These pictures are tragic and horrifying, and deeply upsetting.

Now, Tom, I would ask you, what is the point of sending them out? This is, of course, a somewhat touchy political issue. But I would like to share with you my perspective as an American. I'm familiar with the history of these events, and have read a good book about them, "The Rape of Nanking", by Iris Chang. But I have to say that what I'm disturbed by more now is the Chinese fascination with this part of history, and how it fuels anti-Japanese sentiment.

These things are called "wartime atrocities", and, while they are inexcusable, what is a fact is that every country on earth, even China, is guilty of these kinds of things at some time in the past. America is routinely criticized for massacres committed in Vietnam, and, more recently, in, for example, the Abu Graib prison in Iraq. When I read about these kinds of things I feel deeply ashamed of my country, but I think that it's good that people bring them up and talk about them. On the other hand, what about Americans who criticize other country's behavior towards Americans? Believe me, there are a lot of these kinds of people. They talk, for example, of the extreme cruelty that would have to be in someone's heart to fly a planeload of innocent people into a building full of other innocent people. "Who could do such a thing?", they say. And then they use this as an excuse to go to war. This is one of the reasons that the Iraq war started out as fairly popular in the U.S.

Well, when I hear those kinds of things, I cringe. I think it is healthier to look at the wrongs that are committed by my own country, and try to make my country a better, more peaceful place, than it is to dwell on the wrongs committed against my country. So, when you send out this email full of these kinds of pictures, I would ask you, why? What is the point? These pictures are very inflammatory, and are used to incite people into hatred of the Japanese. Is that what you want to do? I don't think that's a very noble goal. The Japanese are people, human beings just like you and me -- I have a lot of Japanese friends, and I know that they are among the best people I have ever met.

I'm not a Christian, but one thing in the Bible is very poignant: "better to remove the log from your own eye before attending to the splinter in your own". If you think I'm wrong that Chinese people have committed atrocities, think again. You just don't hear about them very often, because your news and education have all been tightly controlled.

Zhang Liqiang, managing director of the Shanghai Health Education Institute, said the government didn't raise the price of tobacco because the economy of many Chinese provinces, such as Yunnan, depended on the tobacco industry. If the government put up the price too much, it would affect their economic development.

in Xiamen for example that the local television station had begun to broadcast news announcements in the literary register of Southern Min, though apparently the news announcer frequently had to consult a senior linguist at the University in order to learn the correct literary Southern Min pronunciation of characters.

Characters appeared to be associated too strongly with Mandarin to be widely useful, and it was noted that many Southern Min vocabulary items have no written form. Cheng estimates that 70% of the lexical items of Taiwanese are shared with Mandarin (1985a:353), and could thus presumably be written with the same characters; this leaves 30% non-shared lexical items for which characters would have to be coined.

A happy preference and a gracious compliment, but once the writer has allowed himself that much it becomes his duty to reread the book with his glasses on—not only to enter into the story of the writing, but to identify the devices (i.e., the inventions) by which the story was created and made to work upon him.

Zi allegedly offered to do a story about poor hygiene at meat bun stalls but failed to find any problems during two weeks of reporting.

"Paper baozi" was an item on Beijing TV's news a few days ago. The general idea was that Beijing has a lot of people using cardboard as the filling for baozi, the process it and then mix it with pork, in order to save cost, and the customers can't tell the difference. This afternoon we had our meeting to select stories, and it was suggested to use this as our cover story, I raised both hands in approval. Even though China's food product safety hasn't been an issue (there are too many problems, so it's not an issue), but when I saw this news I was surprised. If you think about this with the four great inventions, so far we have gunpowder mantou [馒头 mántou - steamed buns similar to baozi], paper baozi, we don't know how the compass and the printing press will be creatively harmonized with food products [he uses the word "和谐 héxié - harmony" here, which is amusing, because he's making fun of the government's recent push for a harmonious society]. During our meeting, the paper baozi suddenly made my colleagues have more confidence in our magazine's future -- since people can use corrugated cardboard to make baozi, a patent for food with magazine paper filling can't be far behind. When that happens, newsstands won't care if they can't find this magazine, when our magazine is printed, every day there will be lots of food vendors lining up to buy at a high price [I think this translation is good -- it also doesn't make sense in the original].

