Here's something to read from someone who went there and did that: Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Jeff Gammage wrote a new book on his adopting from China, and his paper was nice enough to post an excerpt (with some great bios at the bottom of the piece). If I was just starting the process, I'd love to check this out. I may give it a read anyway. Jin Yu looks like a cutie. And I'm not the the only one to think Gammage is an OK writer. More about that on the China Ghosts web site.

(And on reporters adopting from China, did anyone notice that Scott Simon was taking time off for paternity leave? As in is he doing it again? I haven't heard anything about it other than My Attentive Spouse mentioning that someone said something sometime on the radio.)

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So, the other day, what was I saying about all those tiger cubs in Harbin? Looks like their future isn't all peaches and cream (or, um, fresh antelope and slow-moving peccaries). China is considering reopening the tiger trade. It's a revenue stream, after all. In bits of tigers.

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Even more cheerfully, China has now overtaken the U.S. as the biggest (CO2) polluter in the planet. Go, China! Be industrial! Change that climate!

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Perhaps it's the changing air quality that is attracting unidentified flying visitors to Shanghai. Jellyfish UFO would be a great name for a band. Blurry cell phone photo reveals no details of the... phenomenon, but witnesses (as many as 100) agree it "wasn't a kite."

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Politics watchers: Prepare for diplomatic fallout as Japanese legislators - not wingnut nationalists, but members of the majority party in Japan's national government - tell China Nanking? What Nanking? This would be something like German lawmakers announcing that Auschwitz was really just a large bakery. Sound offensive? It is.

Toru Toida, another member of the group, demanded that photographs portraying the Japanese military in a negative light be removed from Chinese war memorials.

"We are absolutely positive that there was no massacre in Nanking," Toida said.

This despite stacks of photographs taken by Japanese soldiers themselves of what they were doing to the Chinese civilians. These are in the public domain; I'm not sticking 'em on here because, well, you can see a few in the wikipedia article. And, you know, when you rape, torture and kill upwards of 300,000 people, there tend to be plenty of witnesses....