Extra! Extra! Photo booths, legit livers and Liu Xiang

• The most popular photo booth makers in the world, the UK based Photo-Me, have already set up a few of their booths in some of the ritzier areas of Shanghai, including the Jin Mao building and Jing An's "Email Plaza" (home of the stickiest bar in town -- Windows), Carrefour and other such places. They're planning on installing more of the booths around town, especially in subway and long-distance bus stations. We don't know if you can print out photos from your phones and cameras there, but you should at least be able to get passport pictures and stickers and a quickie with your friends and loved ones.
• Another American Idol/Super Voice Girl type show is now entering the heated final stages. Feng Jie from Shanghai, who works in IT, was the first person to make the nationwide final 30. You go, boy!
• The sale of organs for transplant is going to be, starting July 1, regulated by hospital committees on medical and scientific ethics to make sure that nothing unsavory is done in the process of harvesting procuring, selling and transplanting organs. Unfortunately, some of Shanghai's own "doctors" are to blame:

  Shanghai Changzheng Hospital did 181 kidney and 172 liver transplants in 2005. Of these, nearly 30 had bad outcomes and were done by unqualified doctors, according to Shanghai-based Life Week magazine.

• Expect 60 million bloggers in China by the end of this year and 100 million by the end of 2007.
• An outspoken member of a certain spiritual "cult" might be sentenced to six months in jail in the US for certain outspoken remarks during President Hu's visit to the White House last month. This is based on a law that specifies jail time for anyone who "intimidates, coerces, threatens, or harasses a foreign official or an official guest or obstructs a foreign official in the performance of his duties."
• The world's fastest hurdler shilling for a cigarette company? Don't say you thought Liu Xiang's new photobook was just a bunch of a previously unpublished pictures of a handsome lad that runs kinda fast. Over a third of the book's pages are in devoted to cranes -- the kind with feathers. Said bird is the emblem of a tobacco company named Baisha with whom Liu has entered in an unholy unconscionable lucrative unsurprising partnership. Little known or remembered is the fact that in November 2004, one of Liu Xiang's commercials was pulled precisely because it seemed suspiciously like a tobacco commercial. What is the world coming to these days? We liked it better when Liu Xiang was endorsing Coca-Cola and Yao Ming was endorsing McDonald's ...

Photo from south.com.cn.