The lead photo for Qingdao's main daily newspaper shows a big hole in the ground subway workers found on Sunday. "In the small hours before dawn that day, at the intersection of Jingxin Lu and Chongqing Zhonglu, the subway tunnel inside suddenly sent out water, and at 5:45 the road surface caved in." The paper indicates that there were casualties.
Above that story the headline boasts, perhaps without intending irony, of the city's enviable public services — "In Satisfaction With Public Services, Qingdao Ranks First" — besting other major cities. The subhead explains that the Academy of Social Sciences released an "essential public services blue book" yesterday, with results from residents in Beijing, Shanghai and other cities. Housing satisfaction was low, and people's satisfaction was not closely connected to GDP.
The Yangzi Evening News put a patriotic peformance on its anniversary cover, with the official "90" logo filling the top right corner. The first bullet point says, "To celebrate the party founding's 90th anniversary a plenary session convenes at 10 o'clock this morning in the capital. Hu Jintao will issue a major speech, entreats you to watch from beginning to end live on TV."
For the 90th anniversary of the birth of the Chinese Communist Party, Chongqing's Evening News was all red today.
The subheadline says, "Today this newspaper respectfully offers a special edition celebrating the 90th anniversary of the Party's founding." (本报今日敬献庆祝建党90周年特刊)
Other stories at the bottom include a change to the country's tax code (the minimum income for taxes is now 3,500 yuan, up from 2,000; try this AP story for more details) and a visit from Henry Kissinger. "American former Secretary of State Dr. Henry Kissinger came to Chongqing to visit." (美国前国务卿基辛格博士来渝访问)
A two-month investigation into illegal food additives in the province has yielded 354 cases of abuse (全省两月查处食品非法添加和滥用食品添加剂案354起). The article says brown sugar had a pass rate of 52.9%, because of too much sulfur dioxide used as a preservative.
In the main photo, a woman sits with her leg under a car, arguing with an officer. The headline reads "Kunming checked illegal taxis yesterday. Car owners denied responsibility in a hundred ways" (昆明昨查黑车 车主百般抵赖). The inside story indicated that the woman had placed her leg under the car and said it was crushed, but a hospital later confirmed that she only had some scrapes.
A smaller title says the IMF welcomed its first female head: 国际货币基金组织迎来首位女掌门.
The main story is flooding in Changsha, but headlines above also announce that the Asian Games site in Guangzhou is opening to the public (亚运场馆大多数开放), and that a mother has been sentenced to 5 years for drowning her twin sons, who were afflicted with cerebral palsy, in a bathtub (溺死脑瘫孖仔 母亲一审获刑5年).
According to the lead story, a downpour swept over Changsha on the 28th, turning roads into rivers and cars into boats: 市区内一些主要道路积水成“河”,车辆成“船”.
- The Vatican excommunicates a Chinese state-appointed bishop, the third bishop appointed without papal approval in recent months. Last month, the government-run Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association announced its intention to ordain 40 bishops "without delay." A Hong Kong bishop siding with the Vatican said, "It's war."
- What's the matter with CCTV's smiling minority performances? How alternative ethnic folk music pushes up against ideological limits.
- The China Daily has run a story headlined "Tiananmen massacre a myth," citing Wikileaks, which asserts that no killings took place inside the square and implies implies none occurred outside, ignoring the current consensus that several hundred people were killed within a few miles.
- "Comrades and Friends, in the 170 plus years since the Opium War of 1840, our great country has weathered untold hardships..." — Hu Jintao kicks off the Party's 90th anniversary speech by casting back to western aggression.
- China has blocked the new Google+ social network a day after it was unveiled. The article mentions that the U.N. "recently declared unrestricted Internet access to be a fundamental human right, putting it in under the same large umbrella as food and water."
- China's Mao Dun Literature Prize will consider Internet novels among its submissions for the first time.
- "No commercial advertisements cluttered the streets, just billboards screaming proletariat platitudes and memorializing Communist icons." The New York Times tours Nanjiecun, reportedly the last Maoist collective in China.
- "The first bird that takes wing is the first bird to get shot... There is no need for you to be the martyr. Do you think history will stop progressing without you taking the lead?" Officials try to contain Cao Tian and other independent candidates, amid some internal debate.
- "Safe, very happy. Needs to rest for awhile." Sakharov Prize-winner Hu Jia was released from three and a half years in prison, but will be deprived of "political rights" for one year and barred from speaking to the media.
- Artist Ai Weiwei emerged from secret detention in a dingy gray T-shirt, looking slimmer, saying, "Everybody should enjoy life. I can't say anything."
- A future-proofed crossword puzzle from 1996.
- "Populism, pugilism and American exceptionalism.” A play-by-play of President Obama's recent press conference.
- "Imagine a ship that is sinking and needs all the available power to run the pumps to drain out the rising waters. The first class passengers refuse to cooperate because they feel hot and want to use the air-conditioner and other electrical appliances. The second-class passengers spend all their time trying to be upgraded to first-class status. The boat sinks and the passengers all drown. That is where the present approach to climate change is leading."
- Chuck Klosterman remembers how the United Tribes Technical College won a 1988 juco tournament basketball game without a bench, "the greatest sporting event I ever witnessed."
- Jon Stewart appeared on Fox News Sunday and asked, "Who (are) the most consistently misinformed media viewers? The most consistently misinformed? Fox. Fox viewers. Consistently. Every poll."
- The New York Times considers Jon Huntsman's prospects as a presidential candidate.
- "The novels of Ann Beattie often (make) me laugh out loud, as does Will Ferrell. In Beattie’s case, this usually has something to do with the juxtaposition of two words... In the case of Will Ferrell, it’s the blankness of his stare." — Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review and of Jonathan Franzen's "Freedom," in a lengthy interview.
- "If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourself man, woman and child, to be slaughtered." Christopher Hitchens draws a bright line under Mohandas Gandhi's less-oft-quoted moments in a review of Joseph Lelyveld's new book.
- "If some people read my fiction and see it as fundamentally about philosophical ideas, what it probably means is that these are pieces where the characters are not as alive and interesting as I meant them to be." — The late David Foster Wallace in an interview heretofore only published in Russian.
- Making "gothic" kittens, by piercing their faces and docking their tails, was found to be cruel by the Superior Court of Pennsylvania.