What better way to enjoy a good carnival than having an Holocaust float amidst the whistles and half-naked Brazilians on the 75th anniversary of Hitler's ascension to power? I remember reading Private Eye magazine years ago and seeing an ad from this very country with a cute cartoon Hitler promoting pest killer with the caption "From the Masters of Extermination."

A Carnival float with a pile of model dead bodies commemorating the Holocaust is causing unease before the lavish parades in Rio de Janeiro this weekend. The Viradouro samba organisation plans to feature the grim display when it marches in the Sambadrome parade strip on Sunday, despite objections from a local Jewish group.

"Really, it makes no sense addressing this theme with drums and dancing girls," said Sergio Niskier, president of the Israelite Federation in Rio de Janeiro state, referring to the slaughter of Jews by Nazi Germany in World War Two. "There are still survivors of that horror who have the marks of that tragedy on their skin," he said.

That's putting it mildly!

Rio's Carnival is famed for the parades by samba schools with glitzy floats and costumes and street parties where costumed revellers drink and dance all night.

The elaborately decorated floats are a key part of each samba school's presentation, along with thousands of dancers and drummers led by near naked Carnival queens.

Viradouro insisted its Holocaust float is not meant to offend anyone.

"The float is extremely respectful, it's a warning, it's something shocking that we don't want to happen ever again," said Paulo Barros, Viradouro's artistic director.

Viradouro's parade theme is "Shockers" and it includes floats depicting the shock of birth, the shock of horror and the shock of cold.

Barrossaid the Holocaust float would be the only one without dancers on top.

"If we had people dancing on top of dead bodies that would indeed be disrespectful," he told Reuters.

Traditionally, the use of religious references causes last-minute problems for samba schools. In the past, the Roman Catholic Church has barred floats with figures of Christ and the Virgin Mary and samba schools had to cover or modify them.

China Cracks Down on Dissent Ahead of Olympics

Hu, 34, and his wife, Zeng Jinyan, are human rights advocates who spent much of 2006 restricted to their apartment in a complex with the unlikely name of Bo Bo Freedom City. She blogged about life under detention, while he videotaped a documentary titled "Prisoner in Freedom City." Their surreal existence seemed to reflect an official uncertainty about how, and whether, to shut them up.

That ended on Dec. 27. Hu was dragged away on charges of subverting state power while Zeng was bathing their newborn daughter, Qianci. Telephone and Internet connections to the apartment were severed. Mother and daughter are now under house arrest. Qianci, barely 2 months old, is probably the youngest political prisoner in China.

For human rights advocates and Chinese dissidents, Hu's detention is the most telling example of what they describe as a broadening crackdown on dissent as Beijing prepares to stage the Olympic Games in August. In recent months, several dissidents have been jailed, including a former factory worker in northeastern China who collected 10,000 signatures after posting an online petition titled "We Want Human Rights, Not the Olympics."

"This is a coordinated cleansing campaign," said Teng Biao, a legal expert who has known Hu since 2006. "All the troublemakers — including potential troublemakers — are being silenced before the Olympic Games."

With fewer than 200 days before the Aug. 8 opening ceremonies, Beijing is in the full throes of preparations. Roads and subway lines are being completed, and the city's new sports stadiums are nearly finished. But with more than 20,000 journalists expected for the Games, Beijing is also tightening controls over information.

Early this month, the authorities announced that only state-sanctioned companies would be allowed to broadcast video and audio files on the Internet, although the practical effect of this edict remains unclear. China has also extended a crackdown on Internet pornography and "unhealthy" content that some rights groups consider a tool for arresting online dissidents. China has jailed 51 online dissidents — more than any other country — and last year blocked more than 2,500 Web sites, according to Reporters Without Borders, a press freedom advocacy group.

Hu used his own Web site to post updates about other dissidents or peasant protests. He also did not hesitate to describe his semi-regular encounters with the police and state security officers assigned to monitor him.

"The police force mobilized is much, much larger than before," Hu told Agence France-Presse in October as the Communist Party clamped down on dissidents during an important political meeting. "Now, they just arrest people very publicly and arbitrarily, without the necessary legal procedures."

