State broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV) has officially launched CCTV America in its bid to capture a greater share of the global audience. The new operation, located out of a brand new studio in Washington DC, will be produced by about 100 journalists in 15 bureaus in North and South America, offering viewers four hours of programming daily in three programmes: Biz Asia America, a business news broadcast; The Heat, a talkshow; and Americas Now, a news magazine programme. more ›

For the first time in 70 years (to the month!), the Economist has launched a new section of their magazine. The last time this happened was when they started up the US section following the events at Pearl Harbor. Now we say something something about how it's representative of a new global shift yadda yadda. more ›

Anti-American crusader Sima Nan (司马南) got his head stuck recently at an escalator at the airport in Washington D.C. but he can consider himself lucky that he walked away with moderate injuries. A nine-year-old boy in Beijing was not so fortunate. He died yesterday after his head got caught between two escalators at a mall: more ›

Raw footage from the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA): The Associated Press opens its latest full news bureau in Pyongyang located inside the KCNA headquarters. more ›

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"The first social responsibility and professional ethic of media staff should be understanding their role clearly and be a good mouthpiece." more ›

Xinhua News Agency recently blew big money on ads in New York City's Time Square, but apparently people still have no idea what it is they sell. more ›

Also watch a report by Channel News Asia after the jump... more ›

A few links to start off your day: more ›

A few links to start off your day: more ›

A 40-year-old man has been apprehended by police after crushing a meter maid to death with his car over a disputed parking fee. The scene unfolded this morning at 10:30am in Xuhui District on Dong'An Road near XieTu Road. more ›

Eleven people so far have been killed and 13 injured when a bus traveling at high speed overturned in what has become the deadliest Shanghai automobile-related accident in recent years. The bus was traveling on the Pudong outer-ring expressway near Longdong Road when the accident occurred at 8:54pm last night . more ›

And the clampdown has begun. more ›

This purported video of the Wenzhou train collision has been burning up the internets since it was first uploaded onto the video-sharing site, Youku. A large part of the video shows us what weather conditions were like that day -- it was raining heavily and cars were travelling slowly on the flooded streets. In the last few seconds, we see a train moving (presumably the D301 that rear-ended the D3115), a few bright sparks, and then shouts of disbelief. No lightning was visible in the video, so If this video is indeed what it claims to be, then it is clear proof that the Ministry of Railways was lying about the collision having been caused by a lightning. We'll be waiting to hear from the video forensic experts on this one. more ›

The latest media release from the Committee to Protect Journalists reads:

The Committee to Protect Journalists is concerned by the dismissal of two Guangzhou-based journalists who advocate for political reform amid tightening restrictions on free expression. While several bloggers and activists have disappeared or been detained in the last month after anonymous calls for demonstrations in support of political reform were published online, journalists in traditional media are now also being targeted, CPJ said. more ›

"POLICE in central China said they had busted a gay pornography website and detained 32 young women, including a 17-year-old, who allegedly wrote gay fictions for the site. Police in Zhengzhou, capital of Henan Province, said they had detained the website owner and his contracted writers for spreading obscene materials, the local Orient Today reported today. Police said the site provided nearly 80,000 gay fictions, including 1,500 with illegal porn descriptions, to about 600,000 registered members. Some fictions were open only to VIP readers who paid fees via cell phone. Its owner surnamed Wang, 28, said most fictions were written by women in their 20s in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chongqing and other cities. Most writers said they were paid less than 100 yuan (US$15.23) for each short fiction and some hadn't received money yet. One writer, Long Juan, said she took the job out of "curiosity" because gay novels were quite popular online." [Shanghai Daily] more ›

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34-year-old TV reporter Xuan Kejiong has covered just about every major disaster happening in Shanghai for the last ten years, so much so that locals are calling him the city's "face of tragedy". CNN follows him about on a normal work day and talks to him about how he's making a difference in China. Read more here.
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Shanghai Daily reports: "The man is said to have hanged himself on Sunday afternoon in a student dormitory at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, school officials and police officers said." No other details about the young man's death are available, but his family members are on his way to Shanghai. more ›

State run news agency, Xinhua, and American media giant, NBC, have just agreed to start broadcasting TV services together. Xinhua's TV arm, named China Xinhua News Network Corporation (CNC) was launched last year and already has a presence in many parts of the globe, compiling approximately 800 minutes of bilingual English and Chinese news daily. Both sides have released some boring glowy PR rhetoric about how this joint cooperation will be so very wonderful for viewers across the world but what we want to know is whether it will mean more featherbrained directives? more ›

