Posted on 12/27/2002 3:06:50 PM PST by knighthawk
BEIJING (Reuters) - China has shut more than 3,300 Internet cafes for safety reasons after a fire tore through an underground Beijing cafe in June killing 25 people and injuring 12 others, the official Xinhua news agency reported on Friday.
Li Rongrong, minister in charge of China's State Economic and Trade Commission, was quoted as saying officials had inspected about 45,000 Internet cafes in the past six months.
Operations of nearly 12,000 of them had been suspended pending improvements and more than 3,300 were permanently closed, it said.
China sentenced two Beijing boys to life in prison in August for starting the city's worst fire in 50 years. Police said the boys were angry because cafe staff would not let them surf there.
Web users at the Lanjisu (Blue Hyperspeed) cafe were trapped inside the blazing den because its door was locked and windows blocked by iron bars. A few customers escaped by squeezing through a bathroom window.
Security obsessed China keeps tight controls on Internet cafes, driving many underground, where they operate behind locked doors to avoid scrutiny.
Minister Li said the ministry was working to reduce work-related accidents. From January to October this year, the number of people killed in accidental fires was 5.3 percent lower than in the same period of 2001, Xinhua said.
The death toll at county- or township-owned coal mines and from road and shipping accidents also dropped considerably, it said, without elaborating.
Minister Li sounds suspiciciously like Mayor Bloomberg who is forbidding smoking in privately owned businesses to protect the health of the innocent workers.
All we need is a good ol' short-circuit in someone's computer and the gov't in China can outlaw them to protect everyone's health. Gosh, I hope Bloomberg doesn't read FreeRepublic and get any new ideas.
> chortle! <
It would appear to me that the PRC and others believe that we will be stretched too thin in Iraq to act elsewhere. I'm not entirely sure that is the case.
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