Peninsula Metropolis Daily, January 26, 2011

Out of all of China's campaigns against unregistered and black-market goods, the annual roundup of illegal fireworks might offer the most excitement.

Sure, watching drugs get consumed by flames and DVDs get flattened under bulldozers can be entertaining for a few minutes, but illegal fireworks are disposed of just like their legal counterparts: they get blown up. Today's Peninsula Metropolis Daily features a great photo of one controlled destruction taking place on a beach outside of Qingdao. Three thousand boxes of illegal fireworks seized since December went out with a bang.

The top headline features today's big real estate news: new rules set to go into effect on April 1 will further regulate the country's real estate brokers. The headline highlights a rule prohibiting agencies from keeping two separate contracts and making money off the price difference.

Today's front page offers stories on a variety of other interesting topics:

• Scalping: The Spring Festival ticket crunch continues as scalpers find new ways to rip off the general public. Here, they'll help you get a ticket as soon as they are released, but first you've got to spend the night in their hotel.
• Falling Metal: A dumbbell dropped out of the sky and severely injured a sanitation worker. The sixty-year-old man was sweeping streets to pay for his grandson's education. Time for more collective punishment?
• Petitioners: Wen Jiabao visited petitioners in Beijing on January 24. The inside headline, "Face to face, Premier Wen listened to me talk about my problems," (面对面，温总理听俺说困难) employs the first-person pronoun 俺 that usually indicates a rural lack of sophistication (no petitioners are quoted in the article itself).
• Gala: The paper sends a reporter to investigate the playlist for this year's Spring Festival Gala.
• Miraculous Escape: A woman jumped off of the top of a 23-storey building but survived her fall. The article inside notes that the incident took place in Argentina.