Newsweek seems to think it might be. While their ability to produce impartial news about China is incredibly suspect, they win against Western media by being cheap, cheap and... non-Western. Oh yeah, did we mention cheap? The heavily subsidized service doesn't have the paycheck problems of the AFP, Reuters or AP and, when they're not talking about China, they're actually kind of good. Go figure. Wouldn't it be funny if, in the future, we turned to Xinhua for every piece of news not about China? more ›

From RTHK via Xinhua: The twelfth employee to jump from Foxconn's Shenzhen plant this year became the tenth person to plunge to his death at the factory just now around 11pm. Earlier in the day, Foxconn CEO Terry Gou arrived in Shenzhen to bring the media for a tour around the factory's recreational facilities said to be available to employees, such as the swimming pool you see on the right. He bowed multiple times for the "unstoppable tragedies", adding that he was willing to stop making Foxconn employees sign the non-suicide pact. He also added that those who jumped did so because of boy-girl relationships, and that he was in no position to stop that from happening. Families of the suicide victims were seen outside the factory wailing, demanding for an investigation. more ›

Over the last few days, Shanghaiist has been all over the Czech media and interwebs, but back at home here, it looks like the local press will not even mention our name, like we're some bad word. more ›

At the Beijing Zoo, of course! That's right, folks. If you make your way to the zoo in that friendly city up north, you may not be able to feed the animals you see, but you'll be more than welcome to put them in your mouth. Other exotic dishes on the menu: crocodile, scorpion, peacock, ostrich egg and shark fin soup, all for very affordable prices at between 100 and 1000RMB! Conservationists have been outraged since the Legal Daily reported on the zoo's menu, but as The Guardian reports, the sale of exotic animal meats at the zoo has gone on for years with approval from the authorities. What on earth have Chinese conversationists been doing all these years, you wonder? more ›

Attempted suicides at Foxconn hit the big 10 today as a 21 year old young man jumped to his death from the iPhone-maker's Shenzhen plant this morning at 5am. This is the eighth death of a Foxconn employee so far this year -- two jumpers survived their falls. Meanwhile, Foxconn executives have confirmed yesterday's report of security guards beating factory workers. The incident apparently happened last August, and insiders say it has been settled in private and that the guards have been fired. more ›

Can anyone tell us what these kungfu kids should do when faced with a knife-wielding mad man? Wouldn't it be better to just arm them with guns already?
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Just when we thought we wouldn't be hearing anymore of that hellhole-of-a-workplace otherwise known as Foxconn, yet another scandal has erupted. This time, several security guards at Foxconn's Beijing plant have been filmed getting physical with factory workers. In a clip that has been circulating around on Chinese interwebs, two guards are first seen pulling a Foxconn employee by his shirt and shoving him around. Meanwhile, three other guards outside have pinned another employee to the ground, and they are joined by another ten or so guards who then jointly beat the living daylights out of that guy. more ›

Here are the exact words from an article in the Global Times, entitled "1,000 yuan to cut the crap", and we quote: "A property management company is offering a 1,000 yuan ($146) to anyone in an apartment complex on Wuyi Road, Urumqi, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region who can confirm the identity of an upper floor idiot who has been tossing newspaper-wrapped feces from above once or twice a week for the last 10 years." Read more here. more ›

The angry email by the Commissioner General of the Czech pavilion to the Steering Committee of Expo 2010 that was leaked out to Shanghaiist yesterday has been making a splash across the Czech media and blogosphere. Due to our limited (read: non-existent) Czech, we can't quite make out what people in the Czech Republic are saying about the saga, but we did find this report by the English-language Prague Daily Monitor. more ›

The two girls, aged 16 and 19, were found last Friday in a secret lair built by their captor under his home in Wuhan. According to the police, they would probably have starved to death if a nearby business owner had not found a piece of paper with their call for help, a map and the phone number of one of the girl's father scrawled on it. The note was hidden in the rubbish of the instant noodles that the girls were fed by their 39 year old abductor. Not quite as shocking as the massive Shanxi slavery scandal in 2007 perhaps, but still an eerie reminder. more ›