Extra! Extra! Gymnasts, thumb-biting pandas, the return of SARS

• Zhang Rongkun is the first person to get arrested in the Shanghai corruption scandal.
• A reporter who wrote about corruption in the city of Shaoyang was freed, though his conviction on charges of extortion was not overturned.
• Shanghai's not the only place with corruption problems: Shenzhen joins the club, with five judges under investigation for taking bribes.
• The Chinese women's gymnastics team won the World Gymnastics Championships, upsetting the United States and winning their first ever team medal in the Gymnastics Championships.
• Shanghai's luxury hotels are not going to provide you with condoms, because most of their guests are foreigners who BYOC or else get a local to help them buy some.
• Pneumonia surged 20% in Guangzhou recently: is this a prelude to another outbreak of SARS?
• A German bus company claims that a Chinese bus company has manufactured a bus that is a carbon copy of the German vehicle.
• A student-run AIDS group in Xinjiang has been banned:

  The crackdown came days after the organisation broke the news that a middle school in Xinjiang's capital Urumqi had expelled 19 students because they had hepatitis B.

  "We suspect that this is the real reason the organisation was banned," said Li Fangping, a lawyer who is helping Chang.

• Hong Kong is going to ban smoking in indoor and public places as of January 1, 2007:

  
  Hong Kong legislators on Thursday passed a ban on smoking in all indoor workplaces, as well as restaurants, parks and beaches starting from January 1 next year.
  But bars, saunas, nightclubs and mahjong parlours, serving people aged over 18, will be exempted from the ban till mid-2009.

  London, Dublin, New York, Hong Kong -- one by one, they all fall down. Can Shanghai be far behind (there's only one correct answer to that one).
• A Shanghai stand-up comedian was attacked by three armed men late on Wednesday night.
• In what some see as a politically motivated attack, a Chinese panda bit part of an American woman's thumb off at a zoo in Chengdu.
• Just when we thought we'd seen it all: a 16 year old boy in Fujian can drink water through his eyes.

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