Two Chinese bullet trains have
collided with two coaches
falling off a bridge after a lightning strike disabled the first train and signaling failed to alert the second in time. A few months previously the railways ministry
expressed and subsequently
retracted concerns that builders had ignored safety standards to complete construction more quickly.
[more inside]
posted by jeffburdges
on Jul 23, 2011 -
42 comments
Prison administrators in China have found a new use for forced prison labour:
gold-farming operations, in which prisoners play multiplayer games for hours on end, handing over the gold they acquire to the guards, who sell it online for real money.
posted by acb
on May 25, 2011 -
93 comments
Interactive map of international adoptions, from the superlative Schuster Institute
for Investigative Journalism. The site contains an amazing amount of information about corruption in international adoption in countries like
Nepal and
Vietnam.
posted by the young rope-rider
on Apr 19, 2011 -
18 comments
Bill Moyers interviews David Simon "Again, we would have to ask ourselves a lot of hard questions. The people most affected by this are black and brown and poor. It’s the abandoned inner cores of our urban areas. As we said before, economically, we don’t need those people; the American economy doesn’t need them. So as long as they stay in their ghettos and they only kill each other, we’re willing to pay for a police presence to keep them out of our America."
posted by bitmage
on Apr 17, 2011 -
67 comments
"The paper puts forward a small but novel idea of how we can cut down the incidence of bribery. There are different kinds of bribes and what this paper is concerned with are bribes that people often have to give to get what they are legally entitled to. I shall call these 'harassment bribes'. Suppose an income tax refund is held back from a taxpayer till he pays some cash to the officer. Suppose government allots subsidized land to a person but when the person goes to get her paperwork done and receive documents for this land, she is asked to pay a hefty bribe. These are all illustrations of harassment bribes. Harassment bribery is widespread in India and it plays a large role in breeding inefficiency and has a corrosive effect on civil society. The central message of this paper is that
we should declare the act of giving a bribe in all such cases as legitimate activity [PDF]. In other words the giver of a harassment bribe should have full immunity from any punitive action by the state."
[more inside]
posted by vidur
on Mar 31, 2011 -
37 comments
How two American kids became big-time weapons traders - "Working with nothing but an Internet connection, a couple of cellphones and a steady supply of weed, the two friends — one with a few college credits, the other a high school dropout — had beaten out Fortune 500 giants like General Dynamics to score the huge arms contract. With a single deal, two stoners from Miami Beach had turned themselves into the least likely merchants of death in history." (
via; previously on
arms contractors)
posted by kliuless
on Mar 21, 2011 -
69 comments
Rep. Peter King (R-NY), not content with
questioning Muslim loyalty, has introduced
HR 607, the "Broadband for First Responders Act of 2011,"
to take away HAM radio from amateur operators, and sell it to he highest commercial bidder in order to fund some kind of separate internet for cops.
posted by Slap*Happy
on Mar 10, 2011 -
72 comments
Malibu's Most Wanted: one might sensibly assume Mel Gibson is the worst person in his neighborhood. One would be wrong. Come on down, Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue.
posted by yerfatma
on Feb 25, 2011 -
20 comments
Election night, Kenya, 2007. The votes roll in, and at some time around 11pm, as victory seemed imminent for the opposition candidate, all televisions in the country went black. When broadcasts resumed in the morning, the incumbent had materialized enough votes to soundly win the election. In the aftermath, a
wave of violence broke out in which some 1,300 people were killed. In opposition to a domestic investigation of the violence, Kenyan MP's chanted 'Don't be vague; go to the Hague!' Now, three years later,
some officials are a bit less enthusiastic. A series of articles on the ICC investigation of political violence in Kenya:
I II III IV [more inside]
posted by kaibutsu
on Dec 15, 2010 -
5 comments
Andrew Fraser was a successful Victorian barrister until he was
jailed for drug trafficking. The investigation against him was led by Detective Sergeant Malcolm Rosenes, but before Fraser entered prison Rosenes was charged with
drug trafficking and conspiracy, for which he himself was later imprisoned. In an unlikely twist, Rosenes later approached Fraser to write an account of police corruption in Victoria.
The book has been
withdrawn from sale in Victoria, allegedly because it identifies informers and a "protected witness", but the publishers
say that the material is old news that is
publicly available (pdf), while Fraser suggests that the government wishes to avoid any embarrassment immediately before a State election.
posted by Joe in Australia
on Oct 15, 2010 -
11 comments
Take a game like Super Mario Bros. Introduce garbage data into the code, either through random Game Genie codes or a corruptor program. Try to play what results,
while the laws of reality slowly go insane in the background, and upload the "best" results to YouTube. Can Mario make it to the princess
when stomping a Goomba turns the air to water,
when hitting a block ends the world,
when the world is infinite length,
if the ground can't support his weight,
when touching a flagpole destroys his mind,
when brought into being over an ocean immediately before a fatal heart attack,
before the enemies turn into Bowser-halves,
while the universe is freaking out around him?
(hint: no)
posted by JHarris
on Oct 11, 2010 -
50 comments
Joeurt Puk (aka Joe Cook) is the father of Cambodian baseball. In
this feature by ESPN, Patrick Hruby looks into Cook's background and finds that Cook may not be the tireless philanthropist he claims to be.
[more inside]
posted by reenum
on May 19, 2010 -
6 comments
A Glimpse of the World All across Africa, new tracks are being laid, highways built, ports deepened,
commercial contracts signed -- all on an unprecedented scale, and led by China, whose
appetite for commodities seems
insatiable. Do China's grand designs promise the transformation, at last, of a star-crossed continent? Or merely its exploitation?
The author travels deep into the heart of Africa, searching for answers.
[more inside]
posted by kliuless
on Apr 26, 2010 -
20 comments