Last year, Hu became involved in the case of Yang Chunlin, the former factory worker who organized the "We Want Human Rights, Not the Olympics" petition drive as part of an effort to help local farmers seek legal redress over confiscated land. Yang was arrested last summer and charged with subverting state power, according to human rights groups.

Hu told Agence France-Presse that Yang's arrest was part of a government effort to "clean up" politically touchy cases before the Games.

"I'm helping Yang Chunlin to hire a lawyer," Hu said. "The authorities have threatened Yang's family and relatives. Yang's wife dares not speak to anyone because of the threats."

Hu also participated via Webcam in a European Union parliamentary hearing in November in Brussels about human rights. He said China had failed to meet its Olympic promise of improving human rights.

Rebecca MacKinnon, who teaches journalism and media studies at the University of Hong Kong, said that any Olympic host country faces domestic critics of the Games and that such dissent is usually freely discussed in the public arena. She said efforts by security agencies to round up critics and other dissidents made the Communist Party look insecure and would backfire in the court of international opinion.

Others who have been detained in recent months are Liu Jie, a longtime protester of land issues in Beijing; Gao Zhisheng, an outspoken lawyer; and Lu Gengsong, an online dissident in Zhejiang Province.

"It shows that China is once again shooting itself in the foot," said MacKinnon, a co-founder of Global Voices Online, a nonprofit forum for bloggers around the world.

"This is very predictable," she added. "Hu Jia is not an opponent of the Olympics. He has just been saying: 'We have problems. Our government needs to address them. As an Olympics host, we need to be treating our people better.' "

This month, Jiang Yu, a spokeswoman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, described Hu's case as a legal matter and offered no elaboration.

"I believe that related authorities will deal with that case in accordance with the law," she said at regular news briefing.

If the authorities hoped Hu's arrest would bring more silence, the opposite has happened. More than 60 intellectuals have signed a public petition calling for his immediate release. A prominent rights lawyer, Xu Zhiyong, posted a lengthy open letter online to President Hu Jintao in which he described Hu Jia as "modern China's conscience."

"If he is brought to trial, then it is a trial of the fragile conscience of 1.3 billion Chinese," Xu wrote. "If nobody stands up for him, it is an everlasting national shame."

Chinese bloggers have also taken up Hu's cause. One blogger, Guo Weidong, wrote a poem that began:

Call on the Beijing government!

Immediately release Hu Jia!

The Chinese people, shackled in chains, welcome the Olympics!

Another blogger, alluding to the president's call for a "harmonious society," wrote, "The common speculation now is that Hu Jia was arrested in order to take out some nonharmonious noise prior to the Olympics."

Hu began his activism in 1996 after he mailed a donation in response to a newspaper article about efforts to stop the encroaching Gobi Desert. He learned that no one else had contributed any money. So he quit his job as a television editor and volunteered to plant trees.

He converted to Buddhism, became a vegetarian and joined a nonprofit environmental group as a full-time volunteer. He later became well known for helping AIDS patients and met his wife, Zeng, when they were volunteering at the same nonprofit AIDS group.

Zeng began blogging in response to the intense surveillance of the couple. When security agents detained Hu without charges for 41 days in February 2006, she generated publicity with her blog. When Hu was placed under house arrest in 2006, she blogged about life in detention and posted online photos of herself wearing a T-shirt that read, in English, "House Arrested Again."

Now Zeng has been cut off from the Internet. Only her parents and Hu's parents are allowed to visit. Friends who have attempted to bring baby formula have been turned away. Last week, the police turned away a reporter from the couple's building. Officers hurriedly unfurled a roll of tape and declared the area a "crime scene."

Mr. Hu has been detained several times, but never before on formal charges. The authorities have forbidden his lawyers to meet with him on the grounds that the case involves a state secret. One of his lawyers, Li Fangping, said no one knew whether Hu's arrest was linked to a specific case or was a result of his overall criticism of the country's human rights record.

Hu's mother, who asked not to be identified by name, said security agents had seized his bank cards, computers, mobile phones and other pieces of personal property. She said agents had tried to bully Zeng into signing statements about her husband and even threatened to take away her baby for several hours each day when the newborn was not feeding. But Zeng has refused to sign.

