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30 September Landlord Lets Smell Of Dead Cats Out The Bag; Hoped Stench Would Make Tenants FleeTenants of a Brooklyn building say their landlord came up with a new idea for how to kick them out: Let the smell of the cats out of the bag. Dead cats, that is. The stench from the carcasses did catch the tenants' attention -- but they stayed and sued. One tenant, Daisy Terry, told a City Hall news conference on Sunday it was so bad she had to hold her nose coming down the stairs. The building in Brooklyn's Bushwick neighborhood was purchased last year by a company listed in court papers as Heskel. A call to Heskel Properties in Manhattan was not immediately returned. Terry says the landlord used the dead cats to try to push out rent-stabilized tenants. Man hugs police officer, gets arrestedLuke Schreder thought the police officer looked like he just "needed a hug." The police officer disagreed. Schreder, 21, of 48 Denbigh Drive in Iowa City was arrested Saturday afternoon at 100 S. Dubuque St. for assault on a peace officer, public intoxication and interference with official acts. According to police records, Schreder ran up to an officer and stuck out his arms. The officer told him to "get away," but Schreder didn't take the hint and embraced the officer. When the officer told Schreder to put his hands behind his head, he refused. Officers got one handcuff on Schreder, but he wouldn't put his other arm behind his back to let them put the second handcuff on, according to the report. The Jishou Mass Accident- What the CCP won't allow knownFor background to this story see the Washington Post's In China, Police Clash With Protestors Who Invested in Illegal Schemes As more than two hundred senior citizens gathered in front of the Jishou city government building to petition, an official vehicle with license plate 0004 (which belongs to Xu Keqin, the governor of the Tujia/Miao Autonomous Region) came through led by a police escort car. A senior woman and a middle-aged woman rushed forward to block the car. But the vehicle did not stop. The middle-aged woman fell to the ground, but the senior woman held on to the car door and was dragged for more than 200 meters. The vehicle stopped only because there was a truck blocking the intersection ahead. Angry citizens rushed forward to surround the car.
According to witnesses, the government official inside the car got out and was condemned by the car. The chauffeur and the governor Xu Keqin were both assaulted. Large numbers of public security officers and armed policemen rushed to the scene. Xu Keqin left the scene quickly under the protection of the armed police. The chauffeur was severely injured. The crowd went ahead to overturn the vehicle.
More and more people showed up until several tens of thousands of people were chanting: "Down with corrupt officials!" and "Give me my pension back!" The armed policemen took no action. A government official asked the crowd to calm down and promised an investigation. The crowd then dispersed.
Dealing with pollution in Chinan this neighbourhood, there are many business people who just dump their garbage everywhere. This resulted in environmental pollution.
So what does it take to have a civilized neighborhood? Here is the public notice that was effective in curbing the garbage dumping.
British agency orders ports to inspect imports for contaminated milkFinally, British ports will begin inspecting air freight and shipments of imported food from tomorrow in a major food safety operation triggered by the contaminated milk scandal in China.
The Food Standards Agency put more than 80 ports and airports on alert yesterday and ordered health officials to intercept and test any food products arriving via China that contain more than 15% milk, including cakes, chocolate, biscuits, bread and protein drinks. The action followed moves by the European Food Standards Agency last week to prevent dairy products contaminated with the industrial chemical melamine entering member states. Baby formula contaminated with melamine has killed at least four children in China and made tens of thousands ill, leading to widespread bans on imports to 12 countries. Europe, meanwhile, had already banned all imports of animal products, including baby formula, from China several years ago. The latest safeguards are designed to intercept other products called "composites" that also contain milk or milk powder in lower quantities. 29 September Patterson Bigfoot film stabilised
A Portion of the Patterson Film Subject showing an Area Devoid of Hair mid-thorax, Swinging Breasts and Caucasian skin tones 28 September China was warned, but didn't stop tainted milkScandal demonstrating weaknesses of Communist Party's authoritarian political system
--New York Times 
The tainted-milk crisis has devastated China’s dairy industry. Farmers in Hubei Province poured out milk they could not sell. Barely a month ago, China’s staging of the Beijing Olympics demonstrated how the Communist Party could mobilize its authoritarian political system. But the international scandal now unfolding over China’s contaminated dairy products is demonstrating, again, the weaknesses of that system.
In recent days, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao has apologized for a scandal that has sickened 53,000 children, killed at least three and devastated China’s dairy industry, which he has promised to reform.
But a year ago, Mr. Wen made a similar pledge to overhaul safety regulations for food, drugs and other products in response to other safety scandals. His government authorised $1.1 billion and sent 300,000 inspectors to examine food and drug producers, but regulators could not prevent China’s biggest dairy producers from selling baby formula laced with an industrial additive called melamine.
The dairy scandal raises the core question of whether the ruling Communist Party is capable of creating a transparent, accountable regulatory structure within a one-party system. Party leaders realize that effective regulation is essential to convince the world that China’s products are safe and so maintain the rapid economic growth that has helped to sustain the party’s power. But many analysts say the party’s need to maintain control — of the economy and of information — undermines the independence of any regulatory system.
Beijing’s political priority of holding a “harmonious” Olympics was also a factor. Parents who tried to act as whistle-blowers were thwarted by an unresponsive bureaucracy, while Chinese journalists were blocked by censorship edicts banning coverage of politically touchy subjects during the prelude to the Olympics.
Officials now acknowledge that China’s leading dairy companies — including the Sanlu Group, the worst offender in the scandal — were exempted from mandatory government inspections. In hindsight, inspections might not have mattered: in May, the government’s top food quality agency rated dairy companies among the safest producers in China’s food industry, reporting that 99 percent of them passed safety inspections for their infant milk formula. Now, the government says that 22 dairy companies, including export brands like Mengniu and Yili, have produced powdered baby formula that contains traces of melamine.
