Shanghai Building Collapses

Source: China Daily

A 13-floor apartment building under construction collapsed Saturday morning in Shanghai, killing one worker.

Witnesses said the whole building started to fall down at about 5:30 am on Saturday and a 28-year-old worker surnamed Xiao from Anhui province was buried in the collapse and killed, the Xinhua news agency reported. No other casualties are reported.

Zhang Supong, a witness across a river to the collapsed building, said his family and neighbors were shocked when they felt the earth shake in the morning.

"It was just like an earthquake," he told China Daily, adding there was no visual damage in his apartment.

The authorities have ordered suspension of the construction and a thorough investigation of the collapse.

A man, who is in his 30s and declined to be named, told China Daily that he just bought an apartment beside the collapse building and with this accident, he would terminate the contract with the property developers.

The apartment building is at a premium location in Shanghai, about five metro stops from downtown areas, and is sold at a price of 18,000 yuan per sq m.

Local media reported on Friday that some cracks appeared on the anti-flood bank near the collapsed building, but the cause of the cracks was also uncertain.

A) This is what happens when you cut corners (literally)
B) This is what happens when your building is 13 floors. It should have only been 8 floors.

Viaduct Bridge Collapses in China

An elevated road on Hongqi Road of Zhuzhou City in Hunan province collapsed, and at present the number of casualties is said to be at 9.


Youtube Link

Sad :(

What surprises me about the video, is not the fact a bridge collapsed in China, bridges can collapse anywhere, but how they get this footage! For a country where all media is censored, state tv often shows disasters or suicides very close up. you can see rescue workers, blood, limbs, bodies etcc.. This was the case during the earthquake last year as well where literally pictures of dead children were beamed around the world. Something that would not be allowed in the US. On American news we hear of death and disaster but often the camera and reporters are kept at a distance.

Sichuan earthquake relief money spent on luxury cars

Source: Telegraph

Officials in Sichuan province have outraged donors by buying a series of luxury cars while millions of refugees face freezing temperatures in makeshift shelters.

Almost every Chinese person donated money in the wake of the Sichuan earthquake last May in a display of charity that unified the country. The disaster claimed the lives of more than 87,000 people and was the deadliest earthquake to strike China for half-a-century.

However, there is growing evidence that a large slice of their pledges has been siphoned off or misused by local officials.

According to China's National Audit Office, there have been close to 2,000 complaints of corrupt behaviour. Some local officials exaggerated the death tolls in their counties in order to grab a larger share of relief aid. In Chongzhou City, the tourism bureau and transport department filed their paperwork twice in order to win 1.23 billion yuan (£123m) of additional aid.

The latest outrage came when a full inventory of the luxury cars purchased by Beichuan County was leaked onto the internet. Beichuan was totally destroyed and 3,000 of its residents have been consigned to temporary shelter for the next three years while a new site is chosen for their town.

According to the inventory, a number of top-of-the-range Toyota Land Cruisers and Nissan X-Trails were purchased, one of which cost over 1.1 million yuan (£110,000).

Can't say I'm surprised. What will it take for people to realize that communism is a fraud. Communism was grown through fear and lies. Through nationalism and poverty lines. People who are poor leaned towards communism in order to be more even with the rich. Little do they realize that the richer got poor and the poor became even worse. All the money goes to government officials. Always has always will. China is probably the richest country in the world yet the majority of its people still live in a hole in the ground. Fourty billion dollars for the worst Olympics in history. Where's that money now? And now one of the worst disaster in Chinese history? Where's that money now? It's fucking sad.