When I got home in the evening and saw that the news said the cardboard baozi was a fake story made by a freelance reporter of Beijing TV.

Interesting!

That's fine, let's have a Goldbach's conjecture-style exercise then.

A. Cardboard baozi is really fake news. According to this, that fake-news film used actors and scenes, and shot a file, then did post-production editing, and achieved a realistic result. Apparently, our criticisms of Chinese television is misplaced! In fact, Chinese television's production quality is comparable to high-tech Hollywood! As a Chinese person, today I really feel proud of Chinese TV.

B. The cardboard baozi story is real, and the story saying the cardboard baozi story is fake is fake. That's a little awkward-sounding, but really should make us even happier, because it confirms a truth, an harmonious society requires everybody to work to create it.

I have a suggestion to give the media: hire more freelance workers and trainees, in case of a rainy day.

妹妹和邻家小哥哥从小要好。

一天，他们在一块玩过家家，小哥哥对她说：“等我们长大后，我们真的结婚，你嫁给我，好吗？”

妹妹想了想，摇摇头说：“我想和你好。不过，我还是不能嫁给你。我爸爸常说，肥水不流外人田。再说你看我们家女的只嫁自己人。我妈妈嫁给我爸爸，婶婶嫁给伯伯，奶奶嫁给爷爷。”

Meimei and her neighbor little Gege were good childhood friends.

One day, they were outside playing, and little Gege said, "When we grow up, let's get married, okay?

Meimei thought for a while, then shook her head and said, I'd like to be with you, but I can't marry you. My father often says 肥水不流外人田. You can see the women in my family always marry within the family. My mother married my father, my aunt married my uncle, my grandmother married my grandfather."

12:24: 充分表明了市委 / 市政府尊重科学 / 尊重民意, 重视环保。

Make abundantly clear that the municipal Party committee / the city government values science, values the will of the people, and cares about the environment.

12:22: 6月2日下午, 中国科学院院士 / 厦门大学教授赵玉芬委托厦门大学新闻发言人潘世墨发表声明: 近日来, 赵院士本人从未接受过媒体记者的采访,

In the afternoon of June 2nd, the China Academy of Science official / Xiamen University professor Zhao Yu Fen entrusted Xiamen University news spokesperson Pan Shi Mo to issue the statement: in the last few days, Professor Zhao has not received an interview by any media reporter,

12:21: 也未授权媒体发表有关厦门 PX 项目的意见, 赵院士认为, 厦门市政府作出缓建 PX 项目并进行区域规划环评的决定是实事求是的,

also has never empowered the media to publish any of his opinions about the PX project, Professor Zhao believes that the Xiamen city government's [this next part, I'm not sure I've got right:] decision to delay construction of the PX Project carried out by the regional planning group is practical and realistic,

Hardships of early human life favored the evolution of certain cognitive tools, among them the ability to infer the presence of organisms that might do harm, to come up with causal narratives for natural events and to recognize that other people have minds of their own with their own beliefs, desires and intentions. Psychologists call these tools, respectively, agent detection, causal reasoning and theory of mind.

If you can posit minds in other people that you cannot verify empirically, suggests Paul Bloom, a psychologist and the author of “Descartes’ Baby,” published in 2004, it is a short step to positing minds that do not have to be anchored to a body. And from there, he said, it is another short step to positing an immaterial soul and a transcendent God.

We are born with an innate facility for language but the specific language we learn depends on the environment in which we are raised. In much the same way, he says, we are born with an innate tendency for belief, but the specifics of what we grow up believing — whether there is one God or many, whether the soul goes to heaven or occupies another animal after death — are culturally shaped.