If you have friends and family from overseas who are planning to visit for the Olympics, you may for their own sake want to subject them to a friendly frisk before they board their homeward flight. According to reports picked up on by Shanghai Scrap, the World Customs Organization is going to leave no stuffed panda unturned in its fight against counterfeit Olympic goods. The head of the WCO, Christophe Zimmerman, seems to be out......

Looks like a high intensity lightning bolt hit someone at the China Daily recently that foreign journalists want to know the truth about China, so they decided to do an article to inform their readers, just in case they, erm, didn't already know. Here's an excerpt from the story:French journalist Caroline Puel wants to present the real China to her readers, who are eager to know more about the country with the Beijing Olympic Games......

Tiger eats tiger in NE China zoo [Xinhua] A Siberian tiger at the Shenyang Glacier Zoo was killed and eaten by four tigers it had lived with for five years over the weekend. Apparently, the cash-strapped zoo has not been able to feed the tigers with sufficient food for the last two years.'Spiderman' Scales Part of China Mountain [AP] A daredevil French climber nicknamed "Spiderman" scaled part of Hunan province's Tianmen Mountain using only his......

Shanghai's booming subway [LA Times] The Chinese metropolis was even later than L.A. in building its system. But it is already big, with plans to make it the biggest within a decade. Shanghai: Art Deco capital - for now [The Telegraph] Just as Shanghai's priceless architectural legacy is gaining overdue recognition, it faces new threats from developers, reports Richard Spencer. Don't exaggerate product quality issues--China [The Inquirer] Concerns about the quality and safety of products......

Income disparity getting worse: Report [China Daily] China's Gini coefficient, a standard measure of a country's overall income inequality, rose to 0.473 in 2004 from 0.4 in 1993. Dream of high-speed rail may prove Shanghai politician's final nightmare [IHT] "I have a dream," Chen Liangyu, Shanghai's Communist Party secretary - since disgraced and removed from office - was fond of intoning before his aides, consciously echoing the words of Martin Luther King Jr. And as......

Expanding on earlier reports, the Associated Press reported on Friday that Major League Baseball plans to open an office in China "within a month" and they'd like to have the regular season opener played in Beijing by 2008. Baseball's bobble heads are gonzo about the sport's potential "in a nation that has a population of more than 1.3 billion." The subhead for the first story linked to above says the "search for baseball's Yao Ming......