Beijing Beat: Women Make Noise. Romance for rent. For young, single city professionals, the Spring Festival holidays present many reasons to be fearful: standing in line for hours to get a train ticket, exhausting long journeys, stuffing red envelopes with cash. Arguably the No 1 reason is the prospect of turning up at home alone. Not only does it give parents the opportunity to nag - "Your classmates and cousins are married and have children. What's wrong with you? " - but it is also likely to result in a holiday spent on blind dates.
To ease the pressure, Chinese singletons are simply paying people to pose as partners for their holiday homecoming. On Dec 14, Tang Yongxue stood on a street in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province, and waved a placard that read: "Fake boyfriend needed for Spring Festival - 10,000 yuan ($1,500) for five days' work. " Although dismissed as a publicity stunt by many people, the incident highlights the huge pressure on China's growing population of single urbanites to marry. Give me your deepest, most profound quote you know. : AskReddit. President John F Kennedy Secret Society Speech version 2. The President and the Press: Address before the American Newspaper Publishers Association. Exclusive: ‘The Fourth Estate is dead,’ former CIA analyst declares | Raw Story. By Friday, December 10, 2010 12:53 EDT ‘The Empire’ is ‘being threatened by a slingshot in the form of a computer’ Traditional lines of communication between the people and the press have fallen into such disrepair in America that a whole new approach is necessary to challenge the military-industrial-governmental complex, according to a former CIA analyst sympathetic to WikiLeaks.
“The Fourth Estate is dead,” Ray McGovern, of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, told Raw Story in an exclusive interview. ”The Fourth Estate in his country has been captured by government and corporations, the military-industrial complex, the intelligence apparatus. Captive! McGovern explained that the term the “Fourth Estate,” known today as the news media in the US, was first coined by 18th century British statesman Edmund Burke. “That was very powerful back then,” McGovern said. McGovern said that modern people can now become informed through what he termed “The Fifth Estate.” Insightly: Google Apps CRM and Project Management. Three Books To Quell Your Quarter-Life Crisis. iStockphoto It's 7:50 a.m., and you've indulged the snooze button for longer than you'd planned.
You're not terribly excited about work, but feel better once you've thrown on your crisp, collared shirt and dress pants; donning your professional uniform still evokes a feeling of purpose, even now, two years out of college. So what if your work get-up is the only part of the job that makes you feel important? It pays the bills, it's better than living with Mom and Dad, and while you have inklings of what you might want to do — write, go to grad school, make movies, start a business — none of that feels overwhelmingly right or certain, so until it does, why rock the boat?
(Even if the boat is, at best, mediocre.) So you stick with it. We are today's recent college graduates; we have virtually limitless opportunities, but that freedom can breed indecision — and complacency. All In The Timing: Fourteen Plays By David Ives, paperback 336 pages, Vintage, list price: $15.95 Sometimes A Great Notion. 11 Tricks to Cutting Travel Costs in 2011.