Cara Anna of AP writes that the increasingly sensitive trial of Yang Jia, the "cop-killer", which was postponed till after the Olympics, is likely to end in a death sentence for the man. However, many among the Chinese public are sympathetic to the man after Xinhua's report of Yang's earlier rejected claim for psychological damage and Southern Weekend's long, sympathetic front-page story which asked what could have made a young, quiet man who liked travelling......

From Reuters:Shanghai police will post photos and videos of jaywalkers in newspapers and on TV in a bid to shame them out of breaking traffic rules, local media reported on Thursday. Offending pedestrians, moped riders and cyclists would be snapped at selected intersections and their images put in regular columns and on special television programmes set up by police, the Shanghai Daily said. The scheme had come under fire from lawyers who said public humiliation......

Beijing resident Yang Jia, stood trial on Tuesday at the Shanghai No 2 People's Intermediate Court for murdering six Shanghai policemen in July this year. As we told you earlier Yang was caught and interrogated by Shanghai police for riding a stolen bicycle on October 15, 2007. After he had been released Yang sued the interrogating officers for psychological damage and later returned to the police station and killed six officers. According to Global Voices......

A woman was killed and two men were injured yesterday during a robbery at an apartment near the crossing of Changde Lu and Yuyuan Lu in Jing'an district. According to the China News Agency's Shanghai bureau the murderer tried to break in to the apartment but met with resistance from the residents. Photos and report (in Chinese), report in English.......

On Wednesday the manager of a construction firm in Shanghai's Jiading District was held hostage by a man who claimed he had a bomb. The three-hour drama ended with the offender taken into custody. According to Shanghai Daily, this is the fourth bomb hoax that has been carried out in the city this summer. We kind of think that's enough for this year.......

The latest from ESPN.com here and here. And the latest from Google News.......

Five people were injured yesterday evening when a man turned violent and started stabbing customers in a food store at Nanjing Road's Pedestrian Mall. The man has been identified as a local of Anhui province, surnamed Zhang. According to the Shanghai Daily, Zhang has a history of mental illness. Fortunately, none of the five who were stabbed received life threatening injuries. When the incident happened, Zhang had brought out his kitchen knife and tried to......

The body of an alleged murderer, Zhou Huihua, who is thought to have stabbed three people to death and injured two others on Huanlin Road, Shanghai, was found near Hengsha Island in the Yangtze River on Saturday. He was located after a tip-off to the Public Security Bureau's hot line. According to Shanghai Daily, Zhou is believed to have committed suicide after the stabbings. [Source]......

Police said yesterday they had cracked down on a Shanghai terrorist cell planning violence at Olympic soccer matches in the city. Shanghai’s Olympic security office head Cheng Jiulong said police, who were put on “crisis” level several days ago, had learned of several international terrorist organizations and staged raids successful in arresting potential attackers. Information not mentioned in Jiulong's report included how many people were arrested, when they were taken into custody and where they......

"Kim Soo-seok, 44, a South Korean, is accused of abducting a young fellow countryman who studied in Shanghai in a bid to extort 300 million won (US$295,000) from the victim's wealthy father. His two alleged Chinese accomplices, Jin Mingyu and Chi Minhao, both ethnic Koreans, face charges of illegal detention before the Shanghai No. 1 Intermediate People's Court. The two alleged accomplices pleaded guilty, but Kim said he was entrusted by a friend in South......

The ground has been broken for the new Hongqiao Transport Hub which will cover an area of 240,000 square meters and contain facilities for both high-speed and normal trains. In service before the 2010 World Expo, the hub is expected to reach an annual turnover of 52.72 million people by 2020. Meanwhile, new security measures at the Shanghai South Railway Station mean that only travelling passengers will be allowed onto the platform and family and......

His name is Chen Jun. He's 18-years-old. And he was captured this morning in rural Anhui province, hundreds of kilometers from Shanghai. Some, actually most, facts are vague: In addition to cash and a laptop computer police say belonged to the victim Diana O'Brien, Chen was allegedly carrying "a weapon." We're also somewhat puzzled by this sentence: "The statement said police narrowed down suspects to Chen after they received reports that a medium-sized man was......

Urumqi police have raided an apartment which housed 15 ethnic Uyghurs and alleged Islamic terrorists shouting "sacrifice for Allah". A spokesman said they tried to break out when police used tear gas to flush them out, wielding knives and injuring one policeman. Subsequently, police shot dead five, injured another two (which were sent to the hospital) and captured the remaining nine. A Xinhua report says the suspects have confessed that they've been planning for a......

In the past 24 hours, the number of Western news agencies reporting details and speculations about Diana O'Brien’s death have multiplied. Shanghai police have stayed quiet on the death though, refusing to report details to foreign press. The result is a series of conflicting stories, most of which point to the model’s death occurring in her own Shanghai apartment building, not on Chongming Island, as we reported yesterday. Some sources say that she was killed......

The body of a 22 year old model, Diana Gabrielle O'Brien, from Salt Spring, British Columbia, has been found on Chongming Island, where she was on an overnight modeling assignment. We haven't found any report of it yet in the Chinese press, but numerous Canadian media are already on the story. Apparently, O'Brien had not been happy in Shanghai with the modeling assignments she was getting here, and had already been telling friends that she......