“The system needs to be re-examined, top to bottom,” said Eliot R. Cutler, an expert on regulation and energy policy at the Beijing office of Akin Gump, an international law firm.
Much of the public outrage in China over the dairy scandal is focused on how the problem remained hidden for months as parents bought bad formula without realizing they were poisoning their babies. Beijing authorities say they learned about the problem only this month. They have blamed greedy corporations and local officials for wrongly hiding the crisis. But there were early warnings that were muffled by censorship or lapses in Beijing.
Fu Jianfeng, an editor at one of China’s leading independent publications, Southern Weekend, recently used a personal blog to describe how his newsweekly discovered cases of sickened children in July — two months before the scandal became public — but could not publish articles so close to the Games.
“As a news editor, I was deeply concerned,” Mr. Fu wrote on Sept. 14. “I had realized that this was a large public health disaster, but I was not able to send reporters to do reporting.”
Even earlier, on June 30, a mother in Hunan Province had written a detailed letter pleading for help from the food quality agency, the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine. The letter, posted on the agency’s Web site, described rising numbers of infants at a local children’s hospital who were suffering from kidney stones after drinking powdered formula made by Sanlu.
The mother said she had already complained in vain to Sanlu and local officials.
“Urgent! Urgent! Urgent!” she wrote. She called on Beijing authorities to order a product recall, release the news to the Chinese media and provide medical exams for babies who had consumed Sanlu formula. “Please investigate whether the formula does have problems,” she wrote, “or more babies will get sick.”
Hundreds of miles north, the health bureau in Gansu Province was also facing an unusual outbreak of sick infants. The Gansu Health Bureau spokesman, Yang Jingke, said his agency sent an urgent report in July to the Ministry of Health in Beijing describing how local hospitals were reporting high numbers of babies with kidney stones. Mr. Yang, speaking at a news conference this month, said all the babies had taken the same brand of formula. He said the Ministry of Health responded that it had attached “great importance” to the problem and would investigate. But nothing happened.
Beijing typically tries to address scandals with high-profile firings and arrests. After last year’s food and drug safety crisis, the head of China’s Food and Drug Administration was put to death for corruption. His execution was interpreted as the party’s way of sending a stern message warning lower officials to toe the line.
The government also oversaw a four-month crackdown that resembled a nationwide vice sweep: 1,187 criminal investigations opened, 300 drugmakers shuttered, 192,400 unlicensed food shops closed and 1,400 substandard slaughterhouses shut down.
The crackdown in response to the dairy scandal already echoes last year’s campaign. The country’s top food quality official, Li Changjiang, resigned while lower officials were fired or arrested.
But the essential relationship between regulators and industry seems unchanged. Some dairy farmers interviewed this week in Hebei Province said it was an open secret that milk was adulterated, although many claimed they did not know that melamine was being used. Some dairies routinely watered down milk to increase profits, then added other cheap ingredients so the milk could pass a protein test.
“Before melamine, the dealers added rice porridge or starch into the milk to artificially boost the protein count, but that method was easily tested as fake, so they switched to melamine,” said Zhao Huibin, a dairy farmer near Shijiazhuang.
Mr. Zhao said quality testers at Sanlu took bribes from farmers and milk dealers in exchange for looking the other way on milk adulterated with melamine. “In this business, bribery keeps everyone silent,” he said.
A company spokesman at Sanlu, after receiving a faxed list of questions, said the company would have no comment on this or any other aspect of the scandal.
Analysts say the lack of a truly independent regulatory system means that high-profile gestures, like executing or firing officials, have limited impact, especially because local industries are so often intertwined with local officials.
“These after-the-fact administrative measures miss the point,” wrote Arthur Kroeber, managing director of the Beijing-based consultancy, Dragonomics, in a recent note to clients. He said the problem was rooted in the Communist Party’s continued involvement in pricing control, company management and the flow of information.
“The party views control of all three as necessary to its rule,” he added. “Further major scandals are thus inevitable.”
The structure of the Sanlu Group, which keeps its headquarters in this gritty industrial city, is a case in point. The Hebei Province Communist Party appointed the company’s chairwoman, who was also a party official. Meanwhile, city officials in Shijiazhuang are now accused of helping cover up the problem rather than trying to warn the public.
For Sanlu, a pivotal moment came on Aug. 2 when company officials informed the board about the melamine problem. Sanlu is a joint venture with the New Zealand dairy giant Fonterra. Fonterra owns a 43 percent share and has three members on the board. Fonterra’s executives say their representatives immediately pushed for a public recall at the board meeting, only to be overruled by the rest of the board.
Sanlu had first received complaints about its powdered baby formula last December, according to state media. By March, the company had hired private companies to test its milk powder for contaminants. Yet Sanlu never issued any public warnings and never stopped promoting its products. On May 18, days after the devastating earthquake in Sichuan Province, the company made a much-publicized donation of $1.25 million worth of baby formula for infants orphaned or displaced by the catastrophe.
But problems were surfacing. On May 21, a father named Wang Yuanping posted a notice on a popular Internet message board, Tianya, in which he detailed months of frustrating interaction with the company. His infant daughter had been sickened after drinking the powdered formula. “Her urine was viscous and yellow, with granule,” Mr. Wang wrote. “This stopped when she stopped drinking and resumed when she started drinking.”
He had first alerted Sanlu in February because he feared someone might be counterfeiting the company’s products. Sanlu asked him to send a sample for testing and later company officials confirmed that the sample was their product. But they told Mr. Wang that the results were a “business secret” and refused to divulge them. By late March, Mr. Wang also complained to local officials in his hometown in Zhejiang Province but they said he needed to pay for expensive testing to prove the formula was bad.
By midsummer, some Chinese journalists were learning that sick babies were arriving at hospitals.
