Danwei Picks is a daily digest of the "From the Web" links found on the Danwei homepage. A feed for the links as they are posted throughout the day is available at Feedsky (in China) or Feedburner (outside China).

Guo Jingjing (MOP NBA)

Chinese diving star pregnant, out of Olympics: From China Sports Today:

In a bombshell for the Chinese diving team, one of China's biggest sports stars, two-time gold medal-winning diver Guo Jingjing, is pregnant and leaving the national team.

However, this CCTV report quotes a National Diving Team spokesperson who denies the rumors.

The transparent China translator: At Paper Republic, Bruce Humes interviews Li Jihong, the mainland translator of Kite Runner:

[O]n the whole, Li Ji-Hong tends to avoid the approach used by Hosseini when he wrote "Kite Runner." Rather than citing the foreign term using English letters or transliterating it into Chinese, the translator uses easily grasped - even run-of-the-mill spoken Chinese - to convey quintessentially Afghan traits and customs. At times, the result is so mundane that one wonders if the reader might not get the impression that Afghan life, or at least the speech of its inhabitants, is rather similar to "ours," i.e., we Chinese.

The quake and Twitter hubris: Kaiser Kuo writes:

It wasn't long before, within the community of Twitterati watching the horrors of the quake unfold, self-congratulatory messages talking about how Twitter was so much faster than the mainstream media, and how Twitter had proven itself indispensable. At first I was caught up in that feeling, too. But really, thinking back now on what happened, there was a little too much hubris in the rush to pronounce that Twitter's moment had arrived.

Wen Jiabao: get to epicenter by noon today: Xinhua reports from Dujiangyan in Sichuan:

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao ordered to remove barriers and open up roads to epicenter before 12 p.m. Tuesday after a strong earthquake jolted southwest China's Sichuan Province Monday afternoon.

Twitter vs Xinhua: Mei Fong on the Wall Street Journal's China blog:

When the earthquake struck, the first instinct of one college student in Sichuan province, not far from the epicenter, was to duck for cover in his dormitory room. The second: record the upheaval, and post it online.

Chang Ping: tolerate public information sharing during quake: At the China Media Project, David Bandurski translates a new piece by Chang Ping in the Southern Metropolis Daily urging the authorities to tolerate open information sharing during the earthquake crisis.

Portents (listen to the suckhole): Earthquakes are often seen as heralding major changes. Bokane notes another natural phenomenon that has been remarkably prescient over the past century.