China’s Brutal Chengguan Police Are Told to Get Polite
China’s despised chengguan, or urban-management police, are hated for their heavy-handed and often violent approach — but in the southern city of Guangzhou they’re trying to improve their image with a...
View ArticleChinese Officials in Search of Goons Turn to College Students
The controversial part-time jobs never happened, at least in the realm of officialdom. On Friday, an online scandal ensued after news leaked out that university students in the southwestern Chinese...
View ArticleA Season in Hell: The Nightmare of Australian Wildfires
There were hundreds of people at the Springwood Sports Centre, an evacuation point in the foothills of the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney. Most of them were elderly, disabled, or with young children —...
View ArticleGirl in Ireland Returned to Roma Family After DNA Test
Embarrassed police in Ireland returned a blonde, blue-eyed girl to a Roma couple on Wednesday, after a DNA test confirmed the 7-year-old was the pair’s biological daughter. Acting on a tip-off from the...
View ArticleThe Seven-Story Chinese Office Block Built for Just Eight Officials
When China’s Premier Li Keqiang came into office early this year, he vowed there would be no more new government buildings constructed over the next five years — in order to crack down on ostentatious...
View ArticleThe Welfare State Isn’t Dead, It Simply Moved to Asia
The welfare state in the West is on the run. Right now in Washington, the White House and Congress are haggling over what to do with key entitlement programs like Medicare, which are key to supporting...
View Article‘They’re Walking Because There’s Nothing Else’: Dazed Survivors Struggle in...
An international relief effort is under way, three days after Supertyphoon Haiyan — the strongest recorded storm to make landfall anywhere on earth — tore through the central Philippines with...
View ArticleFilipinos Return to Leyte, Afraid of What They Will Find
It’s quite likely that the ticket office of Roble Shipping in Cebu has always been a gloomy sort of place. Fluorescent lights, inefficient air conditioners, lines that never move. In one corner, a...
View ArticleA Family Reunites Amid The Devastation Left By Supertyphoon Haiyan
There’s a shudder as the ferry Sacred Star sets off from the pier in Cebu, and a shudder among its passengers too. They’re bound for Baybay, a port on the western coast of Leyte province, which bore...
View ArticleSupertyphoon Haiyan: Getting the Hell Out of Ground Zero
In the middle of a colorless plain of wreckage that was once a barangay of Tacloban there stands a single battered but upright house. You could call the owners lucky because they have a roof over their...
View ArticleIndia To Tendulkar: Thanks For The Memories
The website selling tickets for Sachin Tendulkar’s last test match at the Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai recorded more than 19 million hits within its first hour of ticket sales — and only 5,000 tickets...
View ArticleFrenemies: The Indonesian-Australian Relationship Nears Its Nadir
On Sunday morning, while waiting for his flight to the Sumatran town of Bengkulu, Indonesian democracy activist Rumadi Ahmad tweeted: “I keep praying that Indonesian-Australian relations won’t reach...
View ArticleFurious Pakistanis Block NATO Supply Routes to Protest Drone Strikes
Pakistani cricket star turned politician Imran Khan has been leading protests against U.S. drone strikes in the country by choking off the NATO supply routes that run to Afghanistan through the...
View ArticleNo Indian Flag at Sochi Opening Ceremony
A bureacratic snag will force India’s Olympic athletes to wave a generic flag at the opening ceremony of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, rather than the orange, white and green. Yahoo News reports...
View ArticleThe World’s Deadliest Place for Shark Attacks Tries to Figure Out How to Stop...
People are entering the waters off the west coast of Australia rather gingerly these days. Following a fatal attack on a surfer at Gracetown, 270 km south of Perth, on Nov. 23 — the second shark attack...
View ArticleThe Hindus of Bangladesh Fear for Their Future
Subhash Ghosh was away when, early on Dec. 13, dozens of activists from Bangladesh’s largest Islamist party, Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), descended on the home in which generations of his family have lived....
View ArticleAustralia Is Melting Under a Horrifying Heatwave
Australians are used to heat. But not like this. Adelaide was the hottest city in the world on Thursday as temperatures there peaked at 44.2°C. Authorities scheduled blackouts to prevent a meltdown of...
View ArticleThe Australian Tycoon Who Wants Pakistan to Free Its Slaves in Return for Coal
The Taliban insurgency afflicting Pakistan has shifted attention from the country’s myriad social woes, among them a brutal system of bonded labor that amounts to a modern-day form of slavery. The...
View ArticleRepeat After Me, Class: The Senkaku Islands Belong to Japan
Japan is to revise official high school teaching manuals to assert its territorial claims over disputed islands, in a move that has angered China and South Korea, AP reports. The textbook revisions...
View ArticleShould Schapelle Corby Really Be Paid $2.7 Million for an Interview?
Australia has always had a soft spot for villains. From war criminal Breaker Morant to bushranger Ned Kelly, to hit man Mark “Chopper” Read, the nation has a penchant for casting aside inconvenient...
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