"Hu Jia loves the country so much," his mother said. "He always cares about how China is making progress. How can he be accused of subverting the state? He is someone who can't bear to kill an ant."

But, his mother added, her son is also not afraid. She said that he had told her: "If I don't shed blood for the country, who will? If I don't go to hell, who will?"

200,000+ people trapped in ONE Chinese railway station...

Train won't arrive for a WEEK...

Stranded passengers, many of them migrant workers, wait outside the main railway station in Guangzhou

Fights break out between passengers for seats on a long-delayed train at Guangzhou station

Hundreds of thousands of those workers, many with young children, found themselves stranded at the Guangzhou railway station after snowstorms snapped power lines to passenger trains from neighbouring Hunan province, an important hub for trains on the main line between Guangzhou and Beijing.

Officials struggled to control an estimated 200,000 travellers at the station — a number expected to swell to 600,000 over the next couple of days. Temporary shelter was being arranged for the migrant workers in schools and conventions centres. Soldiers were deployed to stand guard around the station and police barked orders through bullhorns to try to maintain order.

Notice boards inside the station were a sea of red, showing that almost every train had been cancelled. Radio announcements urged people not to go to the station since most trains had been cancelled and tickets were no longer being sold until new year's day.

Liu Si, who hoped to travel back to the western metropolis of Chongqing, had been stuck at the station for days. “The number 1059 train to Chongqing didn't go on the 26th, it didn't go on the 27th and there's no way it's going today on the 28th.”

With officials warning that it could take until the end of the week to work through the backlog of passengers, Mr Liu was not optimistic of spending the festival with his family. “I've been in Guangdong a decade. I've never spent a Chinese New Year here. This year I might have to. It just won't feel right.”

Such is the extent of the chaos that police and soldiers have been called in to deal with a staggering 200,000 travellers waiting for a train.

The swelling crowds, who are mainly migrant factory workers have filled up a huge plaza in front of the main station in Guangzhou, China.

They eventually spilled out into a busy thoroughfare that had to be closed to give people space to camp out while they waited.

Panic: Would be passengers resort to desperate measures to get to the front of the queue

What is even more extraordinary is that the legions of commuters have now been told it will be over a week before tickets go back on sale on February 7.

The date is the start of Chinese New Year - the nation's biggest annual holiday.

Today, officials were scrambling to control the crowds and find temporary shelter for the migrant workers in schools and convention centers.

Police blew whistles and barked orders into bull horns as they tried to restore order while soldiers stood guard at key spots around the station. There was a threat protests or worse could be sparked by the workers, who already have a long list of grievances, such as rising living costs, poor working conditions and low salaries that often go unpaid.

But so far, the scene in Guangzhou, which rarely sees snow, was relatively calm.

Many of the workers were stoic or cheerful, accustomed to huge crowds, discomforts and long delays that are common in the lives of China's impoverished classes.

... while a few became angry. Soldiers and police have been called in to monitor the situation

Sean Lennon, 32, was spotted in New York -- looking so much like like his father-- it was eerie!

Sean was walking with a fiercely hatted woman in SoHo on Wednesday, where temperatures were near freezing. John and Yoko were snapped in Paris in 1969 -- when John was 29.

FASCIST CHINA has systematically covered up the accidental deaths of at least 10 workers, and perhaps many more, in a rush to construct the futuristic ”bird’s nest” stadium in Beijing for this summer’s Olympic Games.

The estimates are drawn from dozens of interviews conducted over six months, under a guarantee of anonymity, with employees from the huge building site in a northern district of the capital.

Witnesses have told The Sunday Times of seeing workers plummet to their deaths from the perilous heights of the stadium, which was designed by a consortium including Arup, the British engineering firm, and Herzog & de Meuron, the Swiss architects.

The bodies were swiftly removed by police, who sealed off accident scenes with orange tape and cleared other workers from the area while the dead were loaded into police vehicles, witnesses said.

Managers and police ordered the workers not to mention the deaths to anyone and not to talk about the accidents among themselves.

