Women Fight On Chengdu Subway

Women fight in Chengdu subway
Two spicy women came to blows on the Chengdu subway after reportedly bumping into one another, or something. Check out the woman in green who takes a seat next to one of the lassies at the 40-second mark, and immediately regret it. Her spot is vacated 15 seconds later.

Available On Taobao: Surrogates To Fulfill China’s Parent Visitation Law

Chronic loneliness
Last Monday, a curious new Chinese law called the Protection of the Rights and Interests of the Elderly went into effect, forcing the country's healthy adults to visit their parents on a semi-regular basis. “Family members who live apart from their parents should visit often or send their regards to their parents," the law stated. (That same day, a court in Wuxi, Jiangsu province cited the law in an actual court case.) But most people say the law is more symbolic than anything, a piece of regulation designed to remind the cosmopolitan, rapidly modernizing citizens of China of their traditional Chinaness, which includes filial piety.

Jiaku The Gorilla Has Quit Smoking, So Please Stop Giving Him Cigarettes

Jiaku the gorilla
A 23-year-old gorilla named Jiaku became famous at Tianshan Wildlife Zoo in Xinjiang for being a "heavy smoker." He was known to perform tricks -- doing handstands, turning in circles, clapping his hands, even performing ballet moves -- to get visitors to throw him a smoke, and would sometimes get desperate without his nicotine fix. His trainer, however, out of concern for his health, has recently tried to wean him off cigarettes. The method has been to lace his ciggies with chili pepper and to apply an ointment on the end.

Evan Osnos’s Valedictory

Evan Osnos leaves China
China watchers already know this, but longtime China correspondent Evan Osnos, who has written for the New Yorker since 2008, has moved back to the United States. "A Billion Stories," published Friday in the best China blog in the business, amounts to his farewell, and it's a typical Osnos piece: descriptive and instructive, poetically constructed from graf to graf, perfectly allusive in the way that the world sometimes is, and keenly humanizing.

Pollution Contributes To Record-Settling Algal Bloom In Yellow Sea

Algal bloom in Qingdao
It happens every year, but the algal bloom in the Yellow Sea near Qingdao, Shandong province has been historically large this year, according to the Guardian. "This year's incident has swathed 28,900 sq km (11,158 sq miles), twice as much as the previous biggest bloom in 2008," in fact, leading officials to use bulldozers to remove 7,335 tons of this green stuff from beaches.

The Weird Demolition Of A 27-Meter-Tall, Two-Year-Old Statue Resembling Sun Yat-sen’s Wife

Soong Ching Ling statue
An incomplete statue of Soong Ching Ling, a.k.a. Madame Sun Yat-sen, which appeared in November 2011 in Zhengzhou, Henan province, was "quietly removed" recently, state media reported on July 4. How does one quietly remove an eight-story statue from a downtown area? Perhaps one should ask how one quietly commissions the building of an eight-story statue in the first place.

CNN Has Video Of Asiana 214′s Botched Landing

Asiana Flight 214 plane crash featured image
Fred Hayes was plane-watching at San Francisco airport when Asiana Flight 214 came in much too low, and the video he captured is the only one so far that shows the plane's moment of impact with the ground. It skidded to a stop before bursting into flames while Hayes could only say, over and over, "Oh my God."