Chinese fashion brand, 1436, recently unveiled its summer collection at an exhibition held at SKP, Beijing.
The brand’s creative director, Antonio Fontana, designed the latest collection with a bohemian flavor, featuring printed flower patterns in silk and chiffon.
The exhibition space was designed and created to resemble a movie studio and the models walked through as if they were acting on the silver screen.
Embed Video
As an intersection of Chinese and Western culture, Macao boasts a vibrant cultural scene that is characterized by cultural diversity.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of Macao’s return to China. The Cultural Affairs Bureau of the Macao SAR government will organize a series of cultural events, including Art Macao, a grand cultural festival, to celebrate the event.
Mok Lanlan, president of Cultural Affairs Bureau of the Macao SAR government, spoke with China Daily Website about the programs Macao plans to hold and what are some of the biggest changes that have taken place in Macao’s cultural landscape in the past two decades.
Mok Lanlan was in Beijing to attend the Conference on Dialogue of Asian Civilizations earlier this month.
Reporter: Hu Zhe
Camera: Yu Xiaoou & Fu Rui
Editing: Fu Rui
Subtitles: Yang Xiaoyu
WASHINGTON – The US Justice Department said on Thursday that it has filed 17 new charges against WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange, including receiving and unlawfully publishing classified military and diplomatic documents in 2010.
He was accused of violating the US Espionage Act. However, multiple US media outlets say the new charges raise profound First Amendment issues with concerns that such charges could set a dangerous precedent for journalists.
The new counts include one of conspiracy to receive national defense information, three of obtaining national defense information and 13 of disclosure of national defense information. Australian-born Assange, 47, faces a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison for each of the new counts if convicted.
The charges, contained in an indictment issued in US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, were revealed during a press conference held by the Justice Department officials in Washington D.C.
The US government has never successfully prosecuted a non-government official for publishing or sharing unlawfully leaked classified information, University of Chicago Law Professor Geoffrey Stone told NBC News.
“This is madness. It is the end of national security journalism and the first amendment.” WikiLeaks tweeted.
The secret documents that Assange published were provided by former US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, who was convicted at a court-martial trial in 2013 to 35 years in jail but released in 2017 months after receiving clemency from outgoing US President Barack Obama. Manning leaked some 700,000 military files including a battlefield video and diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks, the largest leak of classified data in US history.
Assange was sentenced to 50 weeks in jail on May 2 for breaching the Bail Act in Britain after having been expelled from Ecuador’s embassy in London, where he had lived for nearly seven years. He said at the time that he does not consent to being extradited to the United States over charges related to leaking government secrets.
The WikiLeaks databases contain approximately 90,000 Afghanistan war-related significant activity reports, 400,000 Iraq war-related significant activities reports, 800 Guantanamo Bay detainee assessment briefs and 250,000 US Department of State cables, according to local media reports, quoting prosecutors as sources.
A group of 536 swimmers from all over the country recently set a new Guinness World Record in the water in Yuncheng, North China’s Shanxi province.
The swimmers, dressed in red and yellow, created the pattern of a huge Five-starred Red Flag while floating on the city’s Salt Lake and held the pose for two minutes.
The activity was recognized by Guinness World Records as the world’s largest flag pattern made up of people on the water.
“I am quite excited to join in the activity,” Xu Meijuan, a swimmer from South China’s Guangdong province told the local media. “It is a good chance to enjoy the famous Salt Lake and express my love of my motherland.”
[Video by Xue Jun for chinadaily.com.cn]
Leading Chinese smartphone vendor Oppo is making a new effort to lure consumers with cost-effective devices and a partnership with Gundam, a science-fiction media franchise that features giant robots.
The new smartphone Oppo K3 comes with a protruding dual camera setup on the rear, with the main camera containing a 16 megapixel Sony sensor.
It sports a 3D curved-glass body and uses a metal mid-frame.
The device comes with a 6.5-inch display with full high-definition resolution. The front pop-up camera on the top features a 16 megapixel sensor and it can extend in just 0.74 seconds.
Priced from 1,599 yuan ($231), Oppo K3 is part of the company’s broader push to upgrade its product lineup so as to outcompete rivals in the highly competitive smartphone arena. Oppo is the second-largest smartphone vendor in China.
China’s mobile phone shipments reversed the downtrend over the past five consecutive months, surging 6.7 percent year-on-year in April and amounting to 36.53 million units, according to data from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology.
Oppo, previously known as a pioneer in writing big checks to hire celebrities as product spokespeople, is now pouring more resources into research and development, in the hope of sustaining its competence.
Oppo said it would invest 10 billion yuan in R&D this year and expand its R&D staff to over 10,000 people.
