Extra! Extra! Hi-speed railways, more hacking and the Toilet Bowl Award

• Woohoo! It looks like a Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway is coming our way soon that will cut travelling time from 13 hours to under five hours! Shanghaiist can't wait! This will undoubtedly give those darned Beijing-Shanghai "air express services" a run for their money!
• In other travel news, ANA will commence a code-sharing agreement with Shanghai Airlines and Air China on flights operated by ANA and Shanghai Airlines between Tokyo's Haneda Airport and Shanghai's Hongqiao Airport, from September 29. It remains to be seen if this will mean cheaper air ticket prices!
• Meanwhile, Taiwanese director Ang Lee has axed a whopping 30 minutes from his award-winning erotic spy thriller "Lust, Caution" to pass China's censorship rules.
• Experts say Shanghai babies are born bigger, kids here are more obese and the percentage of people with hypertension (high blood pressure) is nearly twice the national average.
• What the hack?!?! The last two weeks saw Germany, the UK and the US accuse China of hacking into government systems. France is the latest to join the party. Meanwhile, New Zealand's premier Helen Clark says she knows which countries tried to hack into her government's computers but is refusing to name names.

In other Shanghaiist news, our favourite media blog Danwei has offered your correspondent a very special Toilet Bowl Award as part of their recent Model Worker's Awards for "posting regularly about news that no one else is finding, and translating some of the more interesting stuff on the Chinese Internet". We have also been singled out for our "excellent contribution to the toilet sector, for the posts Shanghai artist's Nike poo, and especially for the video displayed at this page: New bidet that doubles as enema and colon cleanser." We wish we could take all the credit for it but the first story came in as a tip while the second one was a quite a boo-boo on our part. We've actually since unpublished the post (but somehow it still appears), reason being, one of our colleagues already wrote about it earlier this year. Anyhow, we shall graciously accept our toilet bowl and promise to polish it religiously.

Photo from yanyin
Toilet Bowl Award pic from Danwei.