Corrupt Chinese officials deny that there have been any deaths. The authorities have ensured the silence of bereaved relatives by making unusually high compensation payments, which some workers say can amount to up to £13,000. By contrast, labourers on the site said they earned £3 a day and skilled welders earned £4.40 a day.

The conservative estimate of 10 accidental deaths since construction began on the stadium in 2003 was reached by comparing numerous accounts from witnesses who worked at the site at different periods.

It does not include any deaths at other Olympic venues under construction in Beijing and across China as the nation enters a final frenzy of preparation for a mass celebration of patriotism and Communist party propaganda.

The overall Chinese death toll may never be known. Five workers were said to have died during the building of the Olympic stadium for the 2004 Games in Athens. There was only one accidental death connected to the Sydney Olympics of 2000, and one welder was killed at the stadium built for the 1996 Games in Atlanta.

Several factors appear to have contributed to the Beijing stadium death toll. The sheer ambition of Herzog & de Meuron’s design has required workers to spend long periods at great heights to weld and join the struts and girders that are interwoven to form a bowl shaped like a bird’s nest.

Arup said: “Sadly, fatalities during construction could be due to many different things that have nothing to do with design.”

Most of the workers employed on the project are poorly educated migrant labourers from the inland provinces of China, who have scant specialist training and no experience of building on such a gigantic scale.

Of all their accounts, none was more telling than that of a 25-year-old construction worker from Gansu province who worked as a welder at the site for more than a year. He spoke to The Sunday Times last summer, early in the investigation.

“One day towards the end of [2006], the weather was terribly cold. On the top of the ‘bird’s nest’ I could see some ice. I stood on the ground, thinking of how best to climb to the top to get on with the welding,” he said.

“Just at that moment I heard a terrible scream. Before I realised what had happened I heard a thump on the ground. I suddenly realised that someone had fallen from the top of the nest - yet I couldn’t see anybody on our sandpile, which was heaped in the middle of the running track.

“The manager ordered workers to excavate the sand with shovels. After half an hour a dead body was pulled out of the heap. The body was gory and I didn’t dare look at it.

“The body was taken away immediately and everyone on the spot was told to keep it secret. For a couple of nights after that I had nightmares. In the end I quit and went back to my home town.

“So why did I come back again? Because I couldn’t find a better job. And I guess because my girlfriend broke up with me. I felt lost. So I came back here to forget my unhappiness through hard work.”

As the Chinese leaders urged the project on to completion last summer, the casualties continued in and around the “bird’s nest”.

One migrant worker from Pingyin county, in northeast China’s Shandong province, described how he saw a work-mate die in front of him.

“He slipped off the boards, the safety rope broke, he fell 30 yards to the ground from the scaffolding and died,” the worker said.

“He was only 33 years old and had a pretty young wife and a lovely son. I saw her when she came to get his things and collect his body.

“I felt such pity for him. Just 33. His life was just beginning and then it was over. People said his wife got more than 200,000 yuan [£13,000]. We don’t know exactly because the negotiations were secret. At least his wife and son were lucky.”

Some of the deaths appear to have been bad luck. One employee, who worked on the site for three years, described the fate of a worn-out migrant worker who decided to sleep overnight on the ground inside the stadium.

When a bulldozer drove into the arena before first light, it ran over him. The driver was so stunned that in his confusion he reversed the vehicle and its tracks crushed the victim for a second time.

In interviews workers talked of the relentless pressure to get the job done, of abusive subcontractors who frequently withheld pay in violation of China’s labour laws and of harsh restrictions on their personal lives in thin-walled dormitories where men bunked 12 to a room.

One problem cited again and again was the use of subcontractors - a practice that, Chinese critics allege, leads to opportunities for corruption.

The lead contractor on the stadium is the state-owned Beijing Urban Construction Group. There appear to be up to five levels of subcontractors on some jobs.

Several workers said the subcontractors tried to conceal workplace injuries from the authorities.

“Some bosses do not report accidents to the lead contractor and the Olympic construction committee,” a safety inspector said in an interview.

“They know that if the lead contractor knows which construction firm has a bad record of deaths and injuries, the company could be punished and may not be given more projects.”

