the establishment of a new combatant command:...

October 11, 2008: Six years ago, China began introducing flight simulators for its military pilots. It now has about a hundred of them, although most are crude by Western standards. That is, they are, for the most part, not full motion simulators (with electrical motors realistically moving the cockpit around and a dome over the replica cockpit, showing other aircraft and the terrain below.) China already has sixty of these, mainly for commercial aircraft. But these can also provide training for pilots of military transports. But simulator training for military pilots is seen as critical for the future success of...

THREE more products from China have been found tainted with melamine, including one meant for manufacturing use, the Agri-food and Veterinary Authority (AVA) said yesterday. They are Cadbury Choclairs in the coffee and blueberry flavours, and Panda Dairy Whole Milk Powder. The AVA gave the assurance that the levels of melamine detected in the tainted products were very low and should not cause ill heath unless consumed in very large quantities. It said the Choclairs had melamine concentrations of 21.4 to 92.3 parts per million (ppm) and a 60kg adult can consume between 108 and 292 pieces of the candy...

ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA - Across the border from South Sudan, in the small Ethiopian village of Asossa, Sun Yingtao, a young agriculture student from Hebei Province in China, is teaching subsistence farmers – many of them refugees from war-torn Sudan – techniques for getting good yields out of their meager lands. Seconded to the Ethiopian Department of Rural Development, Mr. Sun spends his days trying to identify various vegetable diseases, discussing possible alternative water usage, and debating the pros and cons of sowing onions and peppers in rows or in a scattered fashion. Sun, who has been here for six...

The N.B.A. and AEG will announce on Sunday plans to design and operate at least a dozen arenas in China, extending the league’s presence in its largest foreign market. The arenas could form the infrastructure of an N.B.A.-branded league in China. Under their plan, the league and AEG will make modest cash investments in the arenas, but their expertise will give them substantial ownership stakes in the buildings. The arenas are to be financed largely by local and provincial governments. “We won’t do this without an economic return over time for AEG and the N.B.A.,” said Timothy J. Leiweke, the...

Chinese leaders announced Sunday that they will adopt a rural growth policy intended to vastly increase the income of China's hundreds of millions of farmers by 2020, setting in motion what could be the nation's biggest economic reform in many years. The goal of the policy is to stimulate market-driven economic growth in the countryside and to narrow the enormous income gap between those living in rural areas and those residing in the cities, one of the largest such divides in the world. The announcement, made through reports in state news organizations on Sunday night, came at the end of...

Security Warning Issued by DHS for Possible Terrorist Cyber Attack on U.S. Financial Institutions Friday, December 01, 2006 WASHINGTON — The government warned on Thursday of a possible Internet attack on U.S. stock market and banking Web sites from a radical Muslim group, but officials said the threat was unconfirmed and seemed to pose no immediate danger. The notice was issued to the U.S. cybersecurity industry after officials saw a posting on a "Jihadist Web site" calling for an attack on U.S. Internet-based stock market and banking sites in December, said Homeland Security Department spokesman Russ Knocke. There is no...

BEIJING: The number of people sickened by contaminated water in southern China has risen to 450, more than double the previously reported figure, state media said on Saturday. The residents of two villages in southern Guangxi province began showing symptoms of poisoning last week, including swelling in the face and eyes, vomiting and blurred eyesight, the official Xinhua News Agency reported on Saturday. Earlier this week, local officials had said 200 people became ill after drinking water contaminated by industrial waste from a nearby metallurgy company.

Click on the link to view the Beijing to Tianjin High Speed Rail link The Chinese are really up to something.

While Chinese companies are in line to benefit directly from U.S. taxpayers' $700 billion-plus bailout of Wall Street, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and other financial institutions, Beijing is stiffing the U.S. for $100 billion or more in unpaid debt. The status of the Chinese economy, including its repudiated debt, has prompted one analyst to warn of an "ominous threat" involving China's finances and suggest the possibility of "a dramatic reversal" for the "so-called Chinese Miracle." "One of the greatest problems facing China is the government's failure to acknowledge and effectively address the true extent of state institutions' bad debt," Kevin...

Hedge funds haunted by Asia pre-IPO deals Reuters By Michael Flaherty and Jeffrey Hodgson - Analysis Reuters - Friday, October 10 09:48 am HONG KONG (Reuters) - Before the Chinese initial public offering boom began to fizzle late last year, hedge funds jumped to buy stakes in hot companies before they went public, an investment known as pre-IPO financing. (Advertisement) What seemed like a good idea at the time is about to come back and haunt them. With Asian capital markets all but shut, forcing billions of dollars worth of IPOs to be shelved, many hedge funds are sitting on...

