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Beijing is undergoing a culinary revolution of the most extraordinary kind. Over the past decade, restaurants specialising in cuisines from around China –and the world – have sprung up across the city. And the venues, from chic, modern dining rooms to hole-in-the-wall eateries hidden in Beijing’s ancient hutongs, are a big part of the fun. The variety is even more impressive when one considers that two decades ago the city was still a culinary desert. In the 1950s, Mao Zedong decided to cut off China’s capitalist tails, a move that resulted in the closure of private restaurants.

In 1980, Yuebin Fanzhuang (43, 31 Cuihua Hutong, opposite main gate of the National Art Museum of China, Dongcheng, tel 6524 5322, mains 10-43RMB) opened in a tiny hutong, becoming the first getihu, or private, restaurant to re-open in Beijing. It was nothing special, and has long since been eclipsed by other eateries, but it ended the long hiatus and offered markedly better food and service than the lethargic state-run restaurants. That said, right up to the early 1990s eating in the capital often meant dining out at one of the ubiquitous Cantonese or spicy Sichuan cafés, usually drab affairs with dim fluorescent lighting and plastic garbage bag table cloths that stuck to your forearms. It was not that long ago that huge heads of cabbage were piled up on the roofs of Chinese houses and on street corners, a reminder of the limited fare then available.

The opening of the Red Capital Club in 1999 in a restored courtyard house set the trend for quaint hutong restaurants. The beautifully renovated The Source offers a set meal of Sichuan dishes; and The Courtyard, once an old house next to the East Gate and moat of the Forbidden City, was transformed into a bright space serving fusion food.

Restaurants also began moving into the city’s parks. Conveniently for tourists many of the best are in Ritan Park. One of the most noteworthy, however, is Bai Family Mansion, set in a sprawling garden that dates back to the beginning of the Qing Dynasty.

Gui Jie, or Ghost Street is lined with billowing red lanterns hanging in front of the more than 100 restaurants standing shoulder-to-shoulder on this thoroughfare that stretches 1.5 kilometres (one mile) from east to west along Dongzhimennei Dajie. The all-night dining boulevard is a night cat’s dream. It’s best known for its mala xiao longxia (hot, numbing crayfish); spicy duck’s neck, a specialty of Wuhan; and the hot, sour fish hotpot that made Guizhou famous. Gui Jie was dubbed ‘ghost’ street because gui is pronounced the same as the Chinese word for ghost. Actually, the character for the street name means ‘vessel for holding food’, but ‘ghost’ better captures the open-all-hours feel of the neighbourhood.

The most recent trend in restaurants in Beijing has seen the opening of chic restaurants with an ultra-contemporary design. The avant-garde People 8 is so fashionably dark that you need a flashlight to make your way to what are probably the coolest toilets in the city. LAN, one of the latest additions to Beijing’s restaurant scene, was designed by Philippe Starck, who whipped the 6,000-square metre (65,000-square-foot) space into a fairy fantasyland.

The year 2006 saw a foreign invasion as restaurants from all over the world set up shop in Beijing. In addition to American, European and South-east Asian restaurants, the city now offers Iranian, Turkish, Tunisian, Israeli, Cuban and Greek food, all opened by natives of those countries. French restaurants and pâtisseries are at the forefront. Caféde la Poste, a French bistro set up by a young French chef, serves excellent steaks, while W dine & wine , opened by Belgian Geoffrey Weckx, a former chef at several five-star hotels in China, offers a variety of moderately priced continental dishes.

For all the openings, the ancient ritual of the tea house, or a dinner at an old laozihao may still be the best part of your trip. It’s difficult to imagine where the next culinary trend will take us, but one thing is certain – dining out in Beijing will never be dull again.

Dining etiquette

Chinese meals are ordered for sharing, with guests serving themselves from dishes placed in the centre of the table. It is good manners to take from each dish only what can be eaten immediately; don’t pile up large amounts of food on your side plate or in your rice bowl.

If there is a serving spoon or serving chopsticks, use them; otherwise it’s acceptable to use your chopsticks to take food directly from the communal plate. One custom for serving someone at your table is to flip your chopsticks so you can use the clean ends to take a portion of food to serve guests.

