Society

An American was injured in an explosion near a subway station in downtown Beijing Thursday afternoon, police confirmed late Thursday.

The blast happened at 3:20 pm Thursday beside a newspaper stand near the Dongzhimen subway station in Dongcheng District, police said in a press release.

Police said a 30-year-old American studying in China, who happened to pass by, was slightly injured in the leg and had been rushed to a nearby hospital.

Police are investigating the cause of the blast.

A Beijing official said Wednesday that the municipality plans to control the number of automobiles in the urban area during a conference on urban planning, the Beijing Times reported.

Liu Yumin, deputy director of Beijing Municipal Commission of Urban Planning, said that related departments had begun planning on how to control the number of automobiles, as a response to the rapid increase in automobiles, and that the traffic management department would publish the plan.

"If we can not solve the traffic problem, the significance of any other achievements would be weakened," Liu said.

Liu also said that buses would still be the main mode of transportation in Beijing's urban area in the future.

A highly publicized incident about milk products that caused baby girls to develop breasts may have been a smear campaign by a competitor.

Mengniu Dairy Co, the largest dairy company in the country by market value, on Wednesday denied rumors that it was assisted by a public relations company in plotting online attacks against its competitors, the Yili Group and Synutra International.

Rumors are now circulating that Mengniu made up a story that spread online in July, which claimed Yili's infant formula contained fish oil that could lead to premature sexual development.

At last the front line media has caught up with the idea that it is foreign exchange that is driving the markets.

While we watch the credit crunch through the lens of stocks, the real story is almost tangential to equities.

While people still think in terms of the credit crunch being about sub-prime debt and bank failures, there is a bigger picture. The real headline of the credit crunch is, the debt world blew up and took western government finances with it.

Trade imbalances remain the chronic reason for this whole sorry state.

Governments rely heavily on citizens to generate taxes. Taxes are generated on earning and spending. When that spending can’t be produced through the creation of wealth, it must be generated by credit. When that credit can’t be repaid by enterprise it has to come out of assets. In order to bolster and liquidate assets credit is needed once again.