watertank: (Default)
Nov 30 06:09 AM US/Eastern
Chinese police are to stop arresting women who carry condoms, traditionally seen as evidence of prostitution, in an effort to help curb the spread of AIDS, state press said Friday.

Despite efforts to stop the practice, women in China are still being sent to labour camps for prostitution offences merely because they were carrying condoms when detained by police, the report said, quoting an expert.

"We have investigated many education-through-labour camps and we have found that for those sentenced for prostitution, the sole evidence was that they possessed condoms," Xinhua quoted the unnamed expert as telling an AIDS conference here.

Copyright AFP 2007
watertank: (Default)
Had a long conversation with a friend who returned home after spending four very successful, business-wise, years in China. His main motivation for coming back was, "I want my children to see blue sky once in a while." When I didn't get it he explained that air pollution in Beijing and Shanghai is so bad that one can see the sun there only maybe ten times a year. Lots of other interesting stories, good and bad.

Need to log the conversation.
watertank: (Default)
China is on its way to becoming not only the world’s largest economy, but also its largest polluter. Of the world’s twenty most polluted cities, sixteen are in China. Ninety percent of the country’s cities have contaminated groundwater. The World Bank predicts that in the next fifteen years, China’s shortage of clean water will create 30 million “environmental refugees.”

China’s pollution problems, moreover, are no longer solely its own. Winds that whip up over the Gobi Desert sweep dark clouds of mercury, soot, and carbon monoxide to South Korea and Japan; as much as 40 percent of the air pollution in these countries can be traced to China. The toxic plumes travel further afield, now detected by scientists in San Francisco and Lake Tahoe. On bad days, a quarter of Los Angeles’s smog originates in China. Later this year, China is expected to overtake the United States as the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases; within twenty-five years, its annual contribution to global warming could triple.
...
Not only is China’s emerging environmental movement tolerated by the central government; for the most part, it’s encouraged. More than 3,000 groups like Green Camel Bell currently operate in China, constituting the largest and most developed segment of the country’s budding civil society. Some NGO leaders are even consulted by government officials and praised by the state-controlled media.



Read the whole thing.
watertank: (Default)
The H5N1 flu virus has been circulating continuously in poultry in south-eastern China for a decade, scientists have found. A massive genetic analysis shows the virus has mainly been spread by poultry, but also that wild birds carried it from southeast China to Turkey.

Robert Webster of St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, US, a co-author of the paper, says this shows the virus originated in those provinces, and has been circulating in the region ever since, long enough to evolve divergent strains.

These strains then “colonised” neighbouring areas. Viruses from Vietnam and Thailand match Guangdong viruses, while Indonesia has its own related cluster. Genes from Vietnamese viruses reveal repeated introductions from Guangxi, most recently in 2005. This contrasts with past insistence by Chinese officials that H5N1 exists only in isolated cases in China, and did not necessarily originate there.

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8686
watertank: (Default)
ламаистские храмы, курительницы и молящиеся красотки в журнале [livejournal.com profile] china_cat
http://www.livejournal.com/users/china_cat/175276.html
http://www.livejournal.com/users/china_cat/174742.html
watertank: (Me: gecko galaxy)
Один из драконов возле храма Конфуция в Пекине у меня прочно ассоциируется с библейской историей о жене Лота. Она взглянула на пылающие Содом и Гоморру и окаменела.




Взгляд крупным планом (c) Ирины Чудновой... )
watertank: (Default)
[livejournal.com profile] china_cat вывесила новые китайские картинки на общую тему "львы и коммунисты".
http://www.livejournal.com/users/china_cat/172945.html
http://www.livejournal.com/users/china_cat/173183.html

очень рекомендую. особенно трибуны и красные флаги.
неделю назад, как только их увидел, где-то глубоко в спинном мозге шевельнулся пионерский инстинкт счастливого советского детства: захотелось идти строем, отдавать салют, равняться на портрет вождя.

Урааааааа! Ураааа! Ураааааааа!

всего за трёху (25 уаней) можно подняться на трибуну и окинуть взглядом прогрессивного лидера главную площадь мира Тянь Ань Мень (?). правда, как рассказали мне потом знакомые местные китайцы, получившие образование в США, обсуждать политические события на этой площади с иностранцами не рекомендуется. народу много, могут и настучать. все как в счастливом детстве!

Урааааааа! Ураааа! Ураааааааа!
watertank: (Me: gecko galaxy)



(f-f) Buddhist temple. Beijing, China.

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