Use your spoon to scoop foods such as tofu or peanuts; after all, your purpose is not to show off your deft handling of chopsticks but to get food onto your plate. For anyone who finds chopsticks awkward, there is no shame in asking for a fork (chazi) or spoon (shaozi). When you’re not using your chopsticks, put them on the chopstick holder – chopsticks sticking up resemble the incense sticks used at funeral services or on ancestral altars.

Cold dishes come first, followed by meat and vegetable dishes, and then fish. Soup comes last. The rice bowl will normally be your soup bowl at the end of a meal.

Chinese friends may try to get you to drink a lot, and you will often hear the toast ‘ganbei’, literally ‘dry bottom’. If you don’t want to down your drink in one you can just say ’suiyi’ or ‘as you like’, which means either party can drink as little or as much as they choose. And if you don’t drink at all, explain that at the beginning of the meal and stick to what you’re drinking.

When dining in a more formal setting, guests normally do not drink at will. It is good manners to wait for another guest to toast you before drinking. After a toast, raise your glass with two hands and tip it slightly in the direction of the person who is toasting with you to show that you’ve taken a drink.

If you are invited to a meal, the person who treats will order the meals. It’s rare for Chinese to go dutch, although nowadays some Chinese who understand the go-dutch concept will comfortably split the bill. But reciprocating is the favoured Chinese way, taking turns to treat. If you’re invited to a Chinese home for a meal, bring some fruit or flowers as a gift.

Practicalities

While most of the restaurants listed in this guide have English menus, some local places will not. Our advice in this case is simply to point to the things you see on other tables. It’s what the locals do.

The Chinese tend to eat early by Western standards. Most local restaurants serve lunch between 11.30am and 2pm, and dinner between 5.30pm and 9pm. Some kitchens are now staying open until 10pm, with a few restaurants even venturing into the wee hours. These places are generally not open for lunch. It is advisable to book in advance for the popular restaurants, particularly at weekends.

The Centre

The historical heart is packed with countless inexpensive eateries. Popular choices include authentic Chuanban , Qin Tang Fu , which specialises in Shaanxi dishes, and the Red Capital Club, which serves Zhongnanhai cuisine. For reasonably priced Western dishes, desserts and coffee, go to the Caribou Café.

The Southeast Asian country has three of the world’s 10 largest shopping centers, two of them in the capital, Manila. Scores of others, ranging from modern glass and steel structures to older, fading buildings, dot cities across the archipelago.

Although over 40 percent of the country’s 90 million people live on $2 or less per day, malls here are crowded at all times, and especially packed at weekends.

Around 80 percent of the Philippines’ population go to shopping centers and around 36 million people visit shopping plazas once or twice a month, according to Nielsen Media Research.

“People just come to the mall to stay cool, said Chris Balberona, a driver for a bank, who was at Manila’s Megamall watching ice-skaters on an artificial rink.

“Life is hard right now so we don’t really come here to shop.”

The air-conditioned malls are a boon in this steamy tropical nation. But shopping plazas in the Philippines have also become a place to pay bills, meet or watch people, eat or see a film.

Catholic masses are even held in the corridors of some malls. While the faithful sit on plastic chairs, less religious folk continue to browse the rails nearby.

Shopping is only an option at Manila’s malls.

A WAY OF LIFE

But with inflation hitting a near 17-year high of 12.2 percent in July as gas and food prices soar, Filipinos are forking out even less these days for non-essentials such as cinema trips and more clothes.

Private consumption is the lifeblood of the Philippine economy and a drop-off in spending is expected to cut economic growth this year to 5.1 percent, according to a Reuters poll last month, from a three decade peak of 7.2 percent in 2007.

Economic growth skidded to a seasonally adjusted 0.8 percent in the first quarter compared to 1.3 percent in the fourth quarter of last year

SM Prime, the largest mall operator in the Philippines, said 2.5 million people still visited its 30 shopping centers across the country.

“There has been no noticeable decrease in this number primarily because the ‘malling’ lifestyle has become a way of life for the Filipinos,” said Cora Guidote, vice-president for investor relations at SM Prime.

