By Kenneth Tan and David Feng Not good news: Tudou may be in for a squashing by the Chinese mainland authorities, specifically, the State Administration for Radio, Film and Television. A Sohu IT report claims that the presence of porn -- a big no-no on the Chinese Internet -- was all that it took for the potato (which is the Chinese translation of "tudou") to be squashed. The squashing is long-term and has no set......

Here is a piece of good news (for all you live music lovers out there) to help quench your thirst while you wait out the events drought that inevitably hits during every Chinese New Year. End of March there is a promising new live music venue (no cover bands!) opening up. Unfortunately, we have been sworn to secrecy on location (hint: former sports bar somewhere on Huaihai Road) but can tell you it will hold......

In part of China's ongoing Olympic makeover, Chinese airlines will face harsh penalties for delays and cancellations . New restrictions will set a cap on the daily number of flights and prevent airlines from overbooking flights. Certain airports will also keep an airplane on reserve in the event of mechanical problems. If problems persist, offending airlines could lose their domestic service or face two-year restrictions on further expansion. This sounds like good news for Chinese......

By JFK Miller So it’s Huckabee and Obama in Iowa. Clearly it’s early days, and neither candidate is a certainty for their respective parties’ nomination for the November presidential election. But it’s worth looking at what both candidates have had to say on the record about China. First Huck. Huck is a Baptist minister turned Republican politician who wrote a best-selling book about his fat-shedding experience entitled Quit Digging Your Grave with a Knife and......

For a second straight week Shanghaiist has missed our Friday deadline, oops. The good news is that Saturday is when all the really good stuff happens. Today, eight Shanghai bands (1 from Beijing) will take part in the 0093 show at 4live, scheduled to start at 4:30pm. This should be a great showcase of the various genres of music that Shanghai bands have to offer, ranging from noise to metal to garage rock and everything......

Heres' a public service announcement to (illegal) satellite TV users from Shanghaiist: Don't put stuff on top of your satellite receiver box. We had gotten in the habit of placing the occasional DVD or DVD sleeve on top of our satellite box, which is covered by a bunch of small vents. Not long ago, while working at our computer (surprise, surprise) at around 1 am, we heard a popping noise coming from near the TV......

RUSSIAN STANDARD VODKA: At a recent vodka blind tasting event at Sashas (corner of Hengshan and Dongping Rds 衡山路/东平路), the winning vodka out of the field of 23 was something called Russian Standard. A few days ago we were invited to partake in consuming a bottle of this drink. Very neutral and smooth, it ended up going down particularly well when served on ice with some crushed basil stirred in. Sashas hasn't confirmed a definite......

There is no end in sight to the good news. Not only is Youtube blocked, but Blogspot is also back behind the Great Firewall, now that the 17th Party Congress is over. Nobody has to put up with this sh*te really. Grab your VPN now, and enjoy the Internet as it was meant to be. Picture from slider22......

Hot on the heels of the FIFA Women's World Cup, yet another international sporting event, right here in Shanghai. The Special Olympics will open on 2 Oct at the Shanghai Stadium and run all the way till 11 Oct. We hear from the organisers:Award-winning producer and director Don Mischer has created a spectacular Opening Ceremonies event to mark the official opening of the World Games. The event will include star-studded entertainment, the Parade of......

This group of women in Guangxi Province's Nanning (南宁) have just completed their state-sponsored training and received their certification as trained maternity matrons (月嫂), who according to our favourite English-Chinese dictionary, are maids -- usually married women who already have their own kids -- that are hired to take care of mothers and their newborns ("Chinese women traditionally are confined indoors for a month after delivering a baby on the grounds that they are particularly......

Whenever there is a crisis or a natural calamity, there are the people who lose money and then there are the entrepreneurs. It seems enterprising businessmen have decided to cash in on an outbreak of rodents in the Dongting Lake area in Hunan province which saw an estimated 2 billion mice on the run from the flooded Yangtse River by taking the matter into their own hands - literally. China Daily says trucks full of......

Newly crowded A3 cup winners Shanghai Shenhua get back down to domestic business tomorrow night in their first home fixture in five weeks when Tianjin come to town. Things on the Shenhua front have been rather busy of late. Not content with winning the A3 Championship for the first time (see You Tube clip), controversial new signings coming in and domestic stars going out have been the order of the day. Former Middlesbrough striker Hamilton......

If you are a text message addict like us — 10 fens do add up fast, we have some good news for you. For a limited time, China Mobile (all you 134-139, 158, 159 people) is offering free SMS service with just one string attached: download its new instant messenger client, 飞信/Feixin/Fetion (Chinese for “flymail”). The IM, at least in its current incarnation is nothing to crow about, but it does have one ass kicking......

While we were wondering why neither ESPN Asia nor Star Sports on our satellite system was showing the Dallas Mavericks-Golden State Warriors game this morning, we noticed a clip on ESPN video that talked about NBA commissioner David Stern expressing interest in setting up a joint venture hoops league in China. We stopped going to Shanghai Sharks games a few years ago because the team didn't seem to care too much about its fans, so......

We are happy to report that we are wearing shorts. It's a beautiful day — 23 degrees Celsius (73 F) and sunny according to the little sun icon above the Shanghaiist logo over on the left. And by Friday, it's supposed to be 28 C (82 F). Since it is finally bearing good news, we thought today would be a good day to remind you about the Shanghaiist Weather Page, which you can access by......

