Extra! Extra! Lesbian wives, killing strangers and floating TVs

• A prominent Chinese statistician was fired from his government post for undisclosed reasons.
• Watch out for deaf mutes and close your passenger side windows, car drivers!
• Two football players from Shanghai Shenhua score goals in the China-Palestine game and take China to the Asian Cup finals.
• Don't tell us that you don't watch TV on that 240 square meter TV floating in the Huangpu River near the Bund.
• Monkey Peaches reports that Johnny To's Exiled (放逐) is going to be released on DVD but not shown in theaters in China. Similarly, Martin Scorcese's remake of Infernal Affairs (无间道), called The Departed is going to be shown in theaters in Hong Kong but not on the mainland.
• Proof that life sucks:

  An unlicensed qigong healer accused of killing a cancer patient with misdirected qi faces 10 years in jail ... Prosecutors said Zhu told them that after warming his hands in the sun he released qi energy through the soles of Bai's feet.

  Zhu said that after 10 minutes of treatment Bai's lung cancer had been cured and he would recover quickly.

  However, shortly after Zhu left, Bai began spitting blood and died, prosecutors said.

• Here's an early stocking stuffer idea for all you tricksters out there: voice changing equipment. From the China Daily:

  A toy which changes the characteristics of people's voices, is proving a hit with practical jokers, suspicious spouses and, more worryingly, confidence tricksters.

  In the 30-odd calls Zhu Liangsheng has made in the past two days, sometimes he sounded like a man and sometimes like a woman.

  "In one call to a male friend, I had my voice transformed to a middle-aged woman," he said, referring to a voice-changing gadget he bought recently.

  "I pretended to be a woman complaining he had harassed my daughter.

  "My friend was shocked and totally confused, it was really funny."

• The mayor of Los Angeles was in town promoting trade and soon certain stores in Shanghai will feature a "Made in LA" section.
• The human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng has had charges filed against him -- something related to "state subversion."
• A Shanghai man kills a stranger in order to get the death penalty. The man had been dumped by his girlfriend. Strangely, no one recommended that he commit suicide.
• And last but not least, Shanghai's first case of a divorce approved because of one partner's homosexuality:

  A court in Pudong yesterday approved a man's request to get divorced, although his lesbian wife had been fighting to keep the marriage together.

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