But with the cost of travel spiking because of high oil prices, some Filipinos say they are cutting back on their mall trips and restricting themselves even more to window shopping.

Cita Foronda, an executive assistant who goes to a mall once a week with her four children, says the visits are now almost entirely to kill time.

“We only shop on a need basis now,” Foronda said. “Even with the sales, it’s not attractive anymore.”

With very few public parks or other public amenities in Manila, and high pollution levels, she says the small play areas for children are a big attraction.

“If you have small kids, of course, you go to the mall,” she said. “You want your kids to be happy because you hardly see them during the work week.”

Almost all utilities bills can be paid in malls, banks are attached and a fairly inexpensive meal at a fast-food eatery is always an option.

“It’s like they give you everything just so you go,” Foronda said.

REMITTANCES

Another factor keeping malls popular is the large inflows of remittances sent home by millions of Filipinos who work overseas.

These remittances, estimated to reach a fresh peak of nearly $16 billion this year, support the retail sector even amidst the economic slowdown.

Every few years a new mall emerges in Manila or one of the larger cities, bigger and more extravagant than the last.

One of the newest is the Mall of Asia, the world’s third largest shopping centre. It is almost as big as Vatican City.

Two other malls in the Philippines, SM North Edsa and SM Cebu, also made the top 10 list in the study.

But for those hardest hit by the recent economic crisis, the family pastime of ‘malling’ is becoming increasingly rare.

“Before, it was a regular family day for us to go to the malls, even if we went there to just eat or walk around,” said Romeo Castillo, a taxi driver who has two children.

“Now, it’s really impossible even for that, it’s just out of our budget.”

Bahrain’s Foreign Minister Shiekh Khalid Bin Ahmed al-Khalifa arrived in Baghdad on Saturday on a surprise visit for talks with senior Iraqi officials, an Iraqi Foreign Ministry statement said.

The top diplomat will hold a meeting with his Iraqi counterpart Hoshyar Zebari, with an aim of enhancing bilateral relations between the two countries, the statement said without giving further details.

His unannounced one-day visit, which came after the Gulf nation named a new ambassador to Iraq last month, is the latest high-level visit by a senior Arab official.

Three years ago, Bahrain’s top envoy in Iraq was wounded when attackers tried to kidnap him while en route to work in Baghdad.

Several Arab governments named ambassadors to Iraq recently after the United States criticized them for acting slowly on normalizing relations with the Shiite-led government in Baghdad.

Sunni Arab countries had been reluctant to restore close ties because of ongoing violence there, and have been cool to what is a Shiite-dominated government in Iraq.

Washington repeatedly encouraged its Arab allies to strengthen their ties with Iraq as a way of countering the growing influence of Iran and reinforcing Iraq’s Arab identity.

A new study suggests that massive wind farms could steer storms and alter the weather if extensive fields of turbines were built, according to a news report.

It is not the first study to come to this conclusion.

The new research is an interesting “what if,” but the installation of large wind turbines would have to be taken to the extreme to have the global effects portrayed.

The scientists, Daniel Barrie and Daniel Kirk-Davidoff of the University of Maryland, calculated “what might happen if all the land from Texas to central Canada, and from the Great Lakes to the Rocky Mountains, were covered in one massive wind farm,” according to Discovery News. The result of such an unlikely installation: a real serious Butterfly Effect.

Such massive wind farming would slow wind speeds by 5 or 6 mph as the turbines literally stole wind from the air. A ripple effect would occur in the form of waves radiating across the Northern Hemisphere that could, days later, run into storms and alter their courses by hundreds of miles.

The researchers “acknowledged the hypothetical wind farm was far larger than anything humans are likely to build,” according to the Web site, but if Department of Energy projections for wind farming are met by 2030 (for the country to get 20 percent of its electricity from wind), “it could probably have an effect,” James McCaa of 3Tier, Inc., a renewable energy forecasting company based in Seattle, is quoted as saying.

In 2004, two separate groups of scientists did similar calculations.

One group found the opposite effect.

Somnath Baidya Roy of Princeton University and colleagues simulated the effect of extensive wind farms on local weather. They found a drying and warming effect in the morning that would warm the air across moist and cool overnight soil, causing the local wind speed to increase slightly.