The company also unveiled a Gundam-edition power bank to appeal to fans of the giant robots.
A new guide to better living has been published in Chinese, Wang Ru reports.
At a time when people are increasingly dependent on mobile phones, Ryder Carroll is encouraging people to make plans with pen and paper.
The 39-year-old digital-product designer from New York has published the Chinese version of his book, which introduces his “bullet-journal” organizational method to help “people live an intentional, meaningful and productive life”.
According to Carroll, the approach is a combination of schedules, task lists, plans, diaries and other things.
Chinese review site Douban user Arnold says: “This is more than a book about self-management or daily schedule but one that tells you how to think and how to live.”
Adults are constantly bombarded with new information and come up with new thoughts.
Carroll encourages people to put down their thoughts and see their “mental inventory” since “holding thoughts in your mind is like trying to grasp water – it’s nearly impossible”.
“But by writing down our thoughts, we can capture them clearly and they can give you a pretty clear picture as to how you’re investing both your time and your energy in them,” he says.
The next step requires you to check what you have written down and ask yourself questions such as: “Why am I doing these things? Do they matter or are they actually holding me hostage?”
Carroll says he first noticed the importance of such questions when he started his own business in 2012.
“I worked really hard for two years, sacrificed my time, energy, friendships and many other things since people told me having your own company at my age was a great success. The company made money right away, but I didn’t feel happy. At that time, I found it actually didn’t matter to me. I invested so much effort but ended up finding I didn’t care about it.”
He discovered that people usually burden themselves with unnecessary responsibilities. They are distracted by all the things that their peers are doing or that society is pushing them to do.
He urges people to seek the “truly important things to do”. After the process, people can see what they have to do and what they aspire to do in their “mental inventory”.
Carroll provides many tips in his books about further procedures to accomplish them. “Ideas are not reliable since they come and go constantly, but with a system to back you up and supervise you, you can accomplish your goal more easily.”
Carroll was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder as a youth. It did not mean he could not focus but he focused on too many things at the same time. Since there was not a lot known about the condition back then, Carroll could find few tools to help himself. So, he started to develop his own methods, and shared them with his friends, who found them helpful.
“I designed it for myself. I’d never assumed that it would work for other people. But with that in mind, I built a website and shot some videos to teach the method to others, in hopes that it might help them the way it helped me. I called the method ‘bullet journal’,” he says.
“If I make you live in a house that has already been decorated, you always feel like you are living somebody else’s life. But ‘bullet journal’ enables you to create and design your own tools to face up to the challenges you meet.”
He thinks the approach “becomes what you need at any time you pick it up and can change its role based on your request”.
In 2016, when “bullet journal” was still a “passion project” for him, as he was working for a design agency in New York, he received an email from a woman who used the method in her daily life.
“The mother worked as a volunteer in her child’s school – a school for students with special needs. She happened to see her child have a seizure in front of her and was too shocked and nervous to say a word,” he recalls.
“When paramedics asked her what medicines the child often took, all she could do was to take out her ‘bullet journal’ and make them see a page with all the medication information on. And thus her child was saved according to the information.”
It was also a turning point in his life when he decided to work full time to promote his idea. Over the years, it has been shared on Instagram about 2.8 million times. The tutorial videos have been watched over 5 million times and the book has been published in nearly 20 countries.
“An intentional life is the one that you want to live, not the one that you endure.”
Coming from Brugge in Belgium, Ignace Lecleir ate French cuisine – such as foie gras, snails and steak with fries – on a daily basis when he was growing up.
For two years, around 20 years ago, he also worked in the kitchen of a French restaurant in Paris.
“I was responsible for preparing all of the vegetables required for any of the dishes,” Lecleir recalls. “Since it was a high-end restaurant, there were many positions (in the kitchen). Dealing with vegetables sounds simple, but it’s actually a very complicated station.”
Lecleir recalls having to use a paintbrush to clean the dirt off a mushroom, because if it was washed, it would absorb the water and affect its flavor.
“Sometimes you have to do as little as possible to get the real flavor, and you want to make sure you can serve them at the prime time,” says Lecleir.
He moved to Beijing in 2007 and is now owner and founder of the TRB Restaurant Group in the capital. After considering the idea of opening his own French restaurant for years, when the two-storey open space at Chaoyang Joy City became available, Lecleir knew it was time to make that dream a reality.
“This section of Joy City actually looks European. It’s like a courtyard somewhere in Europe,” he says. “There are not many French bistros in Beijing right now, so I thought that, maybe, this is a good opportunity.”