Mr. Fu, the editor at Southern Weekend, wrote in his blog that Sanlu applied pressure to block reporting and used its political connections to prevent some other newspapers from publishing articles about the problem. But with only weeks before the Olympics’ opening ceremony, the timing made media coverage nearly impossible. “We couldn’t do any investigation on an issue like this, at that time, in order to be harmonious,” Mr. Fu wrote.
For two years, the Central Propaganda Department had been issuing broad reporting guidelines that were distributed in Internal Digest, a classified bimonthly Communist Party bulletin. The emphasis was on promoting good news about the Olympics. But the scandals in 2007 over the safety of Chinese food and drug exports complicated this agenda. A huge pet-food recall in the United States was traced to Chinese animal feed adulterated with melamine. At home, Chinese consumers were alarmed over a bad-pork scare.
Propaganda officials responded by issuing rules that required domestic publications to obtain permission before publishing any articles about food safety and other politically delicate subjects.
On July 24, a television station in Hunan Province reported that infants who had consumed the same powdered formula were suffering kidney problems. The station showed packages of Sanlu formula, but was careful not to name the company.
Yet the problem remained largely concealed. “I felt very guilty and frustrated then,” Mr. Fu wrote. “The only thing I could do was to call every friend I knew to tell them not to feed their children with Sanlu milk powder.”
The problem was finally exposed in September when the New Zealand government, after discussions with Fonterra executives, contacted authorities in Beijing. Beijing officials say they knew nothing about the scandal until September, though a Fonterra company spokesman said the company believed the central government knew in August.
Chinese leaders have since responded forcefully, even as they have distanced themselves from responsibility for the scandal. The aggressive initial tone of media coverage shifted this week, as state media outlets like Xinhua, the country’s official news agency, emphasized how much the public appreciated the government’s response. And censors were filtering the Internet and removing certain postings, including the blog item by Mr. Fu.
Reached by telephone on Friday, Mr. Fu said he could not answer any questions about his blog.
Some harmless diverting sitesBored with Facebook? Getting tired of poking, American thought policeAeroport security in America is turning Orwellian. Bike warsAll you have to do is stand for President and Obama isn't left out:
Paul Newman dead at 83
A great actor, a cool movie star, and by all accounts a truly decent guy. Paul Newman's death is a loss for fans everywhere. While many celebrities showed off there ability to divide us, Paul Newman used his celebrity to help others via his charity work as exemplified by the money he raised for causes from his "Newman's Own" line and his Hole in the Wall Gang Camp that he ran for kids that lived with chronic and terminal illness. As an actor, he wowed us with performances in such movies as The Hustler, Hud, Cool Hand Luke and The Verdict. But despite such achievements, Newman often refused to take himself too seriously "although he was always, even curiously, when he ate from a can of Newman's Own Dog Food in front of a televised audience" was dignified. Although many are saddened by his death, we can also give Newman a huge Bravo for a life well lived. Peter Hitchens: China's new slave empire I think I am probably going to die any minute now. An inflamed, deceived mob of about 50 desperate men are crowding round the car, some trying to turn it over, others beating at it with large rocks, all yelling insults and curses. They have just started to smash the windows. Next, they will pull us out and, well, let's not think about that ... I am trying not to meet their eyes, but they are staring at me and my companions with rage and hatred such as I haven't seen in a human face before. Those companions, Barbara Jones and Richard van Ryneveld, are - like me - quite helpless in the back seats. If we get out, we will certainly be beaten to death. If we stay where we are, we will probably be beaten to death. Our two African companions have - crazily in our view - got out of the car to try to reason with the crowd. It is clear to us that you might as well preach non-violence to a tornado. At last, after what must have been about 40 seconds but that felt like half an hour, one of the pair saw sense, leapt back into the car and reversed wildly down the rocky, dusty path - leaving his friend behind. By the grace of God we did not slither into the ditch, roll over or burst a tyre. Through the dust we churned up as we fled, we could see our would-be killers running with appalling speed to catch up. There was just time to make a crazy two-point turn which allowed us to go forwards and so out-distance them. We had pretty much abandoned our other guide to whatever his fate might be (this was surprisingly easy to justify to myself at the time) when we saw that he had broken free and was running with Olympic swiftness, just ahead of pursuers half hidden by the dust. We flung open a rear door so he could scramble in and, engine grinding, we veered off, bouncing painfully over the ruts and rocks. We feared there would be another barricade to stop our escape, and it would all begin again. But there wasn't, and we eventually realised we had got away, even the man whose idiocy nearly got us killed. He told us it was us they wanted, not him, or he would never have escaped. We ought to be dead. We are not. It is an interesting feeling, not wholly unpleasant. Why did they want to kill us? What was the reason for their fury? They thought that if I reported on their way of life they might lose their livings. Livings? Dyings, more likely. 
