2010-07-04 CNN
As if our veterans don't have enough to deal with, now an outrageous story from CNN affiliate KSDK. Dental assistants at this St. Louis VA hospital may have been exposed or may have exposed, rather, more than 1800 of our vets to HIV or hepatitis. How did it happen? Contaminated dental instruments.
They were actually doing additional work in order to protect their kind of delicate instruments. Sometimes policies don't always get followed because people have very good intentions. But the end result is the policy that was supposed to be followed wasn't followed.
Huh, you think? Well, the hospital has sent certified notification letters to the affected patients. And Missouri Congressman Russ Carnahan is calling for a full investigation into what went wrong. We're going to talk to him live with this outrageous story, 10 a.m., rather, at the top of the hour.
But we've just received a statement from the VA saying that the VA's primary focus, as always, is, quote, "has been on the safety and care of our veterans. VA leadership recognized the seriousness of this situation and is taking steps to prevent this from happening again. VA has implemented safeguards to prevent a similar situation from occurring again."
And if a living outrage isn't enough, how about in death? Another smack to the face of our veterans this time to those who've paid the ultimate sacrifice. A hearing is set to get under way on Capitol Hill next hour into the problems at Arlington National Cemetery.
You may remember that disturbing and heart-wrenching report that we told you about earlier this month. It actually revealed that the graves of our fallen war heroes had been misidentified. And in some cases, remains had even been tossed aside into a massive pile. We're following that hearing and will bring you updates as they happen.
Now we stay in China for just a moment now to tell you about a story that grabbed our attention. White people can be rented in China. Yes. We said rented. This is how it works, some Chinese companies like to have a few foreigners hanging around to show that they have prestige or money; and, of course, crucial international connections, for real, or not?
One American actor who lives in Beijing actually told us that he was hired for a day to pose as the Vice President of an Italian jewelry company. Our CNN international anchor asked him if he knew that he was the token white guy.
The whole point of his creating this phony Italian partner, which I did not realize at the time, I thought it was legitimate, but the reason why he created this Italian partner was to make his jewelry seem more authentic in the eyes of the Chinese.
Okay, listen Valera. You are a 26-year-old student there in Beijing from Israel, Valera. You got involved in an oil conference in one of the cities. Just tell us about that.
Yeah. It was we were about 100 students from my university, and from other universities, we were offered to go Shan Dong Province, where we had to pretend to be foreign investors, millionaires from other different countries. We were given business cards, and I was an investor from Egypt, by the name of Abella Hamedi. And we just had to walk around and give our business cards and pretend to be interested in their oil technologies. We also had a banquet and a press conference where we had the VIP seats.
Those Chinese people also refer to these jobs as "white guy in tie" events, or simply a "face job".