So, we're trying to get a license for our new dog. They don't make this process easy, of course. But why would they? It's not like our dog's life depends on it. Oh wait ... Red stamps. You have to get three of them, we think, before they will even consider your license application: from some kind of neighborhood committee, your local police station and then the main district police station. Then you get to......

We don't know how you felt upon reading the title of this post, but we're sure it would have been better (or more appropriate) if you had first dropped some acid. From the report: There's some good news today for those of you who concerned about how to find your sausages in the event of a power cut: Chinese scientists have announced the successful production of "partially green fluorescent pigs". The glow-in-the-dark porkers are the......

Shanghai's largest shopping mall is linked to the pension fund scandal.The long awaited parity of the HK Dollar and the RMB was a typo?!Shanghai Wenguang Media group is helping release the film Men (《门》) simultaneously in the theaters and on the internet and mobile devices.Bored during the holidays? Grab one of the hot selling books on Chen Liangyu and the pension fund scandal.China's military white paper says: no arms race.Shanghai's energy white paper: 20% energy......

From The Search Engine Journal we discovered that Baidu won an intellectual copyright infringement case against some major music companies. From Interfax: Baidu, the largest Internet search engine in China, won an MP3 copyright infringement lawsuit against seven Hong Kong music companies today, a company official said. The Beijing No.1 Intermediate People's Court overseeing the case ruled that the accusations brought against the Chinese search giant do not have adequate legal support. "This is good......

This morning we came across two pieces of news, both about sex and sexuality in China, one interesting, the other depressing. We'll start with the good news. The Fourth Guangzhou sex festival kicked off on Saturday. We don't know for sure, but it seems that Guangzhou is a pretty liberal and tolerant place when it comes to sex and sexuality -- a report from two years ago said that they were planning on including sex......

It's good news for those of you who stand accused of one of the nearly 70 offenses that are punishable by death in China. Under legislation enacted on Tuesday, as of January 1, all death sentences handed out by provincial courts must be reviewed and ratified by China's Supreme People's Court. This reverses a 1983 law which gave such powers to the provincial courts in an effort to crack down on rising crime and corruption......

With the GigShanghai guys attending a combined five to seven gigs a week, being from Austin, and having terrific taste, please take this next statement very, very seriously: Last night, we separately witnessed two of the best gigs we’ve seen in a long, long time -- and the good news is that they’re both playing again. We'll start with Jet Echo, who played GigLive at BonBon last night. Admittedly, when bright-red-haired Ripley sat down, lit......

As the convential wisdom goes, China will not respect other's intellectual property rights (IPR) until its own IPR needs protection. If this is true, then IPR in China recently took a significant step forward as the Financial Times is reporting that a litigious Shenzhen USB flash drive manufacturer Netac has hired Morgan Lewis & Bockius to sue New Jersey computer hardware manufacturer PNY Technologies for infringing upon Netac's patent for USB flash memory drives, or......

China to allow a free press during the Olympics -- this means foreign reporters can report about things other than sports, yet of course, there remain boundaries. It sounded like good news, and now we realize that we have no idea if this has any substantive meaning.Along those lines, there will be no TV delay during the Olympics. Get out your protest cards, your fifteen milliseconds of fame are waiting.Liu Xiang is bored with competing......

It’s been a week of uncertainties, at least as far as JZ is concerned. Was JR dropped? Is Coco back? When will we see more of Alec and The All-Stars (pictured above)? Did you all find the bank card we lost there on Wednesday? We’d love answers (especially for that last one -- ICBC wants us to go all the way out to Yangpu to get a new one). If the sol has you in......

Q: How many locals does it take to fill a sidewalk? A: Four cyclists, a guy on a motorbike, two DVD sellers, a trio of street sweepers, a chuanr stand, and the shopkeeper who comes out to his stoop to throw a tissue onto the pavement. Sounds cramped, right? Blame the increase in car numbers: many Shanghai streets were widened in the early 1990s to make way for more vehicles. But here’s some good news:......

Sure seems like it lately. Scientists have called the Yangtze River (heard of it?) "cancerous." This is not good news. The Yangtze is China's longest river. It is also Shanghai's main source of drinking water. Pop Quiz: How many tons of wastewater flowed into the Yangtze in 2004? If you guessed 16.75 billion, you win! Fifty kuai for a bottle of Evian doesn't sound so bad now, does it? And if you think this story......

There's been more good news for all you censorship lovers out there this month. We are sure that you are equally as thankful as we are for that evil foreign site Wikipedia to have been blocked, and are quite content at knowing that you just don't need to know so many things about the world (Answers.com notwithstanding). Baidu.com has gone one better, and released Baidupedia, a site containing all the news that's fit to tell......

Now take a wild guess: Which occupation is the most dangerous in Shanghai? According to this report (in Chinese) by the Shanghai Evening Post, journalists, corporate managers and scientific researchers are the top ones in danger now. Why? Xiong Sidong, director of Immunology Institute of Fudan University explains Shanghainese are threatened by a variety of physical ailments and karoshi (guolao si 过劳死 or "death from overwork"). And the three occupations listed above are the most......

Amongst the technical jargon on the Technology Marketing Coorporation's article, this part brought us out in a cold sweat: The C626 chip is optimized for low power consumption and high performance, providing key features such as MPEG-4 decoder and analog codec for video and audio playback and recording. The chip also included Chipnuts' proprietary and unique MINI-MTVTM feature enabling true mobile Karaoke. Any time ... any place ... you may now be subject to the......