Peking power: A Chinese supervisor cajoles local workers as they dig a trench in Kabwe, Zambia
These poor, hopeless, angry people exist by grubbing for scraps of cobalt and copper ore in the filth and dust of abandoned copper mines in Congo, sinking perilous 80ft shafts by hand, washing their finds in cholera-infected streams full of human filth, then pushing enormous two-hundredweight loads uphill on ancient bicycles to the nearby town of Likasi where middlemen buy them to sell on, mainly to Chinese businessmen hungry for these vital metals. To see them, as they plod miserably past, is to be reminded of pictures of unemployed miners in Thirties Britain, stumbling home in the drizzle with sacks of coal scraps gleaned from spoil heaps. Except that here the unsparing heat makes the labour five times as hard, and the conditions of work and life are worse by far than any known in England since the 18th Century. Many perish as their primitive mines collapse on them, or are horribly injured without hope of medical treatment. Many are little more than children. On a good day they may earn $3, which just supports a meagre existence in diseased, malarial slums. We had been earlier to this awful pit, which looked like a penal colony in an ancient slave empire. Defeated, bowed figures toiled endlessly in dozens of hand-dug pits. Their faces, when visible, were blank and without hope. We had been turned away by a fat, corrupt policeman who pretended our papers weren't in order, but who was really taking instructions from a dead-eyed, one-eared gangmaster who sat next to him. By the time we returned with more official permits, the gangmasters had readied the ambush. The diggers feared - and their evil, sinister bosses had worked hard on that fear - that if people like me publicised their filthy way of life, then the mine might be closed and the $3 a day might be taken away. I can give you no better explanation in miniature of the wicked thing that I believe is now happening in Africa. Out of desperation, much of the continent is selling itself into a new era of corruption and virtual slavery as China seeks to buy up all the metals, minerals and oil she can lay her hands on: copper for electric and telephone cables, cobalt for mobile phones and jet engines - the basic raw materials of modern life. It is crude rapacity, but to Africans and many of their leaders it is better than the alternative, which is slow starvation. 
The Congolese risk their lives digging through mountains of mining waste looking for scraps of metal ore
It is my view - and not just because I was so nearly killed - that China's cynical new version of imperialism in Africa is a wicked enterprise. China offers both rulers and the ruled in Africa the simple, squalid advantages of shameless exploitation. For the governments, there are gargantuan loans, promises of new roads, railways, hospitals and schools - in return for giving Peking a free and tax-free run at Africa's rich resources of oil, minerals and metals. For the people, there are these wretched leavings, which, miserable as they are, must be better than the near-starvation they otherwise face. Persuasive academics advised me before I set off on this journey that China's scramble for Africa had much to be said for it. They pointed out China needs African markets for its goods, and has an interest in real economic advance in that broken continent. For once, they argued, a foreign intervention in Africa might work precisely because it is so cynical and self-interested. They said Western aid, with all its conditions, did little to create real advances in Africa, laughing as they declared: 'The only country that ever got rich through donations is the Vatican.' Why get so het up about African corruption anyway? Is it really so much worse than corruption in Russia or India? Is it really our business to try to act as missionaries of purity? Isn't what we call 'corruption' another name for what Africans view as looking after their families? And what about China herself? Despite the country's convulsive growth and new wealth, it still suffers gravely from poverty and backwardness, as I have seen for myself in its dingy sweatshops, the primitive electricity-free villages of Canton, the dark and squalid mining city of Datong and the cave-dwelling settlements that still rely on wells for their water. After the murderous disaster of Mao, and the long chaos that went before, China longs above all for stable prosperity. And, as one genial and open-minded Chinese businessman said to me in Congo as we sat over a beer in the decayed colonial majesty of Lubumbashi's Belgian-built Park Hotel: 'Africa is China's last hope.' I find this argument quite appealing, in theory. Britain's own adventures in Africa were not specially benevolent, although many decent men did what they could to enforce fairness and justice amid the bigotry and exploitation. 
Taking over: Chinese building workers in Zambia
It is noticeable that in much former British territory we have left behind plenty of good things and habits that are absent in the lands once ruled by rival empires. Even so, with Zimbabwe, Nigeria and Uganda on our conscience, who are we to lecture others? I chose to look at China's intervention in two countries, Zambia and the 'Democratic Republic of the Congo', because they lie side by side; because one was once British and the other Belgian. Also, in Zambia's imperfect but functioning democracy, there is actual opposition to the Chinese presence, while in the despotic Congo, opposition to President Joseph Kabila is unwise, to put it mildly. Congo is barely a state at all, and still hosts plenty of fighting not all that far from here. Statues and images of Joseph's murdered father Laurent are everywhere in an obvious attempt to create a cult of personality on which stability may one day be based. Portraits of Joseph himself scowl from every wall. I have decided not to name most of the people who spoke to me, even though some of them gave me permission to do so, because I am not sure they know just how much of a risk they may be running by criticising the Chinese in Africa. I know from personal experience with Chinese authority that Peking regards anything short of deep respect as insulting, and it does not forget a slight. I also know that this over-sensitive vigilance is present in Africa. The Mail on Sunday team was reported to the authorities in Zambia's Copper Belt by Chinese managers who had seen us taking photographs of a graveyard at Chambishi where 54 victims of a disaster in a Chinese-run explosives factory are buried. Within an hour, local 'security' officials were buzzing round us trying to find out what we were up to. This is why I have some time for the Zambian opposition politician Michael Sata, known as 'King Cobra' because of his fearless combative nature (but also, say his opponents, because he is so slippery). Sata has challenged China's plans to invest in Zambia, and is publicly suspicious of them. At elections two years ago, the Chinese were widely believed to have privately threatened to pull out of the country if he won, and to have helped the government parties win. Peking regards Zambia as a great prize, alongside its other favoured nations of Sudan (oil), Angola (oil) and Congo (metals). 