Complaints about delayed wages were persistent. One man, who said he knew he was talking to a reporter, handed over an open letter addressed to the Chinese government. It read: “At the beginning I was happy to work in the ‘bird’s nest’ because I was making a contribution to the Olympic Games, but now I am very angry.

“Why? The contractor has defaulted on my salary for half a month. My family is anxious. My two children need money to pay tuition. My wife needs money to buy fertiliser. My old parents need money to go to hospital.

“I can’t understand it. The Olympic stadium is a big state project. To my contractor this amount of money is nothing, but for me it is a lifeline. I hope the government can pay attention to this issue.” In the worker’s own interests, the letter was not delivered.

For the younger men sitting around inside a dormitory, the exhaustion of sleep comes as a relief from loneliness and frustration. “The lack of women is a big problem,” said a worker named Qi. “Most of us haven’t been home to sleep with our wives for six months or a year. The single men have no chance or time to talk love with girls.”

His friend Huang, 25, boasted: “I go to the barber’s shop very often and I know how to bargain with the prostitutes. Sometimes I get a discount from 200 yuan (£13) to 50 yuan.” All the young men laughed at him, shouting: “You cheapskate!”

They get by, like many Chinese workers, on a mixture of pride, fatalism and necessity. But that does not mean they are ignorant.

“We know that builders died in Greece at the Olympic site,” said one young labourer. “At first the government denied it but after the opposition party and workers’ union disclosed the names of the dead the government had to admit it.

“But in China who dares to investigate such a sensitive issue? Would you dare?”

A sadist, a masochist, a murderer, a necrophile,
 a zoophile and a pyromaniac are all sitting on 
a bench in a mental institution.
 
"Let's have sex with a cat?" asked the zoophile.
"Let's have sex with the cat and then torture 
it," says the sadist.
"Let's have sex with the cat, torture it and 
then kill it," shouted the murderer.
"Let's have sex with the cat, torture it, kill it 
and then have sex with it again," said the necrophile.
"Let's have sex with the cat, torture it, kill it, 
have sex with it again and then burn it," said 
the pyromaniac.
 
There was silence, and then the masochist 
said: "Meow."

“Dark brick kilns” 黑砖窑
May
Inside scores of dark kilns, about 400 workers were forced to toil in a condition on par with slavery. They were swindled to these brick kilns, overseen by hired thugs and had to work 20 hours a day. They lacked food and carried the red-hot bricks directly on the back, suffering from occasional beating-up. They were the “modern salves” found in Hongdong (洪洞) county, Shanxi province, who had long suffered from the mental and physical traumas in a place out of law.
What is more thrilling is the malfeasance of the local government that should have eliminated the “black kilns”. Nevertheless, it ignored, and even became a ring of the wicked interest chain. In some way the local government connived and shared this crime. Through the investigation, a kiln owner was found exactly the son of a village governor. Up till now, over 30 criminals have been tried and over 90 officials got punished, but the public opinion suggested many inner-party penalties, rather than the jural, didn’t hit the point

Tai Lake pollution 太湖水污染
May
Tai, a beautiful lake and the water source of millions of citizens, was suddenly occupied by thick blue algae in May, 2007, the whole water area stinking. The smelly running water supplied to the city Wuxi(无锡) came to be almost undrinkable and therefore triggered a panic buying of purified water. The apple of discord is the thousands of lake-side factories, which produced GDP while at the same time pouring pollution into the lake. The author of The End of South-Su Mode(苏南模式的终结), Doctor Xinwang, suggested the water crisis told the method of development by the cost of the environment was about to bankrupt. After the crisis the government has scheduled to shut down nearly 3000 high-pollution factories such as print and chemical works.

Fenghuang bridge collapse 凤凰塌桥
August
“The company strictly followed the national regulations to carry out the construction, and in pursuit of high-quality. No accident has ever happened and no corruption report has been received……” This is a piece of news issued a few days before the bridge collapse that claimed 64 people. The construction had been planned as a “gift” for the 50th anniversary of the establishment of Xiangxi State and was hasted to catch the celebration. Ridiculously, an alleged high-quality construction nonetheless made one of the most serious accidents in 2007. Not many reinforced steel bars could be found among the ruin, a fact that poked the eyewash and proved the malfeasance. It once again stroke people’s faith on the so-called “face construction”, or “political-achieve construction”. 24 people, including some officials, were sued.

