Oh, look, another Chinese knock-off. (I can say that because I am half of one.) Taiwan's Susan Boyle is a man with a spherical body, bowl cut, and pitch-perfect Whitney Houston impression.

Poor 'Oriental Yeti'. Not only did the media give you an antiquated name after you were trapped by some hunters in Sichuan, China: You have no hair! Scientists are baffled. We are, too: Aren't Yetis supposed to be scary? [Telegraph]

McDonald's has opened a university in Shanghai to train a new generation of Chinese in the science of encouraging people to eat shitty food. Hamburger U's dean hopes the new campus will be the "Harvard for our industry." [AP]

Eating dirt. Eating at the world's best restaurant. Eating, as a weapon of international cold war. What do all these things have in common? Science! And eating. And death!

Apple products are made in factories that regularly employ young teenagers, constantly work people more than 60 hours per week, and falsify records to cover up their misdeeds. That's according to the shameless gossiping muckrakers at... uh, Apple Inc.

The world is always amazed at how well Apple keeps its newest gizmos secret. How do they do it? One Reuters reporter found out the hard way that you do not go sneaking around their Chinese suppliers' manufacturing plants.

Athletes know the importance of getting loose before they go out to perform. Well someone should tell China's ice dancing team that they should warm up their muscles—not their loins.

Old folks in Shanghai have taken to scarfing down coke, methamphetamine, and ketamine so they can stay up all night playing Mahjong. First it was eldersex, and now olds are doing kids' drugs? How are teenagers going to rebel now?

This is the definition of a perfect internet video. It's short, it has one funny, organic joke, and it involves a squeegeeing Chinese man.

Washington, D.C.'s Tai Shan and Atlanta's Mei Lan have been recalled to China (Did you know they retain inalienable ownership of all pandas, everywhere, forever?) to participate in their ancestral land's breeding program, and will leave next week.

The government, via an anonymous spokesperson, has just released a statement on their website according to Reuters.

Google, and then Hillary Clinton, called on China to stop censoring the web and open a transparent investigation into all the hacking that's been emanating from the country. They responded this morning, in a way that was not entirely warm.

China is to start monitoring text messages for inappropriate key words. The government has told cellphone providers to suspend users whose messages contain "illegal or unhealthy content" as part of what it calls a campaign against pornography. [NYT]

Golden Globe, Shmolden Globe. You know a movie's a real phenom when the People's Republic of China censors it—and tells theaters to play "a patriotic biopic on the life of Confucius" instead.

At least two foreign reporters in China, including an AP television reporter, discovered that their GMail accounts have been hacked (by the government??). Oh, ChinaGuy69@aol.com was just not "professional" enough, right? You had to switch to Gmail. Fools. [NYT]

Gates and co have admitted that a weakness in Internet Explorer allowed the Chinese government (allegedly) to attack the Gmail accounts of human rights activists, prompting Google to leave the country. And potentially causing a diplomatic incident.

Google wants everyone talking about its unique defiance of China's authoritarian rulers. But Silicon Valley gossips increasingly see that spin as a cover-up for the real story: A humiliating security breach exposed cloud computing's dangers and imperils Google's growth.

Google announced it will stop filtering its China search engine — or shut the site. And already, once-suppressed results are showing up on Google.cn (see screenshot; top is current, bottom from June). That's the good news. The bad news?

Google is putting its profits and growth on the line to stand up to China's authoritartian practices. Whatever we might suspect about its motives, the company deserves applause for that. Maybe now it can lead an allied, anti-repression tech force.

In an extraordinary blog posting, Google has all but accused the Chinese government of coordinating hack attacks on its servers, not just in China but in the U.S. and globally. And it's decided to finally push back against the regime.