Two pieces of recent news have piqued the public's interest. First, local governments reported their latest debt figures to the Ministry of Finance. The numbers have not been made public, but sources say many officials reported large amounts in an attempt to account for as much debt as possible.
A sculpture of Deng Xiaoping marking the 100-year anniversary of the leader’s birth, Hong Kong, 2004.
First there were the terrorist attacks in Paris. And then there was the global reaction to the attacks, with its spate of frenzied free-speech cartooning. And then there was the counter-reaction to the initial reaction, which played out mostly on Facebook. And then the China Daily decided to wade into the fray, vaguely blaming Charlie Hebdo for “[persisting] in its way of doing things" and alienating most thinking people with its somewhat baffling display of not-quite-sympathic-but-not-exactly-condemnatory rhetorical showboating.
For much of the last two decades, China has been working overtime to drive the growth of the world economy. Now, it’s slowing to suborbital speeds.
The economy increased by 7.3 percent in the last quarter of 2014 and 7.4 percent for the full year, the country’s National Bureau of Statistics said Tuesday. While many countries would welcome such growth, the rate fell short of the government’s target of 7.5 percent for the year, a rarity for the highly managed economy.
Behind the immaculate gray walls of the Customs and Border Protection’s laboratory here stands a cabinet containing three plastic vials filled with a sticky, yellowish substance. Honey, or so an importer has claimed.
Time was when cash-strapped Latin American governments would turn to the IMF for the bitter medicine of its bail-outs. No longer. Over the past dozen years the supercycle of rising commodity prices has swelled the region’s coffers, while even the most fiscally incontinent autocrat has been able to count on the Chinese checkbook.
Kemo Bosielo is a South African student currently completing his Masters in International Relations at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. Bosielo completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Cape Town in South Africa where he majored in Political Science and Philosophy. After graduating, he moved back to Johannesburg where he worked for Bidvest Bank, a specialist foreign exchange services bank, for two years as a consultant.
Vets are racing to treat a 5-year-old panda diagnosed with canine distemper at the Shaanxi Rare Wildlife Rescue and Breeding Research Center.
China's top anti-drug official said the mass arrests had "sown terror" among drug criminals, according to a report Thursday in China's state-run newspaper Legal Daily. Liu Yuejin told the newspaper that he had called on China's police officers to use "unprecedented strength" and "extraordinary measures" in the operation. Legal Daily is controlled by China's Central Commission for Political and Legal Affairs. The raids were also reported by China's state-run news agency Xinhua.