Fighting back: Peter Hitchens with Michael Sata, the opposition politician nicknamed 'King Cobra'
It has cancelled Zambia's debts, eased Zambian exports to China, established a 'special economic zone' in the Copper Belt, offered to build a sports stadium, schools, a hospital and an anti-malaria centre as well as providing scholarships and dispatching experts to help with agriculture. Zambia-China trade is growing rapidly, mainly in the form of copper. All this has aroused the suspicions of Mr Sata, a populist politician famous for his blunt, combative manner and his harsh, biting attacks on opponents, and who was once a porter who swept the platforms at Victoria Station in London. Now the leader of the Patriotic Front, with a respectable chance of winning a presidential election set for the end of October, Sata says: 'The Chinese are not here as investors, they are here as invaders. 'They bring Chinese to come and push wheelbarrows, they bring Chinese bricklayers, they bring Chinese carpenters, Chinese plumbers. We have plenty of those in Zambia.' This is true. In Lusaka and in the Copper Belt, poor and lowly Chinese workers, in broad-brimmed straw hats from another era, are a common sight at mines and on building sites, as are better-dressed Chinese supervisors and technicians. There are Chinese restaurants and Chinese clinics and Chinese housing compounds - and a growing number of Chinese flags flapping over factories and smelters. 'We don't need to import labourers from China,' Sata says. 'We need to import people with skills we don't have in Zambia. The Chinese are not going to train our people in how to push wheelbarrows.' He meets me in the garden of his not specially grand house in the old-established and verdant Rhodes Park section of Lusaka. It is guarded by uniformed security men, its walls protected by barbed wire and broken glass. 'Wherever our Chinese "brothers" are they don't care about the local workers,' he complains, alleging that Chinese companies have lax safety procedures and treat their African workers like dirt. In language which seems exaggerated, but which will later turn out to be at least partly true, he claims: 'They employ people in slave conditions.' He also accuses Chinese overseers of frequently beating up Zambians. His claim is given force by a story in that morning's Lusaka newspapers about how a Zambian building worker in Ndola, in the Copper Belt, was allegedly beaten unconscious by four Chinese co-workers angry that he had gone to sleep on the job. I later checked this account with the victim's relatives in an Ndola shanty town and found it to be true. 
Evidence of China is never very far away
Recently, a government minister, Alice Simago, was shown weeping on TV after she saw at first hand the working conditions at a Chinese-owned coal mine in the Southern Province. When I contacted her, she declined to speak to me about this - possibly because criticism of the Chinese is not welcome among most of the Zambian elite. Denis Lukwesa, deputy general secretary of the Zambian Mineworkers' Union, also backed up Sata's view, saying: 'They just don't understand about safety. They are more interested in profit.' As for their general treatment of African workers, Lukwesa says he knows of cases where Chinese supervisors have kicked Zambians. He summed up their attitude like this: 'They are harsh to Zambians, and they don't get on well with them.' Sata warns against the enormous loans and offers of help with transport, schools and health care with which Peking now sweetens its attempts to buy up Africa's mineral reserves. 'China's deal with the Democratic Republic of the Congo is, in my opinion, corruption,' he says, comparing this with Western loans which require strong measures against corruption. Everyone in Africa knows China's Congo deal - worth almost £5billion in loans, roads, railways, hospitals and schools - was offered after Western experts demanded tougher anti-corruption measures in return for more aid. Sata knows the Chinese are unpopular in his country. Zambians use a mocking word - 'choncholi' - to describe the way the Chinese speak. Zambian businessmen gossip about the way the Chinese live in separate compounds, where - they claim - dogs are kept for food. There are persistent rumours, which cropped up in almost every conversation I had in Zambia, that many of the imported Chinese workforce are convicted criminals whom China wants to offload in Africa. I was unable to confirm this but, given China's enormous gulag and the harshness of life for many migrant workers, it is certainly not impossible. Sata warns that 'sticks and stones' may one day fly if China does not treat Zambians better. He now promises a completely new approach: 'I used to sweep up at your Victoria Station, and I never got any complaints about my work. I want to sweep my country even cleaner than I swept your stations.' Some Africa experts tend to portray Sata as a troublemaker. His detractors whisper that he is a mouthpiece for Taiwan, which used to be recognised by many African states but which faces almost total isolation thanks to Peking's new Africa policy. But his claims were confirmed by a senior worker in Chambishi, scene of the 2005 explosion. This man, whom I will call Thomas, is serious, experienced and responsible. His verdict on the Chinese is devastating. He recalls the aftermath of the blast, when he had the ghastly task of collecting together what remained of the men who died: 'Zambia, a country of 11million people, went into official mourning for this disaster. 'A Chinese supervisor said to me in broken English, "In China, 5,000 people die, and there is nothing. In Zambia, 50 people die and everyone is weeping." To them, 50 people are nothing.' This sort of thing creates resentment. Earlier this year African workers at the new Chinese smelter at Chambishi rioted over low wages and what they thought were unsafe working conditions. When Chinese President Hu Jintao came to Zambia in 2006, he had to cancel a visit to the Copper Belt for fear of hostile demonstrations. Thomas says: 'The people who advised Hu Jintao not to come were right.' He suspects Chinese arrogance and brutality towards Africans is not racial bigotry, but a fear of being seen to be weak. 'They are trying to prove they are not inferior to the West. They are trying too hard. 'If they ask you to do something and you don't do it, they think you're not doing it because they aren't white. People put up with the kicks and blows because they need work to survive.' Many in Africa also accuse the Chinese of unconcealed corruption. This is specially obvious in the 'Democratic Republic of the Congo', currently listed as the most corrupt nation on Earth. A North-American businessman who runs a copper smelting business in Katanga Province told me how his firm tried to obey safety laws. They are constantly targeted by official safety inspectors because they refuse to bribe them. Meanwhile, Chinese enterprises nearby get away with huge breaches of the law - because they paid bribes. 'We never pay,' he said, 'because once you pay you become their bitch; you will pay for ever and ever.' Another businessman shrugged over the way he is forced to wait weeks to get his products out of the country, while the Chinese have no such problems. 