China’s Winter Olympics pioneer being replaced by her top protege
Legendary speed skater Li Yan is no longer the head coach of the national short-track team after a management reshuffle of China’s skating program.
With the 2022 Winter Olympics approaching, the decision announced on Thursday came as a surprise. Li is transitioning from the coaching post to serve in a supportive role as chairwoman of the China Skating Association.
The decision, made during an internal meeting of the National Winter Sports Administrative Center, also involves combining the short-and long-track speed skating teams into one unit overseen by a single coaching group.
Four-time short-track Olympic champion Wang Meng, who was Li’s most accomplished student, will head the group after taking over the long-track team a year ago.
With the two events differing in physical requirements and racing tactics, short-and long-track teams are traditionally coached and managed independently worldwide.
The merger of China’s teams is expected to streamline management for greater efficiency and unity, according to the governing body.
“To put Wang in such a critical role is a deliberate decision, which needs support and trust from all the members within the system to make it count. Hopefully, the young leader will bring some fresh energy to the team,” said Ni Huizhong, director of the winter sports administrative center.
Wang, 35, won Olympic gold in the 500m, 1000m and 3000m relays at the 2006 Turin and 2010 Vancouver Games, to go with 18 short-track world titles during a long career as China’s most decorated Winter Olympian.
She retired in 2014 after missing the Sochi Games due to an ankle injury
Li’s sudden departure from the coaching position, where she guided an aggressive Chinese team to seven Olympic gold medals between 2010 and 2018, happened after the short-track team failed to win any events at the 2019 world championships in March.
That failure sparked criticism from Gou Zhongwen, director of the General Administration of Sport of China.
“Some of our traditional strong teams shouldn’t just rest on their laurels,” Gou said at a meeting to celebrate the 1000-day countdown to the 2022 Winter Olympics earlier this month.
“The time is pressing and the task is challenging. All the teams should put in extra work in physical training, overseas drills and scientific support to make every minute in the next three years count,” he said.
Among the 13 gold medals China has won since its Winter Olympisc debut in 1980 at Lake Placid, New York, short-track speed skaters have contributed 10.
Li, who won China’s first short-track Olympic medal by claiming silver in the 500m at the 1992 Games, said she fully respects the coaching change and will do her best in the supporting role.
Wang, who will soon lead the combined team in a three-week intensive training program, said she plans to adopt a tougher training regime to push her fellow skaters harder.
A growing number of people are eating alone, whether at home or in restaurants, and overturning traditional etiquette. Zhang Yangfei reports.
In China, food has always played a major role in promoting social cohesion. Communal eating is not only familybased and deeply rooted in the nation’s cultural heritage, but is also regarded as an indicator of society’s health and stability.
Given that background, it is little wonder that eating alone, publicly or privately, has long been considered taboo.
However, in recent years things have started to change as a result of demographic shifts and the growing influence of modern lifestyles.
According to a report released last year by the global market researcher Kantar, 46 percent of people interviewed said they had eaten alone in the previous 24 hours, a rise of 9 percent from 2017, and about 16 percent expressed a preference for eating solo.
In addition, a thread on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like comments platform, titled “eating alone” contains 226,000 posts and has garnered 290 million hits.
In 2017, WithEating Magazine, a Chinese foodie journal, started its Eating Alone channel on Bilibili, a popular video-sharing website. To date, the channel, which has 52 episodes explaining how to prepare meals for one, has attracted more than 200 million hits.
In February, the magazine published a book of the same name, listing 65 recipes for dishes ranging from desserts to foreign cuisine, such as roasted ribs, the Korean favorite bibimbap and seafood curry.
To many people’s surprise, it became a best-seller. “We didn’t expect the book to sell so well. We didn’t print enough copies initially,” the magazine said on its Weibo account last month.
BRASILIA – China’s women missed star player Zhu Ting as they lost 3-0 to Brazil here on Tuesday in their opening match at the 2019 FIVB Volleyball Nations League.
Playing without several Olympic champions including Zhu Ting, Yuan Xinyue and Ding Xia, China were beaten 25-15, 25-21, 25-21.
Liu Yanhan made 11 kills in 23 attempts to lead China with 11 points, while Zeng Chunlei finished 9-for-30 in attacking to add ten.
Gabriela Braga Guimaraes and Ana Paula Borgo Bedani Guedes contributed 20 and 16 points respectively to Brazil’s total, helping to give the team a 53-37 advantage in attacking points over China.
Earlier on Tuesday, the Dominican Republic overcame Russia 3-1 in the other match in Brasilia.
16 teams are playing in the women’s VNL preliminary round over five weeks, with the top five teams at the end of the preliminaries to join the hosts in the Finals, which will be held in Nanjing, China this July.