A 19 year old woman who owed over 500RMB in a bill to a beauty salon in Minhang District stabbed one of the salon's worker 11 times with a kitchen knife before fleeing and committing suicide by jumping into a river. Fortunately, the beautician who was sent to follow the woman home to take payment, has survived to tell the story. The dead woman's siblings have since arrived in Shanghai from Shandong, and said their......

Another police officer who was attacked on July 1 was pronounced dead today, increasing the fatality count to six. The conditions of the three remaining injured officers and one security guard are still unclear. Yang Jia (杨佳), 28, is currently under police custody. Danwei offers further background on Yang.......

The 28 year old suspect, surnamed Yang, is from Beijing, and was taking revenge on police officers at the Zhabei police station for investigating him for alleged bicycle theft. Not the sort of harmonious news we'd like to be hearing one month before the Olympics. [Source]......

As usual, Roland Soong of EastSouthWestNorth is on top of the incident, busy piecing together all the information he can find. He informs us that Weng'an is now a sensitive word, the uncle of the female student is still alive, and the body of the student is still resting in a refrigerated coffin awaiting autopsy despite this popularly-believed story. Soong also observes that the Xinhua story (which all Chinese media are made to carry) opens......

Several thousand rioters have gathered in Guizhou's Weng'an County, torched a police station, ransacked government buildings and overturned police cars, after allegations of a cover-up over a 15 year old girl's death blew up. Ming Pao reports the son of the county's vice-deputy mayor had raped and murdered the girl along with another youth and tossed her body into the Ximen River. Police only detained the suspects for five hours and released them without charge.......

Crazy, vindictive ex-girlfriends may only ruin your reputation, but the kind of danger that is associated with crazy boyfriends often involves physical harm or even a serious personal life threat. Yesterday at 3.30pm, a man who held his girlfriend at knife point was shot dead by police in Songjiang District. All the chilling details here.......

Sorry this bears no relation to the Sichuan earthquake, but has any of you seen this in your hood yet? We don't have any time to translate this right now (maybe one of you can help), but apparently they're looking for the suspect in the explosion of Bus 942 in Yangpu District which happened earlier this month. The (dead) suspect is said to be around 40 years of age, 1.64m tall, and sports about 9......

News from the subway in the past couple weeks:"Can't the city give some street performers some space?" - Street performers in Shanghai are often lumped together with beggars as public nuisances, but often they are just free spirits chasing a musical dream. One cited example are Tuotuo and A-qing, a couple of guys who play the guitar and sing every evening at the City Plaza Mall in Jing'an, often attracting a crowd of mostly young......

You know about getting tea-housed, you've heard about the 'art student' exhibitions, and now it's time to talk about fake red cabs. Sometime a while back, when this Shanghaiist had just moved here, we asked a local what the difference was between all of the cabs. The response was cryptic: 'They're all the same, but watch out for the red ones.' This seemed like a weird piece of advice, perhaps in the same vein......

Here's an English news link:CHINESE police have rescued 33 intellectually disabled people forced to work at a building site by slave labour merchants after the apparent suicide of a detainee alerted authorities. The Chinese press offers some information. For example, the report above says that about 2/3 of the 33 people discovered were mentally disabled, and that they came from all over China. The ringmasters behind this operation go to train stations around China and......

This unusual lawsuit caught our attention in the Shanghai Daily: The children of a notable local professor, Dr Kuang Ankun, said to be "one of the founders of China's incretology research into adrenal disorders like diabetes and thyroid problems", who passed away in 1992 have sued their young stepmother, who they earlier hired to be their father's domestic helper, over an inheritance.A random test conducted by the Shanghai Bureau of Quality and Technical Supervision in......

美国数以百万计未成年少女沦为性奴隶_国际时事_新闻_腾讯网 via kwout What's interesting is this: the headline says that there are at least one million female sex slaves in the US. And the first paragraph of the article goes on to say that these figures from the US Department of Justice (DOJ), which estimates that anywhere from 100,000-3 million underage people are somehow involved in prostitution in the US. What somewhat pisses us off is the headline, which blatantly contradicts the first paragraph.......

The 10 Australian survivors of the Xi'an hostage incident have left China from the Pudong International Airport yesterday. Unconfirmed reports say one member of the group has already employed the services of a celebrity agent to sell her story.The controversial extension of the maglev line will not happen this year, Mayor Han Zheng tells reporters on the sidelines of the National People's Congress.After the long-standing ding-donging of the Disneyland project, it has also been confirmed......

Photo by Michael D Manning Chinese espionage New York Times: Justice Dept. Announces Arrests in 2 Chinese Espionage Cases AHN: Pentagon Analyst, Boeing Engineer In Hot Water For Spying For China Red Orbit: U.S. Space Secrets Sold to China Monsters & Critics: Taiwan accesses damage after US unveils Chinese espionage New internet purge Guardian Unlimited: China launches new internet purge AP: China Targets Internet in Crime Sweep Xinhua: China to tighten supervision over "virtue......

Prodded by our relentless editors to find stuff in the Chinese media, we came across a rather strange article, the date of which was yesterday, but which referred to an event that happened almost ten months ago in early March of 2007. The article talks about a robbery in Nanjing of two foreigners, in their apartment, by two Chinese men. What was amusing about this was the comedy of errors-type way it happened: the two......