Virtually every eyeball in China was on the launch of Chinese spacecraft Shenzhou VII, just as the Chinese regime wanted. But among those eyeballs were many observant ones—maybe too observant for the Chinese Communist Party’s liking.Chinese state-run media called the Shenzhou VII mission “a historic moment.” However, online bloggers have pointed out physics-defying phenomena in the news footage of its space walk that suggest the whole operation was filmed not in space, but under water. As soon as China Central Television (CCTV) broadcast “live” footage of astronauts conducting operations aboard Shenzhou VII on Sept.27, the broadcast was met with skepticism...

Ying Zheng was the First Emperor of China, who ended the Warring States Period, established the first empire of China (Qin Dynasty) in 221 BC and died in 210 BC. According to historical records, it took 39 years and 720,000 workers to build an amazingly magnificent mausoleum... the population size of Qin Dynasty was twenty-two millions and it controlled a vast territory... Between February and March 2003, 121 human skeletons were excavated by a team from Archaeology Institute of Shannxi when cleaning up a Qin-Dynasty kiln 500 meters away from the site where Terra Cotta Warriors were found... Aiming at...

- Drug-resistant HIV strains are turning up in parts of China as the virus stretches beyond high-risk groups and gains a stronger foothold in the general population, a leading Chinese AIDS researcher said

Peter Mandelson rushed to hospital on first day of his new job By Paul Waugh Last updated at 12:44 AM on 07th October 2008 Peter Mandelson was taken to hospital early yesterday after complaining of severe abdominal pain. Tests revealed that the new Business Secretary had kidney stones. He was allowed out to attend the first meeting of the National Economic Council - Gordon Brown's finance 'war cabinet'. He then returned to St Mary's hospital where he underwent a procedure to treat a small kidney stone. Last night a spokesman said: 'He is back at his desk already and is...

The World Bank Group's computer network — one of the largest repositories of sensitive data about the economies of every nation — has been raided repeatedly by outsiders for more than a year, FOX News has learned. It is still not known how much information was stolen. But sources inside the bank confirm that servers in the institution's highly-restricted treasury unit were deeply penetrated with spy software last April. Invaders also had full access to the rest of the bank's network for nearly a month in June and July. In total, at least six major intrusions — two of them...

The World Bank Group's computer network — one of the largest repositories of sensitive data about the economies of every nation — has been raided repeatedly by outsiders for more than a year, FOX News has learned. It is still not known how much information was stolen. But sources inside the bank confirm that servers in the institution's highly-restricted treasury unit were deeply penetrated with spy software last April. Invaders also had full access to the rest of the bank's network for nearly a month in June and July. In total, at least six major intrusions — two of them...

Chinese state-run media called the Shenzhou VII mission “a historic moment.” However, online bloggers have pointed out physics-defying phenomena in the news footage of its space walk that suggest the whole operation was filmed not in space, but under water. As soon as China Central Television (CCTV) broadcast “live” footage of astronauts conducting operations aboard Shenzhou VII on Sept.27, the broadcast was met with skepticism and ridicule among many in the online community in China. Two seconds into the video from CCTV, bubble-like objects rose from the hatch as it sprung open. At 5 min 49 second, a bubble attached...

The US must increase its nuclear arsenal in response to China's growing military might, according to a State Department report. The International Security and Advisory Board (Isab), which reports to Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, warned that "holding the US homeland hostage to missile attack is important to Chinese military goals". It claimed that China will have "in excess of 100 nuclear-armed missiles that could strike the United States" by 2015. By contrast, it said the US had allowed its nuclear stockpile and expertise to "deteriorate and atrophy across the board" for the last two decades. The ISAB...

LONDON: It may sound untrue, but it's now a fact — Britain's standing as a world-class destination for higher education is under threat. Leading British universities have lost ground to their richer foreign rivals in world rankings — both Cambridge and Oxford universities have slipped down the top 200 list to give way to popular US varsities like Harvard and Yale. In fact, according to the Times Higher Education — QS World University Rankings, Harvard is at the top followed by Yale, Cambridge and Oxford. Both these British varsities came joint second last year. However, four UK universities are in...

China Prep follows five Chinese students through their final high-pressure year at an elite high school in Sichuan Province. Eighteen hundred students vie for spots in Beijing’s top two universities. Last year only 59 made it. Studying seven days a week, the students’ lives are regimented almost every minute of the day as they prepare for the end-of-year exam that can determine their fate. For many students from poor or rural backgrounds, a strong performance on the test is the only way to climb the social ladder and excel without connections. Competition is fierce and the majority of high school...

