Gambling dens and gun arsenals shut down
The Guangdong province Public Security Bureau held a press conference in Guangzhou yesterday to show reporters the results of a crackdown on gunrunners in the province. A detective in charge of the operation said that as of July 25, 251 suspects have been detained for involvement in 730 gun-related incidents in Guangdong so far this year.

The detective said that 834 guns and 115,000 pieces of ammunition have been seized from 23 different gun dens. Police also said that many of the above cases involved underground gambling operations, and a large number were centered around Heyuan in the eastern part of the province.

Guangzhou bus stop name changes
Thirty-four bus stops in Guangzhou had their names changed yesterday. A list in Chinese of all the affected stops and the reasons for each name change can be found here. The first one we noticed was Binjiang East Road’s Binjiang Lu stop, now known as ‘Da Yuan Shuai Fu’ stop.

American pig farmer in the news
New Express is running a photo feature today on 48-year-old American Lee Hartmann who, after leaving a high-paying job in the United States two years ago, now runs a successful pig farm and pork distribution business out of Huadu.

“My wife is somewhere here in Asia,” said Hartmann, whose business extends across the continent, when asked by reporters about his personal life. “I just haven’t met her yet. That hasn’t stopped me from meeting women, though. Here on the farm I already have 5,000 girlfriends.”

More Foxconn jumpers coming soon
Foxconn founder and CEO Terry Gou announced last week that the world’s largest contract manufacturer will introduce a million robots into the company’s workforce over the next three years and plans to have 300,000 worker bots up and running by next year. Gou said that Foxconn’s two major campuses in Shenzhen will gradually be converted into R&D centers.

Foxconn ‘only’ has 1.2 million employees, so while we suspect that those soon to be laid off could end up as human batteries, providing just enough organic energy for robots to win the company ‘green’ industry government subsidies, it’s probably more likely that soon-to-be redundant workers will all just be dumped off in Dongguan.

Photo-of-the-day

Yesterday was Army Day, which got soldiers across the country a whole half-day of reprieve from all the wars China’s currently involved in. For one Guangzhou platoon, a morning lesson in how to rip out someone’s tongue was followed by a scaled-down runway show.