Warning: Video contains some disturbing images. Last Saturday, Harbin City Sports Academy student, Lin Songling who had just ended a night of fun and games with a few chums at the city's Box Club picked up a fight with several policemen (who apparently were also drunk) and ended up getting beaten to death by them. Earlier rumours on BBS's had suggested the police were the first to pick up the fight, but the Harbin PSB......

Some of you will remember him for his messy hair, and others will remember him for his tight ass, but Aric Queen is back, this time with a hairband. The former City Weekend nightlife columnist, one time Shanghaiist contributor and serial podcaster found himself wanted by the police for a series of videos that he had been filing for Current TV under the name Shanghai Diaries (not to be confused with Dan Washburn's 2002 blog......

Security cameras at an ATM belonging to the Agricultural Bank of China in Zhengzhou, the Henan provincial capital, have captured a crime in action committed by a (not too intelligent) young man in a suit. Upon withdrawing some cash, the man did not take his money immediately, but instead swapped one of the RMB100 notes with a fake one from his pocket and, if we're understanding this correctly, fed it back into the machine and......

ChinaSmack points us to this shocking and sad story of 11 year old student Zhang Yaoyin in Hunan Province who had her had smashed against the desk by her teacher numerous times, then hit savagely with a metal bar before going thrown out of the window of the fourth storey classroom to her death. This incident occurred in September 2006 but was given fresh attention via a new post on the Chinese forum Mop and......

The Shanghai Daily reports that a 20 year old man, apparently dissatisfied with his genital surgery killed a 71 year old doctor by stabbing him with a pair of scissors in Zhejiang. He has since been detained after attacking two others in the rampage. The murder was committed at the Hangzhou Changzheng Medical Outpatient Department. Photo by Marco Bernardini......

This has gotta be one of the most spectacular stories we've read on Shanghai Daily. A 22 year old Zhejiang native has flown back from Italy to Shanghai to turn himself in to the police for a gang rape he was involved in six years ago. Shortly after the incident, the young man emigrated to Italy with his family, but three of his friends were caught and thrown in jail. In May this year, he......

Valleywag points us to an interesting article in the Financial Times which highlights five markets in which Google plays second fiddle to local rivals — Russia, the Czech Republic, Japan, Korea and, you guessed it, China. In Russia and the Czech Republic, Mohammad Gawdat, a Google executive who oversees 112 countries in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, admits rather squarely that Google was late to the game there and performs poorer than its rivals,......

WARNING: The video on the right contains footage of someone dying and as such may be disturbing to viewers. Recently, an 8 year old girl visiting the factory where her grandmother worked died under mysterious circumstances that were captured by the factory's security camera, as seen here in this report by Zhejiang TV (浙江电视台). The CCTV footage shows the little girl Yang Yang hopping merrily into the factory in Hangzhou's Yuhang district (余杭), and then......

NTDTV speaks to Natan Galkovitch, one of 100 victims of terror in Israel who are now suing the Bank of China for not preventing money that was transferred to the Hamas, and Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, an attorney for the plaintiffs. Among the claims of the suit:...beginning in July 2003, the Bank of China executed dozens of wire transfers for the terrorist groups totaling several million dollars. Many of the transfers were initiated in the Middle East,......

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......

From AP: A Chinese man attacked the two Americans -- a man and a woman and their Chinese tourist guide -- around 12:20 p.m. on the second level of the Drum Tower, a popular tourist attraction in north Beijing, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. The United States Olympic Committee said in a statement that the two Americans were family members of a coach for the U.S. men's indoor volleyball team. "Our priority in this......

Dan Harris of China Law Blog brings us an interesting take on the new pay deal Wal-Mart struck on Friday with the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) in Quanzhou, Shenyang, and Shenzhen. As reported by Forbes, the U.S. retailer operates more than 100 of its namesake stores throughout China and employs 48,589 people. Its new agreement with its employees in Shenyang calls for an 8% pay increase in both 2008 and 2009. Harris remarks......

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]......

China Digital Times points us to these two videos of forced evictions by the local government in Jilin Province's Ji'an City (集安市) that are quickly spreading throughout the Chinese internets. The videos, dated May 29, 4am, were found on Sina but subsequently copied by a journalist from Boxun.com (a dissident site) and posted up to foreign video hosting sites since they would soon be censored from the Chinese internet for being too unharmonious. One protest......

Hong Kong is known to produce some of the most gung-ho reporters and cameramen around. When these guys cross over to the mainland and come face-to-face with Chinese police, interesting things happen. Yesterday, over 30,000 people queued up in the sweltering heat just outside the Bird's Nest to get their hands on the last 250,000 Olympic tickets available. After a series of queue-jumping incidents, scuffles broke out at around 2pm. The Standard (HK) reports [h/t......

"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......

From the New York Times: Foreign entertainers who have taken part in activities that China deems a threat to its sovereignty will not be allowed to perform in the country, according to a new list of rules posted Thursday on the Web site of the Ministry of Culture. The rules say that the background credentials of performers from foreign countries, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan will be scrutinized carefully. “Those who used to take part......

The China Digital Times leads us to a story in Jianghua, in Hunan Province, where local party officials are hanging signs throughout the city claiming that some forms of petitioning the government are illegal. The signs declare, "If you petition illegally, the penalty is imprisonment," or "Attack those who don’t petition legally," or “Wage a war for standard, orderly petitioning." The Digital Times suggests that this is the local government's response to a central government......

The New Dominion finds something suspiciously awry about the public trial and executions of two Uighur men last Wednesday. While Reuters UK sums up a Radio Free Asia report (published by the New York Times on Saturday) asserting that "The Kashgar Intermediate People's Court sentenced two men — Mukhtar Setiwaldi and Abduweli Imin — to death and immediately executed them after a July 9 public trial in Yengi Sheher county," The New Dominion claims to......

Trouble with visa renewal is one thing, but forced deportation is quite another. Foreigners whining about the former should take a look at the recent case of Dechen Pemba, a Brit of Tibetan descent who was detained, driven to the airport, and expelled from the PRC for five years when she walked out of her Beijing apartment last Tuesday. The seven plain clothes policemen who escorted Pemba allowed her only time to pack a bag,......

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.......

This PBS documentary on the underground church movement produced by the Chicago Tribune's Beijing Bureau chief Evan Osnos can now be watched online here, and it is as we said it would be — groundbreaking.......

Unrequited love has led a young Chinese woman to create a website, and publish all the photos of her ex-boyfriend Li Pengfei (李鹏飞) in the most compromising positions (wanking in bed, performing cunnilingus on her, etc.) in a last ditch attempt to get back at him. The sexy pictures were published along with all the sordid details of how the little casanova was supposed to have tricked her out of her money and love......