Extra! Extra! State secrets, metrosexuals and a free press?

• China to allow a free press during the Olympics -- this means foreign reporters can report about things other than sports, yet of course, there remain boundaries. It sounded like good news, and now we realize that we have no idea if this has any substantive meaning.
• Along those lines, there will be no TV delay during the Olympics. Get out your protest cards, your fifteen milliseconds of fame are waiting.
• Liu Xiang is bored with competing in China. So bored that he has to slow down during a race that only lasts about thirteen seconds.
• The Shanghai government is already hard at work on a plan to relocate certain Pudong residents, whose homes were not always happy places and therefore must be razed so that the Happiest Place in the World -- Disneyland -- can take their place.
• Raymound Zhou thinks that Super Voice Girls and My Hero! have ushered in the age of the metrosexual in China. But there is no word for metrosexual in Chinese. Shanghaiist welcomes ideas for a possible translation.
• Why do baby panda bears look like pink gummy bears with fuzz on them?
• A boy was refused entrance into the Songshan Shaolin Temple ... because he was too fat. The report says that he's 300 kilograms (661 pounds). The kid in the picture does look a bit rotund, but more like 300 pounds, rather than 661 pounds. Is it possible for a kid to be that big? Couldn't they have accepted him and just taught him one of those styles of kung fu that doesn't require you to jump?
• The Paramount Theater is looking for dancers (in Chinese). For some, this connotes the revival of an old tradition -- let's call it "dirty dancing."
• Some Google Engineering Research Institute (in Chinese) is coming to Shanghai. Finally, a place to work that's not evil. Li Kaifu and entourage were in town, scoping out locations.
• A Chinese official was executed for being a spy for Taiwan (in April, news released now), and a video of the case has been made for the education and betterment of all:

  The video was also mandatory viewing on July 24 by medical staff in central China's Sichuan province, whose normal jobs were to teach couples how to use condoms and plan their pregnancies.

  The video clip about Tong's case was "useful in helping us protect state secrets,'' the Sichuan Population and Family Planning Commission said in a July 31 statement on its Web site.

  Unless there is a state secret loaded in a chip implanted in a penis, we fail to see how this could be the case. But better safe than sorry, we suppose

• A Canadian of Uighur extraction might be executed for "terrorist" and "separatist" activity from back in 2000. He was extradited and is being treated as a Chinese citizen, even he is technically now a Canadian national.
• The Humane Society is offering China $100,000 US dollars in order to help vaccinate dogs, on the condition that the mass slaughter of dogs must be stopped.

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