Ways That Are Dark

Was it just yesterday that I wrote about cut and paste journalism in China? Then today, China proves once again that when it comes to making mistakes, they still do things bigger and better than everyone else.

From The Guardian’s This week we want to know all about … The Homer Simpson X-ray:

Xinhua, the state news agency, published a health report on its English-language website, China View, under the headline: ‘Two new genes found for multiple sclerosis.’ It was illustrated by an X-ray scan of a human head, presumably from the agency’s picture library. Unfortunately, it was a cartoon X-ray image of Homer Simpson, he of the domed head and doughnut-sized mouth - and walnut-sized brain.

Doh!

This cock-up is nearly as big as the time that Beijing Evening News plagiarized a satirical article from The Onion and passed it off as real news, not knowing the difference. I wrote about that in Beijing buns a fabricated story?

You wouldn’t expect the official state news agency to have a sense of humor, but it’s not asking too much for them to set an example when it comes to copyright infringement and intellectual property.

This is a short follow up on the Chinese government’s directive to local media that all news must be good news. The new rules are adding more pressure to the already challenging job of copying and pasting articles from Reuters.

The task is not always easy, as one episode showed during ceremonies Aug. 8 marking the one-year countdown to the Beijing Games.

The government-run China Daily ran an item on its Web site that evening pointing out that the site of the festivities, Tiananmen Square, was also the place where in 1989 the People’s Liberation Army crushed pro-democracy demonstrators, killing many. The item — true but touching on a subject banned from Chinese newspapers — was taken down the next morning and an investigation was launched. The author, colleagues said, had lifted the sentence directly from the Reuters news agency in a copy-and-paste maneuver common in Chinese journalism.

The offending journalist was suspended without pay for a month and fined the equivalent of $133, they said.

The above cut and pasted from The Washington Post article: Chinese Media Told to Play Up Positives of Traffic Test.

You would expect bank employees to have some required skills when it comes to handling money. It seems that two not so smart bank employees in Hebei province ended up becoming two not so smart bank robbers. With unfettered access to the vault, Ren Xiaofeng and Ma Xiangjing stole 51 million yuan and spent most of the money on lottery tickets. Read on:

The two thought that by buying millions of yuan in tickets they would eventually win back enough to replace the missing funds and allow them to leave their low paying jobs for a life of luxury, press reports said.

“Ma Xiangdong and I both like to play the lottery, we thought that we could use the money and buy lottery tickets and win the big prize. We were going to pay the bank back, we never intended to rob the bank.”

“The most we ever spent on lottery tickets at one time was 14.1 million yuan, we were thinking that we could win double what we had stolen,” said Ren, the father of two-year-old twins.

“But we didn’t win. It was at that time that we knew we were finished and that we had better escape,” he said. “So we decided we should steal some more money and flee Handan forever.”

Ren and Ma are facing charges of corruption and the illegal use of public funds. They face execution if convicted.

Read the original AFP article Bumbling Chinese bank robbers spotlight poor management.

A 25 year old British blogger who works for China Daily in Beijing has used some of that sly, dry wit that the British are famous for, to blog about all the recent goings on in China. It’s a worthy enough recap of recent events to reprint in its entirety. Enjoy!

That’s enough already, China! You’re killing me!

I woke up this morning and ate some baozi. They were disgusting! I’m sure I they were made of cardboard.

To get rid of the strange taste I brushed my teeth. Unfortunately the toothpaste contained diethylene glycol, which can cause nausea, abdominal pain, dizziness, urinary problems, kidney failure, breathing problems, lethargy, convulsions, coma and even death, so I spat it out and rinsed with clean water from my water cooler.

Unfortunately I had read in the Beijing Times that water in water coolers is probably just ordinary tap water. Officials say tap water is now clean, but the problem is that the pipes carrying it are old and dirty, making the final product risky.

I therefore skipped the water and had some fruit juice. What bad luck I was having! It just so happened that the fruit juice I had purchased was in the small 20% group of fruit juice products that are substandard.

Bored with beverages I had a light snack to take my mind off things. I ate a sweet but it was horrendously sweet, so I then had a prawn. Unfortunately the prawn was clearly contaminated with antibiotic residues and carcinogens so I had to throw it away.

My dog was looking hungry as I discarded foodstuff after foodstuff, and I realized it must be his dinner time. He tucked into his pet food, but I was shocked when he suddenly keeled over and died.

I felt very sad at the death of my dog so I decided to take a walk in the fresh air. Unfortunately it wasn’t a blue sky day, so the air was heavy with suspended particulates, carbon monoxide and nitrous oxide. Better give that a miss, I thought, and instead I resolved to drown my sorrows in booze.

It was at this juncture that my run of terrible luck changed.

It just so happened that the beer I had purchased was from the 5% of Chinese beers that don’t contain cancer-causing formaldehyde.

I’ll drink to that!

More China news tomorrow.