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).

China's man at the anchor desk: The LATimes talks to Edwin Maher, an Australian newsman who is currently an anchor on CCTV:

He was hired in 2003 as the station introduced a Western face to shake its image as a stodgy government mouthpiece, famous among foreigners for its wooden presentations and sometimes-tortured English. Maher anchors the news up to four times a day for millions of viewers worldwide, including the U.S. Critics say Maher isn't a reporter at all, but a shameless government yes-man who gives all Western journalists a bad name. Maher answers bluntly: He says he simply doesn't care.

Maher made his mark as a sort of Aussie Willard Scott, an eccentric weatherman who ad-libbed his reports by using map pointers such as carrots, scepters and an ice cream cone. Maher has given the weather standing upside-down and once poured a cup of water over his head during an Australian heat wave.

He came to China on a whim after his wife died from a brain tumor in 2001. Since then, he's become a minor celebrity who has also written a series of articles for government-run China Daily on his fumbling efforts to learn the language and culture. This year, the illustrated columns have been turned into a book, published in English and Chinese.

via China Media News

For grizzled old China hands ONLY: James Fallows takes a photo of workers on the tarmac. Paul Midler at The China Game mocks his conclusions. China Law Blog supports the valuable perspective of a new arrival:

Midler is apparently bothered by Fallows' lack of Chinese sophistication, but I embrace it. I have never known Fallows to pitch himself as a China expert and I would be the first to agree he is not. But so what? We have plenty of so-called China experts writing on Chinese business, law, politics, culture, food, transportation, manufacturing, internet, marketing, schooling, healthcare, etc. Fallows writes about the China he sees and he does a damn fine job of it. The China Fallows sees is that of a writer clearly happy to be writing about one of the most exciting places on earth and his fresh perspective on it is both different from and an oftentimes welcome respite from the experts by which Midler swears.

China's turtles, emblems of crisis: The latest feature in the New York Times' series on development in China, Jim Yardley uses the plight of the Yangtze soft-shell turtle, of which there are only two known individuals remaining, as a jumping-off point for a discussion of wildlife conservation:

Few, if any, of the world's modern economic powers, including the United States, have industrialized without taking a dire toll on plants and animals. In China, the Communist Party's top-down, authoritarian system has presided over a destruction of nature. Now, with environmental problems threatening the economy, the party is trying to engineer a top-down reconstruction.

Environmental construction, a government term, is now a high priority. Yet the results are not always synonymous with biodiversity. Since 1998, China has banned the domestic timber trade and started a nationwide reforestation program. China is now one of the few countries in the world where forest cover is expanding. Yet many scientists say these new forests are more like plantations than habitat.

Includes audio, video, and a Chinese translation.

Crying wolf: Barry Diller, the Economist, and China: James Fallows takes issue with an Economist story comparing Internet usage in China and the US:

The headline on the Economist.com item was: "America's emobyte deficit: China's youth surpass their American rivals online." The story opened with a quote from Diller:

"THE Chinese people seem to be way ahead of Americans in living a digital life," said Barry Diller, an American media mogul, last week in a speech to students in Beijing...[Diller's data] revealed that in this arena as in so much else, China is surging ahead...

They "seem" to be way ahead? I suppose, in the same sense in which I "seem" to be way taller than Yao Ming. Both of these seem true only if you ignore the actual facts. In a million different ways China deserves to be taken very seriously. But there are only two ways in which Chinese people really do seem to be "ahead" of Americans digitally.