Li Xiang, a reporter for Luoyang TV in Henan province, was found dead early Monday morning after having been stabbed 10 times on his way home from a KTV sessions with his friends. His laptop had been stolen, and police are treating the case as a robbery-murder. But AFP reports that he had been investigating swill oil in Henan, and had even been at odds with the food safety commission: "The last post on Li's micro-blog on September 15 said web users "had complained that Luanchuan county (in Henan) has dens manufacturing gutter cooking oil, but the food safety commission replied that they didn't find any". Bloggers said they suspected Li's death was related to his previous reports on the "gutter" cooking oil cases." While this link between his inquiries and his murder is pretty weak, recently the heat has been turned up on illegally reprocessed cooking oil (called 'gutter' or 'swill' oil) and it's not unreasonable to assume that there are some very nervous manufacturers out there. more ›

"A MAN studying abroad was detained this week after he allegedly stabbed his mother, who had come to meet him off his flight home, city police said yesterday. The victim, surnamed Gu, who had been in a coma, was still in hospital last night, although she was in a stable condition. The attack took place on Tuesday afternoon in a terminal hall at Pudong International Airport after the suspect, surnamed Wang, returned from Japan. Gu was there to pick him up, said airport police. But soon after Wang arrived, the two started to quarrel about his tuition fees at the airport. Wang suddenly took out a knife from his luggage and stabbed his mother several times, local police said yesterday. Wang was taken into custody by airport police. Wang is not wealthy and had disputes with his family about education expenses in the past, according to one of his relatives interviewed by Shanghai-based Xinmin.cn." [Shanghai Daily] more ›

• A gay singer in Hunan province has been arrested for murder after allegedly killing six men in elaborate sex games involving sado-masochism, erotic asphyxiation and hanging.
• Up north in Beijing, a new group called Beijing Period has come together to host monthly LGBT events such as the Mr & Mr Dating Game Show at the highly popular White Rabbit club.
• Back home in Shanghai, new gay bar The Box has been hosting matchmaking sessions for young gay men and women seeking to come together in faux marriages.

This week has been a particularly morbid one for China news-watchers, thanks to a string of grisly murders in the headlines. Heck, we're still trying to wrap our heads around the bizarre nature of some of these massacres. Even if you're desensitized enough to think that murders are nothing new, the circumstances of these particular killings are so tragically gruesome that they should shock you into some sort of emotion: more ›

• Even your eggs aren't safe now, people. After Hong Kong found Select's "extra-large fresh brown eggs" to contain close to twice the legal limit of melamine, Walmart has pulled all eggs from the brand off the shelves of all its China stores. Select (咯咯哒 or "Gegeda" in Chinese) is a big brand and is one of those "China Famous Brands" (中国驰名商标). Refer to the packaging of the affected eggs in the video, and if you have them at home, dump them.
• A 37 year old woman from the Zhejiang province has come to Shanghai to seek medical treatment for her incontrollable shaking after spending RMB100,000 on medical care in Hangzhou, but even the best doctors at Huashan Hospital are baffled by her condition.
• An Anhui man has been sentenced to death for the cruel murder of the ex-husband of his lover. After suffocating his victim with a plastic bag, he dismembered him with a kitchen knife and then boiled and steamed all his body parts before dumping them in a creek in Pudong.

Photo from fateless_gypsy more ›

Shanghai Daily reports a man killed 3 members of his family in a grocery store on Tongzhan Road, in Jiading's Fengbang Town. It appears he killed his wife and in-laws as a result of a domestic dispute and has since turned himself in. Meanwhile, ChinaSmack informs us that within a few days of the start of the new semester, four middle school students in Shanghai have committed suicide. more ›

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. more ›

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 in a botched break and enter. Her boyfriend reports her body was found by her roommate, fellow Canadian model Charlotte Wood, and that Chinese authorities told him all valuables were stolen from the pair’s apartment. more ›

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 was planning to go home just one month into her three-month contract. Grieving family and friends of O'Brien have had no news from the Shanghai police or Foreign Affairs of how O'Brien died and whether she was murdered, but they have been informed that an autopsy will be conducted soon. O'Brien's boyfriend, Joel Berry, who has known her for 10 years (and who was intending to marry her), says she was not into drugs or alcohol or anything, so he couldn't help but "think it was anything except foul play". more ›