Here’s Austin latest dispatch from Urumqi.

As you’ll see, we have a new look which feels fresher and cleaner. Let us know what you think. Meanwhile, a reminder to commenters: no profanity please. I am perfectly happy to have lively debate and to be called all sorts of names, would be doing something wrong if it was all sweetness and light, but scatalogical abuse is just childish.

…to deal with the situation in Xinjiang. This is a pretty huge deal. For President Hu to leave Rome and hurry home is a significant loss of face for him in front of the assembled world leaders and that means that there must have been an extremely pressing reason for him to do so. And as a friend points out, that probably can only mean …

This is a very worrying development indeed. Story below from Xinhua, but Austin and other reporters have seen mobs of Chinese in the streets of Urumqi up to a thousand strong armed with staves and shovels, out for revenge. I’ve seen these sort of race riots before and at this point it is up to the security forces to lay down a …

Austin Ramzy, who is in Urumqi called to report that he is witnessing a new protest that is currently underway, apparently sparked by the presence of foreign reporters. He says that the Foreign Ministry and local government officials took six buses of reporters, about 50 in all, on a trip to see a burned out car dealership on Dawangnan …

As I wrote in a previous post, one of Beijing’ more interesting reactions to the Iran protests was to single out Twitter for its role in the protests. Now, not surprisingly, Twitter has been blocked since yesterday afternoon, presumably in reaction to the Urumqi riots Sunday and their bloody suppression. Nur Bekri, chairman of the …

Here’s our take on what must have been a primeval descent into chaos and blood in Urumqi last night. God knows what the final/real death count is going to be. As a number of the people I interviewed pointed out, the rapid admission of the appallingly high death toll is an astonishing break from usual conduct. Think of Tibet last March, …

Beijing environmental officials announced today that the past six months have seen the clearest air since 2000. They cited less frequent sandstorms and sustained emissions control efforts as the major causes for the improvement in the city’s notoriously smoggy skies. By taking 55,000 of the city’s most polluting cars off the streets, …

The China Environmental Law blog, run by Shanghai-based attorney Charlie McElwee, has praise today for a Chinese Ministry of Environmental Protection site that updates water quality data every four hours. Great news of course, but as the post notes, the timely water pollution information isn’t as immediately important as air quality …

My colleague Jessie Jiang and I have a story on time.com today about the grim diagnosis of Yao Ming’s broken foot, and what some Chinese fans think about the possibility of a career-ending injury for one of the country’s biggest sporting heroes.