It’s shaping up to be a bad week for the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (the catchily acronymed SARFT) – and it's still only Wednesday. Recent events surrounding bans of video sharing site Tudou and then actress Tang Wei (汤唯) seem to suggest that SARFT is slipping into farce. First off, there were attempts to mash Tudou due to alleged pornographic content on the site – as we reported a few days ago.......

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......

Sohu, that bastion of hard-hitting news on the Chinese internet, serves up a video of pretty female reporters at the NPC [h/t CDT]: Meanwhile, Radio Free Asia alleges Beijing police have detained 1,000 petitioners with grievances against the government before the start of congress.This is a video shot by petitioners at the Gongyi East overpass. Several hundred of them had gathered here to meet with foreign journalists but their plans were disrupted by local police:......

Japanese investigators have found 'no abnormality' at the dumpling factory in Hebei Province at the centre of a food safety scare in Japan after hundreds of people suffered from pesticide poisoning from eating the dumplings. Traces of pesticide were found on the outside of the dumplings and not in the fillings, leading investigators to point to "deliberate poisoning, rather than accidental contamination". This idea, however, has been rejected by Chinese experts.The world's most powerful music......

A reminder that Shanghai's airwaves weren't always the preserve of Love Radio's soul-negating pop or bizarre phone-ins dedicated to giving out street directions, courtesy of the Radio Heritage Foundation. Around 40 stations operated out of the city in 1940, though this dropped during the course of the Japanese occupation to less than ten by 1945. The website has put together a list of the stations that broadcast during the period, and is calling for anyone......

Huang Qingnan (黃慶南), the activist from the Shenzhen Dagongzhe Migrant Worker Centre who was brutally hacked on his back, waist and leg is finally well enough to give an interview. Erm, well, not really. From this video, it appears he was splashed with acid too? We can't quite tell. Urgh. Anyhow, the muscles on his left calf have all been destroyed, which means he will have to learn how to keep his balance with his......

A new directive by the Chinese censorship board, also known as the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT), has banned producers of erotic movies, including their directors and leading actors, from participation in domestic film awards. Violators may be banned up to five years from the movie industry and recalcitrant studios may even have their licenses revoked. Xinhua quotes a report by the Beijing News that details exactly what kind of content SARFT......

SFist saw Christmas Day turn tragic after a Siberian tiger escaped from her pen at the San Francisco Zoo, killing a visitor and mauling two others. Phillyist counted down the top ten items on Philadelphia's New Year's wish list. Gothamist looked at the wooden bikes being offered for NYC's first bike share program on Governors Island. LAist received a Christmas present in the form of a drunk Santa Claus in a g-string. Bostonist launched......

What would you do if you paid a shitload of money to study at some college, thinking it would legit and all, only to be told that your diploma would not be recognised after all? We don't know about you, but we would definitely riot. Well, that's what some civilian students at the Hefei PLA Artillery Academy did a few days back. And it turned out to be a very bloody incident. Iron doors were......

Burma junta holds rally, arrests 4 activists [AP] On Saturday, the Burmese junta organized a mass rally in Rangoon to denounce Western powers and the foreign media, whom the military regime accuses of fomenting the recent protests. Officials said 120,000 people attended the event, some of whom were paid to be there. Among some of the slogans the crowds were made to chant include "Down with BBC! Down with VOA! Down with Radio Free Asia!"Singapore's......

2,000 sex-related ads dropped from Chinese television and radio [People's Daily] About 2,000 advertisements adjudged to be sexually suggestive have been dropped from television and radio broadcast across China over the past two weeks, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) said on Wednesday. Work on Beijing-Shanghai high-speed rail to start by end of 2007 [AFP] Work on a long-awaited high-speed rail linking Beijing and Shanghai is expected to start by late 2007,......

The Shanghaiist Weather Center is 100 percent sure the answer will be yes (although is Shanghai Circuit really in Shanghai?). It's dry now in the French Concession, but the dark clouds above suggest it won't stay that way for long. Here's the latest weather update from the official Formula 1 website: Thus far Sunday has been dry with a little wind, but no sign of the edge of Typhoon Krosa, which is sweeping through the......

China unleashes cautious giant onto world's financial markets [AFP] The low-key ceremony that marked the launch of China Investment Corp. this weekend could reflect the cautious manner in which Beijing intends to unleash the largest fund in history onto the world's financial markets. Irish charity calls for boycott of Beijing Olympics [Belfast Telegraph] Irish charity Trocaire has called for a boycott of next year's Olympics in Beijing, to highlight China's failure to act on the......

Rumour has it that Shanghai Media Group, the city's largest TV conglomerate which operates 20 television and radio channels, has plans to start a new 24-hour English language news channel. Rejoice all ye who don't have (or can't afford) satellite at home (that includes us)! Well apparently this has been in the works for a year now, and while SMG hasn't jumped pass the final regulatory hurdle, it has already started hiring "hiring English-speaking presenters,......

Shanghaiist usually waits until Friday to update you on this weekend's live shows, but this week we decided to actually get something in a timely manner (actually we are going to Beijing for the Pop Festival so will be partying way too hard to write this later). Yuyintang, those stalwart music promoters, are back with a show tonight (Thursday) at the Zendai Moma out in Pudong. If this morning's weather holds out it should be......

Lost Laowai brings our attention to the following soundbyte of a conversation between an Air China pilot and the control tower of the JFK Airport in New York. In it, the pilot fails to understand anything that the traffic controller was saying and his English was so garbled that he might as well have been speaking in Esperanto -- a language that is deemed so important that China Radio International's website has a version in......

