Widespread speculation on the internet has begun as to whether a secondary school in earthquake-ravaged Lushan county, funded by the Hong Kong government, had been constructed using substandard materials.

Cracked and peeling walls at Lushan County Junior Secondary School exposed bricks that were either hollow or filled with “polystyrene foam”, party mouthpiece People’s Daily reported on Thursday.

Netizens on the Chinese blogosphere began spreading the news after the revelations arose earlier this week. Many placed the blame …

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Reports of Marvel Comics’ Black Panther coming to theaters soon is being confirmed by MTV and plans to have Morris Chestnut play the role of the first African-American superhero are being confirmed by the actor himself.

“It’s time to get familiar with the Black Panther character!” tweeted the “Boys N the Hood” and “Kick Ass 2” star.

Created by writer-editor Stan Lee and illustrator-co-plotter Jack Kirby, before the inception of the Black Panther Party, the Black Panther …

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Mobile phone company Samsung has admitted to using tin sourced from Indonesia’s controversial Bangka Island, where an investigation last year by the Guardian and environmental charity Friends of the Earth (FoE) found that unregulated tin mining depends on child labour, wrecks the environment and kills an estimated 150 miners every year.

The admission from the world’s best-selling smartphone manufacturer follows intense pressure from FoE and 15,000 concerned consumers who had contacted Samsung, demanding the company investigate …

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KUWAIT CITY (AP) — Kuwait put proposals to impose tough new media laws on hold Thursday after the country’s prime minister suggested that objections from press groups and others could force the Gulf nation to scrap the plans.

Rights groups and media watchdogs have criticized the draft law, announced earlier this month, because it would impose possible penalties such as fines of nearly $1 million for insulting Kuwait’s Western-backed emir. The proposals also would give authorities …

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Wikipedia editors have started quietly moving female authors out of the “American novelists” category and into a newly-created sub-category for “American women novelists,” with the intention, it seems, of creating an”American novelists” page comprised entirely of men. There is currently no corollary sub-category for “American men novelists.”

As American (woman) novelist Amanda Filipacchi explained in the New York Times on Wednesday, the process has so far affected women writers whose last names begin with A or …

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BEIJING — In the deadliest ethnic violence in China since 2009, 21 people were killed in confrontations Tuesday between police and Uighur residents of Kashgar, the country’s westernmost city.

Among the dead were 15 police and neighborhood security officers and six people that the state media described as “mobsters.’’

Kashgar, which lies close to China’s borders with Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, has been a frequent site of violence between the dominant ethnic Han Chinese and the Uighurs, a …

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The Boston Marathon bombings killed three and injured more than 180. The West, Texas industrial explosion killed at least 14 and injured more than 180. Guess which one drew the greater media and law enforcement response?

If it turns out that the West, Texas explosion is the result of a “terrorist act,” expect federal law enforcement officials and the mass media to fly to Texas from Boston. But until then, don’t expect much.

One reason — our …

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Struggling homeowners who received loan modifications under a federal government program are defaulting on their mortgages at an alarming rate, according to a watchdog report released Wednesday.

The report from the special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program said the Treasury Department’s Home Affordable Modification Program, or HAMP, has failed to ensure that mortgage reductions are sustainable.

Home loans modified in the third and fourth quarters of 2009 are now defaulting at a rate of …

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Last year, after being voted out of office by the shareholders who technically pay their salaries, 55 directors at publicly-traded American companies did something rather unusual: they refused to step down. In each of those 55 cases, the directors were protected by fellow board members and allowed to remain atop their corporate perches.

Scott Zdrazil said that’s an outrage and he’s fighting to make such situations a thing of the past.

“Elections to the corporate boardroom in …

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Far from surrendering, the defenders of austerity are digging deeper.

The latest to join the resistance is Harvard’s Gregory Mankiw, a former adviser to President George W. Bush and presidential candidate Mitt Romney. In a blog post, he comes to the aid of his fellow Harvard economists, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, whose oft-cited research on government debt and economic growth was recently revealed to be full of mistakes, which the economists have compounded with still …

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