The financial rescue plan passed by the US Congress is viewed as flawed but necessary to head off panic in financial markets and loss of confidence in the economy. It seems a holding operation, a Plan C or D that might need augmentation via a Plan A. A vital component of a Plan A is likely to be additional money. For one thing, there is suspicion that the amount of toxic assets is considerably greater than the rescue plan provides for. For another, more money may be required to address the problem in the housing market by providing relief to...

When Obama talked about China's infrastructure, he was shouted down. He was not entirely correct, but there is a h*ll of a lot of infrastructure spending going on in China. The link shows pictures of some new metro lines / stations in China. The Chinese are putting the trade surplus to good use!

BEIJING — China said Wednesday that it had established limits for the allowable trace amounts of melamine in dairy products that officials assured would make the items safe. The toxic industrial chemical is at the heart of one of this country’s worst food contamination crises. The imposition of the limits, announced by the Health Ministry at a news conference, was the latest in a series of steps undertaken by the government to rebuild consumer confidence after revelations last month that at least three babies had died and 53,000 children had been sickened by drinking milk products adulterated with melamine, which...

China has said it hopes the Nobel Peace Prize will reward what it called "the right person", amid reports that jailed dissidents top the list of favourites. The Prize is to be announced on Friday in the Norwegian capital, Oslo. The Chinese foreign ministry said some past choices had gone against the prize's original purpose of promoting world peace and human progress. The award went to the Dalai Lama 19 years ago, and dissidents Hu Jia and Gao Zhisheng are on this year's list. This year marks the 60th anniversary of the signing of the United Nations' Universal Declaration of...

BEIJING (Reuters) - The toll of Chinese children ill from toxic milk formula may have nearly doubled since the Health Ministry's last public count, local media reports show, but an official said on Wednesday the number of new cases was falling. Beijing is struggling with fallout from adulteration of milk with the industrial chemical melamine. At home four babies have died, and thousands of infants fell sick, while around the world products made with Chinese milk have been recalled. The government has not updated figures issued on September 21, when it said that 12,892 infants were in hospital, 104 with...

Brazil bans Chinese food products 10/08/2008 | 02:56 AM BRASILIA, Brazil - Brazil says it is indefinitely banning all Chinese food imports due to safety concerns. Brazil's food safety officials say Tuesday they are acting in light of the four Chinese children killed and 54,000 sickened by contaminated milk products. The milk crisis is China has led nations around the globe to ban or recall Chinese products. The ban will have little effect on the food supply in Brazil, which imported just US$120 million in food products from China last year.

THE dramatic events of the past few weeks, starting with one of the world’s most powerful investment banks — Lehman Brothers — going to the wall and insurer AIG teetering on the brink, has left a wounded western financial world licking its wounds and looking anew at its model of global finance. Western finance is bound to change dramatically in the next few years. With depleted balance sheets and heightened credit adversity, the void will probably be filled by new players, notably from China and Japan. This could have important implications for Africa, where the resource boom could lead to...

Negotiations seeking a global pact to tackle global warming are troubled and could end in disastrous failure, China's top climate change envoy warned on Monday, saying rich countries are failing to deliver on promises. China is emerging as the world's top emitter of the greenhouse gases that stoke dangerous global warming and plays a key role in talks to address the threat. These are supposed to culminate in a new deal in Copenhagen, Denmark, late next year. But Yu Qingtai, China's special representative for climate change talks, told Reuters he was gloomy about the discussions to create a treaty building...

/begin my translation National Security Bureau Director Cai Chaoming: SARS was the biochem warfare agents 2008-10-06 13:45: 14 Cheng Ping Toxic milk scandal erupts in mainland China, and the joke among Internet users is that this is mainland China launching biochemical agents. Although such an accusation is indeed a joke, National Security Bureau Director Cai Chaoming said today at the (Taiwanese) legislature's hearing that National Security Bureau has the evidence that the SARS virus, which drove entire Taiwan into panic several years ago, was the biochemical (warfare) agents. Furthermore, after the United Nations expert's investigation, serious suspicions were raised on...

Pangong Tso, October 6 Reaching it involves a bone shaking four-hour drive from Leh, but the first glimpse of the incredibly blue Pangong Lake is a sight for sore eyes. Nestled between India and China at an altitude of 14,500 feet, the salt water lake with its various shades of blue is a photographer’s delight. However, the deceptively calm Pangong Lake — or Lukung Lake as it is known among locals — is also one of the key border flashpoints between India and China that is waiting to explode. The area under contention is a 5-km stretch along the lake...

