Asia

To follow up on Simon’s previous post on Beijing’s recent bout of bad air, here’s my story about real-time pollution monitoring. For an in-depth look on air quality in the Chinese capital, I recommend checking out the blog Live From Beijing. And finally, a new study suggests that the good air conditions during last year’s Olympics owed …

We Beijingers have been spoiled in the last few months, with many gloriously clear and minimally polluted days. Today we got a rude reminder of how awful the city can still be. The air smells like a garbage fire and at four o’clock in the afternoon visibility dropped to a few hundred meters. I’d be willing to bet the API must be well …

Here’s my latest story on time.com about a group of Chinese human rights lawyers who are at risk of losing their licenses for taking controversial cases.

This is from the Financial Times:

US firm warns PC makers over Chinese software

By Kathrin Hille in Beijing

Solid Oak, the developer of one of the US’ leading net nanny software products, has started legal action to stop HP and Dell from shipping PCs equipped with a Chinese censorship software that it alleges contains codes stolen

…

Deng Yujiao, the pedicurist/karaoke bar waitress (like everything else in this story the details keep changing) who stabbed and killed a Communist Party cadre after he tried to force her to have sex with him (these exact details also very fuzzy) has been freed by a court in her native Hubei Province. (Here’s the latest official version …

So the U.S. destroyer John S. McCain is the latest ship to run into trouble with the Chinese navy in the South China Sea. In this case, a Chinese submarine, which was undoubtedly tracking the vessel, ran afoul of a sonar tracking device being towed by the ship. The incident took place outside of Subic Bay in the Philippines, where even …

Here’s my story on the rapid growth of electric bikes in China and what it means for the future of transportation here.

As some observers have noted, Barack Obama has appeared a few times on the cover of TIME. This cover of Obama as Chairman Mao, spotted by the Quirky Beijing blog at Beijing’s Joy City mall, is not an official TIME product. Will Sarah Palin want a copy for the next campaign?

So it now seems four of the 17 Uighurs mentioned in the post below ended up in Bermuda, which I guess is kind of like Palau but 10,000 miles closer and run by Britain. The U.S. seems to have a thing about Muslim detainees and tropical islands, Guantanamo, Diego Garcia, Palau, the Bahamas. Anyway, here’s part of a nice AP story on their

…

So the 17 Uighurs captured in Afghanistan and finally declared non-combatants last year after seven years in Guantanamo are to go to Pulau, the only country (it was a U.S. dependency until 1994) that would take them. Palau is a tiny group of islands way out in the Pacific. I have friends who lived there and they would constantly wax …

A heads up, somewhat belatedly, for our take on the Green Dam Youth Escort episode.

The chengguan, China’s notorious city management officers, have become digital villains. According to a thread on the Chinese web portal sina.com (translated here by Roland Soong, with details added at ChinaGeeks), a chengguan officer has been added to the ultraviolent game “Grand Theft Auto IV.” Character Niko Bellic takes on the role …

The New York Times’ Lens blog has a fascinating photo from the 1989 crackdown in Beijing that hasn’t been published until now. It is of “tank man,” the anonymous pedestrian who blocked a row of tanks, producing one of the iconic images of that event. But unlike the more famous photos and footage taken from up in the Beijing Hotel, this …