The country which gave you bears riding bikes now proudly presents ... lion on horseback!





In an attempt to garner more viewers, an animal park in China treated viewers a bizarre display of a lion riding a horse. The horse sure doesn’t look very comfortable.

A Chinese court has jailed two officials after they let a blind contractor build a bridge which collapsed during construction and injured 12 people, the official Xinhua news agency said Monday.

Huang Wenge, township head of Bujia in the southeastern province of Jiangxi, and colleague Xia Jianzhong were sentenced to 18 months and one year in jail, respectively, for not stopping the project.

"Huang Wenge and Xia Jianzhong, who were in charge of road management and supervision, did not ask the contractors to provide certificates guaranteeing their proficiency. When they knew the bridge was being built by a blind contractor, they did not stop it. After the blind contractor changed the blueprint, he carried out the work only using a roughly drawn draft of the plan, which caused the bridge to collapse.” Xinhua did not explain how the contractor was able to run the project considering his inability to see.

I'm speechless!

Foot binding was a custom practiced on young females for approximately one thousand years in China, beginning in the 10th century and ending in the early 20th century.

In Chinese foot binding, young girls’ feet, usually at age 6 but often earlier, were wrapped in tight bandages so that they could not grow and develop normally; they would, instead, break and become highly deformed, not growing past 4-6 inches. As the girl reached adulthood, her feet would remain small and dysfunctional, prone to infection, paralysis, and muscular atrophy.

When I read about it in books, it sounds strange and unkind... when I see it in person, I am shocked and appalled!