Fake microchips from China are causing a growing number of failures in military systems, according to an investigation by BusinessWeek magazine. The FBI is also investigating a consignment of Cisco-badged routers which turned out to be counterfeit - and could have been used to hack into sensitive equipment. The investigation found that the new tendency for the US Pentagon to buy equipment from off-the-shelf suppliers - some of them operating from residential addresses - has led to a fall in quality of supplied chips: Robert P. Ernst, who heads research into counterfeit parts for the Naval Air Systems Command's Aging...

Tests find toxic toys in stores across GTA October 04, 2008 David Bruser Torstar News Service Young children in the Greater Toronto Area are being sold toys, knick-knacks and glittering jewellery laced with dangerously high levels of lead. A Star investigation found the sweet-tasting metal in a shocking range of items – from a dollar-store baby pacifier to a Hannah Montana bracelet bought at Wal-Mart. The federal government, which is responsible for policing store shelves, has failed to protect children from lead in toys. For a decade, officials in Ottawa have commissioned studies and issued warnings about a material that...

Italian police bust Chinese imports in operation 'Toxic Shoes' Fri Sep 26, 5:59 PM ET Italian police said Friday they had confiscated some 1.7 million counterfeit shoes made with leather containing illegal toxins, most of them from China. Operation "Toxic Shoes" began in May and 21 Chinese and seven Italians are now being prosecuted for selling counterfeit products and threatening public health, a police spokesman told AFP. Shoes containing hexavalent chromium compounds which are illegal in Italy due to their high toxicity and potentially carcinogenic effect were seized in Tuscany, police said.

China's economy is strong enough to withstand the impact of the global financial crisis and may even help the world by maintaining fast growth, Premier Wen Jiabao was quoted as saying Sunday. "Our economic fundamentals haven't changed, and the economy is moving in the direction we expected," Wen was quoted as saying by the state-controlled Xinhua news agency. "The strength of our financial institutions has generally increased, and their ability to make money and withstand risk has risen. Market liquidity is ample and the financial system is stable and safe," he said. "This will help us withstand any negative external...

By now you would think that diplomats, analysts, and military planners in Washington would understand that China, a nation that was the world’s sole superpower for centuries, today is preparing to regain that role — in other words, to first make itself a peer competitor of the United States and then push us aside. It cannot attain these goals without a military that is better than America’s, especially on the sea, in the air, and in space. Why do we turn a naive and blind eye to Beijing's massive military build-up?....

No matter who is elected president in November, former CIA officer Robert Baer has no doubt about what will be topping his agenda: Iran. “Everything is coming to a head in the Middle East,” Baer tells Newsmax. “The days of messing around with Iran are over. We’ve been kicking this can down the road for 30 years, and now we’re at the end of the road.” The former CIA covert operative asserts that the Islamic nation of 70 million people is building an empire in the Middle East, believing it should be the “citadel of Islam.” He warns that Iran...

The recent bailout package being approved in the US Congress needs to be viewed in the context of the spurt in the accumulation of forex reserves of China by about $500 billion in the last six months to about $2 trillion in aggregate. This gargantuan build-up of forex reserves by China has strangely received very little attention of economists, policy analysts, currency traders and, of course, geo-strategists around the world. Why is China engaged in this exercise? What could be its implications on the on going global financial crisis? Could China trip the bailout package announced by the US last...

Shanghai highrises could worsen threat of rising seas By Rujun Shen Sun Oct 5, 9:26 PM ET Shanghai, China's most populous city and an aspiring global financial center, is also among the world's most vulnerable urban areas to a rise in sea levels as global warming melts polar ice. Its location on a low-lying alluvial plain near the mouth of Asia's longest river, the Yangtze, had already left it prone, but researchers warn that forests of skyscrapers sprouting across the ambitious metropolis could compound the threat by causing its marshy ground to sink. "Shanghai came from the ocean, and has...

China to make foreign firms reveal secret info The Yomiuri ShimbunThe Chinese government plans to introduce a new system requiring foreign firms to disclose secret information about digital household appliances and other products starting from May, sources said Thursday. <SNIP>If a company refuses to disclose such information, the Chinese government plans to ban the firm from exporting the product to the Chinese market, as well as bar production and sales in the country, according to the sources. Critics worry that such a system risks seeing the intellectual property of foreign firms passed onto their Chinese competitors. <SNIP>However, this explanation is...