Ruihua Old Popsicle, which sells around 50,000 units per day for 1 yuan each, mostly in tourist sites, contains bacteria 1,767 times higher than that stipulated in the national standards for cold beverages, according to the Beijing News.
Most paper cups available on the Chinese market would not meet the new national standard, which comes into effect on June 1, according to industry insiders. The country's first regulation on disposable cups will focus on raw materials, additives and printed patterns, and is aimed at boosting consumer safety. However, as the new rule does not include details on any penalties for offenders, experts predicted on Monday that the standard is unlikely to have a major impact in the short-term. "Most cups, not only those served at small, roadside restaurants, but also those provided by big-name catering companies, will be substandard once the national standard comes into force," said Dong Jinshi, executive vice-president of the International Food Packaging Institute in Beijing.
It’s one tragedy after another. After Mianyang, Sichuan suffered in the horrible earthquake of 2008, millions of RMB were donated to rebuild a local school. Now, that school has suffered not from a quake, but from greed. With over 16,000 re-posts since its appearance, its ruined husk is Sina Weibo’s most viral image of May 21, 2012 according to Hong Kong University’s Weiboscope. Weiboscope displays the most widely re-posted images among prominent users.
A policy directive sent by the U.S. Department of State to universities that sponsor Confucius Institutes suggests that the language and cultural centers that are a key piece of the Chinese government's diplomatic outreach will have to change how they operate or fall afoul of American visa laws. The memorandum, dated May 17, states that any academics at university-based institutes who are teaching at the elementary- and secondary-school levels are violating the terms of their visas and must leave at the end of this academic year, in June. And it says that, after a "preliminary review," the State Department has determined that the institutes must obtain American accreditation in order to continue to accept foreign scholars and professors as teachers.
From their website:
The Chronicle of Higher Education is the No. 1 source of news, information, and jobs for college and university faculty members and administrators.
Based in Washington, D.C., The Chronicle has more than 70 writers, editors, and international correspondents.
Online, The Chronicle is published every weekday and is the top destination for news, advice, and jobs for people in academe. The Chronicle's website features the complete contents of the latest issue; daily news and advice columns; thousands of current job listings; an archive of previously published content; vibrant discussion forums; and career-building tools such as online CV management, salary databases, and more.
The Chronicle's audited website traffic is more than 12.8 million pages a month, seen by more than 1.9 million unique visitors.
In print, The Chronicle is published in two sections: Section A, which contains news and jobs, and The Chronicle Review, a magazine of arts and ideas. Subscribers also receive the annual Almanac of Higher Education and special reports on diversity, the academic workplace, online learning, and other topics.The Chronicle newspaper is available in print and digital formats.
The newspaper is subscribed to by more than 51,000 academics and has a total readership of more than 215,000.
The Chronicle appears weekly during the academic year, less frequently May through August and December (a total of 43 issues a year).
The Chronicle is a nine-time finalist for the National Magazine Awards, and one of its columnists was a finalist for a 2005 Pulitzer Prize. The Chronicle has also received honors from the Education Writers Association, the Society of News Design, the EPpy Awards, and the Webby Awards, among others. In 2007 The Chronicle was ranked in the 10 most credible news sources by Erdos & Morgan, a widely used survey of thought leaders in the United States. The Utne Reader that year named The Chronicle for "best political coverage" among independent newspapers.
Last week, Chinese state-run TV personality Yang Rui published a message through his verified account on the Twitter-like microblogging service Sina Weibo in which he appeared to throw his support behind a campaign by the Beijing Public Security Bureau to rid the city of foreigners who had either entered the city illegally or were living or working there without the proper visas.
Over the past few weeks, stories coming out of China have dominated the global headlines. First came the Bo Xilai political scandal, followed by the story of Chen Guangcheng, the blind dissident, and more recently, the expulsion of Al Jazeera's sole China correspondent Melissa Chan. Chinese authorities have yet to specify the reasons why Chen was not allowed to stay, and it has left room for speculation, mostly negative, in the Western media. Meanwhile, Beijing is addressing what it sees as an unfair deal in the Western media through its own soft power push. China has reportedly spent $6mn on news channels broadcasting in English, Russian and Arabic. In this week's News Divide, we look at one of China's growing exports - the image of itself.
From their website:
Al Jazeera America is the U.S. based news channel that provides both domestic and international news coverage for its American audiences. Translated from Arabic, "Al Jazeera" means "peninsula." Our logo stays true to its Arabian roots with a distinctive calligraphy of the network name.
Headquartered in New York City with bureaus in 12 cities across the United States, Al Jazeera America is available in more than 60 million homes in the U.S. across major television providers, including DirecTV, Comcast/Xfinity, Time Warner Cable, DISH Network, AT&T U-Verse, Verizon FiOS, and Bright House Networks.
More than two-thirds of the new airports under construction today are being built in China. Chinese airlines expect to triple their fleet size over the next decade and will account for the fastest-growing market for Boeing and Airbus. But the Chinese are determined to be more than customers. In 2011, China announced its Twelfth Five-Year Plan, which included the commitment to spend a quarter of a trillion dollars to jump-start its aerospace industry. Its goal is to produce the Boeings and Airbuses of the future. Toward that end, it acquired two American companies: Cirrus Aviation, maker of the world’s most popular small propeller plane, and Teledyne Continental, which produces the engines for Cirrus and other small aircraft.
In China Airborne, James Fallows documents, for the first time, the extraordinary scale of this project and explains why it is a crucial test case for China’s hopes for modernization and innovation in other industries. He makes clear how it stands to catalyze the nation’s hyper-growth and hyper-urbanization, revolutionizing China in ways analogous to the building of America’s transcontinental railroad in the nineteenth century. Fallows chronicles life in the city of Xi’an, home to more than 250,000 aerospace engineers and assembly workers, and introduces us to some of the hucksters, visionaries, entrepreneurs, and dreamers who seek to benefit from China’s pursuit of aerospace supremacy. He concludes by examining what this latest demonstration of Chinese ambition means for the United States and the rest of the world—and the right ways to understand it. —Pantheon Books
Minxin Pei, San Francisco Chronicle (May 20, 2012)
The Economist (May 12, 2012)
John Berthelsen, Asia Sentinel (May 16, 2012)
An nice annotated collection of coverage and commentary on rights activist Chen Guangcheng's arrival in New York.