Also in 2004, David Keith of the University of Calgary and his colleagues estimated the drag from wind farms if they covered 10 percent of the Earth’s land surface. They concluded that global cooling would occur in polar regions and global warming would result in temperate regions such as North America at about 30 degrees North latitude.

When that study was released, Keith had an interesting take on the possibility: “The message here is climate change, but that doesn’t equal global warming,” Keith said. “It’s possible this would have benefits,” by working against the atmospheric effects of fossil fuel consumption on global climate, he said.

Patrick McGoohan, the Emmy-winning actor in the cult classic television show “The Prisoner,” died at 80 after a short illness Tuesday in Los Angeles, according to media reports Thursday.

McGoohan won two Emmys for his work on the Peter Falk detective drama “Columbo,” and more recently appeared as brutal King Edward Longshanks who battles Scottish freedom fighter William Wallace in the 1995 Mel Gibson film “Braveheart,” in what called a “standout” performance.

But he was most famous as the character known only as Number Six in “The Prisoner,” a sci-fi tinged 1960s British series, which has kept a devoted following in the United States and Europe for four decades. He voiced his Number Six character in an episode of “The Simpsons” in 2000.

Born in New York on March 19, 1928, McGoohan was raised in England and Ireland. He had a busy stage career before moving to television, and won a London Drama Critics Award for playing the title role in the Henrik Ibsen play “Brand.”

His first foray into TV was in 1964 in the series “Danger Man,” a more straightforward spy show．

He also appeared as a warden in the 1979 Clint Eastwood film “Escape from Alcatraz” and as a judge in the 1996 John Grisham courtroom drama “A Time To Kill.”

His agent, Sharif Ali, said Wednesday that McGoohan was still active in Hollywood, with two offers for wide-release films on the table when he died. “The man was just cool,” Ali said. “It was an honor to have him here and work with him. … He was one of those actors, a real actor. He didn’t have a lie.”

When Jerald Spangenberg collapsed and died in the middle of a quest in an online game, his daughter embarked on a quest of her own: to let her father’s gaming friends know that he hadn’t just decided to desert them.

It wasn’t easy, because she didn’t have her father’s “World of Warcraft” password and the game’s publisher couldn’t help her. Eventually, Melissa Allen Spangenberg reached her father’s friends by asking around online for the “guild” he belonged to.

One of them, Chuck Pagoria in Morgantown, Ky., heard about Spangenberg’s death three weeks later. Pagoria had put his absence down to an argument among the gamers that night.

“I figured he probably just needed some time to cool off,” Pagoria said. “I was kind of extremely shocked and blown away when I heard the reason that he hadn’t been back. Nobody had any way of finding this out.”

With online social networks becoming ever more important in our lives, they’re also becoming an important element in our deaths. Spangenberg, who died suddenly from an abdominal aneurysm at 57, was unprepared, but others are leaving detailed instructions. There’s even a tiny industry that has sprung up to help people wrap up their online contacts after their deaths.

When Robert Bryant’s father died last year, he left his son a little black USB flash drive in a drawer in his home office in Lawton, Okla. It was underneath a cup his son had once given him for his birthday. The drive contained a list of contacts for his son to notify, including the administrator of an online group he had been in.

“It was kind of creepy because I was telling all these people that my dad was dead,” Bryant said. “It did help me out quite a bit, though, because it allowed me to clear up a lot of that stuff and I had time to help my mom with whatever she needed.”

David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, has had plenty of time to think about the issue.

“I work in the world’s largest medical center, and what you see here every day is people showing up in ambulances who didn’t expect that just five minutes earlier,” he said. “If you suddenly die or go into a coma, there can be a lot of things that are only in your head in terms of where things are stored, where your passwords are.”

He set up a site called Deathswitch, where people can set up e-mails that will be sent out automatically if they don’t check in at intervals they specify, like once a week. For $20 per year, members can create up to 30 e-mails with attachments like video files.

It’s not really a profit-making venture, and Eagleman isn’t sure about how many members it has — “probably close to a thousand.” Nor does he know what’s in the e-mails that have been created. Until they’re sent out, they’re encrypted so that only their creators can read them.