'I'm not sure the Chinese even know there are customs regulations,' he said. 'They don't fill in the forms, they just pay. I try to be philosophical about it, but it is not easy.' Unlike orderly Zambia, Congo is a place of chaos, obvious privation, tyranny dressed up as democracy for public-relations purposes, and fear. This is Katanga, the mineral-rich slice of land fought over furiously in the early Sixties in post-colonial Africa's first civil war. Brooding over its capital, Lubumbashi, is a 400ft black hill: the accumulated slag and waste of 80 years of copper mining and smelting. Now, thanks to a crazy rise in the price of copper and cobalt, the looming, sinister mound is being quarried - by Western business, by the Chinese and by bands of Congolese who grub and scramble around it searching for scraps of copper or traces of cobalt, smashing lumps of slag with great hammers as they hunt for any way of paying for that night's supper. As dusk falls and the shadows lengthen, the scene looks like the blasted land of Mordor in Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings: a pre-medieval prospect of hopeless, condemned toil in pits surrounded by stony desolation. Behind them tower the leaning ruins of colossal abandoned factories: monuments to the wars and chaos that have repeatedly passed this way. There is something strange and unsettling about industrial scenes in Africa, pithead winding gear and gaunt chimneys rising out of tawny grasslands dotted with anthills and banana palms. It looks as if someone has made a grave mistake. And there is a lesson for colonial pride and ambition in the streets of Lubumbashi - 80 years ago an orderly Art Deco city full of French influence and supervised by crisply starched gendarmes, now a genial but volatile chaos of scruffy, bribe-hunting traffic cops where it is not wise to venture out at night. The once-graceful Belgian buildings, gradually crumbling under thick layers of paint, long ago lost their original purpose. Outsiders come and go in Africa, some greedy, some idealistic, some halfway between. Time after time, they fail or are defeated, leaving behind scars, slag-heaps, ruins and graveyards, disillusion and disappointment. We have come a long way from Cecil Rhodes to Bob Geldof, but we still have not brought much happiness with us, and even Nelson Mandela's vaunted 'Rainbow Nation' in South Africa is careering rapidly towards banana republic status. Now a new great power, China, is scrambling for wealth, power and influence in this sad continent, without a single illusion or pretence. Perhaps, after two centuries of humbug, this method will work where all other interventions have failed. But after seeing the bitter, violent desperation unleashed in the mines of Likasi, I find it hard to believe any good will come of it. 27 September China fakes reports from spaceChina fakes reports from space China's state news agency published a dispatch from the country's three latest astronauts describing their first night in space BEFORE they had even left Earth!
The message from the Chinese astronauts was released before the mission had set off ! The Xinhua Propaganda agency took down the story and blamed it on a "technical error". The article described the Shenzhou VII space craft orbiting the Earth and outlined a conversation between the astronauts. "First-level measurment arrangement," said one taikonaut - the Chinese word for astronaut. The article later described the reaction to a successful outcome of the mission. "Ten minutes later, the ship disappears below the horizon. Warm clapping and excited cheering breaks the night sky, echoing across the silent Pacific Ocean." China's most ambitious manned space mission blasted off intent on providing the country's first ever spacewalk. The latest test of Project 921, as its race into space is known, is the climax of China's defining year as an emerging superpower, coming on top of its hosting of the Olympic Games. But its Asian rivals Japan and India are also stepping up their space programmes, to say nothing of America's own revived plans to return to the moon. Next month India will launch Chandrayaan-1, an unmanned space module designed to map the resources of the moon and undertake an intense search for water on its surface. It will also execute environmental studies and measure radioactivity on the lunar surface, officials said, looking for traces of radon, uranium and thorium. The Shenzhou VII, by contrast, China's third manned mission, will conduct few scientific experiments but is seen as simply a move to placate its nationalists. 26 September Now the apes fall victim to China toxic milk scandal as officials admit cover-up during OlympicsTwo gorillas may have become the latest victims of China's toxic milk-powder health scandal, showing the early signs of kidney stones, it has emerged. Tests have also been conducted on lions, orangutans, and chimpanzees, though so far none have shown signs of kidney stones. The gorillas, both from Hangzhou Wildlife World in eastern Zhejiang province and aged one and three, had been diagnosed with crystallisation in their urine, according Chinese media. The news came with the revelation that Chinese officials, suppressing "bad news" during the Olympic games, had ordered a cover-up of the scandal. Sanlu Group, the company at the heart of the scandal, met with the government three times to explain the crisis, according to reports - but despite the warnings no recall notice was issued. 
An orangutan cub named Liu Mao is checked for kidney stones in an animal hospital in China The details of the meetings, recorded in the Daily Telegraph, are the first evidence that the cover-up was a deliberate policy. The two ill gorillas have joined more than 54,000 babies poisoned throughout the scandal so far. Four have died. Both gorillas had been fed with milk powder made by Sanlu. The company has said the infants became sick after drinking milk contaminated by melamine, a compound used in making plastics and added to cheat nutrition tests. "The crystallisation now is very small, but it will grow bigger and then block the urine," Zhang Xu, a doctor from the animal hospital where the two gorillas were being treated, was quoted as saying. "No visible stones have been found so far," Zhang added. 
A Chinese doctor scans a chimpanzee for kidney stones Kidney stones are small, solid masses that form when salts or minerals normally found in urine crystallise inside the kidney. If they become large enough, they can move out of the kidney, cause infection and lead to permanent kidney damage. The World Health Organisation and UNICEF said today China's contaminated milk powder scandal was "deplorable" as more countries in Asia and Europe banned imports of Chinese milk products. Beijing is battling public alarm and international dismay after close to 13,000 Chinese children became ill enough to crowd the hospitals. "Deliberate contamination of foods intended for consumption by vulnerable infants and young children is particularly deplorable," the World Health Organisation and UNICEF, the United Nations agency for children, said in a joint statement.
