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).

Russian rocketeer leaked secrets to China: From the AP:

Igor Reshetin, the head of the company TsNIIMASH-Export, was sentenced to 11 1/2 years in prison by Moscow's Lefortovo District Court, said Anna Usacheva, a spokeswoman for the city courts.

Reshetin, whose company does substantial business with Russia's federal space agency, has been in custody since his arrest in November 2005 by the Federal Security Service or FSB, the main KGB successor agency. He dismissed official charges and said the information his company had transferred to China wasn't classified.

Usacheva said, however, that prosecutors had proven that Reshetin had unlawfully arranged for sensitive information to be transferred into the public domain.

Free petrol for civilized driving: Paul Pennay at the tbjblog introduces a new program designed to reward good drivers in Beijing:

The way it works is that those who agree to attach these stickers to their car are giving permission for a Beijing television station to secretly film them driving. Every day, the reporters from the Honglüdeng (Traffic Light) program head out on the streets to find six winners - six drivers with the sticker attached to their car who are able to drive for 10 minutes while being filmed without displaying any...uncivilized behavior. If the drivers can make it through the full ten minutes....they will have won themselves 200 kuai worth of fuel from any Sinopec petrol station and a 300 kuai card for what looks like car cleaning services.

The premier's visit to the infamous AIDS village: On the occasion of Premier Wen Jiabao's visit to an AIDS village in Henan, Black and White Cat presents a translation of a letter to Wen from AIDS activist Hu Jia, along with related information about embezzlement and "black hole" villages that are dressed up to be PR projects when national leaders visit.

Nasdaq-NYSE rivalry comes to China: At BusinessWeek, Frederik Balfour writes about competition between the two exchanges:

Not so long ago, listing their shares on Nasdaq was a no-brainer for Chinese tech companies looking to tap overseas money. The 52 mainland companies currently trading on Nasdaq include Internet portals such as Sohu (SOHU), Netease (NTES), and Sina (SINA), which listed their shares in 2000. More recently, Chinese highfliers, including search engine Baidu (BIDU) and Focus Media (FMCN), both of which had Nasdaq initial public offerings in 2005, have made spectacular gains.

But in 2007, Nasdaq has faced greater competition in China from exchanges in Hong Kong, Shanghai, New York, and elsewhere. Although it has attracted nine new IPOs raising $1.7 billion this year, according to Dealogic (compared with five listings raising $534 million last year), only one Nasdaq listing—a $300 million deal by financial-services company Xinhua Finance Media (XFML)— managed to rank in the top 20 on the basis of overall funds raised. So far this year, the Hong Kong exchange has raised $28.6 billion with 49 listings of Chinese companies and the New York Stock Exchange (NYX) has raised $4.19 billion with 14 listings.