The Beeb is reporting that the Chinese government suppressed a World Bank report’s findings that smog causes hundreds of thousands of premature deaths:

The move followed pressure from Beijing, which believes the material is too sensitive and could lead to social unrest, said the UK’s Financial Times.

The Financial Times said the Bank report, entitled ‘Cost of Pollution in China’, found up to 760,000 people die prematurely each year in China because of air and water pollution.

High levels of air pollution in China’s cities leads to 350,000-400,000 premature deaths, it said. Another 300,000 die because of poor-quality air indoors

Chinese officials feared this news would cause social unrest, and rightly so. Why, the Chinese people would take to the streets if it wasn’t so dangerous to breathe outside.

Through the magic of SQL and lot of “bachelor time” this weekend, I managed to import all my ancient posts from their bplog database into WordPress. That means that every post I’ve ever written is now in one place, for the first time ever. I also fixed a lot of broken permalinks which didn’t transfer cleanly from Drupal. Now the “404” errors should be largely gone.

I’ve paused at times tonight to wade through a few of my early posts. There are some real gems here (and also some turkeys). I chuckled at this apt description of contracting I wrote when I was a contractor at Glaxo. I also looked back in fondness at my post about Hallie’s first ultrasound, back when Hallie was just an ‘it.’

Being able to relive events like these is one of the main reasons why I blog. Its nice to share it with y’all, too. Thanks for five years of being my audience.