An ill baby receives treatment at a Chinese hospital yesterday. More than 54,000 babies have been affected by the toxic milk scandal But the two agencies said Beijing's plan to overhaul its food safety would help prevent a recurrence. "We are confident that swift and firm actions are being taken by China's food safety authorities to investigate this incident fully." The WHO and UNICEF also urged mothers to breast feed their infants, a need further underscored by "alarming examples" of tainted formula scandals in China and around the world. While the scandal has triggered arrests and official sackings in China, the repercussions began to spread overseas. Taiwan Health Minister Lin Fang-yue tendered his resignation after 25 tonnes of potentially tainted milk powder were imported to the island, the Taiwanese Central News Agency reported. China's poor track record in coming clean on past product safety scandals including toys, toothpaste, pharmaceutical and pet food ingredients has seriously dented the country's credibility. Despite Beijing's reassurances its milk products are now safe and the situation was under control, several countries continued to take steps against milk imports from there. India became the largest and most populous country to announce a ban on Chinese milk and milk products today, with the ban to remain in force for three months.
Filipino officials inspect imported bottled milk products from China in Manila Vietnam and Nepal halted sales of all Chinese milk products and would now increase testing of such imports. Vietnam health officials warned tainted Chinese milk may have been sold in its remote, impoverished central region. South Korea started from yesterday to recall products with melamine after the Korea Food and Drug Administration found tainted rice cookies made for a South Korean confectionary by one of its divisions in China. Singapore said it had tested melamine in five more products including two Dutch Lady fruit-flavoured milk products. Kraft Foods took out a full-page advertisement in Singapore's Straits Times newspaper to say its Oreo products were safe and did not contain milk ingredients from China. Global coffee giant Starbucks said it had started using fresh milk from a Hong Kong milk supplier in 55 of its stores in southern China, ditching its usual China supplier. In Europe, France banned all food items containing Chinese milk products. The European Food Safety Authority is expected to announce this week whether processed items containing milk products from China pose a risk. In the latest update by China's quality control agency on its website (www.aqsiq.gov.cn), it said 235 samples of carton milk and drinking yoghurt produced since Sept. 14 and sold across the country had shown no signs of the toxic chemical melamine. Nitrogen-rich melamine can be added to substandard or watered-down milk to fool quality checks, which often use nitrogen levels to measure the amount of protein in milk. The chemical is used in pesticides and in making plastics. So far, four deaths have been blamed on kidney stones and agonising complications caused by the toxic milk. 25 September Proof Chinese News is FAKEChina space mission article hits Web before launchA news story describing a successful launch of China's long-awaited space mission and including detailed dialogue between astronauts launched on the Internet Thursday, hours before the rocket had even left the ground. The country's official propaganda paper Xinhua posted the article on its Web site Thursday, and remained there for much of the day before it was taken down. A staffer from the Xinhuanet.com Web site who answered the phone Thursday said the posting of the article was a "technical error" by a technician. The staffer refused to give his name as is common among Chinese officials. The Shenzhou 7 mission, which will feature China's first-ever spacewalk, is set to launch Thursday from Jiuquan in northwestern China between 9:07 a.m. EDT and 10:27 p.m. EDT. The arcticle, dated two days from now on Sept. 27, vividly described the rocket in flight, complete with a sharply detailed dialogue between the three astronauts. Excerpts are below: "After this order, signal lights all were switched on, various data show up on rows of screens, hundreds of technicians staring at the screens, without missing any slightest changes ... 'One minute to go!' 'Changjiang No.1 found the target!'... "The firm voice of the controller broke the silence of the whole ship. Now, the target is captured 12 seconds ahead of the predicted time ... 'The air pressure in the cabin is normal!' "Ten minutes later, the ship disappears below the horizon. Warm clapping and excited cheering breaks the night sky, echoing across the silent Pacific Ocean." McCain chickens out of Frodaay's debate with Obama!He claims he needs to deal with the economic crisis his party has made, even though he is serving under no authority to do so. Abraham Lincoln ran for re-election while leading the Union troops in the civil war. Franklin Roosevelt ran for re-election in the midst of terrible depression in 1936, a far worse economic crisis than we have right now, and in 1944 while prosecuting the second world war. If John McCain can't debate while thinking about the country's economy, then he's even more ill-equipped to hold the job than I think he is. But of course he is capable of doing both. His proposal is not serious. It is just a rancidly political act. That he goes before cameras and tries to pass it off as nonpolitical, hoping that people will buy it, is what makes it contemptible. LETTERMAN MOCKS MCCAIN CANCELLATION Sir Paul a "diplomatic success of great import" Sir Paul McCartney in Bethlehem. Sir Paul McCartney visited Christ's birthplace in the West Bank town of Bethlehem yesterday while Israel claimed that a visit he also made there, including a concert in Tel Aviv, was a political victory for the Jewish state. Ron Prosor, Israel's ambassador to the UK, described McCartney's tour as a "diplomatic success of great import". "When one of the most admired musicians in the world not only expresses his willingness to visit Tel Aviv, but also publicly talks about the positive things he's heard about Israel, this is an Israeli diplomatic and PR success of the first order," Prosor wrote in the local daily Ma'ariv. Several Palestinian groups urged McCartney to cancel his trip while an Islamist militant told a British paper that the 66-year-old rock star risked being the target of a suicide bombing attack if he visited Israel. Asked by the Guardian if he was concerned that his visit would become politicised, McCartney said: "Music is a great international voice for getting people together. I will do my best to speak to Palestinians and Israelis and get an idea of what the solution might be and support that. But my little bit is to bring people together through music." McCartney visited the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music where he jammed with Palestinian children. McCartney's entourage has booked 21 suites in the Dan Hotel in Tel Aviv. A butler has been posted on 24-hour duty in his suite and the hotel's chef has been told to cooperate with his personal chef. Nevertheless, Israel STILL continues to build illegal settlements on Palestinian land and there has been only a negligible improvement in the Palestinians' ability to move freely in their own territory, to work, reach their schools or access basic services. The number of obstacles - checkpoints, the West Bank security barrier and restricted roads - increased from 561 at the time of Annapolis to about 600 in August even though Tony Blair, the Quartet's envoy, made the issue of movement and access a priority. Blair is to brief leaders of the group when they meet at the UN in New York tomorrow. Separate reports from the World Bank, IMF and the UN (also prepared for the Quartet meeting) present similarly gloomy views of the big picture in the conflict. Despite the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, the Quartet has been unable to lift the blockade or secure an improvement in the humanitarian situation, the agencies said: 80% of Gaza's population remains wholly or partially dependent on aid, while stalled relief projects have yet to be resumed. WHO says China milk scandal deplorableThe World Health Organisation and UNICEF said on Thursday China's contaminated milk powder scandal was "deplorable" as more countries in Asia and Europe banned imports of Chinese milk products. Beijing is battling public alarm and international dismay after close to 13,000 Chinese children crowded hospitals, sick from infant milk formula tainted with melamine, a cheap industrial chemical that can be used to cheat quality checks.