If Deathswitch sounds morbid, there’s an alternative site: Slightly Morbid. It also sends e-mail when a member dies, but doesn’t rely on them logging in periodically while they’re alive. Instead, members have to give trusted friends or family the information needed to log in to the site and start the notification process if something should happen.

The site was created by Mike and Pamela Potter in Colorado Springs, Colo. They also run a business that makes software for online games. Pamela said they realized the need for a service like this when one of their online friends, who had volunteered a lot of time helping their customers on a Web message board, suddenly disappeared.

He wasn’t dead: Three months later, he came back from his summer vacation, which he’d spent without Internet access. By then, the Potters had already had Slightlymorbid.com up and running for two weeks.

A third site with a similar concept plans to launch in April. Legacy Locker will charge $30 per year. It will require a copy of a death certificate before releasing information.

Peter Vogel, in Tampa, Fla., was never able to reach all of his stepson Nathan’s online friends after the boy died last year at age 13 during an epileptic seizure.

A few years earlier, someone had hacked into one of the boy’s accounts, so Vogel, a computer administrator, taught Nathan to choose passwords that couldn’t be easily guessed. He also taught the boy not to write passwords down, so Nathan left no trail to follow.

Vogel himself has a trusted friend who knows all his important login information. As he points out, having access to a person’s e-mail account is the most important thing, because many Web site passwords can be retrieved through e-mail.

Vogel joked that he hoped the only reason his friend would be called on to use his access within “the next hundred years or so” would be if Vogel forgets his own passwords.

But, he said, “as Nathan has proven, anything can happen any time, even if you’re only 13.”

For years, the videogame business has been all about billion-dollar brands built by rock star game developers and backed by armies of coders and artists, voice actors and marketing executives. Nintendo has Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of “Super Mario” and “Donkey Kong.” Microsoft has “Master Chief,” the star of the “Halo” franchise. And everyone is fighting to land the Houser brothers and their blood-soaked “Grand Theft Auto” franchise on their console next.

When Apple wants to impress an audience, however, it turns to Ge Wang, an assistant professor at Stanford who likes to show off a video clip of a woman playing “Music of the Night” on her iPhone by blowing through her nose. When Apple introduced its new iPhone software earlier this week, Wang took the stage to stun the audience by blowing into an iPhone to belt out a virtual trombone duet. Top that Bono.

The geeks with the imaginary trombones have the momentum lately, and Apple is doing everything it can to keep them rolling. Since the launch of the App store eight months ago, Apple has turned the videogame industry’s star system on its head with a 40,000-strong collection of developers who have built than 25,000 applications for the iPhone and iPod touch.

Users have downloaded more than 800 million applications over the past eight months. Roughly a quarter of them are games, and most were created by independent developers, two- or three-person pickup teams with an idea and a little spare time.

The result: Games that defy the old formulas, which have kept the gaming industry in a hit-driven rut for a decade. And the gaming developers who gathered in San Francisco Thursday at the iGames Summit say there’s more to come. New features introduced by Apple earlier this week will give developers the ability to sell in-game items such as virtual guns and pets, dole out extra levels, or find friends playing on their iPhones or iPods for a pick up match. “I’m totally ecstatic,” says Shervin Pishevar, chief executive and co-founder of the Social Gaming Network.

The changes promise to let Apple’s army of geeks and professional game developers push the iPhone’s oddball designs even further. Unlike a typical smart phone, the iPhone sports a touch screen and an accelerometer, forcing developers to build applications that rely on users touching, tilting, shaking and even blowing on their iPhones.

And unlike the portable gaming gadgets built by Sony and Nintendo, the iPhone and the iPod touch are built to do much more than just games. As a result, it’s the one gadget even hard-core gamers admit they take everywhere. “It’s a revolution,” says Intel and Motorola veteran Jason Rubinstein, an entrepreneur whose latest project is now in stealth mode.

Apple’s smartest move, however, has been to bypass the giant game studios and the brick-and-mortar game stores to connect the geeks with the mass market directly. IPhone and iPod touch users can download software to their phone, over the air, with the touch of a button, rather than rolling down to the local Best Buy to pick up cartridges.

