A fire set off by fireworks to celebrate the Lunar New Year destroyed a five-star hotel in northeast China, state media reported Thursday. The official Xinhua New Agency said the fire gutted the hotel in Shenyang, capital of Liaoning province, before dawn Thursday. No injuries were reported.Xinhua said firefighters had trouble dealing with the fire because their fire engines shot water up only 165 feet, while the building was 720-feet tall.The nearby Sheraton Lido hotel was also evacuated, Reuters reported.New Year fires are common in China, with the Beijing News saying there were more than 160 small ones in the capital alone. The most famous in recent years destroyed a hotel under construction next to state broadcaster CCTV's iconic headquarters in Beijing in 2009.Meanwhile, Chinese leaders celebrated the Year of the Rabbit with visits to the drought-stricken north while ordinary citizens rocked city streets with cacophonous fireworks. They don't care the fireworks must go on.-AL
This is a funny piece of footage. This is what happens when you try to look too cute.-AL
As a metaphor for our troubled economic and financial era -- and the government's stumbling response -- this one's hard to beat. You can't stimulate the economy via the money supply, after all, if you can't print the money correctly.Because of a problem with the presses, the federal government has shut down production of its flashy new $100 bills, and has quarantined more than 1 billion of them -- more than 10 percent of all existing U.S. cash -- in a vault in Fort Worth, Texas, reports CNBC.Officials with the Treasury and the Federal Reserve had touted the new bills' sophisticated security features that were 10 years in the making, including a 3-D security strip and a color-shifting image of a bell, designed to foil counterfeiters. But it turns out the bills are so high-tech that the presses can't handle the printing job.More than 1 billion unusable bills have been printed. Some of the bills creased during production, creating a blank space on the paper, one official told CNBC. Because correctly printed bills are mixed in with the flawed ones, even the ones printed to the correct design specs can't be used until they 're sorted. It would take an estimated 20 to 30 years to weed out the defective bills by hand, but a mechanized system is expected to get the job done in about a yearThe flawed bills, which cost around $120 million to print, will have to be burned. We in America are so fly that we just have money to burn like that. amazing-AL
