Maggie Rauch is editor of China Sports Today, a blog about China's emerging sports scene, and an occasional contributor to Shanghaiist. Today she talks about the top ten sports stories to hit China in 2009—wins, losses and scandals aplenty. more ›

• In an effort to plug the gaping money hole the Bird’s Nest stadium has turned into after the Olympics, CITIC Investment Holdings has given up its management rights to the Chinese government. We wonder what’ll happen if even the government thinks it’s 200,000RMB a day upkeep is too expensive to handle. [AFP]
• An author details the slight craziness that comes with renovating an apartment in China (Dalian for him). After the carpentry and wiring were done and the workers paid, the extortion letters came. And after those threats were paid off too, what did they happen to find but another letter - this one a thank you note. [New York Times]
• In case you want a long, but incredibly thorough, write up of what’s been happening in the massive Chongqing Corruption trials, here’s one from China Brief about how the whole matter exposes “grave woes in China’s legal apparatus.” [China Brief]

• Readings on 1999's "May 8th Tragedy" [The China Beat] The China Beat compiles readings on 1999's "May 8th Tragedy," when NATO missiles were fired into the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, killing three PRC nationals and sparking protests all around the world from angry Chinese citizens. Included are two news accounts from the time - one by the BBC and one by CNN, a Salon.com piece by a Beida foreign student and two later analysis of the situation.
• China eyes regular Olympic show [Financial Times] "Less than a year after China hosted the Olympics, Beijing is planning to put its stunningly choreographed opening ceremony back on as a regular evening show at the “Bird’s Nest”, the main stadium built for the games... Zhang Hengli, vice-president of the National Stadium Company that now runs the Bird’s Nest, said: “We want to put on a regular evening show like the opening ceremony. But that will take longer to realise [than other performances in the works for the stadium] because it requires a huge amount of money. We need to find an investor and deal with potential issues of intellectual property of the International Olympic Committee.”"
• Communists Can’t Outspend Capitalists as China Jobless Increase [Bloomberg] "Demand for work is so high that 5,000 students jostled at a Shanghai employment fair in March for 400 jobs available in the funeral industry. One woman with a management degree applied for a position as a mortician’s assistant to “make up the faces of the dead,” state media reported. The attraction: It paid 4,000 yuan ($585) a month, equal to what she might have earned in an office job two years ago."