"Deliberate contamination of foods intended for consumption by vulnerable infants and young children is particularly deplorable," the World Health Organisation and UNICEF, the United Nations agency for children, said in a joint statement. No doubt the Chinese will blame the West for this.... The WHO and UNICEF also urged mothers to breast feed their infants, a need further underscored by "alarming examples" of tainted formula scandals in China and around the world. While the scandal has triggered arrests and official sackings in China, the repercussions began to spread overseas. Taiwan Health Minister Lin Fang-yue tendered his resignation after 25 tonnes of potentially tainted milk powder were imported to the island, the Taiwanese Central News Agency reported. China's poor track record in coming clean on past product safety scandals including toys, toothpaste, pharmaceutical and pet food ingredients has continued to seriously dent the country's credibility. MORE BANS, RECALL Despite Beijing's lies that its milk products are now safe and the situation was under control, several countries continued to take steps against milk imports from there. India became the largest and most populous country to announce a ban on Chinese milk and milk products on Thursday, with the ban to remain in force for three months. Vietnam and Nepal halted sales of all Chinese milk products and would now increase testing of such imports. Vietnam health officials warned tainted Chinese milk may have been sold in its remote, impoverished central region. South Korea started from Wednesday to recall products with melamine after the Korea Food and Drug Administration found tainted rice cookies made for a South Korean confectionary by one of its divisions in China. Singapore said it had tested melamine in five more products including two Dutch Lady fruit-flavoured milk products. Kraft Foods took out a full-page advertisement in Singapore's Straits Times newspaper to say its Oreo products were safe and did not contain milk ingredients from China. Global coffee giant Starbucks said it had started using fresh milk from a Hong Kong milk supplier in 55 of its stores in southern China, ditching its usual China supplier. In Europe, France banned all food items containing Chinese milk products. The European Food Safety Authority is expected to announce this week whether processed items containing milk products from China pose a risk. In the latest update by China's quality control agency on its website (www.aqsiq.gov.cn), it said 235 samples of carton milk and drinking yoghurt produced since September 14 and sold across the country had shown no signs of the toxic chemical melamine. Nitrogen-rich melamine can be added to substandard or watered-down milk to fool quality checks, which often use nitrogen levels to measure the amount of protein in milk. The chemical is used in pesticides and in making plastics. So far, four deaths have been blamed on kidney stones and agonising complications caused by the toxic milk. Hu Jia: Nobel Peace Prize Laureate 2008?Gaoled Chinese dissident Hu Jia (and maybe also his brave wife Zeng Jinyan who is also under house arrest and who is bringing up their young daughter alone) is/are being tipped for the Nobel Peace Prize. This is very welcome news in light of the Communist Government's blatant failure to uphold human rights as promised around the time of the Beijing Olympics.
Hu was gaoled in April apprently for 5 articles he wrote and 2 interviews he gave criticising the Communist Government in China for failing to uphold human rights. How pathetic is that? Hu has actively campaigned on behalf of AIDS/HIV sufferers and other dissidents such as Chen Guangcheng over a number of years. This year's Nobel peace prize could be awarded to a Chinese dissident to highlight China's human rights record in the wake of the Olympic Games, according to experts who closely follow the workings of the award.
"The prize will go this year to a Chinese dissident and I believe the most likely [recipient] will be Hu Jia, perhaps together with his wife [Zeng Jinyan]," said Stein Toennesson, director of the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo, and a close observer of the peace prize. "He has become the most well known Chinese dissident now and it has been a very long time since anyone [related to China] has won the prize." The last occasion was the Dalai Lama in 1989.  23 September What the hell is going on with my hometown?! A young man was stabbed Sunday aboard a Greyhound bus travelling near the town of White River, about 300 kilometres north of Sault Ste. Marie, Ont.
Police are investigating a stabbing aboard a Greyhound bus bound for Winnipeg, an incident in which a young man was attacked by another passenger as the vehicle travelled through northern Ontario.
The man who was stabbed is believed to be in his 20s. He was taken to hospital Sunday afternoon with minor injuries, the Sault Star newspaper reported. Police arrested a 28-year-old man near the town of White River, about 300 kilometres north of Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., shortly after the bus driver let him get off at the side of the highway. "I can confirm that an incident did occur aboard one of our buses," said Greyhound spokesperson Abby Wambaugh, speaking from Dallas, Texas. "The incident occurred 10 miles east of White River," she said. "The bus originated in Toronto and was headed for its final destination of Winnipeg." Wambaugh said the company is "co-operating fully" with Ontario Provincial Police in the investigation. Another bus was provided for the 13 remaining passengers to continue on their trip. The incident comes less than two months after a Greyhound passenger beheaded Tim McLean, a 22-year-old man from Winnipeg, in front of children with just a comon knife sparking questions about security on buses. Vince Weiguang Li, 40, is charged with second-degree murder and is undergoing a psychiatric evaluation to see whether he is fit to stand trial. He's scheduled to appear in court Oct. 6. |
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