Extra! Extra! Benzo taxis, CCTV condoms and cotton pickers

• No more Mercedes taxis in Shanghai: Their operating costs are too high to be worth it for the cabbies.
• There is an International Wines and Drink Expo held here at the Exhibition Center -- today is the last day!
• Tibetan poet Woeser (who writes in Chinese) has her blogs shut down.
• In another nine years, you may find yourself wondering which of the two Capital airports in Beijing your flight is at.
• Another popular website -- Century China (世纪中国) got the axe.
• A man in Fujian is trying to register a brand of condoms he calls 中央一套 (zhong yang yi tao), which refers to CCTV-1. He admits to trying to use the name recognition of the television channel to help sell his condoms. We always thought having a picture of a woman bent over was a far more effective way of selling condoms, but different strokes for different folks.
• 100,000 people from Chongqing are going to Xinjiang to pick cotton -- and they are only a fraction of the 600,000 people nationwide who make the trip, for which they can be hope to make about 3,000 yuan.
• Yahoo is the strictest censor in China. Not only do Baidu and Chinese Google turn up more unapproved results, they also don't ban access to the search engine for using an unapproved keyword.
• The gap between illegal house church that the authorities tried to destroy.
• Sad but true -- Chinese women are deported from Afghanistan for prostitution and selling alcohol.
• There are now 119 boys for every 100 girls in China, and while the government did not ban sex-selective abortions, they are still cracking down on the non-medical use of ultrasound. Underground ultrasounds, as unsavory as that sounds, can be had in closets, the trunks of cars and other convenient locations.
• A survey found that Shanghai couples marry the latest in all of China, due to "higher housing prices and Shanghai women’s high demands."
• We’ve all heard of marriages of conveniences, and more recently, divorces and re-marriages of convenience, but this one takes the cake: A 35-year old man and an 89-year-old woman. The report says the old lady didn't even know what was going on when they were waiting in line to register. Sad.

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