Made in Brazil Daily Grail Frontpage Chinese 'nail house' owners live in the middle of motorways A new set of images taken last week captures four 'nail houses' in the city of Wuxi, eastern China, from aboveOwners refuse to move for new road projects in the city and as a result they now live in the middle of motorwaysSome roads have entered service regardless of the roadblocks, others are forced to halt constructionBuildings as such are known as 'dingzihu' or 'nail houses' because they refused to be hammered down By Tracy You For Mailonline Published: 17:49 GMT, 14 September 2015 | Updated: 19:33 GMT, 14 September 2015 China's 'nail house' owners might be the bravest residents in the world. As these defiant homeowners stand up against the authorities and refuse to move for urban developments, they often have to live in incredibly dangerous environment too. Scroll down for video A pink-roofed house (right) holds to its ground in the middle of a four-lane motorway near the Huishan High-speed Train Station in Wuxi Motorway built AROUND house in China as couple refuse move Loaded: 0%
7TH MAN MAGAZINE Home To save its stock markets, China is putting its whole financial system at risk When the General Assembly of the United Nations meets at the end of September, it will vote on whether or not an independent body should investigate alleged war crimes committed by the government of Sri Lanka during its 26-year civil conflict. The government of the newly elected president Maithripala Sirisena has insisted that a domestic truth and reconciliation commission—not unlike that instituted in post-apartheid South Africa—will be sufficient; but others disagree. “It is, I believe, an inescapable reality that Sri Lanka’s criminal justice system is not yet ready to handle these types of crimes,” said Zeid Raad Hussein, the UN’s human rights commissioner, at a news conference in Geneva. It’s true: Wounds are still fresh in Sri Lanka. Tensions between the two groups stretch back to the end of British rule in 1948, when Sri Lanka was known as Ceylon. In response to this systemic exclusion, the LTTE was formed in 1976 under the leadership of Velupillai Prabhakaran. Is this reform?
Oyster Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog Maybe This Global Slowdown Is Different The global economy is slowing down. A couple of the big emerging-market economies that drove much of the growth during the past 15 years have hit a wall, and the question of the moment is whether the biggest of them, China, is in real trouble too. Commodity prices are tanking. Trade volumes are down. The Baltic Dry Index of shipping costs, which rebounded from a record low earlier this year, is falling again. These are all characteristic of a cyclical downturn. But there could also be something else afoot. At this point these are just inklings, but I did what I always do when I have an inkling: I made some charts. After a spectacular rise in the 2000s, trade volumes plummeted after the 2008 financial crisis. Again, these things do go in waves. Still, I can't help but thinking (perhaps wishfully thinking) that what we're seeing might also be the beginnings of a plateauing in the world's demand for things -- and, even more, the resources needed to make those things. Well, sort of.
EclectEcon China’s Dual-Track Challenge by Andrew Sheng and Xiao Geng HONG KONG – With China's economic slowdown more apparent than ever, its prospects of avoiding a hard landing are weakening. Whether policymakers succeed will depend on whether they can navigate the challenges stemming from an increasingly divided dual-track economy. The latest year-on-year data, from January, highlight the danger. The consumer price index dropped to 0.8%; the producer price index fell by 4.3%; exports contracted by 3.3%; imports were down by 19.9%; and growth of broad money (M2) slowed by 1.4%. Moreover, the renminbi has come under downward pressure, owing partly to economic recovery in the United States, which has fueled capital outflows. Given huge declines in industrial profit growth (from 12.2% in 2013 to 3.3% last year) and in local-government revenues from land sales (which fell by 37% in 2014), there is considerable anxiety that today's deflationary cycle could trigger corporate and local-government debt crises.
theCHIVE - Probably the Best Site in the World – Keep Calm and Chive On Baidu’s ‘Medical Robot’: Chinese Search Engine Reveals Its AI for Health On a recent trip to Beijing, Wei Fan, a researcher for Baidu in Sunnyvale, Calif., had to deal with his mother’s unexpected ailment. Her knee ached. The wait to see doctors in the city is often arduous, so Wei called up an old friend who volunteered to stand in line for his mother. Even after leaving the waiting room, Wei said, patients like his mother may wait longer to see the right physician. His frustration with China’s overburdened health care system informed Baidu’s latest product: A voice translation app akin to WebMD. A majority of Chinese online turn to the Web first for health information, and voice search is far less cumbersome than text, Wei said. “From a patient’s point of view, you’d rather have something like natural language — something you can talk to, [so] you can describe multiple symptoms at the same time,” he told Re/code. Baidu’s advantage comes with scale. The team is also betting big on voice, a field where it may advance more in China than other rivals.
Marginal Revolution — Small steps toward a much better world.