thinking of the London bombings…
… as we’ve seen numerous times (from the death of lady Diana to 9/11) people need a outlet in situations like this and often this needs to be a shared public response. I’m impressed by the positiveness of the public response generally in this case. The we’re not afraid web site is an example of this attitude.

http://www.werenotafraid.com/

Chinese Flash Card app (in /projects) now does tone marks properly (yī not yi1), thanks to finding the below article and the rather cool word macro (option II).
http://www.csulb.edu/~txie/PINYIN/pinyin.htm

today’s China articles…

reality check for foreign banks…
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/3be4ac40-ed75-11d9-ac0d-00000e2511c8.html (P)

textile quotas…
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/009436ce-ed7f-11d9-ac0d-00000e2511c8.html (P)

Despite having been here almost 2 years now and, of course, my recent first hand experience of the law in action I don’t feel I’ve heard a great deal about the legal matters in here. I don’t think there is anything sinister at work behind this, rather that the media here and abroad doesn’t find a great deal interesting to write about.

This rather encouraging article from the economist is an exception…
http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?Story_id=S%27%29%28%28%2DPQ%5F%21%210%22D%0A&tranMode=none

… well, I’m not sure how much of it was the guards and how much the local police patrol but thanks to all concerned I now have number plates once again. You can’t fault the efficiency – they’d caught the criminals before I even new a crime had been committed.

The evidence…

After a weekend of surreal goings on I awoke this morning to find my rental car was missing its number plates. I’d parked on the street and was a bit later out of the house than I intended so my first thought was that it was some bizarre way of implementing a parking ticket, the odd thing was that the note was on the headed note paper of the apartment management office. So not sure what do I drove to work, with no number plates. At the office the note was translated as saying that my number plates had been stolen and to contact shenme shenme police station. OK said I but why am I getting this information from the apartment management office? Turns out that the ‘perp’ was caught in the act by the guards of our complex – which is pretty cool as I was parked some way down the street. The usual scam is they steal your plates and leave a ‘ransom note’ – they were caught before they had a chance to leave me the note.

http://www.live8live.com/live8/petition.do
http://www.live8live.com/videos/index.shtml?clip=click