And to ensure there’s always something in stock at its virtual store, Apple unveiled free software development tools that made all those features accessible to videogame developers. “I’ve worked on every console on the sun, and hands down, by far Apple has provided the best development environment,” says Neil Young, chief executive and founder of ngmoco, told the iGames Summit audience.

Just ask Steve Demeter. While working a day job creating ATM software for a bank, Demeter put together the game app Trism for the iPhone in his free time. The result: a hit that earned Demeter $250,000 in its first two months.

To be sure, iPhone game developers are growing in size and sophistication. Venture capitalists such as Kleiner Perkins and Morgenthaler Ventures are moving in. And gaming powerhouses such as Sega have introduced games for the iPhone. There’s still plenty of space for the little guys: An Electronic Arts employee canceled his appearance at the iGames Summit and a replacement was not sent.

One worker was killed and six were injured after a blast ripped through a smelting factory in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region Tuesday, the local work safety watchdog said.

A furnace at a lead and antimony plant in Hechi city exploded at about 7:40 a.m., when seven workers were clearing dregs from the furnace, said Huang Aichang, an official with the municipal work safety supervision administration.

One person died at the scene and one of the six injured was in a serious condition.

An initial investigation showed the workers detected a problem in the furnace and sprayed it with cold water to cool it down for maintenance, which triggered the explosion.

The plant belongs to the Nanfang Nonferrous Metals Refining Co. Ltd., a private company set up in 1995. It produces about 60,000 tonnes of lead and antimony, 50,000 tonnes of sulfuric acid, and other metal and chemical products a year.

Officials with the administration are investigating the accident.

Firefighters pave way to set the water pipes to cool the drill at the site of the massive landslide in Chongqing Municipality, southwest China, June 7, 2009.

The search for still missing people and rescue work for those trapped miners were continued on Sunday as rescuers race against time to save them.

Egyptian Prime Minister Ahmed Nazef said on Monday his country could maintain the momentum of economic growth and secure local and foreign investments through step-by-step reforms, despite the unfolding global economic crisis.

Addressing a conference organized by the Economist Intelligence Unit, a British think tank, and the Egyptian government, Nazef said Egypt could ride out the crisis through incremental two-stage reforms, though the tourism sector, exports and Suez Canal revenues are hit hard by the economic slowdown.

“Thanks to financial and banking policies adopted by the Central Bank of Egypt, the country managed to overcome the first wave of the fallout of the financial crisis,” he was quoted by the official MENA news agency.

The first stage of the reconstruction of the financial and banking sectors has been accomplished, he said, adding that the second stage will help fund the small- and medium-sized enterprises, which, according to official statistics, absorb 95 percent of labors after years of privatization.

“Confidence in Egyptian economy encourages businessmen to pump more investments into Egypt,” he added.

The government had refrained from cutting the benchmark interest rates despite worldwide slashes in the past five months, in a bid to cool down the sizzling inflation and buttress the local currency.

“The major challenge besetting us is soliciting jobs,” he said, referring to the high unemployment rate in the most populous Arab country, where, according to the World Bank, 22 percent of labors are jobless.

On Saturday, Egyptian Economic Development Minister Osman Mohamed Osman said the economic growth rate decreased to 4.1 percent in the second quarter of the 2008-2009 fiscal year, against 7.7 percent in the same period in the previous year, which reflects a tangible recession in key sectors.

Osman expected that Egypt’s economic growth rate, recorded more than 7 percent in the past three fiscal years, will decrease to about 5 percent by the end of the current fiscal year (from July 1,2008, to June 30, 2009).

The Egyptian authorities have been taking necessary measures to curb the negative impact of the global financial crisis to the country’s economy.

Due to a recent plunge of inflation rate, the Central Bank of Egypt said Friday that it has decided to cut its key overnight interest rates by 1 percent to 10.5 percent for deposits and 12.5 for lending in a bid to boost the economic growth of the country.

As commodity prices ebbed worldwide, Egypt’s inflation rate was down to 14 percent in January, the lowest one since last April, compared with 18.7 percent in December, the country’s Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics said Tuesday.