Huawei mass resignation 华为辞职门
September
7000 employees were urged by the Huawei Technologies to resign so that the company could avoid signing open-ended contracts with them. According to the new Employment Contract Law, the new contract, which should be signed with employees that have worked over ten years, had no fixed term so the workers would serve just like permanent staff. To shun the future personnel cost, Huawei determinedly persuaded the mass resignation even though it had to pay the $1.34 billion compensation. Later, the workers had to compete to regain the jobs. The action incurred Huawei a bad fame among the public because it was thought to be an ignorance of social duty. But many companies also grumbled about that the new law that focuses on labor right would hurt much of their competence. What effect it might bring to Chinese economy is yet uncertain.

Pengyu case 南京彭宇案
September
In 2007, the most well-known lawsuit resulted from a ridiculous judgment, as most netizens thought. Pengyu, a young man in Nanjing, told that he sent an old woman who got bumped down on the road to hospital because of a warm heart. However, he was sued by the woman, because she accused Peng was actually the wrongdoer. The fact was yet unknown, but the judge’s sentence based on reasoning rather than evidence pushed the public to the other side. As the judge “deduced”, if Pneg had not slammed into and hurt the woman, he would not have helped her. The public was puzzled whether it was a joke or a real sentence. But there is one thing for sure; in the eyes of the judge, there is no more Samaritan in China.

Chang’e 1 lunar probe 嫦娥升空
October
In 2007, Chang'e 1 blasted off on a Long March 3A carrier rocket, marking the first stage of China's 10-year lunar exploration program. On 26th, November, it sent back its first picture of the moon landscape. Reaching the moon has been a dream of Chinese for thousands of years, and today we are so close to it.

Bankruptcy of Yilishen 蚂蚁门 (information blocked on mainland)
November
Yilishen, a well-known company that sold health-care ant products closed in November. A huge amount of investment by many ant farmers vaporized along with the bankruptcy. Furious farmers gathered in Shengyang to ask for compensation, some of them accusing the government of conniving the company’s Ponzi scheme and illegal fund-raising. The information on the topic was soon blocked on mainland China while Global Voice remained a report on the event.

“May golden week” canceled 五一黄金周取消
December
The term “golden week” has been tied with people-packed stations and airports, busy, crowded tour sites, and the bonanza grabbed by businessmen. Born in 1999, the Golden Week has gradually melted into people’s life, while today its mission of stimulating economy is surpassed by the negative effect. This year, one of the three golden weeks was canceled after a public discussion and the break time was allocated to three more traditional festivals. The change also demonstrated the country’s determination to protect the fading Chinese traditions.

An assault on the overheated real estate 房地产攻坚战
2007
The surging real estate price staggered many Chinese in 2006, while 2007 witnessed the macroeconomic control of the industry. Firstly, the new Property Law was passed in March, an action that restricted the “enclosure movement” of the developers. Later in April, 8 central departments collaborated to check the illegal methods used by developers and agents to bid up the price. On 1, August, the central government issued the 24th Resolution that emphasized on building low-price economy residential to provide over 10 million families with affordable housing. Also, the interest rate has been increased for 6 times this year and the down payment of property mortgage also levelled up. The series of measures worked. The heated Shenzhen market, whose average price rose by 50% in the first 7 months, faced a dwindling volume of trade and several other cities in China also confronted a cold snap on the industry.

Price going up 物价上升
2007
Pork, instant noodle, oil and so forth, —- the prices of various goods rose so quickly that people could feel their daily life considerably affected.
2007 is the pig year in Chinese traditional calendar and the pork price echoed. Up till June, the price has increased by 71% compared to last year. In Dong Guan, the pork valued 40 RMB ($5.4)/ Kg. The rise made the prime minister Wen Jiabao said, “We are taking measures to help you afford pork.” Also, instant noodle was getting dearer. Several food companies united to drive up the price this year. The oil followed closely. In Chongqing, to catch the chance to buy discounted edible oil, 3 people were dead of trample by packed, seething crowd. The growth rate of CPI in 2007 was estimated to be 4.7%.

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