Retired NBA star Yao Ming has added another line to his post-basketball resume — politician — becoming a member of an advisory body to Shanghai’s legislature.

Since the 31-year-old Yao announced last July that injuries had ended his career with the Houston Rockets, he has become a university student and set up a wine business to go with owning a professional basketball team in China.

Photos in official media on Monday showed Yao at the weekend closing ceremony for the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference Shanghai Committee.

“There are about 142 members in the group, and Yao is the youngest,” Kong Rong, who works in the service office of committee, was quoted as saying by the China Daily.

The advisory committee does not have any real power, but the newspaper said Yao is supposed to attend regular meetings, and can make suggestions for the advisory body and government departments.

Yao was quoted as saying “raising proposals is very serious business, and I do not want to be hasty.”

It is common for sports figures to move into politics in China. Olympic gold medal hurdler Liu Xiang is a member of both the Shanghai and national political advisory bodies.

Yao, one of the most popular celebrities in China from his eight seasons in the NBA, is a student at Jiaotong University, one of the top universities in his hometown Shanghai.

In November, he released the first-ever bottles of his new Yao Ming-branded wine, a 2009 Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon currently available only in mainland China, where the market for imported wines has boomed over the past decade.

Source: The Daily Caller.

*Taken from NTI.

A North Korean vessel believed to be transporting an illicit cargo of missile components to Myanmar was intercepted two weeks ago by U.S. naval forces, Reuters reported on Monday (see GSN, June 8).

High-ranking U.S. officials told the New York Times the North Korean ship was made to sail back to its home port following a maritime impasse and diplomatic prodding by the United States and Asian countries that stretched over multiple days.

The destroyer USS McCampbell intercepted the cargo vessel M/V Light, which was registered in Belize, on May 26 in waters south of Shanghai. U.S. officials had earlier begun monitoring the ship, which is suspected to have conducted other illicit cargo trips. The U.S. warship requested permission to send personnel to the cargo vessel under jurisdiction provided by Belize but was refused, the newspaper reported.

CONTINUED..

*Taken from the Epoch Times.

In a small hotel across from the Beijing Center for Disease Control and Prevention, a reporter from New Express Daily, dressed in an isolation suit, interviewed a dozen “unusual” patients from different areas of China. Their symptoms are painful and debilitating, and AIDS-like, but repeated tests for HIV have come up negative.

Lin Jun, one of the patients interviewed in the March 24 New Express Daily report, said he used to be chubby, but now he is skin and bones, and his joints have become all deformed.

Lin is referred to in the group as “big brother” for his kindness and giving fellow patients hope when they feel hopeless, with some having considered suicide.

In 2008 Lin’s mother received a blood transfusion at a hospital. Afterwords, she experienced frequent night sweats, numb limbs, aches all over, creaking joints, rashes on her hands, and weight loss.

In May of that year, Lin accidentally became infected through contact with his mother’s blood. Fourteen days later, he fell ill with swollen lymph nodes on his neck, sore knees that made clicking sounds, and pain all over his body. He also started vomiting after every meal, and the left side of his face swelled up. In half a year, his weight dropped from 82 kilograms (181 lbs) to 52 kilograms (115 lbs).

Three months later, his wife and child developed the same symptoms.

Lin said he went to every major hospital in Shanghai, but could not get a definite diagnosis. He has taken the HIV test eight times, and each time the test turned out negative.

Then he found an Internet blog called “The Negative Group,” which he learned stands for “HIV negative.” He realized that writing on this blog were all people like himself, with the same kinds of symptoms, desperate to find a cure.

Several Chinese media have recently reported that the Department of Health of Guangdong Province has confirmed that people in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangdong have fallen ill after being infected with an unknown virus. The patients think they have AIDS, but they test negative for HIV.

Guangdong has organized clinical experts, epidemiologists and psychologists to work together on these cases. The Health Ministry has also selected six provinces with more patients, including Beijing, Shanghai, Zhejiang, Hunan, Jiangsu and Guangdong, to conduct epidemiological studies, but there are no results yet, the reports said.

In most of the 30 cases investigated by New Express Daily for its March 24 report, people said their relatives and friends are also infected. Most of the 30 patients were infected through sexual contact. Some experts diagnosed them as having AIDS phobia.

However, the disease seems to be highly contagious and can spread by contact via any bodily fluid—through kissing, shared utensils, sweat, and even protected sex. Once infected, the immune system appears to be attacked, which results in a decrease of white blood cells and the body’s ability to defend against infectious disease and foreign materials.

In the past, official health agencies have only conducted HIV tests on these patients and have not checked for other, similarly pathological viruses. With HIV results coming up negative, many patients then stopped taking protective measures with their relatives. Subsequently, all their relatives and friends were infected, many have said.

One infected man told The Epoch Times that the disease is highly infectious and hard to prevent. His wife and two-year-old child both appear to have it. The child has lip and skin blood spots, he said.

A retired officer in his 40’s told The Epoch Times for a previous June 16, 2010 report that he had been infected with a disease with similar symptoms in 2009, at a get-together at a friend’s house. “I thought it was just a cold at the time, so I still participated in all kind of gatherings. Consequently, over 100 of my comrades in the army, relatives and friends were infected by me,” he said.

*Taken from the Drudge Report.

Anil Ambani was in ebullient mood last October when he arrived at a luxury hotel in Shanghai to sign one of the biggest business deals of the year. The Indian billionaire’s Reliance Power had just agreed to purchase $10bn of power generation equipment from the state-owned Shanghai Electric.

“It is the largest order in the history of the power sector,” proclaimed Mr Ambani, “and the largest single business relationship between India and China.”

The size of the deal was not its only notable aspect. Shanghai Electric was offering its equipment at about 30-40 per cent below the cost of an equivalent turbine from General Electric of the US. With the generous financing deal offered by China Development Bank and a group of other Chinese banks, the discount was in fact closer to 60 per cent.

Welcome to a new era of globalisation, China-style. As the financial crisis recedes, one of the big fears is that the process of increasingly closer links among big economies worldwide will go into reverse as governments and countries look inward. The message coming from the world’s second-largest economy for the past year has been clear: China wants to accelerate the integration of the global economy, but on its own terms.

Over the past few decades, China has benefited hugely by hitching itself to a process of globalisation where the rules were written in Washington and the American consumer was the buyer of last resort. China prospered by making first the socks, then the washing machines and finally the iPods sold at Walmart.

My Two Cents: This has been reported all over the web today. Take it for what you will. That video of evidence down below looks like complete crap to me. I made a more convincing video with an old Sony Cybershot while trying to film lightning bugs in Gainesville, FL as I drunkenly walked to the beer store. End Two Cents.

*Taken from the Telegraph.

An airport in Baotou, Inner Mongolia, was forced to shut to prevent passenger jets crashing into a UFO, according to reports.

Three flights to Baotou from Shanghai and Beijing were reportedly forced to circle the airport until the UFO disappeared.

Two other flights were diverted away from Baotou and to the nearby cities of Ordos and Taiyuan. The airport was shut for around an hour “to guarantee safety” according to a spokesman.

Witnesses reported a bright light shining in the sky on September 11 around two-and-a-half miles away from Baotou airport, before suddenly vanishing.

The incident was the eighth reported UFO sighting in China since the end of June.

Xiaoshan International airport near the eastern city of Hangzhou was shut down on July 8 because of a UFO, although officials later confirmed the object sighted above the airport had been part of a military test at a nearby airbase.

In the far-western province of Xinjiang, another sighting on June 30 is thought to have been a missile test.

A number of sightings in Sichuan province may also be linked to the local custom of flying illuminated kites at night.