Has China gone mad? An e-mail making the rounds on the internet with a headline 'Mad in China' certainly suggests so. A sampling of last week's news items contains a shocking mixture of the bad, the ugly and grotesque.
Last Monday, Pan Huashan, a senior judge with the Zhejiang Higher People's Court, was arrested for allegedly killing a businessman and dismembering his body after the judge invited him home for lunch in January.
On Wednesday, a massive gas explosion in downtown Nanjing , Jiangsu , left more than a dozen killed and scores injured.
On the same day, a flash flood tore through a warehouse of a chemical factory in Jilin City, Jilin , and swept into the Songhua River about 7,000 barrels containing flammable chemicals used to make rubber and adhesives. This naturally caused panic over bottled water from Jilin to some downstream cities in Heilongjiang province.
Also on Wednesday, the National Development and Reform Commission was forced to defend the government's decision to mess up people's work schedules before and after the Mid-Autumn Festival to create a three-day holiday, September 22-24.
Also on the same day, the leading business daily Economic Observer said its reporter Qiu Ziming was put on an online list of wanted criminals posted the previous Friday by the Shuichang county Public Security Bureau in Lishui , Zhejiang, after Qiu wrote an expose accusing a Zhejiang company of insider trading and other financial wrongdoing. The following day, Zhejiang police were forced to revoke the detention order for Qiu and apologised.
Also on Wednesday, Shenzhen media reported that the anus of a mother who gave birth in a Shenzhen hospital was sewn up by a midwife upset that the woman's husband failed to bribe her properly. Both the hospital and Shenzhen medical authorities later disputed the claim but admitted the midwife breached regulations and volunteered to tie up the patient's bleeding hemorrhoid. The husband has since told state media he was threatened by hospital officials to remain silent.