Every day Li Yizhong translates and puts into brief perspective the headlines of the Shanghai Morning Post's daily newspaper, Shanghai's largest morning newspaper

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21 consecutive days of rain shouldn’t be big news in a city like Shanghai or the southern part of China, but when this happens at the middle of a summer, it’s a bit weird. August has always been the hottest month in the Yangtze delta. Yes, you will see a lot of umbrellas on the streets, but that should be girls, sometimes guys, hiding from the sun and not the rain. The amount of rainwater received in Xuhui actually broke the 1873 year-old record.

Aside from getting depressed, getting too much rain also has other side effects. Sickness and disease are slowly casing their shadows over the city population. Fevers from the weather, and injuries caused by people falling on slipping cement has been the major cause of hospital visits. For hospitals in certain areas, visits have increase by 50% from the same period last year. At least, the mosquitoes are enjoying the party. A lot more places to lay eggs and a lot more food sitting still.

Other Headlines Today

• China formally arrested the four employee of Rio Tinto for obtaining inside information which gave them an unfair advantage at the negotiation tables that set prices of the iron ore much higher than otherwise. Ultimately, these four people cost China billions by giving bribes to a few key personals. First reaction, that’s wrong; they should be punished if that’s true. Second reaction, wait a minute, who took the bribes? Why aren’t they arrested after these Rio Tinto employees were detained in Shnaghai for a month?

• More details on the attack of the license plate auction system today. Mr. Zhou confessed that he used around 5000 hacked PCs to attack the system. The attacked generated 4G to 5G of data to overflow the auction system bandwidth of 1G. In the end, only 8000 buyers were able to participate in the auction with a lowest plate price of 100RMB. The suspect never went to high school and yet he learned to hack computers from free online lessons in a week. Security and Internet might just be two opposite sides of a coin.