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......

DUE TO ITS SOMEWHAT GRAPHIC NATURE, THE PHOTO ASSOCIATED WITH THIS STORY APPEARS AFTER THE JUMP. 24 year old macrodactyly patient Liu Hua from Jiangsu, the man with the world's largest hand (Pic after the jump: NOT for the faint-hearted!!), has arrived at the Shanghai No. 9 People's Hospital for radical plastic surgery. He was born with a left thumb, index and middle finger much larger than normal, which grew dramatically together with his arm......

China's west swelters under record high temperatures. Westernmost China's Xinjiang region was under a blistering heatwave Sunday, with the mercury hitting as high as 44.8 degrees Celsius (112.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in Turpan city, a local official said. Analysts warn China vulnerable to a Japan-style debt meltdown. Today, China could be ripe for a crisis of its own that might resemble the collapse of Japan's "Bubble Economy" in the early 1990's and have enormous global impact,......

China's schools overcharged 1.7 billion yuan in past five years "A massive 1.7 billion yuan (about 217 million U.S. dollars) of unwarranted school fees have been charged to unlucky parents since 2002, the top corruption watchdog said here on Thursday." How long can Great Firewall of China last? "Where Manchester’s worker dissidents of the early 1800s had the works of Percy Bysshe Shelley to urge them to 'rise like lions after slumber', China’s modern......

A few days ago, we linked to a BoingBoing post entitled "Buddha Machine: spiritual, generative transistor radio." Well, Shanghai blogger Swiss James, who is, naturally, "an Englishman born in the year of the Horse," recently bought six of these plastic chanting contraptions and videotaped them for us all to see and hear (he used his close proximity to Jing'An Temple as an excuse). He writes: I think there’s something really appealing about these little gadgets......

We here in the Ist-A-Verse know that we're sensational, but it's very rare that we get a chance to be sensationalistic. This week, we've decided to have ourselves a little fun and try our hand at tacky tabloid headlines, using nothing more than our favorite posts from this week. Torontoist Special Report: Rosie to Trump: "Fire 300 Bicyclists for Fraud!" On DCist: Students Go Wild for Slogans, Secrets and Sexual Harassment The action was thick......

Shanghai-made Ferris wheel applies for Guinness World Records "It is 25 meters taller than the London Eye, currently the tallest observation wheel in the world, and only cost one-eighth the price to build." Probably very safe. Six feared dead as Beijing subway tunnel collapses "A contractor had tried to conceal the collapse from authorities by sealing off the site and confiscating the workers' cell phones, it said, citing rescuers." Chinese director receives official approval......

That's what some people are saying. According to China Radio International, the Shanghai Morning Post reported earlier this week that Spider-Man 3, expected to be one of the summer's biggest blockbuster movies, got the seal of approval from China's censors and will "open in theaters on the Chinese mainland on May 1, even though it won't be released in the United States until May 4." Pacific Epoch also reports this, citing the Legal Evening News......

New Scientist recently reported on a record-breaking feat of a particular bird-of-prey population near Beijing. This news isn't something to celebrate, rather something quite worrisome. Researchers discovered that kestrels had record-breaking amounts of a PDBE chemical known as Deca in their tissues. PBDE or polybrominated diphenyl ether, commonly used in textiles, plastics and electronics, is a ubiquitous environmental pollutant. One formulation, called Deca on account of the 10 bromine atoms it has, is the most......

The Washington Post reports that the former next president of the United States, Al Gore, is going to put on some massive live shows to help persuade the world to take global warming and climate change seriously:At the news conference Thursday announcing this summer's ambitious "Live Earth" concerts -- designed as an exercise in "mass persuasion" about threats of global warming -- Al Gore described his vision: a 24-hour musical extravaganza across seven continents, featuring......

From February until August, Chinese TV "golden hours" (5-8pm) programming is going to go on moral diet, shedding excess and unwanted sex, violence, and moral degradation. This we learned from a Chinese report as well as Asia Times Online, where they quoted official Wang Weiping on the matter: "The country's satellite TV stations should only screen ethically inspiring TV series during prime time," Shanghai Daily quoted Wang Weiping, an official from the State Administration of......

A week ago, we told you about The Departed's bad odds for finding its way into Chinese theaters — censors, reportedly, didn't like a plotline that had Chinese government officials (or people working for government officials) trying to purchase advanced military computer hardware. Well, now we learn that "[d]istributors for Martin Scorsese's Oscar-nominated crime thriller The Departed are negotiating with Chinese censors to edit out some of the politically sensitive scenes." But wait, SARFT is......

Texas is thawing, the Northeast is freezing, and a sort of natural order seems almost restored to the Ist-A-Verse. Almost. Londonist HQ—that is to say, the city of London—was battered by heavy winds, making it a bad time to be a twelve-meter (nearly forty-foot) tall snowman. Still, not everyone decided to keep warmly covered. Meanwhile, back indoors, the Big Brother racism is now causing all kinds of headaches for international diplomats, and Londonist got into......

Illegal radio operators put on notice in Shanghai There are apparently large numbers of unlicensed radio operators in China, whose transmissions often interfere with uses of specialized frequencies EMI, Baidu launch Chinese online music service This is streaming, free, online music. Stuff you cannot download, unless you have the right software. Hong Kong limits pregnant Chinese women Hong Kong limiting the number of mainland Chinese pregnant women entering the SAR, esp. those who do......